JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know

by Grant Leigh Saunders

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Creative Arts under the supervision of Dr Timothy Laurie (Principal) and Professor Larissa Behrendt (Indigenous- Secondary)

University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

November 2020

JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP

I, Grant Leigh Saunders declare that this thesis, is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Creative Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney.

This thesis is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis.

This document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution. *If applicable, the above statement must be replaced with the collaborative doctoral degree statement (see below).

*If applicable, the Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) statement must be added (see below).

This research is supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program.

Production Note: Signature: Signature removed prior to publication.

Date: 1st March 2021

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Big-Ups: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to pay respects to my elders- past and present, whose struggle against racism allowed me the privilege of being able to produce this film and write this paper. I would like to thank the Eora people of the Gadigal nation, whose land was never ceded, and on whose country this research and film production took place. This included the Redfern Community Centre, The Block Redfern and The Bankstown Community centre, in Bankstown, South Western Sydney. I would like to extend a special thanks to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning (IHL) for their support in providing financial assistance in the shape of the UTS Research Excellence Award and the Jumbunna IHL Postgraduate Scholarship. Without this financial support, my research journey would have been a whole lot more challenging; I am deeply grateful of this opportunity that I owe not only to these institutions but to those Indigenous academic leaders who forged a path in Indigenous Higher Education for myself, current and future Indigenous scholars. I would like to also thank all participants, organisations and communities who helped to make this project possible, who gave generously of their time, personal stories, intellect and support throughout the project; namely, Stephen Carr-Saunders aka Sonboy, Jurnan Amy Ayerst aka THORN and Last Minute Productions, Vyvienne Abla and Vyva Entertainment, the 4ESydney HipHop Festival and 2018 4Elements artists Sukhdeep Singh aka L-FRESH The LION, Maya Jupiter, Rhyan Clapham aka DOBBY, Lee Monro aka Figg Kidd, Duval Clear aka Masta Ace and mirrah; Daniel Pearson aka Triple Nip, Ebony Williams aka MC Ebsta, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, Uncle Mick Mundine and the Aboriginal Housing Company, Aunty Jenny Monro, Shane Phillips, Angelina Penrith, Linda June Coe, Cameron Manning, Dr Ray Kelly and Dr John Maynard. A warm thanks and respects to Gayle Hickey, Dyllan Voller, the Dungay and the Doughty families for allowing me to tell their personal and sensitive stories - my hope is that by retelling these stories, more attention is given to your personal and our communal pursuits for justice for you, your families and all those who have unjustly lost their lives to the criminal justice system.

A huge thanks to my supervisor Dr Timothy Laurie, who fed me all the right material to bolster my crazy ideas and supported me throughout the whole process. Dr Laurie not only provided meticulous editorial and academic feedback and guidance, to the very end of the final draft, but also emotional support, reassurance, instilling belief and confidence that I could achieve this incredible undertaking. Without his sage and empathetic support, I would

3  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know have thrown in the towel long ago. To Professor Larissa Behrendt, I also owe a great deal of gratitude for not only providing intellectual rigour to the essay element of my documentary as one of its key experts but as my Indigenous supervisor. I feel extremely privileged to have received the mentorship from someone who I regard as one of my leaders and who I have utmost respect for in the tireless work she achieves in the Indigenous filmmaking space as well as her vital contribution to Indigenous research and scholarship. Last, but definitely not least, I would like to thank my precious family, who all endured my anxiety and time spent on this research, sometimes neglecting their needs and attention but who supported and continually encouraged me regardless, because they understood the project’s value and contribution. I love you dearly and very much look forward to giving you back all the time and attention you deserve from your husband and father.

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Beats and Bars (aka Table of Contents)

Abstract 6

Beat 1 The Hype-man 7

Bar 1 Introduction 8

Bar 2 Represent: Researcher Background 12

Bar 3 My Homies: My Relationship with Participants 20

Bar 4 What’s Up? The Problem, Context and Rationale 24

Bar 5 Freestyling a Theoretical and Methodological Bricolage 28

5.1 Indigenous +Hip-hop Pedagogy + Critical Race Theory = CHIRP 30

5.2 “Keepin’ it Real”: Indigenous Hip-hop Auto-ethnography 43

5.3 Each One Teach One: The Power of Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) 45

5.4 Laying the Beats Down: Methodology vs Creative Process 51

Bar 6 My Indigenous Hip-hop film: JustUS 59

6.1 Australian Hip-hop Films So Far and Other Films that Resonate 59

6.2 JustUS as ‘Trauma Cinema’ 63

Beat 2 “That Resonated With Us”: The Rise of Conscious Hip-hop in Australia 68

Bar 7 The Birth of Conscious Hip-hop and Trans-cultural Communications 70

Bar 8 Racism to Embracism: The Changing Voice of Australian Hip-hop 80

Bar 9 The Bloc Breadfern: The Gentrification of an MC’s Hood 87

Bar 10 From Redfern to Kalgoorlie: Riots or Uprisings? 93

Bar 11 Our Black Lives Matter: Indigenous Hip-hop as Outsider Criminology 103

Bar 12 “But Who Protects Us from You?”: Abolitionism and Radical Reforms 117

Beat 3 Conclusion: The Revolution Will be Televised 123

List of Works Cited 127

Appendix 141

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Abstract Hip-hop music is ubiquitous and Indigenous groups globally are using Hip-hop to express local social and political issues and movements (Mitchell 2001). The question that this film and thesis seeks to answer is evident in the film’s title JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know. More specifically the research and creative production focuses on a sub-genre of Hip- hop called Conscious Hip-hop which provides the audience with a critical lens on society and politics and rallies its listeners to demand social change. The main impetus for this research is to use the popularity of this global youth culture and its music to engage young people in matters of social justice. The recurring themes present in much Australian Conscious Hip-hop - police violence, the over-incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia, and the use of Hip-hop as a means of artistic resistance – are explored visually and aurally through this research and creative project. Conscious Hip-hop artists from Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds share their experiences and knowledge of these issues as they directly or indirectly affect them. I decided to focus on the personal journey of a young Indigenous rapper from The Block in Redfern, Sydney, Stephen Carr-Saunders (aka Sonboy). His story provides the audience with a more personal account of the trauma experienced by those directly affected by police violence and growing up in a predominantly Black community impacted by racism and colonisation. His story is also one of empowerment and an example of the transformative power of Hip-hop to heal those suffering traumas and offer an alternative pathway to recidivism. Sonboy’s story also provides another positive representation of Indigenous Australia. The film is directly informed by scholarly research pertaining to the over-policing and over-incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia and acknowledges the enduring importance of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991). Indigenous scholars in the field of criminology have recognised Indigenous protest musicians, including Indigenous folk/country singer-songwriters, Kev Carmody and Archie Roach, as "Outsider Criminologists", who speak “truth to power” in their music, seen as a form of “artistic resistance” (Porter 2019, pp. 129-137). Additionally, some social anthropologists have recognised the social justice issues experienced by Indigenous Australians expressed in Indigenous Hip-hop as well as the cultural and political connections Indigenous Australians have with African American Hip-hop and the parallel histories of Civil Rights activism (Hutchings and Crooke 2017; Minestrelli 2017). The creative work and thesis build upon Australian Hip-hop scholarship, offering an Indigenous auto-ethnographic perspective and provides more detailed context to a number of social justice issues that Indigenous and other Australian Conscious Hip-hop speaks back to.

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Beat 1

Co-informant-researchers Grant Saunders (left) and MC Sonboy walk the streets of The Block, Redfern.

The Hype-Man

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Bar 1 Introduction

Compared to the cultural and linguistic pluralism more evident in Australian Hip-hop today, Australian Hip-hop from the early to mid-2000’s represented a very different demographic. ‘Aussie’ Hip-hop is what Australian Hip-hop came to be known widely through the Australian Hip-hop community as well as a term promoted and still promoted on the public radio broadcaster Triple J, local music magazines, at venues and festivals. JustUS is an Indigenous auto-ethnographic documentary film with the overall purpose of exposing audiences to traditionally marginalised voices in Australian Hip-hop, specifically those who ascribe to the sub-genre of ‘Conscious Hip-hop.’1 Moreover, my film provides the viewer with historical, political, cultural and social contexts to the texts created by these artists, offering a deeper appreciation of the lyrical content and hopefully engendering empathy for the artists and their communities that birthed them. As an Indigenous storyteller, it is intrinsic to look at my research question holistically. In order to arrive at deeper understandings of what Conscious Hip-hop wants you to know, the research and film attempts to address all the facets and nuances of the Conscious Hip-hop lyric (Wilson 2008). Rigney (2003) also acknowledges the pluralism within Indigenous Australian scholarship and that there is no common agreement on what constitutes Indigenist Research: “Nor is there a unanimous view on method, methodology and epistemes in conducting research with Indigenous peoples...what is central to Indigenist Research is that Indigenous Australian ideals, values and philosophies are core to the research agenda” (p. 41). Even though my research has employed a number of Western theoretical frameworks and methodologies, as an Indigenous researcher and filmmaker, Indigenist Research and filmmaking protocols form the core foundational framework for this project.

As an Indigenous artist, creating a film documentary thesis, the research-led practice leading to making the documentary and the practice-led research that led to the writing of this exegesis (see more in Bar 5.5) was an intuitive, dynamic and fluid process. While I did employ social science methodologies (semi-structured interviews and some observation), I did not follow a structured research process and cannot provide a detailed timeline of when the research began because as an Indigenous auto-ethnographer, much of the knowledge gained to inform this project commenced when I first acknowledged my Aboriginality, early

1 The adjective ‘Conscious’ in ‘Conscious Hip-hop’ identifies Hip-hop that has a social and political education focus. To be conscious is synonymous with, using the Hip-hop vernacular, ‘being woke’; aware of social justice issues and using rap to educate and promote social and political consciousness and activism (See more in Bar 5.3).

8  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know in my childhood years (see more in Researcher Background, Bar 2). What I can provide the reader is that the first observational footage shot for this documentary commenced on February 20, 2018 at the Summer Slams for Social Justice event held at the Ultimo Community Centre, where I first met two of my main Hip-hop informants Rhyan Clapham aka DOBBY and Stephen Carr-Saunders aka Sonboy. My principal interviews commenced during the 4Elements HipHop Festival and Conference (4ESydney) 2 held at the Bankstown Arts Centre between 8th and 10th of March 2018. Other principal interviews and observational footage relating to the story of ‘The Block’ Redfern (see more in Bar 9) and the main character Sonboy coincided with the last Rock The Block3 party on 24th November 2018 with interviews conducted over a period of a week leading up to this event and principal photography complete after Sonboy’s final Block performance. The film editing process was led by these principal interviews and observations beginning the week after Rock The Block, continuing intermittently throughout 2019/20 in tandem with the research and writing of this exegesis, with the final rough cut made only days before finalising my writing, which was also based on editorial feedback from my supervisors and other industry professionals.

As far as the structure of this exegesis is concerned, I have organised it as analogous to a screen play, with Beat 1 representing Act One or the introduction, Beat 2 as Act Two or the exposition and Beat 3 as Act Three or the conclusion. However, as this project is about Hip- hop, I appropriately named these Acts as Beats and chapters as Bars4. Beat 1 of the exegesis provides the introduction, describes the main characters and why they are important to the project, introduces the problem facing our protagonists and how this project goes about

2 4ESydney Festival and Conference runs over 8 weeks, generally in the first quarter of the year. The program includes workshops in the 4 Elements of Hip-hop culture (hence the name), ie. MC’ing (rapping), B- Boying/Girling (Break dancing), DJing (Turntablism) and Graffiti (Aerosol art). According to the 4ESydney Facebook page, “4 Elements HipHop project (4ESydney) opens the floor to having honest uncensored dialogue, putting the HipHop scene and creative industries under the microscope, dissecting and analysing what is really going on, finding new ways to make it healthier and more sustainable… By spreading the good word of HipHop to the wider community and engaging those who wouldn’t normally appreciate it, we allow young people and artists to develop a sense of who they are, and their value to the community is shared and expressed” (Abla, n.d.).

3 Rock The Block was an annual youth focused Aboriginal music and cultural Arts event held on The Block, Redfern by the Aboriginal Housing Company beginning in 2006 and ending with the final stages of The Block’s urban development in 2018.

4 While “bars” denote a measure of time in music, in Hip-hop the word “bars” represent rapped lyrical lines. A rapper known to have “bars” or can “drop bars” or “spit bars” is acknowledged as one who possesses a depth of knowledge or expertise and breadth of experience on any given topic; being able to tell a story through rhyme based on that knowledge and experience with “dope” (superlative) delivery style and flow.

9  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know addressing the problem. First of all, Bar 2 provides my research background to clarify my relationship to the project and establishes my insider or Indigenous auto-ethnographic Hip- hop voice. In Bar 3, I explain my relationship with my informants and how I see them as co- researchers and myself as a co-informant (Houston 2007; Wilson 2008). Bar 4 looks at the problem, context and rationale to outline the issues that my film and exegesis address: identifying the gap in the canon of Australian Hip-hop film and literature that I aim to fill, and why my work is a significant contribution to existing scholarship, to Hip-hop and more importantly to Indigenous peoples and social justice. Bar 5 details the theoretical and methodological framework employed in my research and creative process described as a “bricolage”, drawing from the tenets of Indigenous paradigm, trauma cinema, auto- ethnography, Critical Race Theory and Hip-hop’s 5th Element: “knowledge of self”. More subtly, the film advocates for Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) through the testimonies of the film’s Hip-hop experts, who describe their first-hand experiences as Hip-hop workshop mentors, and the many positive effects of HHBE for young people. This is supported by video observations of the main informants engaging in Hip-hop workshops with young people at the 4ESydney Festival (I explore this further in Bar 5.3).

Beat 2, or the exposition of this film script, details specific issues and events that some of our Indigenous Hip-hop artists are addressing in their music, using discourse analysis of the artist's lyrics, informant interviews and scholarship that speak to the themes expressed, including criminological discourses. Before deconstructing these songs and providing further context, however, I briefly discuss in Bar 7 how Indigenous Hip-hop is seen as a contemporary form of protest music and a natural extension of a modern history of “trans- cultural communications” between African Americans and Australian Indigenous peoples (Minestrelli 2017). In Bar 8 I discuss the history of racism prevalent in Anglo- Australian “Aussie Hip-hop” from the early to mid-2000’s and its active suppression of Indigenous Hip- hop as well as Hip-hop from culturally and linguistically diverse communities (Rodger 2019). I also discuss the recent welcome change in the Hip-hop scene over the past 10 years to include these historically suppressed voices, what they have to say and how their contributions are shifting the look and feel of Australian Hip-hop.

In Bar 9, I introduce the reader to one of these new relatively unknown emerging voices who is the main character of the film, Sonboy, an Indigenous rapper from ‘The Block’, Redfern, Sydney, once known as Sydney’s ‘ghetto’ and now Sydney’s prime piece of real estate

10  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know through its gentrification (Shaw 2000; Rogers and Darcy 2014). Bar 10 naturally segues into a discussion on the Redfern Uprising in 2004. In this section I analyse the news media’s reportage of riotous mayhem against the Indigenous community’s fight to let Australians know why they are throwing bricks at Australian Police buildings and leaving white ochre handprints on the glass panels of the supreme courts. Bar 11 discusses the Aboriginal solidarity with the United States (U.S.) - led Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and how we’ve adapted it to bring attention to the importance of protecting Indigenous lives from police violence and over-incarceration. I discuss this in relation to a song ‘Black Lives Matter’ published in 2016 by Indigenous Hip-hop artist Birdz. Finally, Bar 12 drills down into Briggs’s rap featured in the track ‘Locked Up’ (2017) that speaks back to matters of criminal justice in Australia, analysing Indigenous Hip-hop as a form of “outsider criminology” (Porter 2019). I also use this as a springboard into a further discourse into much-needed prison and criminal justice reform as the only answer to achieving social justice for Indigenous Australians (Cunneen and Porter 2017; Baldry et al. 2015; Gray 2018).

Providing personal testimonies breathes life into well-known statistics of disproportionate rates of incarceration of Indigenous compared to non-Indigenous Australians. By analysing Australian news media through an Indigenous Hip-hop lens, common stereotypes and misinformation about Indigenous peoples are disrupted and subverted. The Australian news media’s reporting on the recent uprisings in the U.S. following the televised murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 and drawing comparisons to the shared experiences of police brutality here in Australia is a very recent phenomenon and one that has been welcomed by many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Historically, however, the media’s portrayal of our own uprisings has concentrated its attention on these actions simply as “riots”, acts of vandalism and the victimisation of our police force (Porter 2015). This film adds to the list of other Australian films discussed in Bar 6.1, also considered as “outsider criminology”, speaking truth to power, offering the alternate stories behind the uprisings so that audiences gain more insight and understanding behind why we need to rise up. Furthermore, it is hoped that this film can be used inside and outside school classrooms, so that Indigenous young people are recognised and empowered and all students and fans of Hip-hop are further engaged in matters of social justice in this country, and more importantly, to feel empowered to join the many taking action.

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Bar 2 Represent: Researcher background According to Shawn Wilson, a Cree ‘Indigenist’ researcher, it is required from Indigenous researchers and those conducting research on Indigenous people and communities, that we are seen as storytellers rather than researchers. It is important that the storyteller imparts their own knowledge and experience in relation to the story: “When listeners know where the storyteller is coming from and how the story fits into the storyteller’s life, it makes the absorption of the knowledge that much easier” (Wilson 2008, p. 32). This view is supported by other Indigenist researchers, including Karen Martin - Booran Mirraboopa (2003), who writes that the “protocol for introducing one’s self to other Indigenous people is to provide information about one’s cultural location, so that connection can be made on political, cultural and social grounds and relations established” (p. 204). Based on an Indigenous research ethic that Wilson terms “relationality” (the other ethical R’s being “Respect” and “Reciprocity”), I would like to now introduce myself and my connection to this research project.

First and foremost, I am a Biripi man from the mid-north coast of New South Wales (NSW hereafter), a place once known by our local dialect of Gathang as Djarii, meaning ‘sweet fig’, now known by most as the rural coastal township of Taree in the Manning Valley. Biripi means ‘big valley people’ and Taree is nestled in the bottom of the valley on the main river system, originally known as Batu but now known more widely as the Manning River. According to my grandfather Horrace Saunders, our country’s intersections with neighbouring language groups, is the Great Dividing Range to the West, where Gamilaraay country begins, the Hastings River to the North, where Dhangutti country starts, the Wallamba River to the South, where Worimi country starts, and the Pacific Ocean to the East. Instead of referring to boundaries, which is a Western concept linked to occupation, I prefer to use intersections, because neighbouring groups would intersect through trade, ceremony and marriage. Neighbouring tribes would also respect these intersections and would dare not cross them without permission. Non-Indigenous writer Max Solling in his book Town and Country: a History of the Manning Valley also recognised the contentiousness of mapping “tribal boundaries”, beginning with anthropologist Norman Tindale’s original “tribal map of Australia” based on his belief “that Aboriginals were linked by culture, kinship and language, and bound to the land geographically and ecologically” (Solling 2014, p. 15). This map was published in 1940, with updates made by Tindale in 1974, Steve Davis in 1992 and David Horton in 2000. Geographer Elspeth Young from her “many years spent studying Indigenous

12  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea” (AIATSIS n.d.) observed that “the definition of Aboriginal territoriality according to non-Aboriginal concepts of boundaries (precise lines on the ground) is fraught with danger. It is generally not appropriate for Aboriginal people" (Young quoted in Solling 2014, p. 15). My tribal totem is Goieewee the ‘deep-water shark’, my family totem is Watoo the possum and my personal totem is Wandigyn the lyrebird. Professor Larissa Behrendt (Director of Research at Jumbunna, University of Technology Sydney), who features in JustUS explains in a chapter of Decolonizing research: Indigenous storywork as methodology (2019), that introducing oneself in this manner is also about telling the reader something about our values and worldviews and asserts our sovereignty. In introducing herself in the same way, Behrendt explains:

Our personal totem reminds us that we are descended from our animal totem and it is this animal that is our ancestor. We have responsibilities for looking after that animal – we can’t eat its meat, for example – and the personal totem reminds us of our interconnection to our environment and the natural world. Our clan totem reminds us that we are connected to other people, that we have responsibility to and for them and our spiritual totem is our connection to our ancestors. (Behrendt 2019, p. 474)

These values were taught to me by my Indigenous family, community, elders and ancestors. I come from a large Indigenous family on my father’s side, who grew up with nine brothers and sisters on Purfleet Mission, an Aboriginal reserve, five kilometres south of Taree, who were all later removed for being “trouble-makers” (I explain this a little later). They were forced to live in a condemned house in the small farming town of Tinonee, the first Indigenous family, as far as we know, to integrate into white society in the Manning Valley. This is where my father later met my non-Indigenous mother Jennifer Sullivan who also came from a fairly large family. I naturally navigated toward my Indigenous family because I have more cousins my age on that side but still, I had a lot to do with my non-Indigenous family and I love both sides dearly. I explore my family history in more detail in another feature length film that I produced for National Indigenous Television (NITV) called Teach a Man to Fish (2018). In this film I share my memories of my first experiences of racism, beginning with the name calling in primary school by other students as well as my experience of overt racism by a high school teacher, which is still very vivid and was for many years traumatising to recall. As an Indigenous student of fair skin, I wasn’t recognisably Aboriginal

13  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know to many people, including my student peers and teachers, and I was the only Indigenous student in my year 10 history class, when we were introduced to a new teacher. In his first lesson on my first ever lesson on Aboriginal history, it was 1987, this teacher proceeded to share his previous experience of working in a remote Indigenous community in central Australia using language to describe Indigenous people as the “most foul-mouthed”, “alcoholic” and “dirty” people he had ever come across. At the time, I lacked the confidence to speak out and I simply broke down and cried. I was completely traumatised. But I rallied. I got a signed petition together from every student in the class, stating his exact words, calling for his apology. My father was called in to meet with the teacher, myself and the principal, and my dad shared his own experience of racism, as one of the first Indigenous students to be allowed to attend a white public school in Taree in the 1950’s5. The teacher apologised profusely, and the Principal asserted that he didn’t condone his behaviour- a small but significant win.

This experience happened just before the 1988 Bicentenary which celebrated 200 years of British occupation of Australia. In this year, while the biggest Aboriginal march in this country’s history took place in Sydney, I staged my own form of protest on a much smaller scale, at my local high school. First of all, I refused to receive the commemorative fake gold medallion and at the school assembly in front of over 1000 students and teachers, delivered an emotional recount of Jack Patten’s Day of Mourning6 Speech, which was first read in 1938, marking Australia’s 150th year celebration. After just spitting the words out through tears and a quivering voice, I had an emotional breakdown in front of the whole school. Some student friends were visibly shocked, with one girl remarking, “I had no idea you felt so strongly about this.” It was as if that moment allowed me to address all the casual racism that I endured up until that point; the racist slurs, jokes and innuendos that I had to tolerate throughout my primary school years and first years of high school. It was one comment, however, from one of my white mates that would inspire me to write my first rap. Within a matter of days after delivering the speech, this friend asked rhetorically, “Why do you have to say you’re Aboriginal? You don’t talk like them, look like them. You’re intelligent, you dress well, you’re not a drunk…” The rap was called ‘Identity’:

5 see more in Beresford 2012 on the history of racism and exclusion of Indigenous people from Australian public schools. 6 See National Museum of Australia’s website for the complete speech and Day of Mourning protest.

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You grew up thinking I was white While I grew up feeling I was black Ya say ya needed some explanation right And I became half this and half of that (Saunders 1988)

I learned most of my Indigenous cultural knowledge of who I am as an Aboriginal person through oral histories and stories shared by my grandparents, my father, my uncles and aunties on my dad’s side of the family. I learned also through the work I did in the community as an Aboriginal youth worker. I learned more about Aboriginal political and social history later through undertaking Aboriginal Studies as my studies major for my Bachelor of Arts (Communications) degree at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), from 1996 to 2000, far removed from my home country. Even though I was displaced from country when I moved to Sydney, I formed many relationships with Indigenous peoples from all over Australia, through living in Redfern, working closely with Aboriginal families in Aboriginal youth work, working in Aboriginal media and in Aboriginal higher education. I have been learning and reflecting ever since on my ontology as an Aboriginal person, while also recognising the duality of my black and white identity, which resonates with many Indigenous people of mixed heritage.

Spending over 20 years away from country, I felt the strong pull to return home and since my return have witnessed many changes. In the past ten years there has been a revival of the local Gathang language and a focus on teaching Indigenous traditional culture. In 2019, Taree High School announced that its LOTE (Languages Other Than English) program would concentrate on teaching our language, using local Indigenous qualified language speakers and teachers, most of whom are family. These units are offered to all students, but traditional dances are taught only to Indigenous students, based on the premise that Indigenous students should become “strong in their own culture and language” (MCEETYA quoted in Morrison et al. 2019, p. 8) As a parent of two Indigenous children, a year 6 boy and a year 7 girl, I am pleased that they are now being afforded the opportunity to learn about their ‘culture and language’, something I could never have imagined as an Indigenous student attending primary school in the 1970’s and High School in the 1980’s. However, while my children have learned some language and some local dances, they have learned very little else about Indigenous history, politics and society from their general education experience up to this point. This knowledge is not only essential for all students in order to engender empathy and

15  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know understanding for Indigenous peoples but according to Yosso (2005) it also helps to build within Indigenous students “Resistant Capital” (p. 80), which I will discuss further in Bar 5.1.

In describing my own identity, I resonate with Māori researcher Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), who recognises the plurality encompassed within the generalised, descriptive term ‘Indigenous.’ She also points to the politics enshrined in the terminologies that others use to describe us, or that we, as Indigenous people, choose to identify with. Smith recognises the term ‘indigenous’ as being ‘problematic’ in that it essentially describes peoples who have vastly different experiences “under imperialism” (Smith 1999, p. 6). Smith advocates instead for the term, ‘Indigenous peoples’, with the ‘s’, which she explains, has been adopted by many Indigenous peoples globally and debated at many world Indigenous forums. It has been argued to express a collective struggle for self-determination, unifying the world’s Indigenous peoples, while also recognising “real differences between different Indigenous peoples” on a local and international level (Smith 1999, pp. 6-8).

While I prefer to use the more localised term of ‘Biripi’ (also phonetically spelled Birpai) to describe my personal connection to country and community, or Guri which means Aboriginal person, I also use ‘Indigenous’ to represent that I also play my part in a collective of Indigenous peoples rallying for self-determination, sovereignty and social justice. I also use the synonyms ‘black’, ‘blackfulla’ and ‘Black Australia’ but I use these terms, as Smith best articulates, as antiquated racist “insults” that have been “politicized as a powerful signifier of oppositional identity” (Smith 1999, p. 6). Hip-hop also has a long history of subversion and word play, for example Tupac Shakur subverted the highly offensive “n-word” into an acronym N.I.G.G.A. (Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished); in a similar vein, our own Indigenous Hip-hop artist Wire MC coined the acronym B.L.A.CK., to stand for “Born Long Ago Creation’s Keeper” (Jarrett in interview 2004). I recognise that I cannot speak on behalf of all Indigenous peoples, but we stand together in the struggle for justice, and we share in many common viewpoints. This is supported by other auto-ethnographers who also say that while one Aborigine cannot speak for other Aborigines, “…auto-ethnographers provide an authoritative voice that permits insight into an otherwise unknowable world… to seek and produce works that speak clearly and powerfully about these worlds” (Denzin 1997 quoted in Houston 2007, p. 49). While I acknowledge that I cannot speak for all mob7, I

7 Colloquial Aboriginal English word to describe Indigenous peoples

16  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know believe that through almost 50 years of identifying as Indigenous, meeting and making connections with other Indigenous groups right across the country, many times in their own lands, I believe I have developed an “authoritative voice” and I can introduce the audience (reader or viewer) “clearly and powerfully” to unknown worlds, foreign to many outsiders.

I use the terms ‘storyteller’ (see Bar 5.1) or ‘Indigenous auto-ethnographer’ (see Bar 5.2) to describe my researcher-self in this project centred around Indigenous Hip-hop and the social justice issues it speaks back to. I claim this because of my Aboriginality, but also because I have practiced the elements of Hip-hop, firstly as a B-Boy in the early 1980’s and as an MC fronting and recording with a number of funk/Hip-hop groups from the early 1990’s to mid- 2010’s. Hence, I write in first person and use personal reflections of related experiences with Indigenous and Hip-hop culture and hence the autobiographical style of my research, writing and filmmaking. Lastly, I have always, like Wilson (2008) slipped in and out of being a participant to that of an observer which has given me a “natural advantage in that participant observation in Indigenous communities has taken place all my life” (p. 40). This also helped me to form a deep understanding of Indigenous as well as Hip-hop culture and so I find that auto-ethnography is a fitting description of my research practice. To illustrate my standpoint as an Indigenous Hip-hop artist, I provide the following excerpt to one of my raps, ‘I am Humane’: So, what does it mean to be Aborigine in this country? to be black in identity? and what does it mean to be white despite the blackness within? you can succeed in this society coz of the colour of your skin (Saunders 2005) The above stanza is about my identity as a fair-skinned Aboriginal man and it is my creative practise in explaining to an audience who I am as an Indigenous storyteller and my connection to this research project. Moreover, while I finally feel comfortable in my skin as an Aboriginal person today, to get to this point has been an arduous journey of self-doubt, self-loathing, managing mental illness and a feeling of being caught in between two worlds, somewhere in the middle of the black and white cultural spectrum. Due to the fairness of my skin, my grasp of the English language and possessing all the tropes of white culture, throughout my life, I have been challenged by both black and white people about my Aboriginality. I have constantly had to explain myself, or choose to ignore or defend against racist slurs, casual racism and ignorant stereotypes of Indigenous people. I didn’t feel like I

17  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know completely fitted in either culture, and at times, I still struggle with this today as an Aboriginal researcher. However, according to Reed-Danahay (1997), this duality of identity I am experiencing now as an Indigenous auto-ethnographer is a benefit to this project. She explains that, while Indigenous auto-ethnographers might feel displaced because they are positioned “outside the dominant Western discourse”, they “maintain a complex dual identity”; as she puts it, “[the] auto-ethnographer must move between identities, not being quite “at home” in either” (Reed-Danahay quoted in Houston 2007, p. 49).

The last line of the above stanza, “you can succeed in this society coz of the colour of your skin”, also acknowledges the privilege that my fair skin has afforded me, in that I have not had to endure racial profiling and racism that my darker skinned brothers and sisters, including family, continue to suffer. My family has always been considered by the wider community as an “exception to the race” because of our success in the fishing business, mostly employed, educated and many of us holding Christian beliefs and values. However, many outsiders, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who might view me, or my family as simply “assimilated” would not know of our history of Indigenous political activism, which began with my grandfather in the early 1960’s agitating for better living conditions for Aboriginal people living on Purfleet Mission and taking this fight up further with the Aboriginal Protection Board8 in the Supreme Court of NSW. My grandmother Faith Saunders, as one of the first Aboriginal teaching assistants at a local public school, in the 1970’s, demanded that Indigenous students be treated equally and not humiliated by having to line up in front of the student body to have their heads checked for lice. My father, grandparents, uncles, aunties, my sister and my cousins have all carried on their legacy by working within the historically oppressive systems of society, in education, welfare, juvenile justice and health. And while I and many of my cousins wear a lighter shade of skin, it does not dismiss who we are as proud Biripi people who are all, in our own ways, fighting these systems from within.

8 The Aboriginal Protection Board operated under “protectionist Policies”, originally put in place to protect Aboriginal peoples from massacres and general mistreatment. According to the Bringing them Home Report (1997), “The protectionist policy proposed by Meston was put into effect by the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, replaced in 1939 by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act and the Torres Strait Islanders Act. These Acts allowed government officials under the control of the Chief Protector and, after 1939, the Director of Native Affairs to ‘remove’ Indigenous people to and between reserves and to separate children from their families. All that was required under the Act of 1897 was an administrative decision authorised by the Minister. There was no court hearing” (HREOC 1997, p. 63).

