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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural

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Listening, journalism and community

voices – Nadyat El-Gawley in
conversation with Penny O'Donnell
a a
Nadyat El-Gawley & Penny O'Donnell
a
Department of Media and Communications , University of
Sydney , Sydney, Australia
Published online: 27 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Nadyat El-Gawley & Penny O'Donnell (2009) Listening, journalism and
community voices – Nadyat El-Gawley in conversation with Penny O'Donnell, Continuum: Journal of
Media & Cultural Studies, 23:4, 519-523

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310903078702

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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 23, No. 4, August 2009, 519–523

PRACTITIONER PROFILE
Listening, journalism and community voices – Nadyat El-Gawley
in conversation with Penny O’Donnell
Nadyat El-Gawley and Penny O’Donnell*

Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

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Nadyat El-Gawley works with local and national media to change the ways in which
issues of race and ethnicity are reported, listened to, and understood in Australian
society. She makes radio documentaries and features, often based on stories that people
tell her about migration, life in the suburbs, racism and their encounters with the media.
Here she describes the ways she works to get mainstream journalists to listen to people
and communities that they report about, often without ever visiting or interviewing.
For Nadyat, listening involves giving people the time and respect they need to tell their
stories in their own way, providing opportunities where possible for them to ‘edit’
themselves, and finding ways to maintain the ‘authenticity’ of the stories when they are
translated and heard in mainstream media formats.

Introduction
Nadyat El-Gawley is an unusual journalist. Listening is a central theme in her journalistic
work. She regularly produces radio programs that invite audiences to listen to people they
may be afraid of, feel uncomfortable about, or have no interest in. Often the first, and toughest,
‘audience’ for her work are other journalists, that is, the executive producers who sign off on
the program content and authorize its broadcast. What makes these interactions tough is the
prevalence of ‘conflict’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives in reporting of cultural diversity in
Australia, narratives that Nadyat challenges by refusing to present only ‘two sides’ of a story.
Instead, she works to persuade other journalists that multi-vocal, dialogic narratives are more
suited to the complex task of reporting issues of race and ethnicity. In the following extract,
Nadyat talks about modelling listening practices that are attentive to the dynamics of racism
and anti-racism. This is listening that enables people to ‘be’ with each other in new ways,
without fear. Nadyat hopes journalists and audiences alike will adopt the model practices in
order to extend their understanding of multiculturalism, immigration, refugees, and so-called
‘ethnic conflicts’. Her most recent radio feature, ‘Stories of Love and Hate’,1 provides a
fascinating example of this kind of attentive listening. Broadcast on ABC Radio National in
early 2009, the feature reports on a play about the 2005 Cronulla riots, a series of racially
motivated mob confrontations between Anglo and Middle-Eastern Australians. Directed by
Roslyn Oades, and produced by Urban Theatre Projects in collaboration with Bankstown
Youth Development Service, the play uses an unusual technique known as Headphone
Verbatim Theatre to present the stories of young people, police, passers-by and others caught
up in the riot. The theatrical experience consists of a dialogue about love and hate between

*Corresponding author. Email: penny.odonnell@usyd.edu.au

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310903078702
http://www.informaworld.com
 520 N. El-Gawley and P. O’Donnell

actors, wearing headphones, who listen to and repeat extracts from recorded interviews with
the storytellers. The technique was specifically chosen to minimize the possibilities of
misrepresentation; actors were instructed to repeat, rather than emotionally interpret, what
they heard in a bid to directly engage audiences in everyday accounts of these extreme events.
Nadyat’s report foregrounds the work involved in attentive, respectful listening. She makes
this work visible by juxtaposing inflammatory talkback radio coverage of the riots with the
play’s quiet and systematic effort to gain a public hearing for the uncomfortable facts about
the riots as well as discussion of what the events might mean for Australia’s cultural identity.

PO’D: I’m hearing you talk about modelling a way of listening for the audience. It sounds
like you’re hoping that by listening differently as a journalist, that audiences will listen
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differently as audiences . . . ?

Nadyat: Well, I’m hoping that happens, but I’m also hoping . . . I’ve found that the
Executive Producers (EPs) that I’ve worked with needed to hear differently too, they
needed to hear what I had to say about how the story came together, how I got the story,
and who these people are, and why things are shaping up this particular way. As a
freelancer, you don’t have an awful lot of power . . . well, you know the way it works,
the EP says, ‘Uh, no, don’t like that’, and out it goes. Unless you say, ‘Well, no, this part
is really important because it links this and this’, and you do that because you’re familiar
with the material and the story, and you see that the EP maybe hasn’t heard that link, so
you just have to stand your ground on your ideas. You’ve got no power as a freelancer.
None! [Laughs] Well, your only power is that you know the story and you know why
you’ve edited it in this particular way, and you know why the links work. So, I think
getting journalists to listen differently is one of the things that happen, and I’m hoping
that that comes across to the audience.

Helping journalists to help themselves to listen

PO’D: So, in effect, your primary target for getting a better hearing is other journalists
and executive producers?

