Place-makers of the mind: Symbolic reconstruction of an inner city park

Abstract

In 2016, a specialist unit that teaches university journalism students how to report in partnership with Indigenous community organisations extended its story range to a news feature produced with members of the wider Nyoongar community of Perth, Western Australia. The story asked the question of what happened to a stalled proposal to co-badge a major inner city park with a Nyoongar name. In conceiving the story and producing it with assistance from our students, we achieved clarity on a local government decision where due process had not been followed. With the help of Nyoongar sources, our team sought to explain the cultural importance of the park and raise awareness of the decolonising potential of Indigenous place names. We and our students advanced discussion of the park’s name, mediating between the broader public, Nyoongar people and a council administration to produce journalism that influenced a political process by privileging Indigenous voices. The following exegesis melds sense of place theory with the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu to situate the story and its producers in social space.