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In my film and this writing my main targets are our criminal “justice” and education systems. This stems from my first encounter with systemic racism in our local justice system. Only two years after graduating in Year 12 in 1989, I took up a job as an Aboriginal youth worker for the local ‘Koori Youth Network’. Up until this point I thought racism was limited to name calling and racist jokes. However, I quickly learned within the first year of this role, working in child protection, that our kids were being physically abused by members of our local police force. I heard testimonials from a group of Koori kids, aged 8-12, who were often wandering the streets of Taree late at night because they were experiencing family violence and didn’t want to go home, often sleeping rough under the Martin Bridge. Apart from sharing experiences of sexual abuse from local paedophiles, they disclosed that the police would often pick them up, sometimes pepper spraying them, take them to the cells to be sprayed with high pressure fire hoses, then literally throw them into the back of the paddy wagon, and were given a rough ride through the Kiwarrak State Forest to be finally dumped in the middle of the bush to find their way back home, 5-10 kilometres away. Even more shocking than these revelations were the disclosures about Indigenous women getting picked up by the same group of officers and taken to the cells to be sexually assaulted. After hearing these testimonials, as a group, we immediately notified the police ombudsman, and an internal affairs investigation took place. Three officers were arrested. One committed suicide before they were all to face criminal charges in the local court. We thought this would make the other two officers look guilty, but the magistrate and jury let the other two get off without any criminal charges laid. In fact, one was promoted to detective, while the other was stationed to another area command in Dubbo, NSW.

My experience as a youth worker, together with the systemic racism I have experienced since, not only informs this work, it drives my artistic activism. I am also encouraged in the knowledge that “education is power” and I get to play my part in dismantling these hegemonic systems of power that have historically oppressed my people from the outside in. I now have the opportunity to tell the world of the struggles that face my people, from my perspective, from inside out. While I struggle at times with this privilege that has been afforded me through my access to education, I know that this privilege is off the backs of my ancestors’ struggle. Many Indigenous researchers, artists and activists who have come before me also recognise this. I will not abandon their legacy, the path they have paved for me, and others of my generation, and generations to come. For me this project is about imparting what I know about this subject as an Indigenous Hip-hop artist/ filmmaker/ educator/ activist/

19  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know researcher and furthering this knowledge by providing a platform for other not-so popular voices, or other subjectivities, in Hip-hop to be heard. More importantly, I have made a film that articulates, through the lens of Hip-hop, the issues faced by our people today. I want to engender empathy for Indigenous people. I desire audiences to be shocked and disturbed by the atrocities they will witness on the screen, to be educated and empowered to act against them, to join the hundreds of thousands of people screaming out for real social and political change in this country so that we do not have to bear witness again to these all too regular crimes against our humanity.

Bar 3 “My Homies”: My Relationship with Participants Aboriginal and African American Australian 38-year-old MC Ebony Williams, aka MC Ebsta, from the inner-city suburb of Newtown, Sydney, was my first interview in 2017. As one of the first recorded Aboriginal female MC’s, Ebsta was a natural choice as an informant and one that I personally knew through my work at Koori Radio (Sydney’s Aboriginal community radio station) in the early 1990’s. Her story opens up the discourse on the influence of African American popular culture and politics, sharing how she was introduced to Hip-hop through “stealing tapes'' from visiting African American Sailors. Another Indigenous informant from the urban Aboriginal community of The Block Redfern, who would later become the main character of my JustUS, was 21-year-old Stephen Carr- Saunders (aka Sonboy), whose personal journey to Hip-hop became one of the main narrative threads to the documentary. I met Sonboy through a poetry slam event in early 2018, in Ultimo Sydney, which is where I also met Aboriginal Filipino Australian rapper 27-year-old Rhyan Clapham (aka DOBBY), who also became one of my informants and features in the film. From there, through the snowball sampling effect,9 facilitated by another aboriginal Australian Hip-hop legend Mark Ross (aka Munkimuk), touted as the grandfather of Indigenous Hip-hop and long-time member of Bankstown’s South-West Syndicate, who ‘upped (informed) me’ on a Hip-hop conference and festival called 4Elements (aka 4ESydney), held annually in Sydney’s South Western suburb of Bankstown, the population of which consists a high proportion of culturally and linguistically diverse peoples (Alian and Wood 2019). It was here that I met 30-year-old Punjabi Sikh Australian MC Sukhdeep Singh (aka L-FRESH The LION), 38-year-old African American Indonesian Australian MC mirrah,

9 In sociology, snowball sampling refers to the accidental or pre-determined research methodology wherein existing or prospective research participants refer to other subjects from among their social circles (see Babbie 2005).

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41-year-old Turkish Mexican Australian MC Maya Jupiter, 35-year-old Anglo-Australian MC Lee Monro (aka Figg Kidd), 4ESydney HipHop workshop mentees, 16-year-old Turkish Australian Ela Pina and 18-year-old Declan Purdue (aka Dippy), and Brooklyn’s first recorded African American rapper 52-year-old Duval Clear (aka Masta Ace), who was touring Australia at the time and was guest speaker at the 4ESydney conference. The other main location, which also in itself became the main subject of my film, was The Block Redfern, a place once renowned by outsiders as Sydney’s ‘ghetto’ and to Indigenous insiders, including Sonboy, the urban political and cultural heart of Aboriginal Australia (Shaw 2000; Anthony 2011).

An interview with Byron Bay based Hip-hop artist 33-year-old Daniel Pearson (aka Triple Nip), came about as a ‘happy accident’ during a failed attempt to gain interviews with international Hip-hop legends Lauryn Hill and Michael Franti, who were both performing at the Byron Bay Blues Festival in 2018. Triple Nip provided another aspect to the transformative and healing powers of Hip-hop, sharing his personal struggle with homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction and crime, and referring to a brief discussion on the healing powers of Hip-hop and its therapeutic use by school counsellors and psychologists10. Each artist, including Triple Nip, had equally important and unique stories to share about their own Hip-hop journeys. Initially the aim of this project was to create a series that would episodically navigate these individual narratives to draw out specific themes that related to each individual. However, after deciding that creating a series for the purpose of this study was far beyond its budget and timeframe, I decided on a feature length film that would focus on Sonboy’s personal narrative with all other informants acting as supporting expert talking heads11.

It was not until mid-interview with Sonboy that I discovered that his younger brother Dean was victim to a police chase from Redfern to the outer Sydney suburb of Kings Cross, during which he was shot three times by Redfern police, almost losing his life in 2012. Apart from indirectly experiencing this level of police violence, Sonboy also shared his direct experience with police harassment, crime, and the recidivism of close family members, community

10 See more in Crooke and Travis Jr 2017. 11 ‘Expert Talking Heads’ is film and TV jargon for participants utilised in documentary or TV journalism for their qualified expert commentary and are seen on screen speaking directly to camera or to the off-screen filmmaker or journalist.

21  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know dysfunction but also the transformative aspects of Hip-hop that liberated him from following a similar path to other family and community members. Legal academic, Professor Larissa Behrendt, was the obvious choice to provide a more analytical voice to the Redfern story not just because of her expertise in the fields of criminology, sociology, history and education, but she also grew up in Redfern and had an intimate knowledge of and relationship to the place and its residents. Other important perspectives to speak to the Redfern story included Shane Phillips, one of Redfern’s community leaders; the CEO of the Aboriginal Housing Company, Uncle Mick Mundine; and ex-resident Angelina Penrith, who provided unique insights into her own social and political connection to The Block.

Filming interviews with all participants in their respective neighbourhoods within familiar surroundings aided in their comfortability, cultural safety, eliciting relaxed and natural conversational responses to my questions. Interviewing Sonboy in the confines of the Redfern Community Centre recording studios also helped to situate him in the context of an emerging Indigenous recording artist. Walking and talking with him around the streets of The Block, his old ‘stomping ground’ before undergoing a complete facelift through its gentrification, helped him to recall memories of the old Block. This had the effect of visually connecting Sonboy to the Redfern narrative and inviting an audience into the Indigenous insider’s perspective of a place so historically, culturally and politically important to Indigenous peoples, and which was the main inspiration for Sonboy’s debut EP, A Kid from The Block (2018).

During the background research and the documentary pre-production process, I made sure to impart as much knowledge as possible to my research participants/on-screen talents, in regard to the nature and purpose of my research and film production. In spite of the fact that most of these particular participants have been the subjects of previous Hip-hop research, they viewed my particular research project with enough regard to want to engage again in yet another Indigenous Hip-hop research project. Therefore, as important as it is that the academy finds my work as contributing something new to my field of research, it is equally important that my research is received well in the Indigenous Hip-hop community and their respective communities; otherwise for me it is pointless to have pursued it any further. To pursue an Indigenous research project that is perceived as having no meaningful benefit to the Indigenous community, would become a selfish pursuit that even non-Indigenous scholars have recognised as problematic, because “…merely studying society and its ills without a

22  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know commitment to making society more humane has been called irresponsible” (Babbie 2015, p. 78).

Apart from sharing interest and knowledge with my informants on the subject of Indigenous Hip-hop, it was through our conversations where we collaboratively arrived at new discoveries. This was also facilitated through familiarity and mutual respect that I shared with my participants. Professor Tony E Adams further explains the relationship between researcher and informant as a collaborative one, based on familiarity.

…research activities in which researchers and participants—one and the same—probe together about issues that transpire, in conversation, about particular topics … and, unlike traditional one-on-one interviews with strangers, are situated within the context of emerging and well-established relationships among participants and interviewers. (Adams quoted in Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010, pp. 6-7)

In understanding research as a form of ceremony (Wilson 2008), as an Indigenous auto- ethnographic researcher/filmmaker I did not purely listen, observe, record and take notes, but actively participated in the research by sharing knowledge, opinions and ideas as a co- informant. Equally, my informants are recognised as co-researchers rather than vessels through which data is collected, as they too come to the interview with their own research and expertise. According to Wilson (2008), researching in Indigenous communities should be a collaborative process, in which the participants have a level of control and ownership and can see the research making a positive contribution to the betterment of the community. The knowledge gained through the research is not owned by the individual researcher or even the team. It is shared in a holistic, physical and metaphysical sense “…It is with the cosmos; it is with the animals, with the plants, with the earth that we share this knowledge. It goes beyond the idea of individual knowledge to the concept of relational knowledge…you are answerable to all your relations when you are doing research” (p. 56, emphasis in original). I discuss my approach to the interview further in Bar 5.5 when I explain the semi-structured interview style employed in my methodology. Additionally, throughout my process I have kept participants informed in relation to the progress of the project, and I have shown rough edits of the film and welcomed participant feedback and editorial. While I haven’t received any

23  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know specific editorial notes from participants, I have received positive responses and to date no suggestions for omissions, changes or additions…phew!!!

Bar 4 “What’s Up?” Problem, Context and Rationale Since the early 2000’s Indigenous Hip-hop music has developed through greater access to affordable production gear, as well as business savvy, through the establishment of Indigenous owned record labels like Briggs’s Bad Apples. More recently Indigenous and other culturally and linguistically diverse Hip-hop has managed to capture a wider audience with Indigenous artist Birdz’s track ‘Black Lives Matter’ receiving high rotation on Triple J in 2016 and Zambian Australian Sampa the Great winning the ARIA music award for best Hip-hop release in 2019. Briggs, Trials, Tasman Keith, DOBBY, Young Nookie, Jimblah, Last Kinection and Baker Boy have also shared similar radio and TV exposure with A.B.Original’s album Reclaim Australia winning Triple J’s album of the year in 2017.

Like artists before them including Wire MC, Les Beckett and Ebony Williams, these Indigenous Hip-hop artists address important political and social issues in their music. Problems of neo-colonialism, institutional racism, over-incarceration of Aboriginal people, and police brutality are recurrent and salient themes expressed by contemporary Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse rappers. This creative research project, therefore, comes at a critical time when young non-Indigenous audiences are exposed to and open to listening to new discourses about social justice issues facing Aboriginal communities, facilitated through national public TV broadcasters such as the ABC, SBS and NITV as well as various social media platforms and radio.

Australian Hip-hop scholarship has burgeoned since a seminal work, Global Noise (2001) edited by Tony Mitchell, was published. The field has since been explored further by non- Indigenous Australian academics, including Mitchell and Pennicook (2009), who have investigated Indigenous Hip-hop ethnographically and linguistically as a localised phenomenon, with its own vernacular, rather than simply mimicking or appropriating African American Hip-hop. Going further than the analogy of World Englishes to describe the dynamism and plurality of Global Hip-hops, Mitchell and Pennicook argue that “what now counts as Aboriginal Hip Hop is the product of a dynamic set of identifications—with African American music, style, and struggle—and a dynamic set of reidentifications—with indigenous music, style, and struggle” (Mitchell and Pennicook 2009, p. 30). Put another

24  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know way, Hip-hop has been adopted into Indigenous culture rather than Indigenous culture adapting to Hip-hop.

Musician and ethnographer Gavin Carfoot, through a collaborative research project with Indigenous musicians from the remote town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, explores the musical response that Indigenous musicians take to addressing the serious problems with alcohol abuse in their communities and personal lives. The purpose of this study was to respond to deficit-based News Media reporting of Indigenous communities since the Government’s intervention12 into remote Aboriginal communities in 2007, which constantly report on the problems of Indigenous alcoholism and the symptomatic effects of domestic violence and child sexual abuse. Reflecting on his own song writing in collaboration with Indigenous musicians from Tennant Creek as well as non-Indigenous colleagues, Carfoot says, “[w]hen these songs deal with issues about alcohol in the community or for individuals, they offer insights that are deeply personal at the same time as they are a way of expressing agency and self-determination” (Carfoot 2016, p. 226). In contradiction to the negative view that arts-based programs do very little to address the issues of alcoholism, Carfoot demonstrates that these ‘community-led’, ‘asset- based programs’ facilitated and continue to play an important role in allowing musicians to advocate through their music positive messages of better health, family support and self-empowerment.

Morgan and Warren (2011) interviewed mentors and mentees of the Hip-hop workshop spaces in Redfern/Waterloo and Nowra on the south coast of NSW as well as Indigenous community members from each location. They explored the generational divide that exists between Indigenous parents and young people and how Hip-hop can bridge that divide through ‘identity work’. They found that “Cultural brokers like Wire MC encourage young men to see hip hop not just in its Afro American form but as a vehicle for handling the contradictions in their own lives. They nurture the symbolic expression of Indigenous resistance and survival, teach about history of struggle and encourage stronger identification than the young Aboriginal men might otherwise experience” (Morgan and Warren 2011, p.

12 In 2007, Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s coalition government, with bi-partisan support from the opposition Labor Party, launched an unprecedented military intervention into remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, called the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (NTNER). This ‘emergency’ was in response to The Little Children are Sacred Report (2007) which reported high levels of child sexual assault in remote Indigenous communities and came just six days after the report’s release. (See more in Bar 6.2)

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12). They identify that informal pedagogies, such as the Hip-hop workshop, allows for students who have rejected or been rejected by the formal education space, to form ‘solidarities’ against the racism experienced at school and on the streets, and to steer away from more dangerous and illicit alternatives, while learning more about and strengthening their Indigenous identities.

Chiara Minestrelli (2017) in her ‘collaborative ethnography’ with predominantly Indigenous Australian Hip-hop artists, charts the history of transnational musical and political influencers on Indigenous politics and music in a chapter titled ‘The Black from Down-Unda’. She argues that all Indigenous music is ‘intrinsically political.” Minestrelli, as do I, find it necessary to bring historical context to the type of political rhetoric evident in contemporary Indigenous Hip-hop. Minestrelli explains that “…a transnational dialogue seemed to be sustained by the racial and discriminatory oppression that the two communities had to face in their respective countries'' (Minestrelli 2017, p. 39). She focuses on the musical and political influences born from physical connections made between African America and Aboriginal Australia, dating back to WWI and demonstrates how these connections, premised on a shared struggle against white supremacy over the years of successive encounters, eventually led to us shaping our own Hip-hop movement.

In a conference paper, Suzi Hutchings and Alexander Crooke (2017) have also identified Indigenous Hip-hop as an extension of a tradition of Indigenous protest music rather than just a re-appropriation of Hip-hop out of the USA or a vehicle through which to reinvigorate Indigenous traditional culture. They focus their talk on the work of Indigenous Hip-hop duo A.B.Original and their album Reclaim Australia (2016). The irreverent song ‘January 26’ is discussed along with the national debate it helped to initiate around changing Australia’s national day. “… the song also sparked several new ones [debates] in both mainstream and social media about White privilege, racism, the treatment of Indigenous Australians by mainstream society and governments and even immigration policies” (Hutchings and Crooke 2017, p. 5). Like my own study they use A.B.Original’s lyrics as a springboard into the specific social and political issues that they address in their music, providing historical, social and political context.

The purpose of this project, however, is to shift Australian Hip-hop research from an outsider ethnographic approach to one based on an insider perspective, in order to gain another

26  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know understanding of Australian Hip-hop music and cultures, allowing for my own experiences, ideas and reflections as an Indigenous Hip-hop artist and activist to also inform the project. As an Indigenous Hip-hop Auto-ethnographer, I have been able to engage with my informants from a position of shared knowledge and experience. This has enabled a more conversational style of interview technique, focusing questions on specific lyrical content and the social justice issues they reflect, which in turn enabled me to elicit responses that expand upon the informants’ knowledge of the issues themselves. Moreover, one interview in particular required a high level of interpersonal trust and empathy. The main character Sonboy was extremely candid about his and his family’s collective criminal histories as well as his younger brother’s current situation in lock up and the traumatic events leading up to his incarceration. Being distantly related also went a long way toward developing almost instant rapport. Additionally, being able to share my own history of connection to The Block, Sonboy’s hometown, its politics and being able to identify other notable individuals and families who resided there, all facilitated a trusting relationship. Wilson (2008) also speaks to this in regard to relationality in his research methodology: “...because I am working within communities that I am already a part of rapport has already been built and trust established. Relational accountability requires me to form reciprocal and respectful relationships within the communities where I am conducting research” (p. 40). Knowing that our interview would involve unearthing traumatic memories, a level of sensitivity was also needed in talking through these difficult life events with Sonboy, and so an ‘insider’ approach very much helped to open up these conversations.

In regard to the creative work, the major output of the research, one main impetus for undertaking this project was hearing Birdz’s track ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016), which specifically references the wrongful deaths of Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia in 2016, TJ Hickey in Redfern, Sydney, New South Wales in 2004, and Mulrundji Doomadgi in Palm Island, Queensland also in 2004. The fact that the song received consistent radio airplay on the national public broadcaster’s Triple J, meant that it was reaching a wide youth demographic. However, my concern is that the messages might be lost on young people without any prior knowledge of the political and social contexts for the events referenced in this song. I was therefore motivated to create a documentary that would not only provide more insight into the subject matter of this track, but to utilise the popular medium of Hip-hop in general as a vehicle into a deeper exploration of the social justice issues that Indigenous Australian Hip-hop, in particular, speaks back to. The consistent goal

27  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know has been to engage young Australians, who are avid consumers of Hip-hop music, into these discourses on matters of Australian social justice, history and politics. In Bar 5.6, I discuss further my approach to the filmmaking process as well as identify the Australian Hip-hop films that currently exist, as well as other films that resonate with mine and that have influenced the style of storytelling that I have adopted in order to contribute something original to the canon of film documentaries in Australia.

Bar 5 Freestyling a Theoretical and Methodological Bricolage The French word bricolage in this study is used to describe the drawing together of a diversity of ideas and thoughts to form a conglomerate worldview. Various scholars have used the term to describe their research objects; for example, in exploring the “construction” of popular music as a vehicle into “changing social contexts”, Mallinder (2011) describes techno music in the London “Clubland” context as “accepting of a post-punk, rare groove eclecticism” forming “another component of the city’s Balaeric cocktail, where music became part of a mutating style bricolage” (p. 169) Stavrias (2005) also uses the term bricolage to explain the hybrid nature of Hip-hop music produced through sampling: “Deejays ‘sample’ various records and have at their disposal the whole history of pre- recorded sounds: songs, advertising jingles or TV theme songs, even speeches by politicians. In this way the deejay samples many sounds to create a new soundtrack” (Stavrias 2005, p. 46). Bricolage is additionally the most appropriate academic term to describe the way in which the culture of Hip-hop pulls together a diversity of ideas and elements, each with their own cultural histories, including breakdance, deejaying, rapping, graffiti, fashion, language, values and beliefs (Beachum and McCray 2011). In breakdance, for instance, one can observe the melding of gymnastics, capoeira with disco and funk dance moves. Also, Hip hop Based Education (HHBE) in the US, uses the art of sampling to teach students about researching and writing. The art of “search and discovery” in finding the right music to listen to or sample, has been a big part of the culture of Hip-hop since its inception (Hill & Petchauer 2013).

In the same way that Hip-hop DJ’s dig through vinyl record stores to find obscure music and various other sonic sources for sampling and remixing new, original and “dope” beats, this project also borrows from a range of ideas and knowledge systems to create a multi-layered and original documentary film. In the assemblage of my own theoretical framework for this project, I have drawn from a number of key disciplines that encapsulate my work. My

28  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know theoretical bricolage also intersects with other critical theorists who have also been described as bricoleurs, who “seek to produce practical, pragmatic knowledge, a bricolage that is cultural and structural, judged by its degree of historical situatedness and its ability to produce praxis or action” (Denzin, Lincoln and Smith 2009, p. 26). This work too is about producing knowledge that is seen as practical and serves a purpose that is beneficial to our communities, as well as a form of artistic activism that inspires further action. Finally, the creative work is in itself an act of sampling and mixing various filmic and sonic sources including interviews, photographic and video archival, music video, text, music, and sound design to tell a complex and multi-layered story.

The project, therefore, has adopted a bricolage to form its theoretical framework and methodology, drawing from discourse theory (Denzin and Lincoln 2008; Jacobs 2009; Mullet 2018), Indigenous paradigm, story-work and standpoint theory (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003; Nakata 2007; Archibald et al. 2019; Pelleitier and Asselin 2013; Rigney 2003; Semali and Kincheloe 2010; Smith 1999; Spark 2003; Wilson 2008), and auto-ethnography (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010; Houston 2007; Whitinui 2013). Being a film predominantly about Indigenous society, history and politics, situated in an Indigenous community and featuring Indigenous people, theories around Indigenous protocols and representation in the cinema were also explored (Collins 2010; Huijser and Collins-Gearing 2007; Janke 2008; Peters- Little 2002; Spark 2003). Collins (2010) work in particular on “trauma cinema” was a touchstone behind making this film, by focusing on presenting the subjective view of an Indigenous rapper, Sonboy from Redfern, Sydney, who has experienced a number of traumatic events throughout his young life. Finally, I discuss Culturally Responsive Pedagogies in relation to the Hip-hop workshop that receives some coverage in the film which underpins my arguments for Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) in Australia (Beacham and McCray 2011; Booth 2014; McKinley 2017; Hill & Petchauer 2013; Morrison et al. 2019; Stokes, and Turnbull 2017; Yosso 2005).

Approaching this research project by exploring the cultural, historical, and political influences that have informed Australian Conscious Hip-hop, I have attempted to explore holistically the central unifying theme of what it means to be black in 21st century Australia, which in a nutshell is what Indigenous Hip-hop wants you to know - hence the title for the film. Additionally, through searching and discovering the most pertinent filmic elements, I have edited together a creative work guided by both the wide-ranging responses of my co-

29  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know informants and my own auto-ethnographic reflections as an Indigenous Hip-hop artist. In doing so, I have attempted to create a layered documentary on Australian Hip-hop that builds on empathy for its main character – Sonboy – to support a wider understanding of his community and the rest of Indigenous Australia. In the following sections, I expand on the elements of the theoretical and methodological bricolage employed in this project, starting with Indigenous Paradigm.

Bar 5.1 Indigenous+Hip-hop Pedagogy+Critical Race Theory = CHIRP Institutionalised education has the potential to play an important role in developing awareness and consciousness around the issues that Indigenous Hip-hop artists engage with. Hip-hop artists featured in my film are raising wider awareness of systems of oppression through their music, particularly around racial inequalities and negative interactions with the criminal justice system. Indigenous as well as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students in Australia also still share experiences of racism within the education system. Scholars in the U.S. have drawn the connections between Conscious Hip-hop and Critical Race Theory, which in turn has led to a long history of Culturally Responsive Pedagogies including Hip- hop Based Education (HHBE). According to Morrison et al. (2019) Culturally Responsive Pedagogy is under researched and underutilised as a framework in designing Australian curriculum. This section explores these concepts as the underpinning tenets of my theoretical bricolage and suggests how they might be employed to address the needs and concerns of Indigenous students and their communities who are navigating the persistence of racism in the education system.

Quentin Beresford provides an overview of the history of systemic racism in Australian schooling from 1900-1996. According to Beresford (2012) throughout the late 19th to early 20th centuries, overt racist policies continued to exclude Indigenous children from education. Their education was limited to primary grades based on “expert” opinion of the time that Indigenous children lacked the intellectual capacity to be educated much beyond 3rd or 4th grade (p. 91). For instance, despite public schooling being made compulsory in NSW under the Public Instruction Act 1880, protests by Anglo-Australian parents led to the Exclusion on Demand policy, formalised in NSW in 1902, ordering teachers across NSW to immediately exclude Aboriginal students if non-Indigenous parents objected to their presence, which became commonplace. “[I]t is likely that 50000 Aborigines were denied access [in NSW alone] to either white or the special Aboriginal schools in the first seventy years [of the 20th]

30  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know century” (Tatz quoted in Beresford, p. 93). Of course, this palpable presence of systemic racism in the education system, obvious to Aboriginal people, would have flow-on effects on the “educational aspirations” of Indigenous children. In NSW:

[a] 1974 conference was told about the intergenerational impact of racism: [Indigenous people] have been made to feel inferior and the children have this inheritance of being born into a group of people who have been considered inferior, the children have started school with an inferiority complex’. (Douglas quoted in Beresford, p. 97)

With the aim of improving their own teacher competencies, two educational scholars Anne Hickling- Hudson (from the University of Queensland, Australia) and Roberta Ahlquist (from California State University in San Jose) in 2003 undertook a comparative study of the education systems in the Australian and U.S. contexts respectively and how they have historically failed and continued to fail both Indigenous Australians and Native Americans. Using case studies of urban and remote school settings underpinned by post-colonial theory, they recognised one of the major problems facing Indigenous students is the prevalence of “whiteness” (p. 14) in both curricula and teaching staff. They identify that Native Americans make up just 1% of the American population compared to a 75% white population and Indigenous Australians just over 2% compared to over 90 percent white Australians and the teaching force in both countries reflecting these statistics. They recognise that “(m)ulticultural education has gone some way towards recognising the languages and cultures of diverse ethnicities. However, the role of black and Indigenous cultures is still inadequately recognised in curriculum practice in Australia and North America” (Ahlquist and Hickling-Hudson 2003, p. 3). They also recognise that from the 1970’s - 2000 some inroads were made, including “specially targeted financial assistance and learning support centres in universities, ...parent and community support groups, ... independent, indigenous- controlled schools, programs of Indigenous Studies, ... Indigenous teachers and teacher aides, and growing numbers of Indigenous leaders and activists working at various levels of the system to improve the education of their people” (p. 5). However, these scholars also believe that the real solutions in attending to the disparities in educational outcomes and experiences in the school systems for Indigenous students lies with challenging teachers to acknowledge their whiteness within critical and reflexive contexts. Also, the teachers can be critical of the curriculum they are teaching by offering other perspectives to the silenced history narratives

31  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know that perpetuate “lies and omissions about indigenous histories and cultures, and histories of white settlement emphasising ‘pioneers’, ‘progress’ and the ‘Great Men’ approach” (p. 17). In contrast, Ahlquist and Hickling-Hudson assert that the results based on their study of bilingual schools in both the U.S. and Australia, where students take “ownership of the curriculum and teachers work collaboratively... If learning is contextualized, culturally relevant, and authentic, students will become more engaged in their education” (p. 21). They also believe that Indigenous studies at university level should be made compulsory for education students, however Indigenous scholars are still recognising problems with the delivery of Indigenous education in the university setting and the difficulty lies again at the cultural interface between Western and Indigenous knowledge.

Like any theoretical framework and given the amount of Indigenous research and multiple viewpoints since, an Indigenous paradigm does not enshrine a concrete or homogenous set of ethics and protocols. It is still evolving and is becoming more pluralistic in nature of interpretation, depending on the voices of the increasing number of Indigenous scholars who are “sanctioned” to weigh in. This is a direct reflection of the diversity of Indigenous knowledge, ethics and protocols held by countless numbers of Indigenous nations and countries all over the world. Torres Strait Islander scholar Martin Nakata et al. (2012) finds the decolonising project, for instance, led by many Indigenous scholars as problematic in its apparent simplification and limitation of Indigenous Education to a binary between Western theories and Indigenist worldviews. Nakata believes that while Indigenous scholars are in the process of decolonising so-called homogeneous western education systems, they do not recognise that through Indigenous knowledge making in the academic space, they are paradoxically drawing from non-Indigenous theories in order to reject them.

Indigenist scholar South Australian Narungga, Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri man Lester-Irabinna Rigney (2003) also asserts that “…while ‘Indigenism’ is highly politicised it is not premised on a total rejection of English language or the culture of the dominant. Nor are orthodox research paradigms and methodologies repudiated for ‘Indigenous only’ knowledge production methods…Indigenism should not be simplified or misunderstood as an argument for ontological or ‘methodological separatism’” (pg. 40). Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains that when writing her ground-breaking work Decolonising Methodologies (1999), she drew from “selected ideas, scholarship and literature” and a “preference for, and a grounding in, particular forms of analysis” so they should be immediately apparent to an

32  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know astute reader upon simply reading her introduction. She implies however that Indigenous ways of knowing are also already evident within Western ways of knowing, in the “Western imagination, in its fibre and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersections” (Smith 1999, p. 14).

Before Smith’s work and Indigenous scholarship since, non-Indigenous scholars Walton and Christie (1994) called this historical intellectual tradition of the Western ways of knowing Indigenous peoples as “Aboriginalism” to mean the writing of stories “about Aborigines told by whites using only white people’s imaginations. Aboriginal voices do not contribute to this story, so in ‘Aboriginalism’ Walton and Christie suggest that Aboriginal peoples develop a counter-discourse to such narrowly written texts that ignores Aboriginal voice and agency” (Walton and Christie quoted in Rigney 2003, p. 34). As his own counter-discourse, Rigney coined the term ‘Indigenist research’ with three key guiding and interrelated principles of: 1) “The involvement in Resistance as the emancipatory imperative in Indigenist research”; 2) “The political integrity of Indigenist research”; and 3) “The Privileging of Indigenous voices in Indigenist research” (p. 39). Noonukal scholar from Stradbroke Island, QLD, Karen Martin-Booran Mirraboopa (2003), another self-identified ‘Indigenist’ researcher asserts that she does not position herself “..in a reactive stance of resisting or opposing western research frameworks and ideologies. Therefore, I research from the strength and position of being Aboriginal and viewing anything western as 'other', alongside and among western worldviews and realities” (p. 205). She extends on Rigney’s principles to include:

• Recognition of our worldviews, our knowledges and our realities as distinctive and vital to our existence and survival; • Honouring our social mores as essential processes through which we live, learn and situate ourselves as Aboriginal people in our own lands and when in the lands of other Aboriginal people; • Emphasis of social, historical and political contexts which shape our experiences, lives, positions and futures; • Privileging the voices, experiences and lives of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal lands. (Mirraboopa 2003, p. 205)

Following these guiding principles of Indigenist research, my research questions to my informants focused on drawing out the social, historical and political contexts of their lived

33  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know experiences. For instance, in order to better understand Sonboy’s story, it was important to explore his historical, social and political connection to The Block, Redfern. Through these questions we learn Sonboy’s negative relationship with Redfern Police, growing up in an impoverished predominantly black community fraught with drug and alcohol problems and a family in constant conflict with the criminal justice system. Having this knowledge allows the audience to better understand and appreciate the lyrics of Sonboy’s track ‘Redfern Hometown’ but moreover to better appreciate and empathise with characters like Sonboy who grew up with similar experiences on The Block and other ‘fringe-dwelling’ Indigenous communities.