Nadyat: Yes! [Laughs] Yes! I think journalists always need to learn. I need to learn from
other journalists as well, but on issues that I’m familiar with, like diversity and racism, and
communities, and Palestine and Israel, I really do feel the need to spend more time with
journalists to let them know what the story is from the community perspective, and to talk
about why it’s happening . . . I’ve found that journalists come out of university, go straight
into a job, sometimes they’re in the media from the age of 22, and they don’t get to work
with the communities they’re reporting on. So they don’t understand how communities are
structured, what organizations to contact, who to speak to, and all of that, and I’ve got an
advantage because I’m still in the community, still working on community projects, and
still getting a first-hand account of what things are like from real people. I think you can
easily lose your connection with real people in the media because you’re talking to experts
all the time. You’re not going out of the office and actually understanding what’s going on,
and that has something to do with the way various stories are reported.

PO’D: So . . . I’m really interested in this idea of you helping journalists to help
themselves to listen! [Laughter] That mightn’t be the best way to put it, but I mean the idea
that journalism needs journalists who are in a more engaged relationship with
communities to help them – to push them – into a more direct understanding of what’s
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 521

happening at the community level. Can you give us some examples of stories that you’ve
done where you’ve felt like you are, I guess, helping the journalist to listen in order to get a
public hearing for a particular sort of story?

Nadyat: Well, one thing is that Australian journalists don’t see journalists from the
Third World or Africa as equal to them. There is this belief that real journalists are only
Western journalists, that journalists everywhere else don’t come up to par with the Western
journalists, that the Western journalists have the right model of reporting! [Laughs] They
have it on impartiality and objectivity, and these other journalists in these hundreds of other
countries just don’t do that, that they are acquiescent and don’t interrogate their material
properly, they are biased and so on. I got that sense when I was working at SBS Radio in
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1995, and I was mightily annoyed because that’s just typical colonialist privilege to think of
yourselves as having it over everyone else. So, it started to sink in that we don’t really
understand what happens to other journalists in other countries, and how important it is to
work in solidarity with them. That’s not something that everyone’s going to have as an
opinion, but that’s why I decided to seek people out who live here as journalists, who I know
will never, ever get a job as journalists because of the structural kind of prejudices that are
here, but I feel that it is really important to hear their stories and to get them out more, and to
talk about who a refugee is. It can happen to any of us at any time. So, that would be one of
the stories that I do that doesn’t get mainstream coverage.

PO’D: Yes, I’ve heard programs you’ve done like that where you talk about really hard
experiences, like when you interviewed Edison Yongai and his friend Sonny Cole about
being journalists in Sierra Leone2 . . . What particularly attracted you to his story?

Nadyat: Well, it was just the integrity of his story. His story, and Sonny’s story, was about
being a journalist in the middle of a war zone. A lot of journalists want to do the foreign
correspondent thing, but they don’t get in touch with the people very much, or they can’t,
or it’s hard, or they only do it for a short period, or they don’t see it in the same way as
when you have something at stake, it’s your country and you’re really fighting for human
rights and justice, and you’re seeing your craft as the craft through which to speak about
that. Edison’s professionalism was on the line; his job as a journalist was on the line.
He was faced with really uncomfortable things, really terrible things, and he maintained
his integrity and he supported as many people as he could, and lost everything and
managed to get away, but still maintained his belief that journalism is something that is
important for societies in conflict and societies in peace, and that it doesn’t really change –
it should always be vigilant and aware. Journalism’s role is not to sit back and be
comfortable. Journalism’s role is always to ask questions. That’s what attracted me to
Edison’s story and to Sonny’s story. Sonny was in more danger than Edison sometimes,
you know, but neither of them got scared. They hung in there and they used their craft
to help people. And I think that’s really admirable. That’s something that not a lot of
people can do.

PO’D: And how do you think their story was heard?

Nadyat: Well, I did get two emails from people who thought they were incredible stories of
courage and bravery, and that more stories like that should be heard. Mind you, those two
people were in the ABC.

PO’D: They were journalists?

 522 N. El-Gawley and P. O’Donnell

Nadyat: Yes! [Laughs] But, hey!

PO’D: Yeah, that’s a good response, you’re pressuring journalism, Australian journalism,
to listen to and hear and respond to themes and people that it neglects or forgets?

Nadyat: Yes, I am! [Laughs] I’m not, um . . . but for me, too, I need to listen too
sometimes. Like I said, when you’re in news and current affairs mode and you just want
someone, a politician, to make a statement and you’re listening out for that . . . if you’re
working in the media, then media imperatives affect you, they affect what everyone in the
media does. But, yeah, when journalists do want to listen then I like doing that work with
them because I think journalists can help us have a better conversation with each other, and
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stop the friction and conflict between communities.

Listening and being heard in a hostile environment

PO’D: What about inside the communities where you work? How do people see your efforts
to enable their stories to be heard in a mainstream environment that is hostile to them?

