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'Daisy M. Bates's influence on Indigenous affairs has often been
attributed to her once romantic legend as 'the saviour of the Aborigines', obscuring
the impact of the powerful news media position that she commanded for decades.
The ideas advanced by the news media through its reports both by and about Bates
exerted a strong influence on public understanding and official policies that were
devastating for Indigenous Australians and have had lasting impacts. This paper
draws on Bourdieu's tradition of field-based research to propose that Bates's 'singular
influence' was formed through the accumulation of 'symbolic capital' within and
across the fields of journalism, government, Indigenous societies, and anthropology,
and that it operated to reinforce and legitimate the media's representations of
Indigenous people and issues as well as government policies' (Author's abstract).