My role as the Indigenist researcher in conducting this research was all about privileging Indigenous voices in relation to their subjective experiences of police violence and certainly not to attempt some facile notion of objective storytelling that allowed representatives of Redfern Police to speak back to Sonboy’s and other Indigenous experiences of police violence in Redfern. Given that the police voice was already privileged via Australian News Media in relation to the Redfern Riots (see more in Bar 10) and in the event that almost ended Sonboy’s younger brother Dean’s life (see also Bar 10), JustUS becomes a resistance narrative or counter-discourse to the official public transcripts of these tragic events for the Hickey and Carr-Saunders families, fulfilling Rigney’s “emancipatory imperative” of Indigenist research as well as recognising the distinctiveness and vitality of our worldviews advocated by Mirraboopa for our “existence and survival”.

Indigenous ‘story-work’, a term coined by First Nations Canadian scholar and educational practitioner Jo-ann Archibald, is also about looking at the story or research holistically and apart from exploring the social, political, cultural and historical context to find deeper meaning in any text, intuitive reasoning and ‘meaning making’ comes into play but also Indigenous principles of respect, reciprocity and relationality (Wilson 2008; Archibald 2019). Archibald adds to these principles, “responsibility”, “reverence”, “holism”, “interrelatedness”, and “synergy” (Archibald 2019, p. 24). Using these guiding principles is about getting the researcher ready to conduct research in Indigenous communities. She explains:

In this story research process the researcher must listen to Indigenous Peoples’ stories with respect, develop story relationships in a responsible manner, treat story

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knowledge with reverence, and strengthen storied impact through reciprocity. The remaining three principles of holism, interrelatedness, and synergy enhance the meaning-making process about Indigenous traditional and lived experience stories. An Indigenous trickster story will exemplify these principles. (Archibald 2019, p. 25)

Trickster stories are much like Aboriginal dreamtime stories that use metaphor to teach reverence and respect for sacred sites, laws, totemic animals, country, water and the spirit world and they are also told to certain listeners who may come to elders (story tellers) for advice or ‘narrative therapy’, like Kaurna elder Aunty Barbara Wingard, a narrative therapist for the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, South Australia. Narrative therapists use stories in their counselling methods in treating clients with mental illness and/ or who have experienced significant trauma (Wingard n.d.). The listener in turn makes meaning from these stories and each individual listener will draw a different meaning based on what context and temporality the story is delivered and what the listener is wanting answered or what trauma they have or are experiencing, consciously or subconsciously. The trickster story that Archibald refers to is the traditional story of Old Man Coyote (OMC) and his search for ‘the bone needle’. She relates this story to researchers working with Western theories to conduct Indigenous research. The bone needle metaphorically comes to represent Indigenous knowledge and in this story of Coyote’s search for the bone needle, OMC becomes fixated on going around in circles around a bright warm fire, which comes to represent Western knowledge systems, looking for the bone needle, knowing full well that he lost it miles away in the darkness of the forest (Archibald 2019, pp. 26-27).

I read this story literally days before submitting this thesis and it coincided with my taking part in and visually documenting a local cultural awareness, ceremonial workshop for local council members, at our traditional camping grounds, now known as Saltwater Reserve. It was conducted by my aunty Pam, my cousin Jay, who now knows our language almost fluently and his sister Joedie, who has also learned traditional dances, songs and language. Directly after leaving this ceremony my Indigenous academic supervisor, Professor Larissa Behrendt, who also features in JustUS, calls to apologise that she cannot make my stage three oral presentation because she needed to be out on her Gamilaraay country visiting family (the country neighbouring my Biripi country). I share with her my experience of reconnecting to country through the ceremony I just took part in and that I had read the book on story-work that she had recommended. I told her that I loved what I had read so far and that what struck

35  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know me was the revelation, from reading her chapter in the same book, that we shared the same animal totem, the Lyrebird. There was a moment of silence before she replied, “I just heard a lyrebird call this morning”. The call is not rare, but you don’t hear them every day. I haven’t heard one for years, but then again, I may have because they mimic other birds. We both agreed that it was a good sign and that I would “ace” my presentation. And I did, because the ceremony grounded me again, I shed my Guba (whitefella) mask and my anxiety around not sounding clever enough. I was strong again in my Indigeneity and in the knowledge and purpose of my project, which in the end, was what got me through my presentation. The synergy and interrelatedness between the bone needle story and this experience, was both empowering and a reminder for me not to be neglectful of my Indigenous knowledge, like OMC, and not to fall into the trap of further colonizing myself for the sake of attaining a higher degree. Behrendt in her chapter in this book recalls the traps that she has witnessed in her 20 years’ experience working in the academy, that other Indigenous lawyers and researchers have fallen into. “The most dangerous trap is to move away from the strong grounding of their culture. That’s when they stop being an agent of transformation and merely are co-opted into the system…The second pitfall is the seduction of title and accolade. It is clear in our own community where people develop a pathological need to be acknowledged by the colonizer. They seek government appointment and affirmation to bolster their self-esteem and sense of self” (Behrendt 2019, p. 497). Archibald also reminds us:

No matter how much knowledge (or qualification) a person accumulates, if the knowledge, research, or stories do not reach the collective consciousness of the wider group, then the person is failing to act in an Indigenous manner. Decolonizing research is not merely ethical research in terms of the requirements of the academy or institutions; more importantly it meets the criteria set by our own communities, who will often sanction the integrity and credibility of the story using their own measures. (Archibald 2019, p. 38)

For instance, the research needs to provide some practical, meaningful and reciprocal benefit to participants and their communities. It is also important to recognise, however, as other Indigenist researchers have already noted, that synergies do exist between Indigenous and Western philosophies that are also about decolonising traditional western frameworks and conducting research that is respectful, collaborative, responsible and mutually beneficial to

36  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know the researcher and the researched. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is another non-Indigenous concept that naturally aligns with this project as it is also about critiquing power and systemic racism in Western society. Therefore, while holding my precious bone needle, ensuring not to lose it, I like OMC went sniffing around the Western Academic fire again.

CRT is not synonymous with but can be described as a derivative of Critical Theory. However, instead of critiquing social institutions in their subjugation of the lower and working classes (to simplify its Marxist ideological origins- see Thompson 2017, p. 3), it places its emphasis on critiquing systems of racial oppression, acknowledging that white supremacy forms the foundation of social structures that continue to subjugate African American and people of colour (POC), particularly through the criminal justice system. CRT is described simply by Tara Yosso (2005) as a “framework that can be used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on social structures, practices and discourses” (p. 70). She also recognises that in its inception phase, CRT scholarship was simplified into a binary between black and white knowledge systems with its main critiques born from frustration with the lack of progress of the Civil Rights movement. However, according to Yosso, after its critique from women, Native Americans, Asian Americans and POC who felt silenced in these discourses, CRT broadened its scope to include these other marginalised groups: “By offering a two-dimensional discourse, the Black/White binary limits understandings of the multiple ways in which African Americans, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Chicanas/os, and Latinas/os continue to experience, respond to, and resist racism and other forms of oppression” (p. 72).

Yosso draws from CRT to challenge pedagogies that reward and value Western cultural capital, based on upper-middle-class knowledges, that consequently continue to subjugate African, Native and Asian American and POC students, who bring with them other forms of cultural capital that are historically not valued by the education system. The term “Cultural capital”, according to Yosso, stems from the work of Bourdieu (1977) whose theory on cultural capital, used by many scholars to explain racial and social inequalities, pertained to the gathering of “cultural knowledge, skills and abilities possessed and inherited by privileged groups in society...The dominant groups within society are able to maintain power because access is limited to acquiring and learning strategies to use these forms of capital for social mobility” (p. 76). While some scholars have used Bourdieu’s structuralist theory to argue that the dominant culture was “culturally wealthy” and marginalised others in

37  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know comparison were “culturally poor”, Yosso instead asserts that “CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty or disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from these communities’ cultural assets and wealth” (p. 82). In Australia cultural assets that Indigenous and other CALD students can bring to the classroom, for instance, can include what Yosso refers to as “Linguistic capital” as in speaking one or more languages other than English (p. 78).

In my own experience, some schools have made language and culture central to Indigenous education. However, I argue, the word culture in the Aboriginal education context is interpreted by non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous teachers to mean traditional culture - static and pre-colonial, something that was disrupted through colonisation that needs to be rebuilt. This approach does not recognise the assets of contemporary Indigenous culture or celebrates Indigenous peoples’ resourcefulness and ability to adapt to, navigate and survive the social structures of colonisation and not just fall victim to it. Resourcefulness and having skills to survive colonisation falls into the categories of “Social capital”- the ability to utilise “networks of people and community resources” (p. 79) and “Navigational capital”- the skills needed to “manoeuvre through social institutions” (p. 80). Yosso also lists three other forms of cultural capital that African, Native, Asian American and POC students bring to the classroom that schools here could also place more value on. “Aspirational capital” refers to the “ability to maintain hopes and dreams” (p. 77), despite living in abject poverty, marginalised and subjugated communities, which can translate here to mean Indigenous students showing up to school and not being punished for wearing the incorrect shoes. “Familial capital” concerns knowledge that is taught and nurtured through kinship that carries “a sense of community history, memory and cultural intuition” (p. 79). Valuing this form of capital allows teachers to (cautiously) encourage Indigenous students to share family stories and oral histories but more importantly to acknowledge the importance of family and community and make more efforts to include them in the education of Indigenous students. Finally, “Resistant Capital” recognises the acquisition of “knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behaviour that challenges inequality” (p. 80). Teaching the hard lessons of colonial settler history as well as the more empowering narratives of Aboriginal Civil Rights history, sovereignty, self-determination and the land rights movement, contributions made by Indigenous people in building the country’s economic wealth as well as other contributions to literature, film, theatre, music, sport, innovation, medicine and so on, all

38  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know would honour the resistant capital of Indigenous students, build upon it and engender a wider appreciation amongst the entire student body of Indigenous society, culture and politics.

In the Australian tertiary education context Nakata et al. (2012) argue that at the cultural interface that exists between Western academe and the pluralistic epistemes that non- Indigenous students bring to the classroom, there exists a risk of Indigenous Studies teachers reifying and homogenising Indigenous knowledge systems while also generalising Western epistemologies as the enemy of Indigenous worldviews that need to be opposed. Nakata’s view of Indigenous scholars and teachers who base their work on Critical Theory as “too reductionist”, “polemical” and “pragmatic” and scholars who dare to think differently are caught in between the ongoing coloniality (from the institution and the Academy) and “Indigenist” binary (p. 31). According to Nakata et al., the design and delivery of Indigenous studies reduces it to a political paradoxical process of “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo quoted in Nakata et al. 2012, p. 124), and the students are not given the chance to be critical or reflective and are too quickly expected to “decolonise” their thinking as the first step to understanding Indigenous knowledges (p. 134). Instead, Nakata advocates for a more open ended and transparent approach to learning that draws from decolonial Indigenous theories as well as knowledge production from the coloniser in order to allow non-Indigenous students to think through one of the most complex of “knowledge contestations that possibly exist” (p. 134). Additionally, Nakata et al. explain that reducing non-Indigenous students as the embodiments of colonial white privilege with knowledges that are simply extensions of colonisation that need to be immediately disrupted, runs the risk of turning students away, especially new undergraduates who come to introductory Indigenous Studies courses ill- prepared with little background experience with Indigenous education. This brings me to the next problem: Indigenous education before university.

Sarah Booth (2014) has researched the phenomenon of non-Aboriginal disengagement with Aboriginal Studies through conducting case studies in secondary and tertiary institutions in Western Australia (WA hereafter), finding that, while many resources are continually updated and are readily available for teachers, it is not mandatory for teachers to access them. Booth says that simply providing the information is not enough to ensure teachers will use the resources. If teachers do access the information, it does not address the issue of how they will teach the material. She identifies the lack of consistent and quality training for teachers as the main block in the way of delivering in-depth and comprehensive Aboriginal studies

39  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know across the curriculum and why current content is still only superficial and “perpetuates negative stereotypes” (Booth 2014, p. 8). MacNaughton (2001) found through a study of young Anglo-Australians that no respondent identified any similarities between themselves and Indigenous peoples, demonstrating an “us and them” mentality and “othering” of Indigenous people. She also observed that this ideology was reflected across the curriculum in the resources used and practices employed to teach Indigenous studies.

The practitioners displayed and discussed Aboriginal people and their cultures as consisting only of ceremonial dance and/or corroborees, as loving animals, as valuing art and craft, e.g. stick painting and weaving, having dark, brown or black skin, the production and use of boomerangs, living in stick type huts and being linked to their ‘Dreamtime’. (MacNaughton quoted in Booth 2014, p. 14)

Booth points to research conducted by National Indigenous Postgraduate Association Aboriginal Corporation (NIPAAC, 2012) which looks at the level of understanding of Aboriginal history, society and culture shared by undergraduate and postgraduate students in Australia: “The research findings proposed that Australian students do not tend to have a deep understanding of Indigenous-Australian culture and histories or of the factors that have put Indigenous-Australians in positions of socio-economic disadvantage” (NIPAAC quoted in Booth 2014, p. 15). This may be attributable to the way in which the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL 2011) “can be enacted in ways that essentialise Aboriginal peoples as cultural artefacts, while erasing Aboriginal peoples’ concerns regarding sovereignty, politics and history” (Moodie and Patrick quoted in Morrison et al. 2019, p. 10).

Instead of studying Indigenous peoples as “cultural artefacts”, Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) has the potential to view Indigenous peoples in a contemporary context, acknowledging that Indigenous cultures like any other culture are continually adapting to society, as well as incorporating other people’s cultures, while also honouring and practicing the culture of our ancestors. Scholars both in the U.S. (Hill & Petchauer 2013; Malone and Martinez 2015) and Australia (Crooke and Almeida 2017; Crooke and Travis Jr. 2017; Morgan and Warren 2011) have also identified the positive physical and mental health outcomes for Hip-hop workshop participants which include increased self-esteem, literacy, critical and creative thinking. In the U.S. HHBE draws on the theoretical framework and

40  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know methodologies of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) to offer students from low- socioeconomic backgrounds (mostly African American and POC) an education that honours their cultural capital, drawing on their assets, rather than their perceived educational ‘deficits’, making learning fun, culturally relevant as well as opening up opportunities for deeper learning of social justice, history and politics.

Our own Indigenous scholars have also recognised the potential benefits of combining the tenets of Indigenous paradigm with those of CRP in order to address an education system that currently continues to fail Indigenous students. According to Māori scholar Elizabeth McKinley (2017), one of the “key levers” to education’s success in retaining and making schooling culturally relevant for Indigenous students is, “providing intellectually challenging and relevant curriculum” (p. 305). This refers to the idea of an “opportunity gap” (pp. 310- 311) rather than an “achievement gap” (pp. 304- 323), that focuses its attention on deficits “located in the Indigenous student, their families and communities, and their culture and language” (p. 303), allowing schools and teachers to blame them and feel comfortable with the “status quo” (p. 310). The ‘Opportunity Gap’ is rather about actively seeking opportunities for better outcomes, addressing “the accumulated differences in access to key educational resources – expert teachers, personalised attention, high-quality curriculum opportunities, good educational materials, and quality informational sources – that support learning at school and home” (p. 311). In a comprehensive “narrative literature review” entitled Toward an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), Morrison et al. (2019) describe the current Australian system of education. They assert that Australian schooling “…aligns all pedagogy and curriculum to the cultural norms and values of the colonisers, imposing top down ‘solutions’ on Aboriginal peoples with little or no consideration of Aboriginal voices, or the needs, values, interests and aspirations of Aboriginal peoples” (p. 6). They also assert that “It would be a mistake to believe that the racism underpinning the educational services offered to Australian Aboriginal peoples has been relegated to the past” (p. 7).

My informants in this study also shared their experiences of racism at school and the empowerment they found through Hip-hop. Ebony Williams in response to my question on why she chose Hip-hop to express herself shared her experience of going to school in the 1980’s:

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…being a kid that went to Darlinghurst Public school, which is mostly all white kids and experiencing racism and stuff like that, at a really early level, and also learning to become a person that could actually speak up, defend themselves and be proud of themselves. That self-pride model [in Hip-hop], that is one thing I guess when I looked at Hip-hop music, I seen in these people and went ‘wow that’s what I wanna be like’. (Williams in interview 2018)

Fast-forward to 2013 and racism in Australian schools is still palpable. A “survey of 755 Aboriginal Victorians found that 97% had experienced at least one incident of racism in the preceding year, including 81.9% who were treated as less intelligent or inferior to other Australians, and 50.9% who experienced racism in an educational setting (such as school or university)” (Ferdinand, Paradies and Kelaher quoted in Morrison et al. 2019, p. 7).

Given that Indigenist scholars like Rigney, Moreton-Robinson, Smith, Behrendt, Archibald, Wilson and other Indigenous scholars reside very much in the division of Indigenous research as a form of scholarly resistance and reclamation of Indigenous knowledge, it makes sense that the tenets of Critical Theory, CRT and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy aligns well. After all, we are still very much living in a society underpinned by white supremacist and racist ideologies which continually needs to be disrupted, exposed and challenged; these principal objectives are exactly what this project strives to achieve. However, while Critical Theory does align with Indigenous theories and methodologies, and I use other western concepts to tell my story, Indigenous story-work and the principles that underpin Indigenous paradigm remain central to the project. These values make me who I am, it honours where I come from, it reminds me to have reverence for my ancient knowledge systems that I grew up with and by identifying the synergies and interrelatedness of stories gathered, I can contribute a deeper and more powerful meaning to Indigenous Hip-hop, while advancing the decolonial project and privileging the Indigenous voice. JustUS is another decolonising project that honours, reveres and respects Indigenous community, knowledge and story, is unashamedly resistive, unapologetically political and transparently subjective, which leads us to Indigenous Auto-ethnography, another tool in my theoretical tool belt, which I discuss in the following section.

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Bar 5.2 “Keepin’ it Real”: Indigenous Hip-hop Auto-ethnography

It was not until much later in the research process that I discovered that the best academic articulation for my research methodology, apart from being practice-led (see Bar 5.5), was inherently Auto-ethnographic. Also, as an indigenous person who identifies with the Hip-hop community, my identity very much informed my style of questioning, observation and reflexivity; where I chose to conduct interviews, when it was appropriate to conduct research, who I chose to question or in a metaphysical sense who chose to be interviewed by me. It is these decisions on who, what, where and when to research that are ultimately made through subjective choices. Alternatively, auto-ethnography is not only transparent about subjectivity, it “accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don't exist” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010, p. 2). My personal Hip-hop journey not only informed my research and creative project, but I actively participated in its telling as a “key informant, consummate insider” as opposed to the “conventional standpoint of the objective outsider” and my participants “becoming co-researchers, not mere subjects” (Houston 2007, p. 47).

In providing his own validation of Indigenous auto-ethnography as his preferred research methodology, Whitinui (2013) explains that it was his upbringing, influenced predominantly by non-Māori culture and shaped by his desire to feel accepted by other students, that essentially disguised his Māori identity, even though the values of Māori culture were always ever-present. This was an experience not too dissimilar to mine. Using Indigenous auto- ethnography enabled Whitinui to build “a better personal understanding about how the institution and systemic role of sport co-opted and negotiated” his Māori male identity (Whitinui 2013, pp. 463-464). Similarly, I am using Indigenous auto-ethnography to reflect upon the ways in which Hip-hop has empowered me to reclaim my Indigenous identity after years of non-Indigenous education. Before discovering Indigenous auto-ethnography as a valid methodology, I was grappling with my continued engagement with the higher education system and its power to manipulate my Indigeneity through its requirement to support my claims with Western academic language, which masked my personal, authentic Indigenous voice. Autoethnography is “a tool with which Indigenous people can decolonise research practices and representations of themselves. This is possible with Indigenous autoethnography because the researcher is the subject, the key informant and the expert” (Pratt quoted in Houston 2007, p. 48). As an example of my own scholarly resistance,

43  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know through my editing process of juxtaposing news media accounts of Aboriginal so-called “rioting” against the alternative truth behind Aboriginal uprisings (discussed in Bars 10 & 11), I have been able to challenge dominant forms of knowledge and decolonise representations of our people. As the key informant and expert sharing this alternative knowledge with my participants, I have been able to provide not only alternative information relating to these events, but also new meanings that can enhance existing understandings of Australian Hip-hop.

Whitinui (2013) goes further to say that Indigenous auto-ethnographers get “to consider their own level of connectedness to space, place, time, and culture as a way of (re)claiming, (re)storing, (re)writing, and (re)patriating our own lived realities as indigenous peoples'' (p. 467). Returning to Redfern to conduct this research allowed me to reconnect with a space once familiar in my early days in the early-mid 1990’s as a youth development officer for the local youth centre, ironically named “The Settlement''. Even though The Block on Eveleigh St. is almost unrecognisable due to recent redevelopment, there were remnants still semi- intact, like the old terrace houses and Tony Mundine’s boxing gym (since demolished). I also walked and talked with a past colleague, Shane Phillips, and sought permission to shoot on The Block by another community leader, Uncle Mick Mundine, who I had also known from my youth workdays. Attending the last Rock The Block party on The Block also allowed me to come in contact with other Indigenous residents, with whom I had either worked with or met through my volunteer radio presenting for Koori Radio, which in the early 90’s was also situated near The Block. The JustUS project gave me the chance to reclaim and restore the old Block and the sovereignty of the people who once resided there. I achieved this through engaging in conversations with my participants on our shared memories of this space, juxtaposed with archival footage that represented those memories. Through my own connection to The Block, I prompted the main participant, Sonboy, to reassert his ownership: “This is our town, ya know this is our block. We made it The Block. No-one would have known it was The Block if it wasn’t for the people who grew up on here” (Sonboy in interview 2018). I also gave the opportunity to an ex-resident to share her feelings on the re- development (gentrification) of The Block and her desire to re-establish or restore the once “all black community” (Penrith in interview 2018).

Conducting research in Bankstown however was a completely different experience. Bankstown is situated in the South-West of Sydney some 17 kms West of the CBD, and

44  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know while the Block’s cultural mix (at least when I had been working there) was predominantly Indigenous, Bankstown is known as “one of the most diverse communities in Australia… 60% of the population speaks a language other than English at home, including Arabic (21%), Vietnamese (9%), Cantonese and Mandarin (5.5%), and Greek (3.6%)” (Alian and Wood 2019, p. 87). Because of my lack of familiarity of space or the people who occupied it, I wasn’t able to draw upon the same shared ‘connectedness to space, place, time, and culture’ with the set of participants who resided there. However, while I was not primarily concerned with the historical, cultural or political context of Bankstown, interviewing these participants within their community context was mainly about facilitating a culturally appropriate, safe, comfortable and familiar space. Additionally, my choices of participants from this area collaborate regularly with Indigenous Hip-hop artists as well as mentor Indigenous young people through Hip-hop workshops. Therefore, they have a good understanding of Indigenous Hip-hop and address similar themes in their own music, and to this extent, we did find familiarity and mutual understanding. The one major facet of Hip-hop culture where we found common ground was in our understanding of the 5th Element of Hip-hop, which is an epistemology linked to self-awareness and social consciousness, which I will now explore briefly in the following bar as it relates to Hip-hop Based Education but will expound further in Beat 2 (Bar 7) when I discuss the rise of Conscious Hip-hop in Australia.

Bar 5.3 Each One Teach One: The Power of Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) According to Beachum and McCray (2011), ‘Knowledge’ has always been seen as a form of liberation for African American peoples harking back to the slavery era where the African American proverb Each One Teach One originated as an ideology that promoted the communal act of education, stressing that anyone with the opportunity to learn would in turn teach others so that no-one was left behind. During this period, new West African slaves to America, through the traditional communal activity of spirituals, used coded language to teach history, where songs were sung, and dances performed in resistance and in celebration; this maintained a sense of African identity and cultural transmission. The proverb is still used amongst Hip-hop Headz13 who appreciate and uphold the communal nature of Hip-hop culture, sharing information, using a contemporary coded language of resistance, ensuring cultural transmission from OG’s (Original Gangstas) to mentees. In her action research and

13 Headz’ is synonymous with Hip-hop ‘fans’ or ‘community members’

45  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know development of a “Hip-hop Empowerment Model” of education based on the principles of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Tasha Iglesias tests the “Hip-hop Learning Community”, as an intervention to develop the “cultural wealth” of foster kids (viewed as the most disadvantaged group of students on University campuses) with the purpose of better preparing them for University. Iglesias provides how the proverb underpins the philosophy of Hip-hop culture and now the pedagogical framework of Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE). In her personal communication with MC T La Rock, La Rock explained that the proverb Each one Teach One, in Hip Hop culture means “each individual, whether it be a rapper/emcee, DJ, beatboxer, or Bboy [or Bgirl] …is obligated to teach another his or her special skill” (MC T La Rock quoted in Iglesias 2019, p. 1).

Hip-hop workshops have been an important part of knowledge sharing, community building, and enhancing social wellbeing in Australia. For example, the use of Hip-hop as a resource to enhance social wellbeing can also expand the role of music education: as Robinson and McMillan suggest, “acknowledging cultural difference within musical systems and sharing this knowledge with broader communities would enliven knowledge, learning and culture for all students” (Robinson and McMillan 2016, p. 238). Counterintuitive to this, Hip-hop is at this stage not used as an additional part of music education curriculum in Australia. Hip-hop is however being trialled as a holistic resource to support personal and collective wellbeing in the institutional education setting. According to Crooke and Travis Jr. (2017), Hip-hop is being used by a group of psychiatrists at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom (U.K.) as a form of musical therapy with school counsellors, psychologists and social workers helping to “normalise the option of integrating hip hop within health strategies” (p. 2). The 5th Element of Hip-hop “Knowledge of Self” (see more in Bar 7) as an epistemology that promotes “self-awareness and social-consciousness” underpins the use of lyrical content as a tool “for building self-reflection, learning, and growth. Whether analysing existing songs, or creating new content, the vast array of themes found in Hip-hop songs enable therapists to access topics that may otherwise be hard to talk about” (p. 4). Researching the social contexts for Hip-hop workshops, Flaherty discusses the experimental uses of Hip-hop as an educational and motivational tool outside the Australian classroom and references a successful initiative to engage disadvantaged youth, a four-year project, ‘Hip-hop + Healthy’ (HYPE). The project was delivered as an after-school hip-hop program in Logan Queensland and “offered strong evidence that an ongoing break-dancing workshop helped promote positive behaviours, better health outcomes, more social capacity, and resilience among

46  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know disadvantaged youth” (Flaherty 2015, p. 140). A larger project has been the Indigenous Hip- hop Project (IHHP), which - according to their own promotional materials - “have worked in every state and territory, with over 200,000 participants”, deliver “over 55 week-long projects, performs at over 30 festivals, conferences and events and facilitates at least 1 National Youth Leadership Camp and 1 Artists’ camp annually” (IHHP 2014). Flaherty suggests that, like HYPE, IHHP seeks “to improve community health and outcomes via individual education and discussion; and they promote stronger community ties and communication” (Flaherty 2015, p. 141). Further research in the use of Hip-hop as musical therapy, conducted by Katitjin (2009), tested the effectiveness of a joint workshop venture by Beyond Blue and IHHP targeting Indigenous youth in WA, focusing on mental health and teenage suicide. The results showed that the positive messages delivered through the workshops lasted long after the team left:

Youth felt positive attention and self-worth through community recognition of their music which included airtime on the radio, the use of music as ringtones, and general awareness. The workshops promoted social justice by promoting better mental health and outcomes for all as well as offering tools to build self- empowerment and self-expression. (Katitjin quoted in Flaherty 2015, p. 142)

More recently, Crooke and Almeida (2017) conducted an ethnographic joint study into the efficacy of a “Hip-hop and beat making” workshop, which took in 9 students (years 7-9) from a West Melbourne secondary school (p. 14). Apart from one student who self-identified as “Australian, with some New Zealand background (white)”, the remaining eight students were from CALD backgrounds, self-identifying as Ethiopian, Lebanese (Muslim), Māori, Pacific Islander, and Vietnamese (pp. 15-16). The criteria that the school leadership and “wellbeing staff” used in selecting the students to take part in the workshop reveals further the inherent problems with school culture and its attitude toward certain students: “A year level coordinator explained they were the most disengaged students in the school, for reasons including: social withdrawal; low intelligence; oppositional behaviour; inappropriate conduct towards people in positions of authority; and disengagement from school due to “cultural and family factors” (p. 16). In contrast to the pessimism expressed by the year level coordinator, the program recorded student engagement, positive rapport building with facilitators, self- expression, personal development, peer to peer learning, and development of musicality and career aspirations.

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Factors that contributed to positive learning outcomes included the establishment of a “non- traditional learning environment” where the students felt that the program space was significantly different to the typical school environment, while providing sufficient “structure to facilitate learning” (p. 25). Crooke and Almeida conclude that this speaks to the ability for Hip Hop to both engage young people and disrupt the power dynamics replicated in traditional schooling contexts which further alienate ‘disengaged’ students” (p. 25). The facilitators themselves in various ways related to the participants by the way in which they presented themselves as casual with a Hip-hop aesthetic, offering “authentically encouraging”, “one on one feedback”; being “firm in setting boundaries”, yet remaining “open and approachable” and not punishing students for behaviour that would otherwise land them in trouble with other schoolteachers (p. 23). They account for the success of the program, based on “familiarity and importance, students have the greater propensity to grasp concepts originally considered foreign or ‘uninteresting’” (Stovall quoted in Crooke and Almeida 2017, p. 26). Apart from the positive outcomes observed in the students’ learning and behaviour, Crooke and Almeida also pointed toward troubling teacher and school leadership attitudes toward students, who were initially described as “disengaged”, “oppositional”, “inappropriate”, and of “low intelligence”.

My research participants and collaborators also commented often on the social benefits of Hip-hop. Professor Larissa Behrendt talks about the need for a “two-fold approach” to student learning, which Hip-hop and other alternative learning programs can offer, which again aligns with the tenets of CRP:

Part of that approach is ensuring that young people know that people have high aspirations for them…So, in an education context, that would be expecting Aboriginal students to do well…But the other part of that is connection to culture…It's because connection to culture is a way of having expression…which is why painting, hip hop, performance, dance, singing, can all be ways to help somebody connect to their culture and build self-confidence and self-esteem. (Behrendt in interview 2018)

Reflecting on her own experience as a Hip-hop mentor, Ebony Williams suggests that: “That’s where self- identity is and that's where the people can feel proud of, you know, who

48  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know they are. And I think when people go in and actually take the time to sit there and listen to young people, that's when you see the best results” (Williams in interview 2017). In JustUS Triple Nip and Lee Monro also attest to this idea of Hip-hop as a tool for healing and self- help. Triple Nip in sharing his personal struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, says that if he didn’t have Hip-hop, he would either be “in jail, or dead, hooked on drugs somewhere, in the gutter … it has saved me many times, through many, many trials and tribulations in life. I’ve been blessed to be able to write out what’s going on for me and it helps me heal” (Triple Nip in interview 2018). Lee Monro at 4ESydney Festival shared publicly on stage his personal battle with depression and overcoming it through Hip-hop, which he received rapturous applause for, denoting the socially supportive environment of the Hip-hop community. He adds that “…here’s the other good thing about Hip-hop is as a part, to like, heal yourself, you can put it all down with a pen to pad or on your iPhone, however you function these days…” (Monro in interview 2018).