Nadyat: Oh, sometimes people are hostile too! [Laughs] That’s OK. I expect it. I remember,
when I was working on one story about cultural diversity in the media and I had to go to
Bankstown to interview some young people and I went to this youth centre in Bankstown and
these kids were high on I don’t know what . . . and one of them came running out and said,
‘Where’s the bitch from the ABC?’ and I thought, ‘My god, that’s me!’ [Laughs] He then
went off somewhere else because he was high on something . . . but, you know, at that time
there was a kind of underlying tension in Bankstown towards the media because whenever
the words ‘Lebanese’ and ‘Bankstown’ were mentioned in the news, an immediate
association was made with crime. The same thing happens with ‘Vietnamese’ and
‘Cabramatta’. And it’s not just commercial media journalists who make those connections,
even ‘thinking’ journalists make those assumptions too. So, people behave that way in
response. It’s been rare, but people do have an idea that the media twist your words, that
they’re going to edit you badly, so it’s often means negotiating with people. Depending what
you’re working on, you say ‘Look, this is what I’m going to be doing, and this is how I’ll do
it’, and you spend as much time as people need, talking to them about what you’re doing, so
that they can feel confident in giving you their story, because in the end that’s what you’re
dependent on – their story. You have to show respect. That’s it. When I’m not working on a
story for the mainstream media, I’m working on other community media projects. Oral
histories. We do it differently then, obviously because people are really concerned about
their story, and how you’re going to set it up. There’s always an element of ‘Oh, what are you
going to do, and what are you going to make me say?’ So, you allow people to have a look at
the interview transcript, to tell you what they don’t want to have in there and what they want
to have in there, and you’re totally mindful of that. In that way, generally, after it’s finished
and people hear what you’ve done, they’re fine. They’re totally fine.

PO’D: Going back to the Cronulla riots in 2005, how does media coverage of events like
that affect the communities’ abilities to listen to each other, either through the media or
not through the media?

Nadyat: I think at the moment – at least with the Arabic-speaking community in Sydney – I
think there’s been a bit of a long time where the community has felt under attack. Since
2001. It feels to me like people no longer listen to the mainstream media. They’ve switched
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 523

on to their own media, or they’ve created their own subcultures and gone into protective
mode. I think an event like the Cronulla riot was a confirmation for a lot of people in the
Arabic-speaking community that there was so much racism against them, and that they
would bear the brunt of that for a long time.3 So, I’m not sure how much listening is going on
in that community. I know there’s work that’s happening within the community with
Muslim young women, and Muslim women, to create their own media and to get a hold of
the media for themselves, to be empowered, and that’s been a reaction to the attacks. I think
people are slowly starting to listen to each other, but I think they need a time in which to
regroup and create their own media and create their own meaning through the media, that
they produce . . . I don’t know. Is that answering your question?
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PO’D: Yes, I’m just wondering if you see your main work in those more community-
focused media, or in this bridging role between communities and mainstream journalism
that you’ve described so well and played so successfully?

Nadyat: Oh, I don’t know if it was successful, Penny! [Laughs] I think there are some
people who think I’m . . . somebody once told me that I proselytize too much.

PO’D: In relation to . . . ?

Nadyat: In relation to – well, generally, in my work. Hey, she’s entitled to her opinion!
[Laughs] But no, I like the bridging role, you know, because that role gives me some
legitimacy. The media work that I produce has the legitimacy of being rooted in the
community, coming from the community, so it’s an authentic – I hope that it would be an
authentic voice, and that I’m able to translate that authentically into the mainstream media
and get a hearing for community voices.

Notes
1. ABC Radio National, Artworks Feature, 2009, ‘Stories of Love and Hate’, produced by
Nadyat El-Gawley, 22 March, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2009/2517400.htm.
See also ABC Radio National, The Night Air, 2006, ‘Racing’, produced by Nadya Stani
(now Nadyat El-Gawley), 10 December, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nightair/stories/2006/
1768453.htm
2. ABC Radio National, The Media Report, 2008, ‘From Reporter to Refugee’, produced by
Nadyat El-Gawley, 17 July, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2302955.htm
3. ABC Radio National, The Media Report, 2001, ‘Representation of Ethnicity’, Part 1, produced
by Nadya Stani (now Nadyat El-Gawley), 6 September, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/
stories/2001/359532.htm; ‘Reporting Race’, Part 2, produced by Nadya Stani (now Nadyat El-
Gawley), 27 September, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2001/377056.htm

Notes on contributors
Nadyat El-Gawley is a freelance journalist, radio producer and community arts worker. She has
worked on various storytelling projects with older people, refugee communities, and young people.
She is interested in connecting what happens at the grassroots on race and identity with national and
international conversations. Nadyat has worked as a journalist and producer for SBS Radio and ABC
Radio National; she is currently tutoring in broadcast journalism at the University of Sydney.
Penny O’Donnell is Senior Lecturer in International Media and Journalism at the University of
Sydney. She co-convenes the Listening Project with Dr Justine Lloyd and Dr Tanja Dreher. She is
currently researching the future of newspapers, media and multiculturalism in Marrickville, and
listening in journalism.