'The Innocence in Her Beautiful Green Eyes': Speculations on Seduction and the 'Feminine' in the Australian News Media

Abstract

It is a familiar refrain to describe journalism as, simply, story-telling (Manoff, 1986). The aim of this article, however, is to explore how that simple project turns complicated in a place like Australia, with its lingering anxieties of culture and identity (Gelder & Jacobs, 1998, p.142). This article is a start to a longer study of the specific critical and cultural implications of contemporary journalism, practised in an 'unsettled' Australian postcolonial milieu. Here, the study makes some speculative observations of gender representation in long-running news stories about two women: Schapelle Corby and Lindy Chamberlain. My disciplinary background is cultural studies, not social sciences. The result here, therefore, is not a set of conclusions drawn from content analysis, as would be the case in a different kind of paper. I also want to lend support to the discussion in journalism scholarship of the conundrum of 'objectivity' for journalistic practice in socio-political contexts where assumptions of 'objectivity' may, in fact, obscure journalism's public interest principle.

Deviant divas: Lindy Chamberlain and Schapelle Corby and the case for a new category of celebrity for criminally implicated women

“…The offending comments were made by radio host Malcolm T Elliott about the Indonesian judges hearing Corby's case and exemplified some of the xenophobic attitudes circulating in the media at the time: 'The judges don't even speak English, mate, they're straight out of the trees if you excuse my expression' (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005a). Religion, race and settler-colonial anxieties about belonging were aroused in the context of Corby's arrest which took place in a predominately Muslim country against the geo-political background of the global 'War on Terror' (Lambert, 2008) and, locally, in the wake of the Cronulla race riots and ensuing reprisal attacks (Little, 2006).…”

“…In academic writing on both cases much has been made of the significance of remote physical settings as iconic sites in an unsettled Australian postcolonial milieu (Little, 2006; Staines, 2006); as territorial and political spaces whose boundaries, borders and displacement are explored in the metaphorical bodies of Lindy and Schapelle (Lambert, 2008); and as symbolic settings for exploring bilateral relations between Australia and Indonesia in the Corby case, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the Chamberlain case (Lambert, 2008). These writings reveal the grid of intersecting discourses connecting territorial and physical bodies in debates about national sovereignty and belonging.…”

“…The Corby case’s articulation of ongoing prejudice against the Indonesian justice system and resurgence of Anglo-Australian nationalism is an argument well developed elsewhere (Lambert, 2008; Little, 2006). Similarly, in the Chamberlain literature are claims that the couple’s belief in the little known religion of Adventism, the involvement of frontier characters such as dingoes and ‘white campers’ and the national myths aroused by the infant’s death at ‘the Rock’ – an Aboriginal ancestral site in the heart of central Australia – were important in the processing of public opinion on the case (Howe, 2005; Schaffer, 1988).…”

“…In his examination of the Corby case, news columnist Sam de Brito attributed the national fixation on Schapelle to her physical appeal in comments that, ‘Corby was a half-good sort a certain type of Aussie man finds attractive’ (De Brito, 2014). For Janine Little, the seductive pull of the Schapelle Corby case can be partly understood in the operation of ‘stereotypes of femininity and innocence [that] are activated in stories about women’ (Little, 2006: 132), whereas for Stephen Crofts, Corby’s appeal was stoked by her gendered vulnerability since, ‘as a woman, she carries connotations of victimhood more readily than would a man’ (Crofts, 2006: 8).…”