To demonstrate the educational element of Hip-hop, JustUs presents some observational footage of Monro and mirrah workshopping with youth at the Bankstown Arts Centre during the 4ESydney HipHop Festival and conference in 2018. As we see Monro teaching the kids stage presence and movement, we hear mirrah describe what makes a Hip-hop mentor. “You're getting people that are passionate, they're hard working, they're humble. They've come here to make sure that the next generation that wants to know hip hop, they get educated about the history” (mirrah in interview 2018). In the beginning of the film Maya Jupiter as a self-proclaimed Artivist (the words artist and activist combined) supports this claim and lists, from personal experience as a Hip-hop workshop mentor, the social justice messages prevalent in the lyrical content of Hip-hop: “I mean, it's a wonderful tool to teach, about politics, to teach about activism to teach about social justice to create an awareness of what's happening” (Jupiter in interview 2018). In JustUS, we see the B-Town Warriors rapping in language their track ‘People of the Red Sunset’ (2016) and performing choreographed dance moves. In the B-Town Warriors’ music video, a result of a Hip-hop workshop conducted by another not-for-profit grass-roots organisation Desert Pea Media, children can be seen confidently performing complex choreography, smiling, asserting their power and delivering their bars (lyrics) with conviction. We also see Ela, Declan and other youth who participated in the 4ESydney workshops in Bankstown, which culminated in a live performance of their own rhymes. In response to my questions about the workshops, they had the following to say:

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hip hop itself, in its own, is loving and respecting everyone and that's why I've learned that more than I would have just any regular public-school programme. (Declan in interview 2018)

I’ve gotten so much more confident. I’ve learned so many life lessons, not just hip hop. And they’ve just helped me in general and I’ve got them for life, not just in Hip-hop but for life. (Ela in interview 2018)

These reflections are also shared by DOBBY, who speaks to all the positive impacts that he has also witnessed as a workshop facilitator: “There's so many comparisons you can make in terms of how it is a youth and parent culture, how one generation can teach the lower generation about anything because you're engaging in language you're engaging in knowledge” (DOBBY in interview 2018). In their ethnographic study of Hip-hop workshops conducted in the poor urban centres of Redfern/ Waterloo and Nowra on the south coast of NSW, Morgan and Warren (2010) recognise the “identity work” that Hip-hop mentors encourage when engaging Aboriginal young people. Similarly, to Crooke and Almeida’s findings, through their observations they argue that “(1) Young Aboriginal men who resist formal educational settings often thrive in informal settings, particularly participating in communities of practice with their peers. (2) Contemporary youth cultural projects are often most successful when they draw on subcultural/street culture enthusiasms” (Morgan & Warren 2010, p. 12). They also argue that Indigenous Hip-hop mentors like Wire MC act like “cultural brokers” who are using Hip-hop as a vehicle to teach Indigenous resistance and survival histories and the importance of Indigenous culture. This they argue helps to form stronger identities and “communal solidarities” amongst Indigenous youth who are otherwise alienated and stigmatised. Hence, Hip-hop becomes a bridge re-linking young people to their parent generations and channels their rebelliousness toward “protest politics” (p. 21).

While Morgan and Warren (2010) and Crooke and Almeida (2017) identified a number of positive outcomes for young “disengaged” Indigenous and CALD students who do engage with Hip-hop workshops outside of school or the formal school setting, very little research to date has taken an in-depth study into the therapeutic or other educational benefits of HHBE. Compared with the level and depth of research and practice in the US, HHBE in Australia is very much at its infant stages. This research project at least identifies this gap and points to the therapeutic benefits of Hip-hop, its ability to boost self-esteem, to allow students to learn

50  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know collaboratively through group work, to creatively express themselves, to re-engage so called “disengaged” youth and strengthen Indigenous identity and cultural transmission. This is demonstrated by my own observations of the 4ESydney workshop space and through interviews with the 4ESydney mentors indicating the many positive impacts of HHBE on young people and the positive relationships forged through the youth and parent culture of Hip-hop. In the following section, I discuss my own research process in working with Hip- hop artists and other research participants to document the diverse benefits of Hip-hop cultures and communities.

Bar 5.4 Laying the Beats Down: Methodology vs Creative Process The creative production and post-production process for JustUS has been carried out over a period of two to three years, through continuous self-reflection, responding to recent events, including the televised police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent international response of Black Lives Matter protests (see more in Bars 7 and 9). Since its conception in 2017, the film’s title, format, style and content has changed from the initial purpose and vision for the project and therefore, the writing of this exegesis is now the result of practice- led research, although it began more as research-led practice. Smith and Dean (2009) define these terms as follows:

we as editors are referring both to the work of art as a form of research and to the creation of the work as generating research insights which might then be documented, theorised and generalised… Research-led practice is a terminology which we use to complement practice-led research, and which suggests more clearly than practice-led research that scholarly research can lead to creative work...It has included symbiosis between research and creative practice in which each feeds on the other; hybridisation of the many discourses surrounding them; transference of the characteristics of research onto practice and vice versa; and alternations between research and creative practice, often within a single project. (pp. 7-11, emphasis in original)

The JustUs creative project began as a research-led practice and the primary methodology has been qualitative, with semi-structured interviews and participant observation at key sites of Hip-hop community practice. At the same time, however, the qualitative data collection process needed to take into consideration aesthetic variables, including mise-en-scène

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(composition, colour and depth), the quality of camera and sound recording equipment, a production crew (producer, cameraman and sound operator), and documentary interview technique. Throughout this process, I was conscious of the dual purpose of my video interviews and observations, serving the production of a film documentary as well as my exegetical writing. Sharon Bell (2009) discusses the binary between the social sciences and humanities with that of the creative arts through interrogating her own experience as a creative practitioner academic. She describes her transition from anthropologist to ethnographic filmmaker and admits that her first films “bore the clear markings of an anthropological thesis – an accurate, even if sanitised, reflection of the appropriate (that is acceptable) fiction of the fieldwork experience” (p. 256). Bell contends also that this was the problem of many documentary filmmakers during the 1990’s who prioritised “the veracity of observational film techniques” over the imaginative and dramatic techniques employed in the editing process. As a corrective, Bell argues that “research-led practice demands the creative transformation of the research methodology, not just the reproduction of it” (p. 256). She also explains that some of the norms for qualitative social science research cannot be easily translated over to the “aspects of the creative process that are ill-defined, less tangible, often intuitive but oh so important dimensions of the creative process that don’t lend themselves to analysis” (p. 260). While I did not take a strict ethnographic approach to my own research and creative process, as in writing field notes, collating, codifying data and analysing it, I still claim it is a part auto-ethnographic study because my experiences and relationship to the material gathered informed the creative work and now the exegesis. As an Indigenous Auto ethnographer, Hip-hop artist and filmmaker my research project too was guided by intuition, self-reflection and personal experience. This is demonstrated in the use of my on-camera presence as the interviewer and expert talking head. My self-reflexive narration, my walk and talk with other informants and my piece to camera in Redfern are all indicative of my insider positioning. It is also worth noting that as an insider, I did approach the research with pre- conceived ideas based on my knowledge and experience of Indigenous and socially conscious Hip-hop. What I did not expect was the level of solidarity, familiarity and empathy shared amongst Hip-hoppers from CALD communities with and for Indigenous Hip-hop, culture, society, history and politics. Experiencing, observing and engaging with the CALD community of Bankstown, where Indigenous Hip-hoppers performed, Indigenous issues were discussed and collaborations with Indigenous artists took place demonstrated that socially conscious Hip-hop in Australia coming from CALD communities like Bankstown have a history and deep engagement with Indigenous Australia.

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Apart from my auto-ethnographic and Indigenous insider perspective, another social science methodological tool that I utilised, which also translated over to the creative process was discourse analysis. Given that my film is about translating the meanings behind the lyrics of Indigenous Hip-hop, discourse analysis became an obvious methodology for this project and is worth outlining how it was employed.

Keith Jacobs’ (2009) chapter on Discourse Analysis in Maggie Walters’s book, Social Research Methods (2019) mostly informed this aspect of the research-led practice. However, I also found it important to be cognisant of an Indigenous research paradigm when using discourse analysis to ensure that my analysis was not just a deconstruction of the subject matter into textual and contextual components to be analysed and synthesised using deductive or inductive reasoning. As Bell also suggested is true of the creative process, Cree Indigenous researcher Shawn Wilson (2008) in his book Research is Ceremony looks at the holistic way of arriving at deeper meanings from analysing research data (stories) relying, more on “intuitive logic” and looking at “an entire system of relationships as a whole” (Wilson 2008, p. 119). To achieve the whole story will involve analysing and synthesising collaboratively more pluralistic viewpoints from Hip-hop artists, and other participants. As Wilson notes: “…What it (logic) involves is our whole lifelong learning leading to an intuitive logic and way of analysis…It just can’t be thought of in a linear or one-step-leads-to-another way. You build relationships with the idea in various and multiple ways, until you reach a new understanding or higher state of awareness regarding whatever it is that you are studying” (Wilson 2008, pp. 116-117).

In traditional Western methodology, however, Jacobs focuses on two of the most popular strands of discourse theory, being that of Norman Fairclough’s ‘critical discourse theory’ and ‘Foucauldian-inspired analysis’, based on the work of Michel Foucault. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis is more about analysing social policy texts and “emphasises the importance of ideology and the discursive strategies that are employed by public actors to shape political outcomes” (Jacobs 2009, p. 21). This form of analysis is used by Rogers and Darcy (2014) in analysing the social policy documents and the political rhetoric used by public actors involved in the gentrification of public housing in Redfern and Waterloo (discussed further in Bar 8). Even though a critical discourse analysis pertains to social and political discourses, I view Conscious Hip-hop music as just that and therefore an appropriate

53  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know method of analysis. Fairclough’s methodology involves a systematic three-tiered approach of textual analysis of “vocabulary, grammar cohesion, and text structure”; examining discursive practice of “strategic devices used by the author to reinforce argument” and social practice by “making reference to the wider context and explicit theories of hegemony and power; in particular, the ideological components (explicit or implicit) in texts are discussed within this wider frame” (Jacobs 2009, p. 22).

Foucault’s approach is less rigid, yet equally rigorous in examining what he termed “regimes of truth”, which Jacobs explains as “...the basis from which we assert our understandings of the social world. From a Foucauldian perspective, our understandings are subject to historical shifts, depending on the ways in which power is exercised” (p. 23). Using a Foucauldian approach in practice, researchers are mainly interested in making “explicit the historical context in which the discourse is situated” (p. 23). In a series of tape-recorded public lectures, Foucault gave at the College De France from 1975-1976, translated by David Macey (2003), Foucault explains his view on history and its relationship to power and the race struggle. “History is the discourse of power, the discourse of the obligations of power uses to subjugate; it is also the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize...is both the founder and guarantor of order” (Foucault 1976, p. 68). Foucault was talking about how history tells the tales of the conquerors and their conquests over those who were once sovereign, whose story of defeat is also important to tell, as they are discourses used to maintain law and order over the colonised. It was never meant to be told by the conquered and despite the countless books written and published telling the counter-history from the point of view of the subjugated others, traditional Western education continues to place front and centre the telling of His-story (the history of the victors over the vanquished). Through the synergies between critical discourse analysis, Foucauldian- inspired analysis and Indigenous story-work, I provide the social, historical, political and cultural contexts of Conscious Indigenous Hip-hop discourses throughout this exegesis. The counter-histories and other alternative truths told by Hip-hoppers in resistance to more public transcripts disseminated largely by news media, not only acknowledge the victim narrative, they also speak of the empowerment of taking ownership of his-story and making it our-story. This is the decolonial and emancipatory process of speaking truth to power.

Translating discourse analysis to the creative work as research-led practice, led to the creative decisions on filmic tools and elements (shooting and editing, archival footage, interviews and

54  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know photographs) employed in producing JustUS, used to illustrate and expound upon the textual analysis of Hip-hop lyrics. For instance, after analysing the text of Birdz’s track ‘Black Lives Matter’ (discussed in Bar 11), I found it important as an Indigenous storyteller to not only illustrate the social context that Birdz is critiquing, by juxtaposing the song under news reel footage of the clash between police and the Kalgoorlie Indigenous community, it was important to demonstrate the interrelatedness between this story, the TJ Hickey and Redfern Uprising stories and the story of Sonboy’s brother Dean (discussed below). Making these connections generalises for the viewer how widespread systemic racism and violence is in Australia.

The completed JustUS project is a hybrid of biography, observational and essay genres of documentary filmmaking, with Sonboy’s personal journey forming the narrative spine of the film. Supporting Sonboy’s story is an essay on the question of ‘what Hip-hop wants you to know’. The essay aspect of the film draws on the themes of Hip-hop history, the parallel histories of Black American and Black Australian Civil Rights movements, systemic racism and police brutality, and Hip-hop as a form of activism and education. Each participant spoke to these themes, in response to a loose set of conversational questions, to varying degrees based on their level of knowledge. The questions that I asked Sonboy and the people [or participants] connected to his hometown in Redfern (Professor Larissa Behrendt, Shane Phillips, Angelina Penrith, and Uncle Mick Mundine) were focused on the socio-political history of The Block and specific events, including the gentrification of The Block Redfern (see Bar 9) and the Redfern Uprising (see Bar 10).

However, the interview process led into unexpected territory. Mid-way through the interview with Sonboy, I learned of the tragic circumstances that led to his younger brother Dean being chased and shot by the Redfern police. I also could not recall this event that took place in 2012 but thankfully my non-Indigenous cameraman did, who felt that we needed Sonboy to go over the story again in more detail. I asked the question again: “So tell us about the lines in the song [‘change the situation’ (2018)]- ‘my brother got shot three times and almost lost his life and there’s still no justice. What’s that story about?” At this point Sonboy seemed to feel at ease in the interview space and had no hesitation in relaying this story. In fact, he seemed determined to tell this story, perhaps with the hope that the documentary might reach a wider and sympathetic audience, and thereby help his brother and the family to receive justice. In the context of qualitative social research, new information of this kind could be

55  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know comfortably included in a discussion of different research participants’ responses and experiences. However, in the context of a documentary, I had to take into consideration the scaffolding required to present viewers with difficult - often upsetting - subject matter, such as police violence. For this reason, the tone, emphasis and structure of JustUS necessarily needed to shift as participants such as Sonboy made connections between Hip-hop and wider social issues.

Apart from the binary that I needed to navigate between the Humanities and Creative Arts, I also needed to be conscious of Indigenous filmmaking protocols as well as the binary that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous creative collaborations. While I have written, directed and produced as well as shot much of the content and edited JustUS as an Indigenous filmmaker, the resulting work was formed through collaboration with Indigenous and non- Indigenous artists and film practitioners. Firstly, I collaborated with the film’s participants as co-researchers, who came to the project with their own experience and knowledge of Hip-hop as well as Indigenous society, culture, history and politics. I also collaborated and am still collaborating with a non-Indigenous executive producer, editor and a predominantly non- Indigenous production and post-production crew.

However, the film as a decolonising project aims to add to the canon of films that disrupt and challenge the widely accepted representations of Indigenous people as either the “noble savage” or the “problematic other” (Huijser and Collins-Gearing 2007, p. 6). Therefore, I find it important that, as the Indigenous producer, I get to retain ‘chain of title’14 in the film and not hand over that control to a non-Indigenous producer, which is often the case in non- Indigenous and Indigenous film collaborations. Non-Indigenous scholar Henk Huijser and Kamilaroi scholar Brooke Collins-Gearing talk about colonising and non-colonising collaboration between Indigenous filmmakers and/or Indigenous communities with non- Indigenous filmmakers: “Colonial collaboration is the white person’s power to work with Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Non-colonising collaboration would not be dependent on the power of one white man, but on the sharing, reframing and renewal of Australian stories and experiences” (Huijser and Collins-Gearing, 2007, p. 1). Nevertheless, Aboriginal

14 Chain of title is legal terminology that describes “the series of written instruments that demonstrate the successive conveyances of a certain property down to and including the conveyance to the present owner (ie. Documentary evidence supporting the producer’s claim to the title of and right to film a literary property). (Cones 2013. pp 68-69).

56  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know people or stories depicted in Australian films, up until the films Rabbit Proof Fence and The Tracker, both made in 2002, were either “unacknowledged” (e.g. anthropological films and studies “representing their native informants”) or “acknowledged” with caveats (e.g. framed by ‘with the permission of’; see Huijser and Collins-Gearing 2007, p. 2). Huijser and Collins-Gearing also recognise that “there is still a strong sense that this space is pre- determined by the coloniser and as such it ultimately sustains the binary between coloniser and colonised” (p. 2).

Screen Australia’s Pathways & Protocols: A filmmaker’s Guide to Working with Indigenous People, Culture and Concepts (2009), written by Indigenous Intellectual Property lawyer, Terri Janke, is a guiding set of principles and behaviours to be adhered to by both non- Indigenous and Indigenous filmmakers when filming on Indigenous country, depicting Indigenous characters, or engaging with Indigenous content. The guide urges filmmakers to consult directly with Indigenous communities with regard to specific protocols to adhere to when filming in their country and directs filmmakers to consult Indigenous elders when entering onto Indigenous lands, making clear their intent and purposes while ‘on-country’ and how the project will benefit the community. Filmmakers should also ensure to not film families who are going through ‘sorry business’ unless permission is granted15 and to respect sacred sites by not filming them at all. Consultation and collaboration are also meant to be ongoing throughout pre-production, production and post-production, for instance allowing participants to view rough cuts before picture lock-off. The guide also requires that non- Indigenous filmmakers collaborate with at least one Indigenous key creative – a writer, director or producer.

By holding all key creative roles as an Indigenous filmmaker, yet allowing for meaningful collaboration with non-Indigenous creatives, I am attempting to exercise greater control over Indigenous representation in film. Furthermore, I am ensuring that by ‘telling’ the story of Redfern and ‘retelling’ the story of Australian Hip-hop, “reclaiming the past, and providing testimony to the past”, I - together with the people of Redfern and Indigenous Hip-hop artists - am “engaging the process of recovering from a colonial past” (Iseke-Barnes quoted in Huijser and Collins-Gearing 2007, p. 2) Spears (2005) responds to the old archetypical tropes

15 Sorry business describes the mourning process that Indigenous people observe when a family or community member passes away.

57  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know of Indigenous representation in film and television, and challenges the industry to allow Indigenous filmmakers to play with and make films that are not about the “entrenched colonial gaze”:

The point is not to strive for a single definition of our work [or in this case, a single definition or process of collaboration] simply because we ‘happen to be Native’. Our lived experience will inform our work, whether we’re making horror films, erotic poetry, intellectual/ theoretical works, love songs, broken- heart songs, romantic comedy, stand-up comedy or searing social commentaries. (Spears quoted in Huijser and Collins-Gearing 2007, p. 7)

Indigenous cinema and television have come a long way since Davidson et al (2000) and Spears (2005), with the establishment of National Indigenous Television (NITV) re-launched as a Free to Air TV channel on SBS in 2012, as well as the expansion of the Indigenous Programs unit at the ABC to include drama production. This has allowed for more Indigenous content to be produced by Indigenous filmmakers, more Indigenous and non- Indigenous collaborations, which has led to a more diverse representation of Indigenous people and film genres, including sketch comedy, Black Comedy (2014) on the ABC; crime fiction, Mystery Road (2018) also on the ABC; sports, Marngrook Footy show (2007-2019) and true crime series, Cold Justice (2018) on NITV. Audiences are also now more exposed to Indigenous as well as CALD Hip-hop through the national radio broadcaster, Triple J’s Hip- hop show as well as the children’s show Move it Mob Style (2012-present) on NITV and ABC iView, where Indigenous contemporary dancers, B-Boys and B-girls as well as Indigenous Hip-hop acts perform and teach children choreographed dance moves and promote healthy lifestyle choices. Therefore, audiences, albeit public broadcaster audiences, over the past ten years or so, have been exposed to and hopefully are beginning to be more accustomed to contemporary narratives about Indigenous culture and society.

To ensure that my creative work is contemporaneous and builds upon the current canon of Indigenous film and Television, it was also necessary to explore the breadth of documentary films that I found resonated with mine, specifically dealing with Hip-hop culture and Indigenous social justice. Consulting other Hip-hop documentaries in Australia and elsewhere also helped to support creative decisions about the use of images, interviews, and

58  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know background information in scaffolding interviews with Sonboy and others, to which I now turn.

Bar 6 My Indigenous Hip-hop Film: JustUS In comparison to the plethora of Hip-hop films published out of the United States,16 there have been but a handful of films exploring Hip-hop culture and music in Australia. While some of these films touch on the connections between Australian Hip-hop and Australian social justice, they do not explore in detail the direct connections between Conscious Hip-hop lyrics and specific social justice issues or events that they speak back to and that have affected Indigenous or other CALD Australian communities. This is what JustUS sets out to achieve.

Bar 6.1 Australian Hip-hop Films So Far and Other Films That Resonate There is an emerging body of filmmaking work around Australian Hip-hop. Here I provide some brief commentary on six films that lay the groundwork for JustUS. An early contribution toward Australian Hip-hop documentaries was the short film Basic Equipment, produced in 1997 by Paul Fenech. This film focused on the music produced by Sydney-based artists, Anglo-Australian Def Wish Cast, Lebanese-Australian Sleek the Elite and Fijian- Australian MC Trey. Narrated and presented by Ser Reck of Def Wish Cast, the film explores Ser Reck’s authentication of Australian Hip-hop, with its own localised content and accent, taking the audience into the then underground world of Aussie Hip-hop, exposing our own interpretations of the four elements of Hip-hop (rapping, breakdancing, graffiti and Deejaying). Unfortunately, this film did not engage with Indigenous Hip-hop, despite significant Indigenous groups recording and performing at the time, including South West Syndicate and Les Beckett.

The first feature-length Australian Hip-hop documentary and the first to showcase an Indigenous rapper was Words from the City (2007). This was a cinema verité style documentary providing insider observations and interviews with Indigenous as well as more well-known non-Indigenous Australian artists. It invites viewers into the home studios and

16 Popular Hip-hop magazine XXL (now online: https://www.xxlmag.com/greatest-hip-hop-documentaries/) lists “29 of the greatest Hip-hop documentaries of all time” out of the US. From the very first Hip-hop film Wild Style (1982) to Who Killed Jam Master J (2018) this list is fairly exhaustive, even though it still represents a sample of films that exist. Last updated in 2016, IMDb lists 48 titles as the “definitive list of Hip-hop films” (https://www.imdb.com/list/ls063099039/)

59  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know stages of TZU in Melbourne, Downsyde in Western Australia, Layla in Cairns Queensland, Wire MC in Redfern, Sydney, Hill Top Hoods in Adelaide and Koolism in Canberra. Being an observational documentary, the film is more about getting inside the character’s personal lives, their process, what inspires and motivates them to write and why they chose Hip-hop as their art form. While Hau from Koolism talks about his Tongan heritage and culture and we see him communing with family, there is no talk about his culture informing his Hip-hop. Also, Wire speaks about racism and his experience with police harassment, but the film doesn’t explore these issues further to provide more context. However, the film’s intention is not to analyse the lyrical content of the artist’s music but is much more about inviting the viewer into the lives and worlds of Australian Hip-hop culture.

On the Brink (2017), another short documentary by Alex Bradshaw, again introduces the audience to culturally and linguistically diverse Australian rappers in Sydney, briefly describing their respective upbringings in Australia as small vignettes, using interview, family photographs and live performance observations. They each talk about their experiences of white Australian racism, the Aussie Hip-hop community’s initial reticence to acknowledge them because they didn’t sound “Aussie enough” until more recently where they feel their difference is now more accepted. For its part, Vice also published a short music documentary online, OneFour: Australia’s First Drill Rappers (2019), using inside observations and direct pieces to camera in situ with the members of Drill17 Hip-hop crew OneFour. The group’s members express their authenticity as real gang members who rap and not just rappers who rap about being “gang”. The short film exposes an audience to another under-exposed urban community, with a thematic focus on criminality, isolation, gang culture and ethnic differences in the Western Sydney suburb of Mt Druitt. However, there is no further exploration of the ongoing racial profiling, harassment and brutality by the police or issues around lack of infrastructure and poverty associated with living in under-funded and over-policed social housing estates. Despite featuring insightful interviews, OneFour: Australia’s First Drill Rappers does have the same potential to over-simplify the intent of Drill music, reducing it - like the label ‘Gangsta Rap’ in the 1990s - to glorified gang culture.

17 According to Lambros Fatsis (2019), “UK drill music is an adaptation of Chicago drill music, which sprang in the mid-noughties from the impoverished suburbs of the Windy City’s South Side and is characterised by the ‘drilling’, whirring sound of its rhythmic structure (beats) and the graphic imagery of its lyrical content...UK drill music treads in the footsteps of its Chicagoan counterpart, featuring masked-up ‘crews’ of rappers, like 67, Moscow17 and the Harlem Spartans, who deliver their lyrics over distorted, makeshift beats that fiercely express the harsh reality of life in deprived South London social housing estates, and the artists’ loyalties to their immediate locale” (p.1302).

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Adjacent to the documentary film mode, in 2014 Morgan Lewis (aka Morganics), a well- known Australian Hip-hop B-Boy, rapper and theatre actor, adapted his theatre production to produce Australia’s first dramatic feature length Hip-hop film, Survival Tactics (2014). This film again features Wire MC and Morganics, who in real life for many years collaborated in workshopping Hip-hop with young Indigenous people and producing their music. This film features an Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse cast with Wire playing the lead character as a Hip-hop artist, who is dealing with how to survive Australian racism and staying out of gaol through adopting alternative tactics, including Hip-hop. Apart from the dramatic narrative, the film showcases some of Sydney’s prominent Breakers, DJ’s, MC’s and Graffiti artists and was touted as Australia’s equivalent to the US film Beat Street (1984).

Finally, my own half-hour documentary B.L.A.C.K.- An Aboriginal Song of Hip-hop (2004), also featuring Wire MC, used the lyrics of his song B.L.A.C.K. (Born Long Ago Creation’s Keeper) to explore through interview, archive and music video the issues around Indigenous identity, racism, cultural loss, police brutality and empowerment through Hip-hop. In this film I attempted to contextualise for an audience what Wire’s song spoke back to but instead of exploring more of Wire’s personal journey, I used interpretive analysis to tell my own personal story of Aboriginal identity, through interviews with my family members and family photographs. Nevertheless, the issue of systemic racism and police brutality, prevalent in Wire’s song, was reflected through telling the story of the wrongful death of Thomas ‘TJ’ Hickey at the hands of Redfern police. This subject was close to both mine and Wire’s hearts and minds at the time, as this incident occurred just prior to the film’s production. JustUS builds on this previous work B.L.A.C.K., making a clear link between Hip-hop music and Australian social justice, but this time I make sure to follow my main character Sonboy’s personal journey including his own interpretation of his music and not just mine.

My research process involved watching many Hip-hop films out of the U.S. but the one that I found most unique and resonant with my own film was Marc Ford’s film Uprising: Hip-hop and LA Riots (2012), which is an essay film mixed with observational cinema, which documents, chronologically, the events leading up to, during and post LA Riots in April 29- May 30, 1992. It focuses on Dr. Dre’s album, The Chronic (1992), and how the Rodney King bashing in 1991, the subsequent acquittal in 1992 of the police officers involved, and the consequent and infamous LA Riots (Uprising) contextualised the writing and production of

61  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know this record. Its main focus is on an historical event, using a generous on-the-street VHS archival footage provided by an embedded black filmmaker, Matthew McDaniel, who captured the uprising from ground level with the participants. This is cleverly juxtaposed against the other popular perspective in the form of news-reel footage capturing the events from a distance with their own biased reportage. This rich observational archive is supported by talking heads made up of eyewitnesses, black sociologists, Hip-hop artists, and even Rodney King himself to bring more depth to the re-telling and offering analysis on its social, historical and political context that informed Dr. Dre’s album. Like Uprising, JustUS references our own uprisings, the Redfern Uprising (2004) and the Kalgoorlie Uprising (2016). In the same way that the LA uprising inspired Dr. Dre to write an album, so too did the Kalgoorlie Uprising inspire our own Indigenous Hip-hop artist Birdz’s song ‘Black Lives Matter’, which is another subjective rap narrative on the inequality of Australia’s criminal justice system (see more in Bar 11). Like Ford’s film, JustUS takes a more microscopic look at the Redfern Uprising, and its catalyst being the wrongful death of a young Aboriginal boy TJ Hickey at the hands of Redfern Police.

Australian documentary filmmakers have recently turned their attention towards issues relating to Indigenous incarceration and Indigenous deaths in custody. Prison Songs (2015), written and directed by Indigenous filmmaker Kelrick Martin, is shot solely within Berrimah adult prison in the Northern Territory (NT), before it was converted into a juvenile detention centre, with the adults moved to a newer, “state-of-the-art” corrections facility. The film borders on the absurd casting the harsh real lived experiences of the prisoners into a film musical documentary. The main characters are prisoners telling real stories of their experiences with drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, suicide and life behind bars. Their stories are then transposed to song and each character, through solo or ensemble performances, sings or raps their stories to camera over reggae, country, Blues and Hip-hop music. Apart from using song to articulate personal and collective traumas, the film also uses graphic text to highlight statistics and information regarding the rates of Indigenous imprisonment in the NT as well as the incidences of alcohol and domestic violence related crimes that have been attributed to the high incarceration of Indigenous people.

Another Australian film focusing on the criminal justice system is The Tallman (2011), directed by non-Indigenous director Tony Krawitz and produced by Indigenous producer Darren Dale. This film investigates the manslaughter of Indigenous Palm Island, Queensland

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(QLD hereafter) resident Mulrundji Doomadgee in 2004 by QLD Police Sergeant Chris Hurley. The film features interviews with family and community members, as well as family photographs, to engender in its audience empathy for Doomadgee, his family and community. These personal accounts of Doomadgee’s life and how his death affected these people are balanced with a true crime investigative style of journalism. It utilises a re- enactment video produced by QLD police officers - which lent support to Hurley’s account of the events as an “unfortunate accident” - in direct juxtaposition with a video of an Aboriginal cell mate’s eyewitness account and a role play of Hurley assaulting Doomadgee. The head of the QLD Police Union is interviewed and commends Hurley, while the lawyer for the family discusses the impossibility of Doomadgee sustaining the types of injuries (equivalent to those of a car accident victim) from an alleged accidental fall. Autopsy reports, newsreel footage of the coronial inquest, the QLD Police Union turning out in large numbers lending support to Hurley, expert and eye-witness testimony are all elements that culminate in a film that uncovers a corrupt and unjust criminal justice system, and in doing so, documents the trauma experienced by family and community members. These elements along with personal interviews with family and community members, as well as the use of family photographs of Mulrundji are all devices that bring the audience into the subjective experience of trauma victims, and are the building blocks of Trauma Cinema, which I will now discuss.

