ABC Q&A host Stan Grant has unleashed on his own employer, revealing he felt ‘betrayed’ by the public broadcaster when the Queen died and staff were forced to wear black to mourn the monarch.
In an interview with Radio National on Monday morning, the 59-year-old journalist and author said he felt outraged at the ABC’s ‘obsequious’ response to Elizabeth II’s passing.
Grant said he refused to ‘put on a black suit’ and mourn ‘the White Queen’ – a long prepared-for custom at the news organisation – and said he felt at the beginning that ‘no one got it’ at the broadcaster.
‘How dare the Queen just die and this country go into mourning?’ said Grant, a Wiradjuri, Gurrawin and Dharawal man.
‘What about my own people, who continue to be the most impoverished and imprisoned people.
ABC Q&A host Stan Grant (pictured) has unleashed on his own employer, revealing he felt ‘betrayed’ by the public broadcaster when the Queen died and staff were forced to wear black to mourn the monarch
‘I felt in my own organisation … a sense of betrayal because (at) the ABC, everyone donned black suits, everyone took on a reverential tone.’
He added that ‘We saw Aboriginal people being attacked because they voice another view… and they are entitled to our anger. It was a time, I thought, to open it all up and we didn’t.’
Grant said he made his views known inside the ABC that ‘a lot of our coverage was obsequious’.
‘We failed my people, and we failed Australia to have the debate that we needed to have’.
The failing that he felt prompted the veteran journalist to write a new book, The Queen is Dead, published by Harper Collins.
In it, he writes candidly about the national broadcaster’s treatment of the Queen’s death and upon Australia’s future without her.
In an interview with Radio National on Monday morning, Stan Grant said he felt outraged at the ABC’s ‘obsequious’ response to Elizabeth II’s passing. Pictured are ABC presenters Michael Rowland (left) and Lisa Millar (right) wearing black after the Queen died
‘The White Queen is dead. The ABC is nervous. It has circled around these topics all week. The republic. Colonisation. Empire. Genocide. Racism.’
Grant admitted that at one point it was suggested his own program wouldn’t discuss the Queen’s death at all – and would instead opt for a panel discussion about aged care.
‘That would be ridiculous. No. We will do it, I say, and I will put black voices front and centre’.
That panel discussion left him felt ‘sorely tested … wounded, and empty,’ he said.
Speaking with Patricia Karvelas on Radio National on Monday, Grant explained his reference to the ‘White Queen’.
‘Over the last three or four hundred years, the legacy of empire, colonisation, genocide, has firmly established whiteness as an organising principle.
‘Look at the power and where power sits in our world. Who occupies the positions of power? We talk about a liberal-ruling global order; what are the countries that sit at the heart of that?
‘Britain, the United States, European countries. The IMF, the World Bank, big institutions are dominated by countries that benefit from the legacy of empire and colonisation, that was most assuredly routed in a racial hierarchy of whiteness.’
Grant said he made his views known inside the ABC that ‘a lot of our coverage was obsequious’. Pictured are ABC presenters Sarah Ferguson (left) and David Speers (right) wearing black to cover the Queen’d death
Grant said he had ‘experienced that personally as a First Nations person because our people lost our place in the world, our land, our sovereignty, which we have never ceded.’
He said he had met Queen Elizabeth on a couple of occasions and that she was ‘someone who symbolises that power in the Crown, the symbol of the Crown, that my people continue to suffer under …
‘Her death was a cathartic moment, I thought, and I wanted to explore that, to really tear open that idea and examine it again.’
The broadcaster got emotional when he spoke about how his grandmother was a ‘white Australian woman living with an Aboriginal man, discarded by her own people, turned away from the hospital (when) having a child’.
He said she was ‘constantly harassed by police, to the point where it broke her, mentally broke her’.
Unable to cope with the pressure, his grandparents eventually divorced.
‘She moved on and she married another man and she was no longer a scandal to white Australia,’ Grant said.
‘This woman who would walk down the street pushing her pram, (only) to have the police intercept her, turn her pram upside down, looking for alcohol, accusing her of “running grog to the blacks”.
‘(Now) she was suddenly another white woman walking down the street, and I suppose she had a way of disappearing back into that world, that her own children could not have.’
Grant said ‘The privilege of whiteness is to not have to answer those questions, and for us, we are constantly being asked questions.’
Stan Grant said he made his views known inside the ABC (Sydney headquarters pictured) that ‘a lot of our coverage was obsequious’
Speaking about the upcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, he said he feels ‘this is a judgment on us. It is a vote on us …
‘I feel, as a First Nations person, incredibly observed, judged, and it can be a deeply wounding thing, a lonely thing.’
Ultimately, though, Grant said his book is ‘written with love, to a nation I love’.
King Charles III’s coronation will be held on Saturday, May 6.
The Queen is Dead is on sale May 3, RRP $34.99