Bar 6.2 JustUS as ‘Trauma Cinema’ Felicity Collins (2010) looks at the use of Indigenous film and television to reframe the News Media’s ‘othering’ of Indigenous Australians, which consistently depicts violence, alcoholism, derelict housing and other suffering experienced in remote Indigenous communities. She cites two major Australian historical events in 2007 and 2008, that in combination with a profusion of “writing and media commentary by journalists, public intellectuals and activists on endemic violence in remote Aboriginal communities”, since 2006, effectively “opened the way for the reinvigoration and renewal of an anti-colonial politics of subjectivity” and the “ethical imperative to speak up about the suffering of others” (pp. 65-66). The first event of 2007 saw Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s coalition government, with bi-partisan support from the opposition Labor Party, launch an unprecedented military intervention into remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, called the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (NTNER). This ‘emergency’ was in response to The Little Children are Sacred Report (2007) which reported high levels of child sexual assault in remote Indigenous communities and came just six days

63  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know after the report’s release. Despite the report’s 97 recommendations (Wild & Anderson 2007, pp. 21-33) that addressed the problems of child sexual assault as a government and community responsibility, with localised solutions, community consultation, community controlled and self-determined policies - including the increased employment of Indigenous professionals in health, education and policing - the federal government instead intervened with a paternalistic punitive approach. The NTNER policy enacted in the last term of this government required that the Anti-discrimination Act (1973) be suspended, allowing for the clearly discriminatory and “spectacular despatch of 600 soldiers, along with teams of bureaucrats and health professionals, to remote communities” and the proliferation of negative images by the News media of Indigenous suffering helped to legitimise it (Collins 2010, p. 66). This policy also included harsh penalties for possession of alcohol and pornography, the removal of customary laws, and it introduced the racially discriminatory ‘Basics Card’, a cashless debit card that quarantines welfare payments that can only be used to buy groceries and other ‘essentials’. As reported by The Guardian, this policy was extended under a different name, Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act, by the successive Labor Gillard government in 2012 to 2022. Former human rights commissioner, Gillian Triggs, was highly critical:

Assault and sexual assault convictions are about the same as before. Domestic violence has significantly increased. Incarceration of juveniles is now at world record heights. We’ve had a 500% rise in Indigenous youth suicide since the years 2007-11…The Act and its extension breach the Racial Discrimination Act, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the important Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples…While it was nominally designed to protect children, it’s become a chilling act of political cynicism and opportunism, an overreach of executive decision-making, a failure of parliament and the manipulation of truth. (Zhou 2017)

Less than a year after the NTNER, in 2008, the successor to the Howard Government, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Government, issued a nationally broadcasted public apology to the members of the Stolen Generations from Parliament House. ‘The Stolen Generations’ is a term to describe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who were forcibly removed (stolen) as children from their families under government assimilation policies that prevailed from 1908 until the early 1970’s, with the most intense period of forcible child removals occurring

64  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know between the 1950’s and 60’s. Most Indigenous children were sent to boarding homes where they were trained in domestic servitude, farm labour and other indentured labour. Many were also fostered or adopted out to non-Indigenous families and were never reunited with their Indigenous biological families. The Howard government avoided making the apology over three successive terms, after an apology was first recommended by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1997; for this reason, Collins describes Rudd’s 2008 apology as very much a belated one. Given how belated it was, when Rudd’s government announced it would make the apology in its first term of office, there was a nationally felt collective sense of relief and momentarily most Australians were transfixed to their TV screens showing the live broadcast of the Apology via the ABC. As an Indigenous person who was also working for the ABC at the time as an assistant producer, wrangling “talent” for our Indigenous journalist to interview, I was personally moved emotionally as many were. I was sharing tears in amongst a sea of grieving stolen generation members on the lawns outside parliament house, along with my grandfather Horrie, who was at home in Taree watching the broadcast and thinking about his sister who was removed from him when he was just five years old and she, Margie, only seven. However, shortly after the apology, I along with many Indigenous people found it to be hollow rhetoric, especially when Rudd, in the same speech, had to qualify that the apology in no way would guarantee or trigger compensation claims. In fact, Rudd by performing the apology only fulfilled one part of five key components of the third recommendation of the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report, which also included “guarantees against repetition, measures of restitution, measures of rehabilitation, and monetary compensation” (Pearson 2018, emphasis added).

Nevertheless, these two events, the NTNER (2007) and the Apology (2008), laid the groundwork for a number of films to find a more discerning and empathetic Australian audience: “Cinema under these circumstances, has the capacity to narrativize and reframe media images, and to draw a broader constituency into an anti-colonial response” (Collins 2010, p. 66). Collins argues that by reframing these negative images Indigenous filmmakers are offered the opportunity to “contribute to an anti-colonial politics” and expose in more depth, from an Indigenous perspective, the issues of violence and dysfunction, breathing life into images that are normalised by news media’s simplistic surface depictions. Collins explains that trauma cinema deals with the aftermath of a traumatic event by immersing the viewer into the subjectivities of the trauma victims and cinematically imbuing their worlds with remnants of what is left after the cataclysmic event/s, “photographs, home movies,

65  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know archival footage and witness testimony” (p. 67). This has the effect of drawing the viewer in to resonate with other unknown worlds of trauma, with the ultimate intent of engendering empathy for these real-life characters. This is particularly important in contexts where Aboriginal communities are “othered” by Australian news media: “our relations with others are determined by social and media norms that designate some as ‘familiar’ and some as ‘strange’ others, and that our exposure to the vulnerability of others in the media can make an ethical claim upon us by unsettling our subjectivity and calling our self-sufficiency into question” (p. 69).

The films that Collins references as cinematic anti-colonial responses are the feature ‘art- house’ film Samson and Delilah (2009) by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, archival documentary TV-series First Australians (2008) by Indigenous filmmaker Rachel Perkins, and the dramatic feature film Australia (2008) by non-Indigenous filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. She refers to these films as “post-apology films” and says that through their focus on “that what is lost or ignored in the incessant flow of media temporality is precisely what invites an affective and ethical response in cinematic spaces” (Collins 2010, p. 75). Thornton’s Samson and Delilah is the film that more directly responds to the ‘incessant flow’ of negative news media depictions of remote Indigenous communities, especially around the time of the NTNER (2007). Across the film, Samson’s hopelessness in his addiction to petrol sniffing forces the viewer to consider uncomfortable realities in some remote Aboriginal communities, which Australian news media consistently portrays from a distance as hopeless, dangerous, out of control, and “othered”. Relating Samson and Delilah’s success to its subsequent political impact, Collins describes the ‘circular exchange between media and cinema publics’ after the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival:

Samson and Delilah does more than rehumanize generic images of ‘bare lives’ reduced to violence and suffering. The film makes these lives human and grievable. The experience of seeing the film with a receptive and responsive audience lingers as a powerful bodily affect long after the initial viewing. One name for this lingering effect is grief but another might be the haunting temporality of utter devastation that requires an ethical response. (Collins 2010, p. 74)

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The purpose of my own film is to provide names and faces to the abstract statistics of over- policed and incarcerated Indigenous bodies, and to fill in the gaps left by the media that represent the humanity of our people struggling against systemic racism. By re-humanising the people of Redfern, in particular, JustUS attempts to elicit “ethical responses” to injustices in the Australian criminal justice system, especially the disproportionate impact on Aboriginal communities that continue to be represented as inherently “criminal” (see Cunneen and Porter 2017).

Beat 2 will discuss these matters in more detail, using discourse analysis to unravel the works of Indigenous and other culturally and linguistically diverse Hip-hop artists in Australia that speak to these issues with a focus on criminal justice matters. My film in a way then acts as a ‘Trojan Horse’, using pop culture as a vehicle into the “anti-colonial politics” articulated by young people, through dynamic collaborative discussions between Indigenous and non- Indigenous Hip-hop artists, activists and community leaders. The information discussed in the film comes from those who have personal direct or indirect experience with the topics being discussed in Indigenous Hip-hop, offering nuances that are fresh and untypical of the way the information has traditionally been presented. The style of documentary is also important to engage a young audience and by borrowing the style and tools of Trauma Cinema and ideas from the films that resonate, incorporating the popular medium of music video, JustUS communicates a familiar visual language to young people.

67  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know Beat 2

“That Resonated with Us”:

Aiyisha Donnelly (left) and Sonboy perform at Redfern’s last Block Party, 2018.

The Rise of Conscious Hip-hop in Australia

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The purpose of the film JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know is to take a closer look at what Conscious Hip-hop artists are writing about within a cultural, historical and political context. In the previous Beat I discussed how the documentary tells these stories, and provided contexts for the production process, both in terms of the rationale for the focus on Hip-hop and Hip-hop workshops, and in terms of key reference points for documentary filmmaking. This Beat is like the exposition of a film script detailing the problems of our Hip-hop protagonists, about what it is exactly that their stories are trying to tell but also about the struggle it has taken for Indigenous Hip-hop to be recognised so that these stories could be heard. I use discourse analysis of the artist's lyrics, informant interviews and scholarship that speak to the themes expressed, including criminological and social discourses. Before deconstructing these songs and providing further context, however, I briefly discuss in Bar 7 how Indigenous Hip-hop is seen as a contemporary form of protest music and a natural extension of a modern history of “trans-cultural communications” between African Americans and Australian Indigenous peoples (Minestrelli 2017). In Bar 8 I discuss the history of racism prevalent in Anglo-Australian “Aussie Hip-hop” from the early- mid 2000’s and its active suppression of Indigenous Hip-hop as well as Hip-hop from culturally and linguistically diverse communities (Rodger 2019). Here I also discuss the recent welcome change in the Hip-hop scene over the past 10 years to include these historically suppressed voices, what they have to say and how their contributions are shifting the look and feel of Australian Hip-hop.

In Bar 9, I introduce the reader to one of these new relatively unknown emerging voices and the main character of the film, Sonboy, an Indigenous rapper from ‘The Block’, Redfern, Sydney, once known as Sydney’s ‘ghetto’ and now Sydney’s prime piece of real estate through its gentrification (Shaw 2000; Rogers and Darcy 2014). Bar 10 naturally segues into a discussion on the Redfern Uprising in 2004. In this section I analyse the News Media’s reportage of riotous mayhem against the Indigenous community’s fight to let Australians know why they are throwing bricks at Australian Police buildings and leaving white ochre handprints on the glass panels of the supreme courts. Bar 11 discusses the Aboriginal solidarity with the U.S. led BLM movement and how we’ve adapted it to bring attention to the importance of protecting Indigenous lives from police violence and over-incarceration. I discuss this in relation to a song ‘Black Lives Matter’ published in 2016 by Indigenous Hip- hop artist Birdz. Finally, Bar 12 drills down into Briggs’s rap featured in Spinifex Gum’s track ‘Locked Up’ (2017) that speaks back to matters of criminal justice in Australia,

69  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know analysing Indigenous Hip-hop as a form of “outsider criminology” (Porter 2019). I also use this as a springboard into a further discourse into much-needed prison and criminal justice reform as the only answer to achieving social justice for Indigenous Australians (Cunneen and Porter 2017; Baldry et al. 2015; Gray 2018).

Bar 7 The Birth of Conscious Hip-hop and Trans-cultural Communications Most Hip-hop Headz and scholars alike ascribe to the quintessential four elements of Hip- hop: Emceeing (rapping), Breaking (breakdancing), graffiti (aerosol art), and Deejaying (turntablism) (Gosa 2014; Stavrias 2005). Stavrias (2005) has also identified Beatboxing (producing beats with the mouth) as the fifth element of Hip-hop. ‘Conscious’ rappers, like KRS (Knowledge Reigns Supreme) -One, list a number of components that form the conglomeration of Hip-hop culture. On top of the universal four elements, KRS-One includes in his track ‘9 Elements’ (2003): “beatboxing, street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurialism” (KRS-One 2003). I tend to gravitate, however, to a fifth element that resonates with my own Hip-hop worldview that many Conscious Hip-hop headz and US scholars refer to as ‘Knowledge’.

Apart from the elements that make up the culture of Hip-hop, there is an ever-growing list of sub-genres with Conscious Hip-hop (aka Message Rap) representing just one amongst a myriad of others, including Trap, popular in Chicago, Atlanta and the UK. Others include Grime, Horrorcore, Gangsta Rap, Comedy Hip-hop, Crunk, Avant Garde Hip-hop and the list goes on. The website Hiphopdatabase.fandom.com provides the most comprehensive list, including historical time periods and U.S. regional scenes as well as rest of the world scenes (Fandom n.d.). JustUS, however, is concerned with the binary between Conscious and more popular sub-genres of U.S. Hip-hop which at this point (2020) is Trap music represented by artists including Cardi-B, XXXTentacion, Future, Drake, Post Malone among many others. However, not all Trap music is free of socially conscious lyrics with other popular socially conscious artists like Logic using Trap sounds to produce what he has referred to as “Conscious Trap” (Cowen 2018). In the film Maya Jupiter explains the shift in genre balance over the past 30 years that she hears on commercial radio:

… when I was growing up, I felt like there was a lot more balance on the radio, you could hear the party stuff have a good time. But you could also hear you know that what we call Conscious hip hop…It was a little bit more about, you

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know, improving society and getting into politics, and talking about social justice… These days, there's a lot of misogyny, a lot of talk about drugs and partying. But you know, we have to ask ourselves, why is that the only kind of music that they allow on radio, why is that the only stuff that they want us to listen to? (Jupiter in interview 2018)

Byron Bay based, Tongan Australian rapper, Triple Nip, feels the same and backs up Jupiter’s inference of a conspiracy at play within the industry, between record company executives and radio stations to push music that sells. This according to Triple Nip trivialises and reduces Hip-hop’s message to money, cars and “hot chicks”. In my film he is then seen in sync as he breaks into an improvised rap, mid interview and adds, “we want to grow, we have a hunger to learn and grow, you know what I mean, and the only way to do that is through the truth, man, you know the truth and information that empowers us, rather than disempowers us” (Triple Nip in interview 2018).

Concerns about the perceived depoliticization of Hip-hop have been ongoing within African American Hip-hop communities. Byron Hurt’s documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006) explores the music industry’s promotion of misogyny, gunplay and gangsterism, and suggests that Hip-hop’s tastemakers or gate keepers, including Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons’s belief that it’s “what the kids want to hear” that drives the decisions on what gets played on radio. Through on the street interviews, Hurt also exposes that there is a pressure on prospective young black male rappers, to conform to the “gangsta” image of rap in order to succeed in the industry. US scholars Beachum and McCray (2011) recognise the difficulty in promoting conscious or ‘positive’ rap over the allure of acquiring wealth promoted in commercial rap, especially when there is a lack of political and social context being taught in American schools. Nevertheless, as discussed further below, political consciousness around the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a shift in the thematic concerns of high- profile Hip-hop artists.

In 2014, Wu Tang Clan published ‘A Better Tomorrow’ (2014) with a music video that featured footage of the Ferguson protests in response to the police shooting of Mike Brown (featured in JustUS). ‘Alright’ (2015) by Kendrick Lamar includes a dramatization of a police officer shooting Lamar as he escapes arrest and runs away (also featured in JustUS). More recently, Trae tha Truth and a number of other US Hip-hop artists including Killer Mike, LL

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Cool J, Lil B, El-P, Cool and Dre, have come out responding to the murder of 46-year-old African American man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020 (Ryan 2020). Protests, both peaceful and violent, played out in the U.S. after footage circulated via social media of Floyd slowly being choked to death by Chauvin holding Floyd face down to the ground, with his knee across the back of his neck for nine minutes, with Floyd desperately pleading that he could not breathe. Chauvin is now to face charges of 2nd degree Murder (upgraded from the initial 3rd degree murder charge) and 2nd degree manslaughter, while the other three officers, who watched on without intervention, will be facing charges of aiding and abetting murder (ABC News 2020). The incident was filmed on a mobile phone and once circulated led to mass uprisings and protests starting in Minneapolis and spreading across over 100 major cities nationally, with the media focusing most of its attention on protestors outside the Whitehouse, Washington DC, Santa Monica, Los Angeles and New York City. Protests were then reported in other countries, including Canada, the UK, France, New Zealand, and Australia.

Stephanie Shonekan suggests that 2020 songs about police brutality “are a continuation of Black artists raising awareness and capturing the horrors of their circumstances. What is new is that perhaps now they will be heard by more people because of the scope of global reaction against the George Floyd murder" (Shonekan quoted in Ryan 2020). In Australia, at the time of writing, there has been one track that directly responds to George Floyd’s death in relation to the Aboriginal death in custody of David Dungay in 2015. DOBBY’s ‘I Can’t Breathe’, featuring BARKAA (2020) features in the introduction of JustUS when the film discusses the global BLM response (discussed further in Bar 11). Birdz’s track ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2017), Ziggy Ramo’s track ‘Black Thoughts’ (2015) and others have also referenced the movement and have directly responded to the wrongful deaths of Indigenous people at the hands of police and white supremacists.

Tricia Rose’s ground-breaking Hip-hop ethnography Black Noise (1994) navigates the early history of Hip-hop, from the birthplace of disenfranchised African and Latino American Boroughs of New York City and addresses the cultural influences that make up the foundational elements of Hip-hop culture (i.e. Rap, Deejaying, Break-dancing and Graffiti), the commodification and censorship of ‘Gangsta Rap’ recordings and performances, the responses of Hip-hop artists to Raegan’s War on Drugs policy, and so on. Through analysing the lyrics of Public Enemy, Ice Cube, N.W.A, KRS-One and others, Rose demonstrates how

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Hip-hop music forms a counter discourse to white hegemony offering a unified musical response to systems of oppression by other marginalised groups the world over. She writes: “Mass-mediated cultural production, particularly when it contradicts and subverts dominant ideological positions, is under increased scrutiny and is especially vulnerable to incorporation. Yet, at the same time...are also made vastly more accessible to oppressed and sympathetic groups around the world and contribute to developing cultural bridges among such groups” (Rose 1994, p. 101). Rose is speaking to the cultural diaspora of Hip-hop from African American and POC or in other words the transmission of resonant experiences expressed through Hip-hop music to other marginalised and subjugated communities of colour, including Indigenous peoples, who in turn have used Hip-hop to express their own experiences of racism and oppression.

Another of my research participants, a Punjabi Sikh MC Sukhdeep Singh (aka L-FRESH The LION), describes his own understanding of the cultural bridges formed through listening to earlier African American Hip-hop but also through collaborating with Indigenous artists. He expands on his relationship with the music of Tupac:

...his stories of displacement. Talking about oppression, subjugation, marginalisation, but also empowerment, all of that really spoke to me...And often when ... we talk about hip hop, we talk about how it's an adopted culture for us that we did not have the history of Civil Rights movements and slavery and all that contextual stuff that built, helped form and give life to this culture of hip hop. But we did!...I can totally see why hip hop relates. And I can also appreciate the storytelling connection, and the music connection as a lifeblood, and as a survival mechanism and also as a passing on of tradition, because that's something that's common in Sikh culture as well. (L-FRESH in interview 2018)

Taking the globalisation of Hip-hop’s message to another level, Malone and Martinez Jr. (2015), editors of The Organic Globalizer, have collected a number of contributions from scholars writing about Hip-hop from various locations across the U.S. as well as globally including a contribution from American scholar Anne Flaherty on Native American, Maori and Indigenous Australian Hip-hop. All essays support their claim that Hip-hop has moved from a powerful form of expression to form localised social and political grass-roots

73  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know movements across the U.S. and globally, to the point of having Hip-hop artists running for political office in the U.S. Hip-hop came to be a global phenomenon through its commodification, initially with radio hits ‘Rapper’s Delight’ (1979) by the Sugar Hill Gang, Hip-hop films Wild Style (1982) and Breakin (1984). In their introduction, however, Malone and Martinez Jr. (2015) argue that the international communities that originally bought this “caricature” of Hip-hop, promoted by the “rap industry”, with many obviously still consuming commercial Hip-hop, many have also since, through what they claim as “an organic reversal”, used Hip-hop for its original purpose, to make the “same visceral connection to local communities” (pp. 5-6).

This supports my own claim that Indigenous Hip-hop as well as Hip-hop from CALD communities are using Hip-hop as a vehicle for social change and speaking back to the concerns of their communities. Potter believed that as a “cultural force” Hip-hop’s origin can be traced back to “May 19, 1968 precisely, when the New York-based group Last Poets(...) got together to celebrate Malcolm X's birthday in Mt. Morris Park in Harlem. Their flowing vocal styles were the precursors to rap music…” (Potter quoted in Malone and Martinez 2015, p. 7). From the Last Poets (who are briefly referenced in the film), they trace the trajectory to the forefather of Hip-hop music, Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc and his Jamaican sound system, his innovation of the two-turntable DJ technique still widely used today (see Cepeda 2004, p. 19), to his hosting of Block Parties and as an entrepreneur seeing the economic viability of the artform. He soon inspired others to do the same including Kevin Donovan aka Afrika Bambaataa (also referenced in the film), who was most well-known for coining the term ‘Hip-hop’ to describe a culture that draws together the four “aesthetic” elements of breaking, DJing, Emceeing and graffiti, each with their own cultural histories. Bambaataa also insisted that “’knowledge of self’” be considered the official fifth element of hip-hop culture” (Gosa 2014, p. 58).

During one of his signature jams, Bambaataa would bait partygoers with the familiar dance tracks, then once the dance floor was full, switch to the German electro pop of Kraftwerk and the Nigerian Afro-beats of Fela Kuti. “During long music segments when Bam was deejaying,” his official biography recalls, “he would sometimes mix in recorded speeches from Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, later, Louis Farrakhan. (Gosa 2014, p. 64)

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Gosa also however recognises Bambaataa and others who ascribed to the Universal Zulu Nation as ‘idealists.’ According to Gosa, the ideology that Bambaataa espoused was that Hip- hop, by combining “beats, rhymes, dance, art, and politics could empower oppressed people around the world” (Gosa 2014, p. 59). He shares further his scepticism of Bambaataa’s emancipatory theory underpinning Hip-hop culture, which sounds reminiscent of Nakata et al.’s (2012) criticism of critical theory’s role in some ‘Indigenist’ research.

Romanticized retellings of hip-hop history tend to describe block parties as mini revolutions spontaneously born out of the ashes of the failing Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Hip-hop’s “original myth,” as H. Samy Alim calls the narrative of hip-hop’s genesis in the 1970s’ New York ghettos, involves some truth, nostalgia, and wishful thinking. (Alim quoted in Gosa 2014, p. 59)

Malone and Martinez (2015) maintain however that Hip-hop from its very origins in the early 1970’s to present has always been politically active, charting three distinct stages of Hip-hop activism; “Stage I: Cultural awareness and emergence (early 1970s to the mid-1980s)” (pp. 7- 8); “Stage II: Social creation and institutionalization (mid-to late 1980s-2000)” (p. 8-11); and “Stage III Political activism and participation (2000 - present)” (pp. 11-14). Many grass-roots organisations were established by the US Hip-hop community during Stage II across multiple jurisdictions attracting the attention of the United Nations who on May 16, 2001 “commended hip hop as an ‘international culture of peace and prosperity’ through the UN- sponsored Hip Hop Declaration of Peace” (p. 10).

Today Hip-hop grass-roots organisations persist across the US, with major artists like J Cole aka ‘Therapist’ running a “non-profit organisation Dreamville Foundation, [that] houses single mothers rent-free in his childhood home” (Crooke and Travis Jr. 2017, p. 1). Finally, in describing the third stage of Hip-hop activism, Malone and Martinez (2015) recognise the increase in the direct influence of Hip-hop on electoral outcomes in US politics. “... through voter registration drives, political style summits and conventions, and get-out-the-vote operations...The election and re-election of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 also signalled the greatest level of electoral involvement for the Hip-hop community to date. Yet, at the local level (and to a much smaller extent) hip hop has produced political candidates in the political activism and participation stage of development” (p. 12).

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In Chapter 8 of The Organic Globaliser, Flaherty (2014) asserts that Indigenous Hip-hop in Australia as well as in North America and New Zealand is still at stage II of using Hip-hop as a force for social change, given that at this stage of development there are no prominent Indigenous Hip-hop artists vying to be political candidates, nor are there organised Hip-hop based groups rallying support around particular parties or political candidates. However, they are moving beyond using Hip-hop as a vehicle of self-expression and into the realms of ‘social creation and institutionalisation’. Flaherty notes that: “Social activists have created workshops and teaching activities where participants-often youth-create and practice hip hop to encourage social ties, positive behaviours, and empowerment in terms of building their skills of self-expression” (p. 137).

According to Minestrelli (2017), in a historiography of the cultural and political exchange between African America and Aboriginal Australia, “transnational and transcultural influences” from the US resulted in developing our own forms of protest music and the eventual “diffusion of Hip-hop across Indigenous Australia” (p. 36). From the mid-20th century when the plight of African Americans was made more accessible, through TV and print media, as well as physical contact, a “period of productive transcultural communication” between African America and Aboriginal Australia started to open up and these exchanges have occurred “intermittently” ever since (p. 38). Historian Ann Curthoys explains that the communication between the two groups was facilitated through invitations to African American touring musicians to perform on Aboriginal “missions managed by religious groups, churches and Aboriginal leaders” (p. 38). Information was also shared through popular literature and music by African American leaders who recognised the shared plight of racial inequality with other marginalised groups around the world. The motivation, according to Curthoys, was that cooperation was seen as a “potent tool of subversion of dominant powers…to reach out to other Indigenous people in order to gain more support towards their own uprisings” (Curthoys quoted in Minestrelli 2017, p. 38).

In JustUS Behrendt summarises the parallel Civil Rights and Black Power histories shared between African America and Aboriginal Australia from the 1960’s onwards, specifically referring to Redfern as the birthplace of modern political activism: “Hip-hop is a moment in a long history between these two groups and no doubt will continue to be” (Behrendt in interview, 2018). In support of Behrendt, Minestrelli (2017) denotes the 60’s and 70’s as “the most intensely prolific period in the history of this relationship” (p. 43). She references

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Charlie Perkins’s Freedom Rides in 1965 to put an end to racial segregation in NSW rural townships, which were directly inspired by the Freedom Rides that took place in the southern states of the U.S. against segregation laws. The Black Power movement was re-interpreted in Australia by Indigenous leaders to suit our own agitation for “land rights, self-determination and sovereignty” (p. 44). Smith (1999) also recognises our struggle for land rights in parallel with their own, as well as other Indigenous peoples globally (pp. 109-111), and they too found inspiration in the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements as well as the underlying principles of critical theory as the origins of Maori academic positioning (p. 165, see also Bar 5.1). Apart from interactions with African American seamen, invitations were also extended to African American leaders of the Black Power movement to hold talks with Aboriginal political groups, like the Victorian arm of the Aboriginal Advancement League. Aboriginal leaders Bruce McGuiness and Bob Maza “organized an event where Dr. Roosevelt Brown, a Caribbean academic and activist, was invited to give a talk about the meaning of ‘Black Power’ in the United States, thereby suggesting new ways of political struggle for the Indigenous people of Australia” (Minestrelli 2017, pp. 44-45).

However, while Indigenous people were inspired by African American political activism, our own political and artistic activism was not unoriginal mimicry, as Australian news media at the time criticised it to be (pp. 44-48). Nevertheless, African American music went hand in hand with political activism, and as such was also hugely influential on our own musical expressions. Curthoys explains that soul and blues music from the Motown era directly influenced the music of Indigenous female group The Sapphires, while African American artists and activists like Paul Robeson also actively sought out Indigenous political groups, performing music and speaking to Indigenous people at churches and Aboriginal missions (Curthoys quoted in Minestrelli 2017, pp. 49-50).

After reading this contribution by Curthoys on Robeson’s communications with Indigenous Civil Rights leaders, I returned to what I thought was the final cut of the film, and as part of my research-led practice, cut in a brief reference to some ABC News archive of one of Robeson’s visits to Australia. Being a Marxist, Robeson was also interested in speaking with Australia’s proletariat (the working class) and after not being able to find any footage of his meetings with Indigenous leaders, I decided to use some newsreel footage of a visit he made to waterside workers in Sydney Harbour. This cuts to him singing ‘Ol Man River’ (1927) then to his appearance on an ABC TV studio program where he suggests to the journalists

77  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know that Australia’s wealth was stolen from Indigenous people - a claim met with nervous laughter. This footage cuts to Indigenous poet and activist Aunty Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) reciting her poem ‘Oh Son of Mine’ (1974) over a Hip-hop beat:

I could tell you of heartbreak, hatred blind, I could tell you of crimes that shame mankind, Of brutal wrong and deeds malign, Of rape and murder, son of mine (Kath Walker 1974)

Oodgeroo’s poem adds a further layer to Robeson’s comment on the theft of Aboriginal land, adding the “rape and murder” that came with British colonisation. In this way, such cuts in JustUS point toward the solidarity between Indigenous Australian and African American communities. Additionally, by juxtaposing Oodgeroo’s’ 1970’s poem over contemporary Hip-hop beats also points to the progression of Indigenous artistic activism.

Indigenous Hip-hop is carrying on a tradition of Indigenous protest music and often pays homage to Indigenous protest musicians who have come before them, including folk musician/singer-songwriters Kev Carmody and Archie Roach, through the art of sampling as well as actual musical collaborations. Briggs has already teamed up with Gurrumul on Triple J’s ‘Like A Version’18 performing a rendition of Archie Roach’s “Took the Children Away” (2014), a song about the state’s policies of child removal from Aboriginal families, and Torres Strait Islander rapper Patrick Mau from Mau Power also teamed up with Archie Roach on his track ‘Freedom’ (2014), also referenced in JustUS. Gibson (2017) also recognises the ongoing tradition of Indigenous protest music through the contemporary medium of Hip-hop: “Artists including No Fixed Address, the Warumpi Band, and Archie Roach have for decades used contemporary musical styles like rock and reggae to express socio-political issues faced by Indigenous communities, providing a voice for Indigenous peoples throughout Australia” (Gibson quoted in Hutchings and Crooke 2017, p. 5).

No Fixed Address wrote a reggae/punk song about police brutality, simply titled ‘Pigs’ (1982), in which the chorus sang, “You gotta watch yourself, ya gotta protect yourself from

18 A radio program that invites contemporary artists to perform live versions of other artists’ songs.

78  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know the Pigs.” After No Fixed Address, drummer/singer/songwriter Bart Willoughby, performed with Yothu Yindi, Coloured Stone and Mixed Relations but while he was with No Fixed Address wrote another reggae song, ‘We Have Survived’ (1981). In this song Willoughby sings, “We have survived the white man's world; And the horror and the torment of it all”. In the film I also give a “head-nod” to these very important Indigenous artists who have helped pave the way for contemporary Indigenous artists.

Indigenous protest music and the transcultural communications between African America and Indigenous Australia have continued into the late 20th century to present, with African American Hip-hop acts seeking out Indigenous Hip-hop artists for collaborations, to share revolutionary ideas with Indigenous radio, and to demonstrate solidarity with Indigenous Australia in general. In particular, Redfern in Sydney has been a key site where African and Native American artists, Indigenous and POC visit and commune with Indigenous Australians. Koori Radio, Sydney’s Indigenous radio station situated near The Block in Redfern, has regularly hosted travelling artists including Lauryn Hill and Wyclef of the Fugees, who performed an impromptu concert at the local youth centre, The Sydney University Settlement (ABC TV 2009); Salt-n-Pepa, who drove down Eveleigh street handing out free tickets to their concert; Snoop Dogg (aka Snoop Doggy Dogg, Snoop Lion), who met with local Block residents for photo opportunities (Lucas 2008); Public Enemy, who visited The Block in the early 1990s (Maxwell 2003); Michael Franti, who has been a regular visitor; and other celebrities, such as Muhammad Ali and Michael Jackson, who both visited Redfern (Morris 2013). These transcultural communications persist today and Indigenous rapper, Kid Laroi from Redfern, Sydney, recently crossing over into the US charts, who collaborated with the likes of the late and yet still hugely popular Juice World, is testament to this.

The next section looks at the history of ‘Aussie Hip-hop’, which has predominantly been identified with white Australian artists. It references testimonials by Australian Hip-hop Headz, including my own informants, in regard to the prevalence of racism, exclusion and division within the Australian Hip-hop community, from the early to mid-2000’s, and considers the impact of Indigenous and other CALD voices in changing ideas about Hip-hop in Australia.

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Bar 8 From Racism to Embracism: The Changing Voice of Australian Hip-hop In an ethnographic study of the Australian Hip-hop communities of Adelaide and Melbourne in the mid-2000’s, Dianne Rodger (2019) identified the “parochial” and “xenophobic” attitudes of some of her non-Indigenous informants. She identified a dichotomy in the two communities she studied. On the one hand, a majority of her Australian Hip-hop participants did acknowledge and respect the origins of Hip-hop, rooted in a history of resistance to black oppression. For instance, an Italian-Australian informant talks about his and other “ethnic background kids” connection to Conscious Hip-hop and with People of Colour, “because they were always being repressed, and that’s the whole thing with Hip-Hop in the States, of that generation, Black, Hispanic people” (p. 16). However, on the other hand, a minority of her Anglo-Australian informants actively rejected African American Hip-hop by purposely consuming ’Aussie’ Hip-hop only and called for Aussie Hip-hop to be identified as an entirely original and separate genre within Hip-hop. My own Hip-hop informants had observed similar divisions within their Hip-hop communities. For example, Maya Jupiter recalls her experience as an MC as well as radio host of Triple J’ Hip-hop show in the early to mid-2000’s: “I came to realise that there were two Hip-hop scenes, there was an Indigenous hip hop scene and an Australian hip hop scene. And I started thinking, you know, why is that? Why are there only a few of us that you see at both events and why does that happen? And obviously it's a reflection of our society you know” (Jupiter in interview 2018).

Hau Latukefu, a Sydney-based MC of Tongan descent and member of ARIA-winning Hip hop duo Koolism, succeeded Maya Jupiter as host of ‘The Hip Hop Show’ on Triple J since 2008. In an interview with The Brag, an online Australian Hip-hop magazine, Latukefu talks about the changing face and voice of Australian Hip-hop. Reflecting on the cultural change in the Australian Hip-hop scene since the mid 2000’s, Latukefu says “this was a time when acts like Hilltop Hoods and Bliss N Eso were really hitting their straps, so as a result there were a lot of artists trying to sound like that. At that point, it was very white too. Unfortunately, that led to a redneck element creeping into the scene – not so much in the artists, but in the listeners. It’s not what I had envisioned at all” (Young 2017). Sensible J of Remi also concurs with Latukefu that “this level of visibility for the diversity of the genre was – while entirely welcome – also well overdue.” He continues, “That representation has been in the Hip-hop demographic of Australia since the early ’90s – maybe even before. It just seems to be getting the coverage that it deserves now” (Young 2017).

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Rodger also found that the authenticity of “Aussie Hip-hop” for these informants included the valuing of “lyrical themes and the accents used by MCs, with local experiences, Australian slang/references, and ‘natural’ accents…” (p. 5). Another of my own informants, Lee Monro, an Anglo-Australian male Hip-hopper, like L-FRESH, grew up in a predominant CALD community of South West-Sydney. He talks about the paradox of growing up as a minority in Australia, when Anglo-Australians are the dominant culture overall. He also speaks about the resonances between the street narratives from U.S. Hip-hop artists with that of the street knowledge of his own ‘hood’ (community). Monro also describes his lack of identification with the majority of Aussie Hip-hop being promoted at the time of Rodger’s study (mid- 2000’s): “When we heard American Hip-hop that resonated with us. We didn’t even know that Aussie Hip-hop existed because… it never had a place in our communities” (Monro in interview, 2018). Monro talks about the typical content of Aussie Hip-hop at the time as “soft” narratives compared to the real lived narratives of people living in South-Western Sydney: “we had people getting stabbed and shot in our area” (Monro in interview, 2018). Monro also talks about the pressure to drop his apparent American accent, which he eventually looked on as a positive, as it allowed him to rap in his natural “Bankstown accent”, a distinguishable accent from the South West of Sydney, that according to Monro was seen as a “badge of shame” and later as a “badge of honour”: “It took me ten years to get rid of an American accent” (Monro in interview, 2018). However, while Monro later saw the accent change as a positive, he along with Indigenous and other rappers from CALD communities, who all identified with and listened more to African American and POC Hip- hop from the U.S. felt that this requirement from the dominant Aussie Hip-hop community of the mid-2000’s was yet another means to exclude them and a reason for self-exclusion from the Aussie Hip-hop community.

Rodger attributes these divides to “xeno-racism” dating back to British colonial settlement. Xeno-racism is not biological racism (i.e., belief in a superior “race”), but rather a belief that ‘Others’ do not fit or belong into the white way of life that is understood in cultural terms (pp. 14-15). The cultural artefacts or ways of being Australian are exclusively owned by white Australians, and ‘others’ are required to comply to earn the right to be called Aussie. To Rodger’s observations about the existence of xeno-racism within Australian Hip-hop, we can also add that xeno-racism either consciously or unconsciously motivates an active denial of Australia’s colonial history and rejection of Australian Hip-hop artists who do acknowledge this history, including those whose communities have been dispossessed. White

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Australians in general, including Aussie Hip-hop’s fan base, cannot identify with Indigenous Hip-hop resistance narratives, for they were, and never will be, victims of their own hegemony.

This dichotomy in cultural belonging to Hip-hop is predicated by a historical division to two very different senses of belonging to Australia. Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2003) identifies the original ‘colonizer/migrant’ (i.e. English, Irish and Scottish settlers) connection to Australia as based on the dispossession of Indigenous people and the continued denial of our rights through an inevitably unworkable Native Title Act.19 Indigenous people’s ontological connection to country,20 disrupted by colonisation and the consequent alienation of Indigenous peoples, has been further compounded by state and federal policies enacted to control and subjugate: “Legislation and state policies served to exclude Indigenous people from participation as citizens through their removal to reserves, missions and cattle stations where their everyday lives were lived under regimes of surveillance” (p. 32). Moreton- Robinson (2003) names this continued act of colonisation as “post-colonising [emphasis added] to signify the active, the current and the continuing nature of the colonising relationship that positions us as belonging but not belonging” (Moreton-Robinson 2003, footnotes, p. 38).

Given the historic oppositional relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, it is unsurprising that the same dichotomy would persist in Australian Hip-hop culture as an extension of this historical relationship. Additionally, Moreton-Robinson identifies a historical division between Indigenous and non-white migrants and their descendants, who while understanding the experience of marginalisation and racism in Australia through direct experience, cannot fully appreciate the experience of being dispossessed and having their sovereignty denied. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her book Decolonising Methodologies (1999) also recognises that historically before L-FRESH’s time and before the Hip-hop community in Australia expanded to include more Indigenous and CALD voices,

19 The Native Title Act was enacted by the High Court of Australia in 1993 after over a decade of lobbying by Torres Strait Islander man Eddie Mabo for the court to recognise the historical connection of the Indigenous peoples to land and waters of the Torres Strait islands. The High Court eventually recognised that Australia’s basis for its colonisation on the doctrine of Terra Nullius (empty land) was unlawful and that Indigenous peoples title to land could be claimed under the new doctrine of ‘Native Title’ if Indigenous people could prove their pre- colonial connection to lands dispossessed through colonisation. See Moreton-Robinson (2003, pp. 35-36). 20 “The ontological relationship occurs through the inter-substantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land; it is a form of embodiment. As the descendants and reincarnation of these ancestral beings, Indigenous people derive their sense of belonging to country through and from them” (Moreton-Robinson 2003, pp. 31-32).

82  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know that there wasn’t the same experience of unity or solidarity between these communities. “In Australia the Aboriginal land rights and anti-racism struggles were often conflated, although this did not necessarily gain the support of other ethnic minorities for the Aboriginal cause” (Smith 1999, p. 111). Today, however there seems to be at least pockets of solidarity between these groups. L-FRESH continues in the interview about his understanding of and sympathy with African Americans and Aboriginal Australians as a person of “immigrant background”:

I can see the direct connection between being a young person of immigrant background on black land in a colonial settler society, removed from my own Motherland, but not even conscious of all of that complexity. For me, it was as simple as trying to fit in. You know, and when I think about that struggle of trying to fit in, it's a futile journey, because like, it doesn't matter what a person [of] brown or black skin does, [they] will never fit into a society that is underpinned by white supremacist ideas, you know, then a foundation… even though I couldn't relate to being a young black male in America, I could relate to the feeling of not knowing or being pushed to the side and feeling voiceless and feeling like I didn't have power...I can never say that I share that experience because I don't know what it's like to be black indigenous in Australia, but I can empathise. (L-FRESH in interview 2018)

It would seem also, through the level of support that Indigenous and CALD Hip-hop is receiving from Triple J Radio airplay, music festivals and the fans, that the wider community is becoming more sympathetic to the cultural and linguistic diversity now more prevalent in Australian Hip-hop. Despite Indigenous Melbourne-based rapper Jimblah’s agitation for a weekly program dedicated to Indigenous music on Triple J (In Daily, 2019) Jimblah also acknowledged a recognisable shift in Triple J’s programming to include more diversity as well as a coming together between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Hip-hop. For The Brag (2016) Jimblah positively commented on Triple J’s prime-time radio segment Like A Version’s collaborative cover of Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Gonna Come’ (1964) for Reconciliation Week in 2012 between non-Indigenous Hip-hop crew The Hill-Top Hoods, Aboriginal Tongan rapper and R&B singer Radical Son, Aboriginal rapper Nooky and Aboriginal Fijian female rapper Sky High. He said, “Some of my biggest heroes all take us somewhere real special…Change is in the air, we here now” (The Brag 2016). According to In Daily (Adelaide News online 2019) Triple J have also hosted Jimblah collaborating with

83  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know non-Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter Matt Corby covering Corby’s track ‘Resolution’ (2013) and his solo of U.S. soul singer Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going on’ (2020). A.B.Original has also featured on this show collaborating with the late Indigenous singer- songwriter Gurrumul and non-Indigenous musicians Ben Hauptman and Michael Hohnen on a cover of Gurrumul’s ‘The Hunt’ (2014), also with folk Australian icon Paul Kelly on his track ‘Dumb Things (2016). Triple J also supported the shifting of their Hottest 100 (annual song and album review) to another date other than Australia Day and has an ongoing partnership with the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). They also promote other Indigenous acts including Yolngu rapper Baker Boy, Wire MC’s son and Gumbayngiir rapper Tasman Keith, and DOBBY. Smaller local community radio stations, like Koori Radio, have a dedicated Hip-hop show that promotes local and national Indigenous Hip-hop as well as African American, Native American and other Indigenous Hip-hop from around the world. FBi radio based in Sydney and 2KND in Melbourne have also all played more frequently Australian Indigenous Hip-hop.

In JustUS Monro references the changing voice and look of Hip-hop to incorporate more CALD Hip-hop, comparing the new sound of Aussie Hip-hop to “Afro-Australian kids that are nice, they have flow, that are dope, that are current” (Monro in interview 2018). To illustrate this claim, we see a music video ‘Ode to Ignorance’ (2015) by Remi, a Melbourne based Hip-hop duo, consisting of Drummer/producer Justin ‘Sensible J’ Smith, whose parents migrated from South Africa, and Nigerian Australian rapper Remi Kolawole. Remi is seen rapping to camera: I come from the land down under, I'm Australian Where we've got men at work, Sudanese to Israeli And this has got the ignorant acting a little Hitler-ish Saying that any immigrant should be detained-ed 'Cause though we got skills, man, they want us in cages They're scared, they see beige skin and think we're Hussein skins (Remi 2015)

Remi’s song further demonstrates the common theme of white Australian racism, experienced and expressed by Indigenous Australians, shared with CALD Australians. To demonstrate further the shift in Australian Hip-hop and what Monro means by “nice” and “current”, JustUS also presents a sample of music video ‘Final Form’ (2019), which won an

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Aria Award for Best Hip-hop Release in 2019 for Zambian, Melbourne-based Sampa The Great (SBS News, 2019).

It took one of the most iconic Aussie Hip-hop acts, Hilltop Hoods from Adelaide, to recognise and support the talents of Indigenous Hip-hop artist, Briggs from Shepparton, Victoria. “The Hoods”, as they are affectionately known by fans, signed Briggs to their Golden Era Records label in 2009, inviting him as their support act on their European tour in the same year and releasing his debut album, “The Blacklist” in 2010. Briggs’ debut album ranked #3 on Australia’s iTunes list for four days, and as a result, Briggs was able to establish his own record label, Bad Apples Music, in 2015, which signed up more emerging Indigenous Hip-hop artists, including Birdz, Nookie and Philly. Briggs also managed to win Triple J’s album of the year in a collaboration with Trials, originally of the Funkoars, called A.B.Original, for their album Reclaim Australia in 2017 (Golden Era Records Bio n.d.).

In the film Lee Monro offers his own observations of Briggs’s interventions into necessary public discourses around social inequality and racism, through his growing notoriety and the content of his music. “…all of a sudden they just slide straight into those hot seats and then they’re a voice and as soon as that comes to the masses, ya know, it’s on the table” (Monro in interview 2018). In an interview with ABC’s Awaye program, Briggs speaks to what he laid down on “the table” when he released his second album Sheplife in 2014 on the Golden Era Records label:

I tried to not "beat around the bush" with ‘Bad Apples’ and that was my ultimate goal: to make a track that was "in your face". That was scary for some people. That did make some people squirm; make some people think. I wanted to put that fear back in hip hop. That voice, you know, that fist back into rap music, because I hadn't seen it in this country for so long. (Awaye 2014)

Hutchings and Crooke focus on A.B.Original’s award-winning album Reclaim Australia (2017) and their utilisation of their mainstream success to highlight issues of Australian identity and racism. ‘January 26’ (2016), currently at 1.3 million YouTube views (November 2020), is a track off the album which managed to kick start a national debate around changing the date of ‘Australia Day’ to a day that’s less offensive and more inclusive of Indigenous and other culturally and linguistically diverse Australians.

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Fuck celebrating days made of misery While Aus still got the black history (A.B. Original, 2016)

As is apparent from just these two lines, the date celebrated as ‘Australia Day’ is offensive to at least A.B.Original but arguably the majority of Indigenous Australians. This is mainly due to it marking the beginning of British colonialism in Australia. For many this celebration of Australian nationalism is akin to celebrating all the “misery” that came with it, including massacres, dispossession of traditional lands, forbidding the speaking of Indigenous languages, child removal policies and other legislation enacted to subjugate Indigenous peoples. Indigenous people in protest to this celebration have held alternative festivals under the banner of “Survival Day” or “Invasion Day” which aim to subvert the colonial celebration and educate Australians from the perspective of the colonised. Further, Hutchings and Crooke address a number of debates that opened up:

Along with fueling major existing debates about changing the date of the public holiday, the song also sparked several new ones in both mainstream and social media about White privilege, racism, the treatment of Indigenous Australians by mainstream society and governments and even immigration policies. (Hutchings and Crooke 2017, p. 6)

Another rap from Briggs featured in Spinifex Gum’s ‘Locked up’ (2017) deals more with our criminal justice system and will be discussed further in terms of it representing a form of “outsider criminology in Bar 11. In the next section I will look at another “hood” far removed from The Hilltop Hood’s Adelaide, in South Australia; the urban community of Redfern (especially “The Block”) in Sydney NSW. Through the lens of a young Indigenous rapper, a legal academic, a community leader and ex-resident, I will provide the social, historical and political context of The Block and how it informed an Indigenous rapper’s music. In doing so, I will provide a more personal and subjective view on the specific social justice issues facing young Indigenous Australians.

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Bar 9 The Bloc Breadfern: The Gentrification of an MC’s Hood ‘The Bloc 145’ is a name of a recently established Café/ Bar and ‘Breadfern’ is the name of a newly opened organic and gluten free bakery. The names alone symbolise a form of colonisation and a reappropriation of a place once known as ‘The Block Redfern’, situated in walking distance from these establishments, once occupied by a strong Indigenous presence who for a long time enjoyed communal sovereignty and rights to an urban life in low-income public housing. This section looks at the successful conquering of one of the state’s final frontiers, the forced re-dispossession of Indigenous peoples, demolition of architectural icons that signified urban black social, cultural and political heritage to be superseded by ‘shiny neo-whiteness’, through post-colonising tactics deployed over time by property developers and other public actors. I will also discuss how this whole process of gentrification affected long-term Indigenous residents including Sonboy, an Indigenous MC who wrote a song about it- ‘Redfern Hometown’.

Pre-colonisation, the Gadigal Indigenous people enjoyed a long and continuous occupation of many parts of Sydney, including Redfern, which is located in the centre of Sydney. However, after being dispossessed through British settlement, many Indigenous people returned back to their traditional homelands to find work. In the late 19th century Indigenous people from around the country flocked to Redfern to gain work building the railways. My grandfather and other relatives joined them. According to Anthony (2011), “the population grew to 12,000 by 1965 and Redfern became a home for the Aboriginal Rights Movement” (p. 393). The space the Indigenous people occupied came to be known as “The Block” and was formally established, after much political agitation from Indigenous leaders and non- Indigenous supporters, through a grant by the Whitlam federal government in 1972, that allowed the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) to purchase approximately 70 Victorian terrace houses on a block of land bordered by Eveleigh, Caroline, Vine and Louis streets, (Shaw 2000, p. 291). According to McAuliffe (2009), this “was regarded as part of the process of self-determination and reconciliation” and The Block became known as the “symbolic heart of (post)colonial political struggle” (McAuliff quoted in Anthony 2011, p. 393). The AHC was charged with the responsibility of managing The Block, but according to the current CEO, Uncle Mick Mundine, the AHC has historically not received adequate state or federal government funding to pay for necessary infrastructure and housing upgrades (Mundine in interview 2018).

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Consequently, The Block quickly gained a reputation through Australian news media as a “failure”, with the responsibility squarely levelled at the AHC and the Aboriginal people residing there. From the early 80’s through to mid-2000, The Block was often described as Sydney’s “black ghetto”, “spiralling out of control and imploding in a sea of drugs and crime” (Shaw 2000, p. 294). Shaw goes on to recognise that The Block became popularly compared to Harlem, NY: “It is all too easy to consider the presence of an urban Aboriginal community in Sydney in the same ways. For ‘black ghettos’, failures due to ‘race’ are the common emphases” (Shaw 2000, p. 294). Like Harlem is to New York, The Block has slowly been affected by Sydney’s gentrification of public housing spaces in Redfern, as well as the neighbouring suburb of Waterloo. As Professor Behrendt (Director of Research at Jumbunna, University of Technology Sydney) notes, the gentrification of Redfern is symptomatic of “gentrification all around Sydney in all of the pockets where they have a strong social housing or strong working-class communities” (Behrendt in interview 2018). Gentrification of The Block has been justified through successfully demonising The Block through sensational news media headlines (see Appendix 1-3) and non-Aboriginal anti-Block lobby groups (Shaw 2000, p. 301), planned public housing obsolescence (Rogers 2014, p. 119), and finally a state sanctioned privatisation of The Block through the expansion of Sydney City’s urban renewal plans (Rogers 2014, pp. 118-119). Like Harlem, The Block was seen as colonisation’s final frontier (Shaw 2000, p. 296). With the mass exodus of Indigenous people since the early 2000’s, the demolition of public housing to make way for development, the rise in rental prices and the cost of living (Hromek 2016, pp. 6-8) The Block may have since been conquered but the future of The Block is still highly contested.

By the time I arrived in Redfern to take up a job as a Youth Development Officer in 1995, I witnessed firsthand the state of disrepair of the Aboriginal public housing on The Block (See Appendix 4-6). People were living in overcrowded derelict homes, with a small group of homeless, drug and alcohol-dependent people living rough outside on the footpaths at the top of Eveleigh Street, diagonally opposite Redfern Station. The social problems of The Block were laid bare to non-Indigenous students and commuters travelling to and from Redfern train station, which is a key transport hub for the University of Sydney. To many outsiders, Indigenous people sleeping rough in Redfern came to represent all Aboriginal people from The Block, in spite of the fact that there were over 200 Indigenous people recorded as residing there at the time (Shaw 2000, p. 299). As a country boy moving to the city, to work in Redfern, it was a frightening prospect and mainly due to The Block’s reputation. At first, I

88  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know felt like a fearful outsider, even though I am Aboriginal and had family living in Caroline Street, one of the streets, along with Vine, Louis and Eveleigh Streets, forming the boundary for The Block. As Sydney’s purported “ghetto”, it was known as a place where drugs were used, bought and sold, violence and criminal behaviour thrived. Residents of The Block were perceived by non-Indigenous outsiders as outcasts, deviant and as having very little worth to society. An attitude that is evident in the 1970’s ABC archive I provide in the film from neighbouring residents and one that prevailed 20 years later and arguably until the community was eventually evicted.

Most non-Indigenous outsiders saw the Indigenous residents of The Block as occupying valuable land in the heart of the city and squandering its economic potential. Shaw (2000) describes the residents of surrounding suburbs of Chippendale and Darlington, as comprising “a sea of increasingly affluent ‘whiteness’ (p. 291). Shaw uses Bonnett’s (1992) “discursive environments” to explore the “shared perceptions” of residents of these communities and to provide “insights into some of the ways of whiteness” that have resisted The Block’s expansion. After undertaking in depth interviews with over 30 randomly selected, mostly non-Indigenous, Redfern, Chippendale and Darlington residents, Shaw found that “anti- Block” groups had a strong influence over governments rejecting any calls for future expansion of The Block, including housing for Indigenous elders and a “shooting gallery” (i.e., Safe injecting rooms) for heroin users. These groups used language to demonise the residents of The Block, with respondents using “race-based assumptions about (urban) Aboriginality”, including the word “dirtiness” (Shaw 2000, p. 301). Her non-Indigenous informants even suggested that the removal of the Indigenous Block residents would attract “real” Aboriginal culture. Suggestions for “improvement” of the area included replacing the residents on The Block with “a Japanese tourist-attracting [and spending] craft centre”. An interviewee commented that “this would produce real Aboriginal arts and crafts, like dilly bags, didgeridoos and boomerangs which would bring real [read consumable] Aboriginal culture back into the area” (Shaw 2000, p. 301).

According to Shaw, one anti-Block group went as far as to collect “‘stories’ of 500 victims of [race] crime’” and the worst stories were told at various “timely” meetings. “There is a highly organisable politics of specific whiteness in the area, that mobilises swiftly when it is deemed necessary to defend white space and place against incursions from or expansion of The Block. The tactics used to ‘unite’ whiteness include the creation and manipulation of fear”

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(Shaw 2000, p. 302). However, countering these outsider claims are people who grew up on The Block who saw another side to the Indigenous community from the inside. In JustUs, Professor Larissa Behrendt offers an insider’s perspective, based on her own experiences of living and working near Redfern with family and friends residing there: “They [ outsiders] didn't see the kinship, they didn't see the families…they didn't see the way that people had to kind of really look out for each other as you do when you're living in extreme poverty…And people just didn't, didn't see that if they look from the outside in” (Behrendt in interview 2018).

The film’s main character, Sonboy, is a young Indigenous Trap artist who grew up in The Block. His personal experiences of all the social ills, as well as “the good things” of this once predominantly black community, informed and inspired his debut EP, Kid from The Block (2018). Sonboy is seen rapping one of his songs ‘Redfern Hometown’, walking toward camera, with the iconic Aboriginal flag mural of Redfern filling the background frame, and at the time of filming was one of the few markers left of Redfern’s black heritage. It has since been demolished. This shot visually connected Sonboy to The Block. He is also seen in slow motion walking through Tony Mundine’s gym, and then playing basketball outside with his brothers, cousins and friends, which all further cement his social connection. Sonboy paints a picture of Redfern as he remembered it in the mid to late 2000’s, when Indigenous people still had a strong presence there. “I want people to understand that back then, Redfern ...was on a whole different level. To us young kids growing up, it's our home, you know what I mean? There was nothing ever bad [that] happened to us, you know what I mean? It's just love and family on every corner” (Sonboy in interview 2018).

When I asked Sonboy about what he understood about the outsider perception of The Block, he recalled that the area was constantly under police surveillance and that many non- Indigenous students and other commuters were too afraid to walk down Eveleigh Street (the main street of The Block). “There was never a taxi coming through here. There was always police here, but personally me being in the block, I've always thought, "Why don't I see other cultures," you know what I mean? Why don't people walk through, you know what I mean? They walk around the block” (Sonboy in interview 2018). This is also congruent with my own memories of The Block, only years before Sonboy was born. But despite the abject poverty, I also witnessed – like Behrendt and Sonboy – an inter-connected community who looked out for one another. After being invited into homes and other community-oriented

90  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know events, my fears abated and I started to feel welcome, even though I would still be considered an ‘outsider’. Regardless of my own comfortability with The Block, however, outsider fears continued to feed into the dangerous narrative of the Block as a No-go-zone strategically favouring the economic interests of neighbouring white residents.

Shaw (2013) explains that the rhetoric of The Block being a “failed project of Aboriginal self-determination” also became the “‘truth’ about life in Redfern, as repeated in media and local discourses for decades... It has provided grist for the gentrification mill – real estate developers and marketeers have joined a mass media chant that seeks to erase the existence of The Block” (Shaw 2013, p. 260). Other public discourses also played into this ideation to conquer The Block. According to Rogers (2014), a discourse of “urban obsolescence” played a role in the eventual destruction and reconstruction of the “blighted” dilapidated Block, to a future place of “redemptive” urban renewal, with the in-limbo state seen as an “irrelevant” consequence of progress (p. 119). Rogers using critical discourse analysis explores the discursive practice of “social actors” - State agencies (e.g., NSW Department of Planning), private property developers, and the news media – in facilitating the eventual destruction of public housing, in order to pave the way for market-driven housing (or “affordable housing”) and other urban developments (e.g., shopping centres). Focusing on Ong’s (2006) “zoning technologies” used by the Metropolitan Planning Authority in delivering the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy (SMS), Rogers reveals the thinking behind the SMS as “a form of market driven rationality that demarcates spaces … in order to capitalize on specific locational advantages of economic flows, activities, and linkages” (Ong quoted in Rogers 2014, p. 118).

Public housing estates like The Block are seen as providing no economic value in their current form and, from the viewpoint of the real estate market and business district, The Block is a “block” in the way of economic progress. Analysing plans advertised by the government for public consideration and comment, Rogers and Darcy identify “a broader political discourse about addressing social exclusion/inclusion by constructing public tenants as unproductive market citizens and public housing as an unproductive use of urban space” (Rogers and Darcy 2014, p. 80). Rogers and Darcy show that the terminology used in the SMS and its Built Environment Plan (BEP2) to describe the type of housing to replace public housing - “affordable housing” and “social housing” - actually allowed governments to shift their responsibility for public housing to private property managers (p. 81).

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Along with the class-based stratification of Redfern, the cultural identity of the suburb and its surrounds has slowly shifted. Architecture Doctoral student (in 2016) Michael Hromek notes that the City of Sydney promoted Redfern’s iconic status as built on a “working class heritage and vibrant Aboriginal community” (Hromek 2016, p. 8). However, he notes that the council also supported a “surge of cutting-edge galleries, a buzzing food and bar scene, vibrant local cafes and a string of vintage stores”, which in turn - with some irony - have led to “higher rent prices, higher property taxes, more demand for accommodation, [and the] inflation of prices for goods and services” (Hromek 2016, p. 6). Hromek also identifies a gradual exodus of Indigenous people from Redfern: in 2011, the Indigenous population was only 2.4% of Redfern’s late 1960’s population of 12,034 (Hromek 2016, p. 6). As of 2020, significant urban redevelopment is well under way. The Block’s last Aboriginal icon, Tony Mundine’s Boxing Gym - which incorporated the large Aboriginal flag on its outer back wall - has been completely demolished. In the film, juxtaposed over Behrendt’s voiceover, we see slow motion footage of a non-Aboriginal man walking up Eveleigh Street in a half corridor shot, with a sky crane and scaffolding surrounding a building in the distance. A tracking shot of a restored Aboriginal mural, as the only remaining remnant of Aboriginal occupation, further illustrates not only the gentrification of Redfern, but signifies the ongoing process of colonial dispossession and whitewashing of Aboriginal history. “I think for many of us who grew up there,” Behrendt tells the viewer, “what we really worry about being lost is kind of the history that was there” (Behrendt in interview 2018).

According to Mundine (2018), the AHC was able to negotiate for 62 “affordable” Aboriginal designated houses and that through leasing the land to the government and private investors, the AHC would be able to autonomously raise enough revenue to build more “affordable” housing not Public Housing (Mundine in interview 2018). However, many original residents of The Block, who were forced to leave and find other housing, dispersed throughout the city and NSW country towns, remain sceptical and know the difference between public and affordable housing. This scepticism was not unfounded, when the plans literally revealed by the builder hired by the AHC Deicorp promoted a neighbourhood free of Aboriginal people on their website (n.d.): “Dei Cota (Deicorp’s subsidiary company) has good rental return and convenient location. The Aboriginals have already moved out, now Redfern is the last virgin suburb close to the city, it will have great potential for capital growth in the near future” (Hromek 2016, p. 9).

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Apart from this “unintended racism”, later pulled down from the website, in 1973 the AHC acquired 70 houses which eventually became overcrowded, and in this context, the promise of 62 houses almost 50 years later falls significantly short of the original community’s needs. Other displaced residents like Angelina Penrith also wonder whether they will ever be eligible for the new houses and hence be able to return to The Block: “We want better homes, better, you know everything for our mob, but it just hasn't happened, and I don't think the Aboriginal Housing Company has been transparent with this community” (Penrith in interview 2018). Nevertheless, Sonboy, Angelina and others remain hopeful of their return and repatriation: “Me personally, I want the family back on The Block and the people who don’t have housing, they’re gonna come back here, they’re gonna roam the streets again, ya know what I mean. This is our home … we’ll always come back to The Block” (Sonboy in interview 2018). Sonboy’s dissatisfaction is also shared by Penrith. Apart from expressing her frustration with the amount of time it has taken to wait for the affordable housing, Penrith explains why The Block is so important to her, and many other ex-Block residents: “So it's more than just a home. It's more than just a community. It's an ongoing resistance of colonisation” (Penrith in interview 2018).

My guided tour of Sonboy’s memory continues to the basketball courts where in the extended interview he explained was a place where he would play spontaneous games of basketball with his brothers, cousins and friends living on or near The Block. He recalls these good times spent with community and mourns that they are now all but eroded. Accentuating this articulation of loss of what was his Block, Sonboy looks down at the ground in front of him and it’s apparent that his nostalgia is replaced by a bad memory that he would prefer not to recall. Regardless of the rich political and social history of The Block, its heritage and its Aboriginal residents’ connection, their rights to public housing and an urban life are superseded by the economic interests of non-Indigenous Australia. Colonisation continues, or in referring to Moreton-Robinson (2003) again, the gentrification of The Block is another ‘post-colonising’ project and while the final frontier of Redfern may have been conquered, momentarily, the Indigenous resistance continues.

Bar 10 From Redfern to Kalgoorlie: Riots or Uprisings? In this section, I will provide more context to better understand the effects of the actions of a major public actor responsible for over-policing, police violence and over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples. Using the lyrics of Sonboy’s song ‘Change the Situation’ (2018) to open

93  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know up a dialogue with Sonboy about the genesis of the song, I discuss the personal impact of police brutality, in relation to Sonboy’s direct experience conveyed in the text. This discourse will lead into a major historical event, infamously known as the “Redfern Riots” in 2004, discussed in terms of its reaction to police violence against Indigenous residents of The Block as the Redfern Uprising.

When interviewing Sonboy, I was not aware of his link to a fairly well-known event that took place in 2012, where a 14-year-old boy was involved in a police chase that started in Redfern, ending in Kings Cross and with the boy being shot three times by one of the pursuing police officers. The boy was Dean Carr-Saunders, Sonboy’s younger brother. The story unfolded after I asked the simple question about the line that is performed in his song, ‘Change the Situation’ (2018): “My brother got shot three times, almost lost his life/And there’s still no justice”. As Sonboy describes the details of the event in JustUS, we see ABC News archive to corroborate his story. Eventually an UPSOT21 of non-Indigenous eyewitnesses are seen and heard in voiceover as we see footage of Sonboy’s brother Dean being carried away by paramedics on a stretcher, cutting to police de-identified in mobile phone footage punching one of the teenagers in the face several times while he was on the ground. My decision to include the non-Indigenous eyewitness accounts of the incident was to also demonstrate that the event was not only traumatic for Sonboy and other Indigenous witnesses, but it was traumatic for non-Indigenous onlookers as well, thereby displacing any clear binary between “us and them”. Furthermore, hearing this story from someone so closely related to the incident - including Sonboy’s recollections of visiting the hospital with his mother and father - creates more opportunities to engender empathy in its audience, an issue that Felicity Collins (2010) discusses in relation to trauma cinema (see more in Bar 6.2). In the interview Sonboy describes his father’s anger at the time threatening police and medical staff in attendance to their son Dean that “if he doesn’t make it there will be another Redfern Riot” (Sonboy in interview 2018). This statement from Sonboy moves his narrative from the personal to the collective communal response by the people of The Block Redfern to a long history of police brutality and provides a natural segue to the story of the Redfern Uprising.

In 2004, 17-year-old Aboriginal Boy Thomas TJ Hickey was wrongly identified by Redfern police in a bag snatch and was pursued while riding his push-bike by two police paddy

21 UPSOT is an old TV/film term, acronym that stands for ‘up sound on tape’ and means the use of archival or newsreel footage in full sync with sound rather than for filmic overlay or illustrative use.

94  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know wagons. The chase ended in TJ being fatally impaled on a metal fence in the nearby suburb of Waterloo and 16 years later the family is still calling for a parliamentary inquiry into his suspicious death. The coronial inquest held shortly after his death exonerated the Redfern police of any wrongdoing and culpability in TJ’s death and was, according to Sydney Criminal Lawyers, completely “full of holes”. It was widely believed amongst the Redfern and Waterloo communities that the police were culpable in TJ’s death, with Uncle Ray Jackson claiming that “‘the police actually rammed the young kid’. TJ’s mother, Gail Hickey, said ‘these dogs [the police] …kill[ed] my son’” (Anon quoted in Anthony 2011, p. 405). Additionally, the Redfern police were criticised for “inciting the riot” by their “pre-emptive mobilisation of riot police to Redfern on the day of TJ’s death” (Gargett quoted in Anthony 2011, p. 405). TJ’s death at the hands of Redfern police “saw the Aboriginal community vent its anger over the incident and numerous prior injustices” (Gregoire 2020). Larissa Behrendt, who knew many residents from Redfern as family, friends or colleagues, also reflects on the history of police and Indigenous relations in Redfern: “The people who were engaged in the reaction to TJ’s death were young people and, in a way, it was a trigger to let them express the frustration and anger they had about what had happened” (Behrendt in interview 2018).

In the film I try to illustrate this continued adversarial relationship between Redfern Police and the Indigenous ex-residents of The Block. We see a repurposed montage of the police presence at the last “Block Party”, including a close up shot of a Glock strapped to the hip of a horse mounted police officer, to a group of officers scrutinising the audience. In juxtaposition, Sonboy continues in the interview describing his experience with the Redfern police. It is evident in Sonboy’s demeanour, in the way he relays this information, that the anger and frustration is obviously still felt by this experience of racial profiling and police harassment. “I don't know about the police now, but back then, like, every day, like my uncles and my cousins, you know, were getting arrested…Yeah, we can't even walk the street without the police always looking at us, snapping their necks'' (Sonboy in interview 2018).

According to Cunneen (2001), “At least since the late 1960’s, the Indigenous community at Redfern has been subject to over-policing and police aggression and has responded with resistance” (Cunneen quoted in Anthony 2011, p. 404). Laura Brown, a solicitor in the Indigenous Justice Program at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), supports this claim as well as Sonboy’s experience of racial profiling and over policing in Redfern, leading to higher rates of detention.

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One reason for the high rate of Indigenous interaction with the criminal justice system lies in the different treatment that NSW police extend to Indigenous and non-Indigenous juveniles from the initial point of contact… an Indigenous young person was more likely than a non-Indigenous offender to be arrested, charged, taken to court and given bail conditions. Non-Indigenous offenders were more likely to be let go with a warning or a caution (and no arrest) or without bail conditions if they were arrested and charged. (Brown 2012)

This again supports Sonboy’s observations of the harassment and racial profiling he and other young Indigenous people experienced on The Block. Further, Brown refers to “when a police officer tried to stop an 18-year-old client from boarding a train, the officer hit the 18-year-old so hard that his jaw shattered. There were no sanctions against the police officer, but the 18- year-old was charged with resisting arrest. In a separate incident for one of PIAC’s clients, six police officers arrested a 15-year-old boy whose only crime was being 10 minutes late home; in the process, those six officers used so much force that the boy vomited and suffered bruising...” (Brown 2012). Even though Brown recognises there are “dedicated” police operating at all levels of command trying to break down barriers and foster positive relations with Indigenous young people, the anecdotal evidence provided to PIAC suggests most interactions are antagonistic.

Rather than engage with this hostility shown toward Indigenous people by the Redfern Police and the type of police violence that Brown references, the Australian news media played a role in criminalising the people of Redfern and thereby shaping attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to TJ Hickey’s death and subsequent responses (see Gargett 2005; Anthony 2011 and Appendix 2, 7 & 8). Most of the headlines and stories reported on the “accidental death” of TJ Hickey, and liberally quoted police perspectives as “authorities'' on the conflict, with community views often conveyed as “rumour” (see Appendix 9). This had the effect of discrediting the Aboriginal viewpoint, especially when juxtaposed against large photographs of the riotous mayhem. Reflecting on the “law and order” framing of the news media reports at the time, Gargett argues that it “reinforces the either/or logic that places Indigeneity outside legitimacy and into the world of deviance. It washes away the links between colonial legacies and Indigenous crime” (Gargett 2005, p. 9). As part of this, journalists perpetuated misleading beliefs that the “deviance” of Indigenous people was a primary cause for the over- representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system (Gargett 2005, p. 8).

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The Redfern uprising provides an important historical backdrop for the discussions of Redfern in JustUS. To anchor these discussions in a personal experience, I speak with Shane Phillips, a well-known Indigenous community leader in Redfern, who actively took part in the Redfern uprising and who now fosters a more positive relationship with the Redfern Police. I had known Shane through my youth work in Redfern in the early 1990’s and through his ongoing leadership in the community. I wanted him to recall the more strained relationship he used to have with the Redfern Police: “What drove you to be involved in the riots?” Phillips’s response was, “We thought that was the way we were getting back, we thought we were standing up and fighting back…” (Phillips in interview 2018). As Shane and I walked and talked opposite Redfern Station toward the camera, Shane appeared uncomfortable recollecting his active participation in throwing Molotov Cocktails at Redfern Police. Shane eventually concluded that “[that] night… we look back on it and thought we could’ve done it better but that’s what happened” (Phillips in interview 2018). JustUS then segues to Behrendt’s next clip which gently points toward conflicting viewpoints shared both within and outside the Redfern community, when she states that “the difficult thing about that is then mainstream Australia says, ‘see they’re all dangerous!’” (Behrendt in interview 2018). Pursuing this discourse analyses of the (textual) media reportage of the rioting against the (contextual) reasons or counter-narratives of why Aboriginal people “riot” or “rise up”, I see the same rhetoric being played out in the media’s examination of the death of Western Australian (WA) Indigenous teen, Elijah Doughty in 2016.

Fourteen-year-old Elijah Doughty, while riding a motorbike that at the time he allegedly stole, was fatally run down by a middle-aged white man, running over Doughty’s body with his two tonne four-wheel-drive. The first uprising of the local Aboriginal family and community in response to Elijah’s death led to conflicts with Kalgoorlie Police which occurred directly after the driver was charged with manslaughter rather than murder. It was this event that the TV news media focused the audience's attention on, without providing a further exploration of the catalyst behind the uprising (as referenced in the film). The trial of the man accused of Elijah’s manslaughter was heard much later in the Supreme Court in Perth and broadcast to the Kalgoorlie Courthouse. The Jury “found that his death was not manslaughter but a case of dangerous driving causing death” (Wahlquist 2017), a charge that Aboriginal activist Cameron Manning described as “the equivalence of a traffic offence” (Manning in interview 2017). This led to protests in Kalgoorlie and various other locations

97  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know around the country, demanding justice for the family and bringing the “Black Lives Matter movement to the fore in Australia once again” (Wahlquist 2017). The man, whose identity was also suppressed, was sentenced with three years gaol, which was later shortened to 19 months, when he was successful in a plea to be paroled (The Guardian, 2018). Uncle Ken Canning, also angered by the verdict, said “that if an Aboriginal kid was caught shoplifting, he would receive a much heavier gaol sentence than this man got” (Canning in interview 2018). Canning also makes a link to the song ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016) by Indigenous rapper Birdz, juxtaposed in the film under the news media footage of the uprising demonstrating his understanding as an Indigenous poet that the lyrics were inspired by the “continual rage” felt by the wider Indigenous community (which I discuss further in Bar 11). By expressing that rage, according to Canning, the artist is able to provide the wider non- Indigenous community with another understanding of the news media’s portrayal of an Indigenous “riot” from an Indigenous perspective on the reasons behind the rage.

In her examination of the trials and sentencing of the Redfern rioters, Thalia Anthony, for the Griffith Law Review (2011), goes further to remind the reader that, according to historians and anthropologists including Fogelson (1968), riots are actually, “‘articulate protests against genuine grievances’. Rationality, rather than irrationality… is among a riot’s ‘most crucial features’” (p. 391). Riots are also, according to Anthony, contestations over space, noting that Indigenous identity is “not only linked to race but also to territory” (pp. 391-392). The significance of The Block in Redfern to the Indigenous people who grew up there has been made abundantly clear in the last Bar in terms of its continued occupation by Indigenous peoples. In 2004, however, the Redfern Riots brought a sharp focus on this historically contested space, where Redfern rioters were not only retaliating against the police but were actively exerting their sovereignty over The Block. This contestation over space in the Australian colonial project would only ever be reported from the perspective of the “spatial managers” (the courts and media), who deny the “managed” (Indigenous people) a space to speak and ultimately in this instance a space to live. As is evident from the images and headlines of the time (see Appendix 2, 3, 7 & 8) “Media and court representations of Indigenous rioters as uncontained rabble are a legacy of the colonial mentality that allowed Indigenous people to be segregated and their places to be claimed and named by whites” (Anthony 2011, p. 393).

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Anthony further explains that the courts “… not only have discursive power to manage space, but also the punitive capacity for enforcement, which was used unhesitatingly with the Redfern Riots” (Anthony 2011, p. 407). Again, the grievances that the rioters had toward police and TJ’s death, who were charged with ‘riot and affray’ and given 12-month jail sentences, were not accepted by the courts to be linked to their actions, with the courts focusing instead on the harm that they caused, including smashing the window of a police vehicle. This simplified line of reasoning and outcome for the rioters was of course relayed to the public via news media. In line with the purpose of my film, Anthony concludes that, “For sentencing courts to take meaningful account of Indigenous factors, they need to be contextualised within historical and political contests over space. To do otherwise is to pathologize the Indigenous riot and deny its purpose” (Anthony 2011, p. 415).

In contrast to the history of Australian news media reporting of Indigenous “riots”, our news media are quick to show sympathy and support in its reporting of African American uprisings, as was apparent in the recent reporting of George Floyd’s death. Indigenous Affairs correspondent for the ABC, Isabella Higgins, who has reported on many protests by Indigenous people relating to other under-reported Indigenous deaths in custody or incidences of police brutality, identifies this imbalance in reporting of Indigenous deaths in custody to that of the recent reporting of Floyd’s death. She points to a number of factors framing this phenomenon including: the sheer difference in the proportion of populations represented by African Americans at 14% of the U.S. population compared with Indigenous Australians at just 3% of the Australian population; the long history of African American popular culture and celebrity, including Hip-hop artists who have all informed global audiences of the social injustices experienced by African Americans; and finally, and most notably, the vast contrast in numbers turning out to protest Indigenous deaths in custody (some as little as 10) compared to the turnouts in the U.S., as was evidenced in the outpouring of sympathy demonstrated globally in response to Floyd’s death. She writes: “Where there are lots of people, there is a media presence, then there is public scrutiny, that leads to accountability. When terrible things happen in remote areas, they too easily slip under the radar” (Higgins 2020). However, while she recognises the overwhelming sympathy shown toward the African American community in the wake of Floyd’s death, she also notes “America might have worldwide attention, all the power and influence of celebrity, and even a black president for eight years, but just like Australia, its justice problems are not going away” (Higgins 2020).

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Porter (2015) also identified the discrepancies in the Australian News media’s reporting of the African American Ferguson ‘riots’ (2012) to that of its reporting on our Indigenous “subalterns” in the wake of the Palm Island Riots (2004). Porter surmises that apart from the difference in populations of African Americans compared with Indigenous Australians, “Civil dissent in the US has also been more diverse- Congressional Walkouts, ‘die ins’, and other publicised acts of solidarity…famous NBA basketball player Lebron James wore a shirt emblazoned with Eric Garner’s final words, ‘I can’t breathe’” (p. 299). She points out that the language used by Australian news media, reporting on the Palm Island uprising, in reaction to the police killing of Mulrundji Doomadgee (see the film The Tallman, discussed in Bar 6.1), focused on describing the police involved and the media reporting as “victims”, contrasted with that used to describe the Aboriginal “rioters” as “folk devils” (p. 292). In its reporting of the U.S. Ferguson Riots which was in response to the police shooting of young African American adolescent, Michael Brown, Porter argues that Australian news media offered more considered and sympathetic airtime, providing historical context of systemic racism, subjugation of African Americans and police brutality (see Porter 2014, pp. 294-295). Porter suggests that it is “safer” for the Australian news media to report on racism that happens at a distance than to involve the accountability of white Australian racism. Exposing racism against our own Indigenous people in Australia might call Australian audiences to question the authority and legitimacy of Australian police forces, and to therefore empathise more for Indigenous people. Porter suggests that, among other things, such news media framing may simply not sell papers (Porter 2014, p. 297).

Alternative narratives to the popular news media versions of Indigenous and African American uprisings can be found in Hip-hop. On the East Coast of the U.S., groups like Public Enemy have spoken of issues of systemic racism affecting African Americans and POC, inspiring Indigenous and other Australian artists of colour to do the same. Chuck D of Public Enemy, one of mirrah’s Hip-hop idols, stated that “rap music was Black folk’s CNN… the music of the culture is a source of information on the experiences of Black folk around the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Within this parallel is the vital point that knowledge within Hip-hop is most frequently a counter narrative to the mainstream news media…it also often challenges the dominant and hegemonic mainstream media platforms” (Hill & Petchauer 2013, p. 49). It is the silence around police brutality, around over- incarcerated Indigenous people and around systemic racism, that Hip-hoppers are speaking back to. Most recently, DOBBY was inspired to write a conscious track ‘I Can’t Breathe’

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(2020), also featured in JustUS, specifically referencing the police murders of George Floyd and David Dungay Jr., pleading to an Australian audience to show the same sympathy to Dungay’s family and Aboriginal people as has been afforded to Floyd, his family and the African American community.

No wonder our people do not trust the system Over 400 not one conviction Shame! No justice and no peace They won’t charge the police They both said I can’t breathe (DOBBY, Vyva Entertainment 2020).

Dungay’s family have been protesting to have his case re-opened and to have those responsible for his death brought to account since he died in 2015, with only handfuls of protesters, mostly Indigenous, turning out in support. Here DOBBY is speaking the family’s truth to power, pointing to the overarching problem of police enjoying immunity to criminal prosecution when acting in their roles (see more in Bar 12). He in solidarity is sharing the family’s frustration at the injustice, Australia’s apathy and pleads to the audience to show the same sympathy afforded to Floyd, his family and community.

In 2015, during a prison cell transfer at Long Bay Gaol, Sydney, Dungay Jr. was held down and sedated until he could not breathe and perished only minutes later after his heart arrested. The officers stormed Dungay’s cell because he refused to stop eating a packet of biscuits. No officer has since been charged and the family of David Dungay and human rights activists have been marching and demanding justice ever since. Lorena Allam, for the Guardian online, reported the findings of the NSW Coroner and outlined the demands of Dungay’s family: “The National Justice Project, which is representing the Dungay family, is considering three options, including suing the immediate action team and Corrections NSW for wrongful death, seeking criminal prosecution of the officers involved, and seek prosecution under Safe Work legislation” (Allam 2019). However, the NSW Coroner Derek Lee, announced that while he believed that the “professional conduct of the nurse who administered the sedative should be reviewed”, he did not believe that the five guards should “face disciplinary action, saying the immediate action team’s “conduct was limited by systemic efficiencies in training” and was “not motivated by malicious intent” but “was a product of misunderstanding” (Allam 2019).

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Finally, to provide the audience with an understanding of how these so-called “misunderstandings'' personally affect Indigenous people, I ask a question to draw out of Sonboy his understanding of the relationship between the wrongful deaths of TJ Hickey, Elijah Doughty and the violence enacted against his younger brother Dean by the Redfern police. He responds with, “I think justice? I don't even know if we gonna get it. Ya know what I mean. I don’t think. We will get it one day, but I don't think it's gonna be too soon. We've tried everything...” (Sonboy in interview 2018). Over this narrative we see Sonboy mostly in sync until halfway through his dialogue when we see archival newspaper clippings, illustrating the family’s attempts to get media attention, as well as the NSW Police Commissioner’s response. I chose to allow Sonboy to remain in sync for the next part of this interview because as he describes how his brother got shot and now sustains a scar from his “chest down to his gut”, he draws the line representing his brother’s scar and points to the bullet wounds. I found this to be more powerful than seeing a photo of his brother Dean and I didn’t want to lose this line or the manner in which he expressed it. It demonstrates powerfully Sonboy’s indirect connection to the trauma directly experienced by his younger brother and allows the audience to visualise for themselves what those wounds might look like on their son, nephew, brother, or grandson’s body. Sonboy’s song ‘Change the Situation’ (2018) continues to narrate his frustration with the system and the injustice he feels in regard to the treatment of his brother: “and they wonder why us black people are so aggressive”. This line without context may be lost on most audiences without knowing in more detail Sonboy’s story and the stories of many other Indigenous people angered by an unjust criminal justice system.

This film and exegesis are about providing more understanding to the depth of these lyrics so that audiences do not have to ‘wonder’ anymore why Sonboy and other young Indigenous people are ‘so aggressive’ and will maybe also feel angered enough to ‘change the situation’. However, there is light at the end of this dark narrative when Sonboy brings the story back to the purpose of his music, promoting an alternative pathway. “I'm trying to make people understand you can do better for yourself, but you have to fight, you have to fight for it ya know what I mean” (Sonboy in interview 2018). Sonboy is speaking here to the main refrain of the song written and performed by Indigenous collaborator Aiyisha Donnelly, also from Redfern: “Constantly fighting, trying to change the situation, coz the system that surrounds me was built by thieves” (Donnelly 2018). Sonboy’s story told through song is not only providing aspirational guidance to young people, along with Birdz’s song and other

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Conscious Hip-hop, it has the power to open up dialogue, as I have demonstrated in this Bar, that can explore in minute detail its provocative subject matter. In the next section I will analyse in more detail the resistance narrative of the Kalgoorlie “Riots”, deconstructing almost line for line the text of Indigenous Hip-hop artist Birdz’s track ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016) written in direct response to the uprising. I will also discuss this and other Indigenous Hip-hop as a form of “outsider criminology”.

Bar 11 Our Black Lives Matter: Indigenous Hip-hop as Outsider Criminology Before providing my analysis of Birdz’s song, it’s important to provide some wider social and historical context, following a “Foucauldian discourse analysis” (see Bar 5.4), by discussing a brief history of the Black Lives Matter movement and our adaptation of the movement to bring attention to our lives that also matter. Then by using “Fairclough’s three- tiered approach” (see also Bar 5.4) of textual analysis, discursive practice and social practice, I will deconstruct Birdz’s song to further explicate its many layered meanings.

According to the Howard University’s School of Law the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement started “with a social media hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin back in 2012. The movement grew nationally in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York” (HUSL n.d.). In Australia to accept the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize, Patrisse Cullors, founder of the ‘Black Lives Matter Global Network’ delivered a speech at Sydney University with her fellow co-founders, Rodney Diverius and Alicia Garza, offers some insight into her own experience growing up black in Oakland, California. “We are the generation of over-policed bodies, of over-incarcerated. We are the generation that witnessed police raids. We are the generation that witnessed the ‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on gangs’ and in my own lived experience in community with other poor black people, we are the generation that were completely discarded and purposefully so…” (P. Cullors 2017, speech, 3rd November). Apart from witnessing the war on drugs or the war on gangs, Indigenous people in Australia are over-policed, are over-incarcerated, have experienced police raids and many of our people are still being discarded. This is why the BLM movement has resonated, has been embraced and adapted to express our own experiences of police brutality, and has become a unifying anthem or catch cry for our own social justice activism. Aboriginal people have also started Facebook groups, using the same hashtag (#BlacklivesmatterAU; #BlackLivesMatterSydney) or my own group, Aboriginal Lives

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Matter (#Aboriginallivesmatter). Rodney Diverius, co-founder of the BLM movement at the same talk held at Sydney University, explains that it was only upon moving from Haiti to the US when he was nine years old that he became acutely aware of his blackness. His parents told him “… ‘just so you know, not everyone is trustworthy, just so you know, be careful of police, just so you know, you can’t do this, just so you know, these are the realities of what it’s like to be a dark skin human being in this country…” (R. Diverius 2017, speech, 3rd November)

Similarly, to Diverius’s experience, African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a self- reflexive journal piece addressing his son, sees the ‘American dream’ as the purveyor of police brutality, an unjust, racist criminal justice system and which maintains the social order of white hegemony over black bodies. He reflects and compares his then 13-year-old son’s sad and angered reaction to Mike Brown’s murder in 2014 to his own similar reaction to the death of his old Howard University friend, Prince Jones, also murdered, in this instance, by a black under-cover officer in 2000. The American dream for Coates is synonymous with white privilege and the criminal justice system in the U.S. is merely a tool to maintain white privilege by keeping black people subjugated and white people protected and elevated above them. He states: “The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs” (Coates 2015, P. 79). Coates describes for his son the harsh realities of growing up black in America, that black people have to be ever vigilant, behave twice as good as white folk, especially in white dominated areas, in order to survive the very real possibility of being abused, tortured or killed by police or white people who have been taught to fear and devalue the lives of black people.

It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage. (Coates 2015, p. 103)

Coates explains that this heritage of devaluing and destroying black lives stems from the days of slavery and its abolition is almost seen by many whites as an unfortunate consequence of

104  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know the confederates losing the Civil War at Gettysburg,22 mourned and preferred to be forgotten. “To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this” (Coates 2015, pp. 98-99). African American Brooklyn rapper Duval Clear (aka Masta Ace) in the interview supports this observation made by Coates in regard to the cognitive dissonance23 of white America to its barbaric history of murder and subjugation of African and Native Americans and explains why it’s relevant to Hip-hop.

They don't want to really face the ugly side of what America is. So, it's either not mentioned at all, or it's mentioned in a way that makes it sound less devious or less evil or less murderous than it actually was. And I think hip hop is the flag waver, hip hop's voice is to let these young people know “that's not how it went down, this is how it went down”. And we want to tell you about it over this beat and teach you over this beat. (Masta Ace in interview 2018)

The same cognitive dissonance of middle America to the murderous history of their ancestors is shared by white Australia. L-FRESH explains:

You know, when you start telling people like, “Hey, you know, your presence here is the continuation of a genocidal regime. And, you know, like, you're not doing anything about it or even just being conscious of it is part of the problem.” People don't want to hear that, you know what I mean, like, why would I want to hear that? (L-FRESH in interview 2018)

Additionally, the perspective of a non-Indigenous Australian Hip-hopper’s experience of the Australian education system is shared by Lee Monro. When I asked him about the idea of incorporating Hip-hop Based Education (HHBE) on a full-time basis within the school system, as discussed in Bar 5.3, he revealed a very similar experience to Masta Ace.

22 Gettysburg is the location where the American Civil War had turned in favour of the North (July 1–3, 1863) with the Northern Union forces’ eventual triumph over the southern confederates (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.) 23 “Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person encounters ·a situation that strongly goes against the person's previously held views. This, in essence, creates anxiety within the individual and thus the individual usually accepts the cognitive dissonance as truth and reality, or works tirelessly to undo the current situation in order for it to align more with his or her original perception” (Beachum and McCray 2011, p. 74)

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I had to educate myself. I was ignorant, I would confidently say up until about 26. So, our curriculum currently on indigenous isn't consistent enough-depends on where you are. And that has to be straightened out first and yes, absolutely I love that hip hop can be a beautiful part of that and can be a representation of understanding it, but we need to openly contextualise the true, unadulterated raw story of what's happened to our people first. (Monro in interview 2018)

Similarly, in the U.S. context, as Coates acknowledges, it’s the denial of the “true, unadulterated raw” history and the existence of systemic racism that allows the state to strategically manufacture ghettos (the new “killing fields”), privatise prison systems where black bodies continue to maintain the US economy through state sanctioned slavery (see the film 13th)24. And it allows police officers to murder and violate black and brown bodies with impunity. Coates and others (Cherkis and Diaz, 2000) also recognise that the problem is that the black “elite” buy into the American Dream and he implores his son not to do the same: “The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto” (Coates 2015, p. 111).

As discussed in Bar 9, before the gentrification of Redfern, The Block was seen as Sydney’s “ghetto” where police could more easily contain and routinely control the lives of its Indigenous residents. This is what Coates means when he says, “drawing a redline around the ghetto”. The regular presence of the police on The Block was normalised by the many non- Indigenous onlookers, including students and other commuters travelling by foot to and from Redfern station. Their positions of privilege helped to enable police brutality because Indigenous people from Redfern were widely known as people to be feared. The police, therefore, in the public’s collective mind, were right to use excessive force in apprehending them in order to keep the Australian (white) dream alive by protecting its favoured citizens

24 13th (2016) is a film by Ava DuVernay, which discusses how the privatised penal system in the U.S. and mass incarceration of African American and POC is a strategic form of state sanctioned slavery, based on the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that provides a certain provision to the abolition of slavery that allows for convicted criminals to be slaved. The 13th Amendment states, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (National Archives n.d.)

106  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know from the “dangerous” ones; As Behrendt said in the interview, “It’s always been the case that excessive force has been acceptable since the days of the frontier” (Behrendt in interview 2018). In support of Behrendt’s claim, Porter (2015) provides a brief condensed history of police violence against Indigenous people from frontier days through to current times which she describes as “Neo-colonial”.

Australian policing history goes to the heart of many issues regarding contemporary deaths in custody. In the colony of New South Wales, for example, the activities of the Mounted Police Force — which historian Henry Reynolds describes as ‘the most violent organisation in Australian History’ (1987:27)—included fighting frontier wars and extending the colonial frontier. From 1909 in New South Wales, state police officers were given broad powers in the policing of reserves and in the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Neo-colonial violence continues today via deaths in custody, over- policing, harassment, heavy-handed policing and over-surveillance. (p. 298)

Examples of neo-colonial violence are becoming more and more accessible via social media providing platforms for amateur mobile phone footage captured and uploaded live as the violence takes place with none more so accessible than the footage captured of George Floyd’s life being snuffed out by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Witnessing this footage incensed and mobilised millions of people world-wide to get behind the BLM movement as a vehicle to not only demonstrate solidarity with Floyd’s family and African America but to also shed light on local examples of neo-colonial violence. Contemporary neo-colonial violent acts like this and many more, through their increased visibility, are being more widely discussed and critiqued by news media, artists, criminologists and sociologists with these discourses also being made more accessible through online platforms. Deathscapes is a website publishing research that “seeks new ways to document, understand and respond to the critical issue of racialized deaths in sites of state custody such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres”. It brings together “the shared institutional practices, technologies and explanatory frameworks that characterize custodial deaths in the key settler states of Australia, Canada and the United States…By exposing and naming the structures that produce racialized deaths, Deathscapes’ ultimate aim is to stop these deaths.” (Perera and Pugliese n.d.)

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While Deathscapes’ main focus is on analysing case studies of deaths in custody in these settler states, it also relies heavily on visual culture as well as social justice activism to engage its audience into further discourses around deaths in custody, with its engagement page including publications as well as the analysis of current cases as they play out. In regard to art as a medium of resistance and mobilisation, the page authors say,

In the absence of access to the official platforms through which to speak back to state violence, targeted communities have drawn on art as a way to represent their otherwise silenced viewpoints and in order to embody and materialise their acts of resistance and protest, to celebrate their cultural practices and histories of survivance and to memorialise and commemorate their dead. (Perera and Pugliese n.d.)

JustUS too relies on the combination of case study, social justice activism, the popularity of Hip-hop and the visual medium of film to make more accessible these acts of state sanctioned neo-colonial violence. To illustrate this point, one of the film’s main characters mirrah asserts the view that, “not all policemen and not all law people are negative. It's just unfortunately when someone, individual has taken their prominent status and abused it” (mirrah in interview 2018). Contrapuntal to mirrah’s voiceover (VO) is mobile phone footage of an Aboriginal teenager in Western Australia being rammed by a police paddy wagon as he was calmly walking across a street. The boy is then seen lying flat on his back appearing to be suffering a seizure. Instead of rushing to the boy’s medical aid, the officers casually roll the boy over and proceed to handcuff him. This footage, like all mobile phone footage capturing these incidences of state sanctioned police violence, clearly illustrates for the viewer the more abstract statistics of deaths in custody and the testimonies of police brutality.

Mirrah’s interview cuts to her live acapella performance of her song, ‘We Want to Know’ (2016), which specifically speaks back to the aforementioned incidences of police shootings in the U.S.: “Target on their back, like they are under attack/ Got their iphone’s live/ so the cops don’t lie”. As mirrah explains in the interview, “the only thing that’s saving them (black people) right now is media, their phones” (mirrah in interview 2018) and excerpts are seen of mobile phone footage taken from the same Inside Edition segment used earlier in the film. The footage reveals the police officer about to shoot 37-year-old Alton Sterling, while another officer pins him face down on the ground, outside a store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another mobile phone clip shows the Minnesota police officer after shooting 32-year-old

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Philando Castile, while sitting inside a car. Both mobile recorded incidences, as previously mentioned, sparked protests after they were uploaded and shared widely on social media (Miranda 2016). These images effectively bring these discourses to life and provide further historical and social context to Birdz’s song ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016).

In borrowing the title for his song, one can easily deduce that Birdz has been inspired by what the BLM movement means for Black America as well as here in Australia for Indigenous peoples but in what exact way will be discussed. Keeping in mind still that apart from utilising the three-tiered and historical context approach to discourse analysis, intuitive reasoning and the relationality shared by various invested viewpoints on the Kalgoorlie uprising (Canning, Maynard, Kelly, Munro, Manning and so on) have all culminated to form this analysis as well as the filmic choices I made to convey these meanings.

In the film we hear the fading up of a TV journalist’s voice describing the 2016 Kalgoorlie uprising. The imagery also eventually fades up on Channel 7 News reel montage (2016) of Aboriginal people uprising against the police. The imagery and the typical sensationalist commentary by commercial TV networks, illustrates my interpretation of what Tupac was referring to in his self-reflexive track ‘Thugz Mansion’ (2002), in that the mainstream media will only ever report on the “trouble” that black people cause and not the “struggle” that initiated it. In this case, the reduced charge of murder to manslaughter for a white man who purposely ran over an Aboriginal boy with his two tonne four-wheel-drive. Birdz track, ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016), is heard juxtaposed against the Channel 7 news footage. Indigenous Hip-hop artist Birdz’s track was inspired by this event and was released shortly after. This one right here for Elijah Kalgoorlie raise ya lighters and watch that motherfucker burn down with the murderous liars. (Birdz 2016) Birdz’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ received high rotation on Australia’s popular national and publicly funded youth-oriented radio station, Triple J. Produced by Briggs’s the newly established, Aboriginal owned record label, Bad Apples, Birdz’s track “crossed over” to a wider mainstream audience. The fact that this track received so much airplay makes it a significant track because of its audience.

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The social and political context underpinning Birdz’s lyrics is a microcosm of a larger overarching power relation between the state and the Aboriginal community, previously discussed. As we hear the first verse of this song, we see a montage of footage taken from a Justice for Elijah Rally in Civic Park in Newcastle in August 2017. Firstly, we see a rally participant inscribing on a concrete path, with coloured chalk, the slogans “Justice for Elijah”, then the hashtag “Black Lives Matter”, immediately and literally drawing the connection between the BLM movement and the collective demand for justice for Elijah. Aunty Jenny Monro is then heard speaking at the rally and we eventually see her in silhouette at a microphone. Her urgent voice is emanating literally from figurative “shadows”, representing the hidden, unpopular voice of the oppressed: “It’s time for all of us as Aboriginal people from one end of this country to come together and to point this racism out” (Munro 2017). The film cuts then to Cameron Manning, slightly out of focus, which again was a “happy mistake” because it metaphorically represents a voice determined to come out of the shadows, but in light of mainstream press coverage, has not quite succeeded in gaining focus and attention. He fervently adds: “you can replace a bike, but you can't replace a life, a black life of a child. This child was 14. He’ll never grow up. He’ll never have kids. He’ll never see his family again” (Manning in interview 2017). Illustrating this dialogue are emotional still images of the Doughty family members in mourning. The choice to use these images is in an attempt to engender empathy in the audience through seeing the impact of Elijah Doughty’s death on those who lost a son, a brother, a cousin, a nephew, a grandson, and a friend.

Every person I interviewed at the Justice for Elijah Rally shared the same belief that his killing was intentional and criminal. Aboriginal activist and linguist, Dr Ray Kelly Jr., said the acquittal “smacked of double standards… but double standards are what we have to live with” (Kelly in interview 2017). A non-Indigenous university student said that “The legal system, which is supposed to be our justice system, has protected the perpetrator here” (name unknown 2017). Aunty Jenny Munro, a long time Aboriginal activist, said that “Kalgoorlie is known as a racist red-necked town and this type of vigilante justice is nothing new for our people” (Munro in interview 2017). Aboriginal historian, Dr John Maynard, said that it was but one example of many wrongful deaths of Aboriginal people (Maynard in interview 2017). The next lines from Birdz’s track are in synchronicity with these statements, further

110  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know demonstrating the shared social and political consciousness between Indigenous Hip-hop artists and social activists.

I fear that there will be no justice ever for my people! We say Black Lives Matter but shit the fact that matters is we just black matter to them this shit keep happening (Birdz, 2016)

On textual analysis of this half of the lyric, the cohesion between the different meanings and contexts of the word ‘matter’ forces the listener to distinguish between the ways that the Black Lives Matter movement matters from a black Australian perspective, and the ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives may not “matter” to non-Indigenous Australians. According to Birdz, ‘Black Lives’ are merely “matter” to the other. Are we simply stuff or material, a problem or trouble? Birdz’s clever wordplay and poetic ambiguity is not new to Hip-hop, but its success on Australian radio is an important new phenomenon. The ambiguity in the meaning of the words “this shit keep happening” points to a much larger historical socio-political context that focuses attention on the history and ongoing experience of interpersonal, institutional and structural racism. The discourses provided by my interviewees at Civic Park, Newcastle also point to this phenomenon. The very final refrain of the chorus, “Let me hear ya, oh my, Oh my, let me hear ya Oh my, oh my”, simplified is really a plea to the mainstream ‘other’ to be moved, to be shocked, to recognise the injustice and is a call to action.

Bullymen be my enemy These killers be running around still… (Birdz 2016)

‘Bullymen’ is part of the Aboriginal English vernacular to describe police. The second line here again refers to the numerous experiences of police and white vigilantes, responsible for the manslaughter and murder of Aboriginal people, being completely vindicated, protected or handed light sentences, as in the case of TJ. Hickey, Mulrundji Doomadgee, Elijah Doughty and many others.

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…So what you finna do huh? They running the ship with one in the clip (Birdz 2016)

The word “finna” is an African American slang term that literally translates to “going to”. The adoption of an African American vernacular here is further testament to the African American and Aboriginal Australian alliance and cross-cultural communication. The rhetorical question posed with the use of this word is really asking “what can you do?” given our powerlessness to the police who are a law unto themselves, for “they are running the ship” after all, often with a loaded weapon or “one in the clip” and the authority to use it or excessive force.

When the government's all in it the royal commission aint shit... (Birdz, 2016)

The historic inaction in following recommendations from the RCIADIC (1987-1991) and subsequent commissions and reports by federal, state and territory governments (discussed in the following Bar) provides context to these lines. Birdz is also spelling out to the listener that without an independent body charged with the responsibility to implement recommendations born out of a Royal Commission and instead having Governments in control over the process, in essence investigating themselves, another Royal Commission is futile (‘aint shit’). This is the new discourse of the dispossessed and disenfranchised, the counter-history/narrative that rejects Western hegemony.

These Hip-hop resistance narratives, including ‘Black Lives Matter’ (2016), contribute to a history of Indigenous artistic resistance from a number of platforms including film, TV, theatre and other musical genres. These artists along with Indigenous rappers in Australia are exposing audiences to information, normally the domain of qualified and practising criminologists, through what legal academics and Indigenous criminologists describe as “outsider criminology.” I will look at another rap lyric by Briggs written for Spinifex Gum’s ‘Locked Up’ (2017), as featured in JustUS and expand on its direct connection to Australia’s criminal justice system, Aboriginal deaths in custody and how his rap response provides another opportunity to open up these discourses to young people and expose them to matters of Indigenous social justice. Firstly, I will provide some understanding of the term “outsider criminology” by reviewing scholarship by qualified Indigenous criminologists.

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Cunneen and Porter (2017) recognise that Indigenous resistance to injustices experienced by Indigenous people can come in the form of “artistic resistance”, through the many forms of visual arts, film and music: “Criminologists have begun to document the important contribution of Indigenous artists in adding voices and perspectives to criminological discourses on criminal justice and reform” (p. 676). They argue that along with Indigenous artists, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commission and many other Indigenous researchers and scholars engaged with social justice have been largely ignored by contemporary criminologists: “the inclusion of Indigenous methodologies - involving the incorporation of Indigenous standpoints, perspectives, methodologies, vocabularies, and priorities in a way that is more cognizant of the standpoint of the researcher - seems imperative in this regard” (p. 679). Porter describes Indigenous artists, researchers and scholars who advocate for social justice reform as “outsider criminologists” but contends that criminology is yet to fully appreciate or acknowledge their collective work in this field (Porter quoted in Cunneen and Porter 2017, p. 676).

In a more recent work on “sovereignty, crime and criminology” Porter (2019) reviews the book Indigenous Criminology (2016) by Indigenous criminologists Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri. This text explores further the importance of Indigenous perspectives to be taken more seriously by Australian [structures or institutions or formal bodies of] criminology. According to Porter traditional criminology does not consider in the same way the complexities of the criminal justice victim’s personal history and the relationship with imprisonment. The works of Indigenous filmmakers, Richard Frankland and Professor Larissa Behrendt are referenced as examples of artistic resistance that fill this void in traditional criminological discourses. Firstly, the film Who Killed Malcolm Smith (1992), a screenplay by Richard Frankland is based on the field research that Frankland undertook in gathering evidence for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987- 1991). Porter explains that Frankland uses a combination of the use of “archival material, first-hand observations, in-depth interviews with family members, police officers, prison guards and other government officials- to paint a more complex picture of the personal, systemic and structural racism underlying Aboriginal deaths in custody” (p. 134). Secondly, Behrendt’s Innocence Betrayed (2013) is another example of a film that is an in- depth criminological analysis of the unsolved murders of three Indigenous people, Evelyn Greenup, Clinton Speedy and Colleen Walker-Craig, which occurred in the early 90’s near

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Bowraville Aboriginal Reserve on the far north coast of NSW. The film, according to Porter, fulfilled the motivation of Behrendt to “tell the story of the children’s family in a way that conveys their strength, beauty and resilience in light of these injustices” (p. 134). Behrendt (2019) also adds that apart from giving voice to the families and control over their stories, “[t]he Bowraville case is an example of how we have used Indigenous knowledges and methodologies within the colonial legal system to try to achieve justice. This is an important part of the decolonization process” (p. 494). This imperative goes beyond filmmaking for telling entertaining stories that raise awareness around social justice issues. There is additionally a commitment here to using documentary filmmaking to achieve social justice. These two Indigenous films, apart from the films mentioned in Bar 6.1, balance the personal stories with in-depth critical analyses to tell stories that humanise the characters, the victims of systemic racism, social and criminal injustices. As Collins (2010) suggests this has the effect of eliciting more empathy and understanding from an audience, unaware of the personal lives of those screaming out for justice. Without these important films, outsiders (non-Indigenous) only see and hear the “noisiness” of the protests and not the humanity of those making the noise or the reasons why.

Cunneen and Porter (2017) also reference the songs of Indigenous singer/songwriter Kev Carmody as another notable proponent of artistic resistance including ‘Thou Shalt not steal’ (1988), ‘Rivers of Tears’ (1991), ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ (1988) and ‘Eulogy’ (1991) that deal with “issues of policing, colonialism, and crimes of the powerful” (p. 676). Indigenous and other socially conscious Hip-hoppers have also been active in this space for over three decades. One of the more well-known and contemporary Indigenous Hip-hop artists, whose music could also be described as a form of “artistic resistance” or outsider criminology, is Adam Briggs aka Briggs,25 a Yorta Yorta Indigenous rapper from Shepparton, Victoria.

They put our kids in the system Findings, reports and royal commissions

25 As a solo artist, Briggs has released one EP, Homemade Bombs in 2009, and two albums, 2010's The Blacklist and 2014's Sheplife. He has also made appearances on songs with Hilltop Hoods, the Funkoars, Drapht and The Last Kinection. In the live arena, he has supported international artists such as Ice Cube, KRS-One, Necro, Ghostface Killah, Dilated Peoples, M.O.P., and Pharoahe Monch. In 2015, Briggs founded his own record label, Bad Apples Music, which has signed several Indigenous hip-hop artists and houses A.B. Original, a joint project with Trials from the funkoars (Muzeroom.com, n.d.).

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Numbers, statistics when they’re making decisions Assess the risks and build another prison (Briggs, 2017)

‘Locked Up’ (2017), currently at 65,986 YouTube views (Nov. 18th, 2020), featured in the documentary, however, hasn’t garnered as much mainstream coverage or sparked a national debate around the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples or over-policing, as their track ‘January 26’ (2016) did for reigniting a debate around changing the date for Australia Day (discussed in Bar 8). In addition to the above excerpt from this track, the song ends with a sample from a speech made by Yawura man, chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Western Australian, Labor Senator Patrick Dodson:

The vicious cycle remains the same. Indigenous people are more likely to come to the attention of the police. Indigenous people who come to the attention of the police are more likely to be arrested and charged. Indigenous people who are charged are more likely to go to court. Indigenous people who appear in court are more likely to go to jail. (Dodson sampled in Spinifex Gum 2017)

Briggs and Senator Dodson are illuminating the fact that no matter how many reports or Royal Commissions into Aboriginal deaths in custody, nothing changes. This “vicious cycle” is largely due to federal and state government inaction in implementing and adhering to the 339 recommendations based on the original Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-1991). Porter explains that despite the number of International recommendations born from reports on Indigenous deaths in custody in Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia informing the “growing base of criminological disciplinary knowledge about Indigenous criminal justice, Indigenous rates of incarceration and victimisation continue to rise within settler-colonial societies around the globe” (Porter 2019, p. 122).

Even though the numbers of non-Indigenous deaths in custody are much higher, the proportion of Indigenous deaths in custody in relation to the overall population of Indigenous people in Australia is far greater. This is due to the fact that Indigenous people are disproportionately policed and incarcerated. According to the Guardian online, “Too often, time behind bars is a first, rather than last, resort – particularly with Indigenous youth…They

115  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know are among the most imprisoned people groups in the world. In fact, an Indigenous person is more likely to be returned to prison than they are to stay in high school or university. This is a national disgrace” (Wright 2013). Four years later, this article is supported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics Corrective Services, Australia publication released on 7th September 2017 which states, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28% of the total full-time adult prisoner population (during the June quarter 2017), whilst accounting for approximately 2% of the total Australian population aged 18 years and over…” (ABS 2017). Haughton (2016) includes that the Australian Institute of Criminology boasts that Indigenous rates of deaths in prison have “dramatically” declined. However, Haughton asserts that this is misleading information because while the actual number of deaths in custody since 1991 have increased, so too have the rates of incarceration, effectively presenting a positive statistical outcome for Indigenous rates of death, over 20 years after the report’s findings.

In response to these statistics and bringing the film back to Hip-hop and reminding the audience why the film is discussing these matters of criminal justice, Maya Jupiter lends her perspective, as a self-identified Artivist: “This should be number one in the papers every single day, we should be in the streets, all of us, not just standing in solidarity, but acting and doing something to make change” (Jupiter in interview 2018). Jupiter and partner Aloe Blac on stage are then seen performing live to the 4ESydney HipHop Festival audience in Bankstown. As Jupiter on stage walks assertively toward the audience, she raps: “I’m sick of all the deaths in police custody/ Where’s all the consequences and accountability” (Jupiter 2018). Jupiter’s lyrics and interview explicitly detail her knowledge of the criminal justice system and how people of colour experience it. Her lyrics clearly cry out for the authorities found culpable in the deaths of black prisoners to be held to account and be punished for their crimes. The growing list of recommendations made to address the growing rates of incarceration and deaths in custody continue to be ignored with only a handful of exceptions. Maya connects the Australian struggles to the U.S. context:

A lot of my songs talk about different issues. Now that I'm living in the United States. I have a song right now about the school to prison pipeline and police brutality. It's called crumble. And it's just about how the whole system just needs to come down. And you know, there's no room for reform anymore. It's like we just need to change the whole thing and start from scratch. (Jupiter in interview 2018)

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While Senator Dodson, A.B. Original, DOBBY, Birdz, Maya Jupiter and other “outsider criminologists” may have never served prison time, they know from indirect experience of others, including family members, what incarceration represents for many Aboriginal people and the systems of power that maintain the over-policing and over-incarceration of our peoples. They are recommending reforms informed by those who do not have a platform to speak for themselves by following the Indigenous criminological protocol of reciprocity, which is defined, as Porter puts it, “as giving back by ‘speaking truth to power’. Presumably, this includes processes of counter-colonial storytelling and ‘truth’-telling” (Porter 2019, p. 125). As for artistic resistance as a form of outsider criminology, Porter explains that Indigenous artists, including filmmakers are “concerned with ‘speaking truth to power’, not only to a criminological audience but to the education of the broader public on Indigenous justice issues more generally” (Porter 2019, p. 135). Moreover, beyond raising awareness, it is hoped that those who have the power to influence the instruments of change are further motivated to redress much needed reforms in Australia’s criminal justice system. The next section will discuss this issue in more detail.

Bar 12 “But Who Protects Us from You?”: Abolitionism and Radical Reforms This section will discuss the types of reforms that artists like Jupiter and Briggs in particular are advocating for through their music and social activism. The types of justice reforms are the same advocated for by the original RCIADIC report (1991) and numerous criminology reports produced since. I will focus my discussion, however, in reference to footage depicted in JustUS and one of the problems that I see as central to all other problems with the criminal justice system and that is that police and corrective service officers are permitted to act in their roles with complete or partial immunity to criminal prosecution even when that includes allegations of murder, manslaughter or use of excessive force. My discussion will draw mostly from the work of Dr Stephen Gray, a Senior Lecturer at Monash University’s Faculty of Law, and an Associate to the Castan Centre for Human Rights.

Firstly, in the film I place a title card with a KRS-One quote: “You were put here to Protect us but who protects us from you”, which is a line from his song ‘But who protects us from you’ (1989). This title is eventually replaced by footage of a young boy strapped into a chair, shirtless, wearing a spit hood, surrounded by juvenile detention guards fixing his restraints, talking to him and eventually leaving him in the room. This footage is repurposed from the

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ABC’s investigative journalism program Four Corners, who broadcasted a program, ‘Australia’s Shame’, which provided CCTV and other footage, obtained through deception, of torture and mistreatment of Indigenous children detained in the Northern Territory (NT) Don Dale Detention Centre (ABC 2017). The airing of this program prompted the then Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to launch the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory, which began on August 1, 2016. In the film, Padraic Gibson, Head of Research at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, in reference to Voller’s experience, says, “the real challenge is to take that experience…and try and generalise that understanding about what’s going on, so people don’t just see the spit hood or see the thing and think, “oh that was just a few bad apples”; that is Australia in 2017!” (P. Gibson 2017, speech, Aug 7). To support this claim, Stephen Gray (2018) cites a number of wrongful deaths and mistreatment of Indigenous people at the hands of police and Corrective Service Officers (CSO’s) in both adult and juvenile detention centres across various state jurisdictions in Australia. Gray advocates for the abolition of certain provisions within criminal justice laws, across all jurisdictions, that currently allow police, juvenile detention centre officers and CSO’s to act in their roles with full or partial immunity from criminal prosecution.

In JustUS, I also re-purpose the CCTV footage of a younger Dylan Voller being thrown down on a mattress by one of the detention centre officers and stripped down. The detention centre officer responsible for this act against Voller, Derek Tasker, was acquitted on charges of aggravated assault, and when the prosecution appealed this decision, the NT Supreme Court rejected the appeal in favour of Tasker.26 As discussed in Gray (2018), this decision was criticised in the NT Royal Commission Final Report. The prosecution tried to argue that Tasker was in breach of “section 15327 of the Youth Justice Act 2005 (NT), which strictly excluded ‘physical violence’ from the definition of ‘reasonably necessary force’ for disciplinary purposes” (p. 671). However, the NT Supreme Court viewed this section as irrelevant to the case and the appeal was dismissed. “…because the force used was not for

26 Police v Derek James Tasker [2014] NTMC 02 27 Section 153 provides, in part, as follows: 153 Discipline (1) The superintendent of a detention centre must maintain discipline at the detention centre. (2) For subsection (1), the superintendent may use the force that is reasonably necessary in the circumstances. (3) Reasonably necessary force does not include: (a) striking, shaking or other form of physical violence (Gray 2018, footnotes).

118  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know disciplinary purposes, but rather to protect the victim by denying him the means of self-harm. Thus, the only applicable provision was the more general requirement that the officer do what is ‘necessary or convenient’ for the custody and protection of persons within the detention centre” (Gray 2018, p. 671).

The choice in JustUS to repurpose the CCTV footage, exposed by this program, is two-fold. First, it helps to scaffold the discourse shared by Briggs providing hard, unavoidable evidence of the gravity and extent to which Indigenous people are treated in these centres, bringing to life Briggs’s lyrics.

Positions need filling and they need another guard Who is lighting their path when they're frightened in the dark They got spit hoods understood that it's for their own good And you expect them to act When they get told they're no good (Briggs 2017)

Second, the fact that the footage is taken within a detention centre located in the Northern Territory (NT), far away from Redfern, has the effect of generalising the experience of mistreatment of Indigenous people in custody, demonstrating to the viewer that the experience in Redfern is systemic - that is, prevalent across many jurisdictions across Australia.

Even more telling of the legal protections enjoyed by the NT police, CSO’s and juvenile detention officers is a provision that was not even exercised in the Voller case. Gray explains that section 21528 of the Youth Justice Act 2005 (NT), if invoked by Tasker’s defence, would have automatically granted him immunity against any charge of assault, providing “he was performing or purportedly performing a function under the Act, such as maintaining

28 215 Immunity (1) This section applies to a person who is or has been: … (e) an employee, within the meaning of the Public Sector Employment and Management Act, performing functions under this Act. (2) The person is not civilly or criminally liable for an act done or omitted to be done by the person in good faith in the exercise or purported exercise of a power, or the performance or purported performance of a function, under this Act. (3) Subsection (2) does not affect any liability the Territory would, apart from that subsection have for the act or omission (Gray, 2018, p. 672).

119  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know discipline or order, and was acting in good faith” (Gray 2018, p. 672). Gray further clarifies that arguments for assaulting detainees as not “performing a function” nor “acting in good faith”, are virtually futile and based on case law are not likely to hold up. Gray provides further examples from other jurisdictions that clearly indicate a desperate need for reforms that hold police and CSO’s to account for allegations of negligence, misconduct, assault, excessive force, and in the extreme, manslaughter and murder.

In JustUS, within the NSW context, we see CCTV footage of two-three NSW police officers dragging an Indigenous man out of a paddy wagon and transferring him to a holding cell at Toronto Police Station on January 26, 2018, while six other police officers watch them punch and kick the man on the ground. The 28-year-old Aboriginal man Carl Hoppner was arrested for “intimidating his wife, drunken and aggressive behaviour.” After the beating Hoppner told the ABC, “When they pulled me up, I seen [sic] this pool of blood thinking that is mine and then they just said, 'Happy Invasion Day you black c**t'"(ABC Newcastle 2019). This image cuts to another piece of mobile phone footage of a QLD police officer punching a 14- year-old Aboriginal girl square in the face. This footage was uploaded to Facebook in 2019. When the woman recording the altercation asked the officer why she was being arrested the officer said, “They "contravened the requirement" of not giving the details of their names and addresses when they were asked” (NITV 2019). Mobile phone footage is then seen of a 17- year-old Aboriginal boy being tripped and slammed face down into the ground by another NSW police officer while handcuffed behind his back in 2020. A solicitor at the Redfern Legal centre told SBS News, "Not only is this not acceptable, what occurred is downright dangerous. This boy’s body connected quite abruptly with a very hard surface and these kinds of police conduct should not be happening” (SBS News 2020). The purpose of including this confronting footage is to visually illustrate the scourge of police violence against Aboriginal people that Behrendt and Brown critique. Brown (2012) says that a “vicious cycle is at work here” (p. 1) and the implications of yet another set of recommendations not being followed, perpetuates recidivism of young Indigenous people.

Australian criminologists, including Indigenous criminologists, look at abolitionism as the “ideal” response to these unacceptable statistics and devastating consequences for many Aboriginal families who have lost loved ones to the Australian penal system. However, according to Baldry, Carlton and Cunneen, because abolitionism is often over-simplified to

120  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know mean “advocating the immediate and wholesale closure of prisons and release of prisoners”, its primary goal of “strategizing alternatives to imprisonment”, with the ultimate goal of “eventual eradication of prisons”, is lost to the more conventional strategies of “positive reformist reforms”29 that do not risk undermining the “prevailing order” (Baldry et al. 2015, p. 171). The “prevailing order” in the Australian context, they explain, is to advance the “colonial project” that maintains the coloniser’s “rightful dominance” over the “colonized race”, keeping the penal system “central to the colonial governance of Indigenous peoples” (p. 175). Given the mounting evidence of police brutality, over-policing, over-incarceration and increasing numbers of Indigenous deaths in custody, it comes as no surprise that Indigenous people are naturally abolitionist in their critiques of the Australian criminal justice system. Abolishing the penal system, as the ultimate solution to crimes committed by Indigenous peoples, forms a significant part of the overarching desire of Indigenous peoples to be autonomous of the “colonial project”, including the “abandonment of the institutions of colonial society.” After all, a punitive prison system only facilitates “further personal, family, and community disintegration and does not positively change individuals’ behaviour” (p. 172).

As outsider criminologists, Hip-hop artists have frequently offered critical commentaries on the carceral systems in Australia and the United States. Another stanza from Briggs in the track ‘Locked Up’ (2017) for example, recognises the ineffectualness of the penal system in rehabilitating and its ability instead to worsen the situation for individuals and their families.

Remember that they're kids not a campaign policy Isolate the individual Separated from their families, visits and intervals Maximum punishment, rehab is minimal Treat them like that you just make them better criminals (Briggs 2017)

29 “Positive reformist reforms”, according to Baldry et.al. (2015), are about upholding and legitimating the prevailing order of a punitive carceral or penal system, by simply making improvements to its functionality”, whereas “negative non-reformist reforms” are abolitionist in scope and “work against this process of readjustment and re-legitimation of the prevailing order” (Baldry, Carlton and Cunneen 2015, p. 171).

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There have been a number of attempts at prison reform by Australian governments as well as independent Aboriginal elected bodies, but frequent calls for Indigenous self-determination, treaty, and self-governance have yet to gain real traction (see Korff, 2019; Allam, 2019; Morgan, 2019; Coggan, 2019). Nevertheless, Baldry et.al (2015) still argue that “radical expressions of reform and decarceration” can also lead to the “realization of abolitionist ideals” (pp. 172-173, emphasis in original), and that the “decolonisation of justice” can already be seen “between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous domains…the development of Indigenous healing centres, justice groups, community patrols, and Indigenous courts…built on principles of Indigenous control and self-determination…and yet they have been taken up by government agencies” (pp. 174-175). Foucault also believed that instead of reshaping society, the “whole of society”, seen as built upon “diffuse power”, meaning power operating at all levels and all facets of society including schools, prisons and hospitals, need to be completely “destroyed. And then, we can only hope that it will never exist again” (Foucault

1977, p. 233). However, until the system is completely dismantled and replaced with a more egalitarian and humanist system, our people who make up just 2.8% of the population need to continue to work within and around it in order to survive.

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Conclusion:

The Revolution Will Be Televised

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The changing voice and look of Australian Hip-hop shows signs of a progression from what Michel Foucault presented in the mid-1970’s. In a chapter on the history of race war and race struggle linked to and contrasted with the racist discourse of the colonial history of the18th to the late 19th century, Foucault proffers that:

…the light, the famous dazzling effect of power - is not something that petrifies, solidifies, and immobilises the entire social body, and thus keeps it in order; it is in fact a divisive light that illuminates one side of the social body but leaves the other side in shadow or casts it into the darkness. And the history or counter-history that is born of the story of the race struggle will of course speak from the side that is in darkness, from within the shadows. It will be the discourse of those who have no glory, or of those who have lost it and who now find themselves, perhaps for a time – but probably for a long time – in darkness and silence. (Foucault 1976, p. 70)

First Nations Canadian scholar Jo-ann Archibald (2019) shares an African proverb that quickly sums up what Foucault argues here about the relationship between race and power. “[U]ntil the lions have their storytellers, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o quoted in Archibald 2019, p. 32). In this project we are the voice of the lion. I along with all my co-informants and co-researchers, as storytellers get to share our stories. This is story work. We now use the weapons and tools of the hunter for our emancipation, like every other Indigenous researcher or filmmaker or Hip-hop artist or other storyteller who have remained true to themselves, their culture and community. We dare not to succumb to the seductive trappings of individual success or be co-opted by the system that continues to subjugate our people, turning a blind eye to its victims less fortunate or with less agency. I have privilege but like the staunch, passionate Indigenous storyteller Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts says in her speech outside NSW Parliament House, in reference to her own lighter-skin-privilege, “that does not dismiss who I am or where I am from and it does not dismiss the institution and exactly what it portrays and prevails to all of us as First Nations people” (V. Turnbull- Roberts 2018, speech, 18 September).

Australian Conscious Hip-hop texts, along with many historians and other authors countering old victor histories and an education system still peddling these post-colonising narratives, are drawing attention and bringing light to the narrative of the oppressed from out of the

124  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know shadows. This practice of bringing hidden truths to the surface in the form of artistic resistance in opposition to more popular or authoritative truths, via news media and an outdated Western education system, has been the business of Conscious Hip-hop for decades. This has been the case since its inception in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ (1982) and Afrikaa Bambaataa using his shows to teach the revolutionary texts of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as forming a counterculture he coined ‘Hip-hop’. U.S. Conscious Hip-hop artists that have emerged since, from the 1990’s to the present such as Public Enemy, NWA, Talib Kwelli, Nas, Tupac, Wu Tang Clan, Kendrick Lamar, Common, LOGIC, K.A.A.N., Trae Tha Truth, and J Cole, have also influenced our own Conscious Hip-hop artists in Australia, including those featured in JustUS: Sonboy, DOBBY, Remi, Ziggy Ramo, mirrah, Maya Jupiter, A.B.Original, Birdz, L- FRESH The LION, Last Kinection, Kween-G, Sampa the Great, Ebony Williams, and Mau Power, among many others. In producing the film JustUS, I have set out to provide an audience with a deeper understanding of the historical, political and cultural context to the lyrical content of a sample of contemporary Indigenous Hip-hop produced by some of these artists. I am confident that the film will find an audience because, as one of my Hip-hop informants, Triple Nip reminds us, “it’s the shit that’s been written out of the history books that people are learning about now, it’s being more embraced and more embraced the further we go down the track. And the more people know the truth, the more people are aware and can relate, empathise and understand what’s going on” (Triple Nip in interview 2018).

My documentary has explored the themes of police violence, the parallel political and social histories shared between African America and Aboriginal Australia (including the Black Lives Matter movement), as well as the educational and transformative power of Hip-hop. I have aimed to provide more personalised and nuanced insights into what colonisation looks like for poor urban communities displaced through urban development and gentrification. By using the popular medium of music video, I have endeavoured to produce a film that offers a visual language that speaks to young people. Through the employment of Hip-hop experts, an Indigenous legal academic and an Indigenous community leader, I have created an authentic narrative on the criminal justice system in Australia, both in relation to its impacts on Indigenous people directly, and in relation to its thematization in Indigenous Hip-hop.

Through the juxtaposition of Australian news media against the resistance narratives of Indigenous rap lyrics and the thoughts and experiences of those who scribe them, JustUS

125  Copyright Grant Leigh Saunders 2020 JustUS: What Hip-hop Wants You to Know seeks to offer audiences further insights into how racist propaganda works to maintain an “us and them” mentality. In doing so, I demonstrate that Hip-hop can play an important role in negating these racist narratives and untruths. By inviting the audience into these alternative perspectives, I am providing the opportunity for understanding and empathy toward the plight of Indigenous and other disenfranchised people to be engendered. Through the film’s discussion on police violence and the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples, the film aims to initiate meaningful dialogue on police and prison reforms, and to invite audiences to reflect on the impacts of over-policing and over-incarceration on Indigenous communities. In turn, I am tentatively optimistic that Hip-hop artists will continue to play a vital role in raising awareness about the disproportionate impact of police misconduct - and misconduct from other Corrective Service Officers - on Indigenous communities in Australia. It is hoped that by speaking truth to power in JustUS, I am able to reach both the Australian institutions of criminology as well as general audiences adding to other outsider criminology produced not just for entertainment sake but for edutainment (as Chuck D puts it) and to help influence much needed changes in order to achieve social justice. In other words, as a creative project that was the result of research-led practice, it is hoped that my creative work in turn can now encourage further practice-led action-based research in the criminological space.

Finally, by revealing the positive impact of Hip-hop workshops, it is hoped that further research in the field of HHBE is initiated to further test the viability of incorporating HHBE within our Australian school curricula. Until this end goal is achieved, I hope that JustUS will be employed by schools as a pedagogical tool to be utilised by teachers of Aboriginal studies, music, English, history, and social studies. Documentaries provide an important format for cultivating cross-cultural understanding, empathy, and self-awareness, and music is a particularly powerful tool for engaging young people in Australia. The project aims to empower young Aboriginal people by foregrounding their existing cultural capital in the classroom and other institutional spaces. Rather than beginning with a "deficit" model of Indigenous identities in Australia, this documentary JustUS fosters a greater recognition of the positive, productive, and articulate expressions of Aboriginal Hip-hop artists, and in doing so, illuminates a range of life pathways that may be available to young Indigenous audiences. How younger audiences react to this film is yet to be seen, but I am confident that it will at least start a conversation - if not many conversations - and that is where positive social change begins.

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APPENDIX:

1) Daily Telegraph, “Block this Redfern drug user’s honeypoy”, Aboriginal Housing Company, accessed online < https://images.app.goo.gl/CpPzmDRHY5uJTxRa8>

2) Daily Telegraph, Feb 17, 2004, “Flames and Fury: the mind of a mob”, p. 19.

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3) Sydney Morning Herald, May 17, 2004, “Redfern Riot blamed on Heroin Trade”.

4) “Eveleigh Street, Redfern”, City of Sydney Archives, accessed online 19th November, 2020 < https://images.app.goo.gl/v8b8eRb7Sq7e5YLg7>

5) Sukovic, S. and Peter R., 2011, “1980’s A History of Aboriginal Sydney”, Accessed online 18th November 2020,

6) Daily Telegraph, n.d., “Redfern’s Gentrification Continues as Families and Young Couples Flock to the Inner City”, accessed online 18th November, 2020

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7) Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 16th, 2004, “Teenager’s death triggers fiery Aboriginal rampage”, p. 1

8) Daily Telegraph, Feb 17, 2004, “Flashpoint”, p. 1

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9) The Australian, Feb 17, 2004, “Rumour the spark that fired racial tinderbox”, p. 11

10) Daily Mail, Sept 1, 2016, “Smoking pot, skipping school and kicking goals on the footy field: The life of troubled but talented Aboriginal teen Elijah Doughty – whose suspicious death sparked the Kalgoorlie race riots”, accessed online July 2017 < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3768242/Troubled-life-Elijah-Doughty-death- sparked-Kalgoorlie-race-riot.html>

11) Daily Telegraph, Feb 17, 2004, “Growing up fast-dying too young”, p. 2.

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