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Contents
Abstracts
Ien Ang
Henry Mayer Lecture 2009: From Dallas to SBS: The popular, the global and the diverse on television
In her 2009 Henry Mayer Lecture, presented in Brisbane in March, Ien Ang reflects on her own work on global and popular television cultures, spanning almost 25 years. In particular, she traces the intellectual continuity from her first, classic book, Watching Dallas, published in 1985, to her last book, The SBS Story, published in 2008, from the point of view of her own experience as a migrant.
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Albert Moran
When TV formats migrate: The languages of business and culture
Debate concerning media globalisation is paralleled by discussion of the emergence of a world language system. Will we all watch the same television programs and discuss them in English in the future? This article examines the dual linguistic structure which underlines the international circulation of TV program formats. It suggests that there is increasing homogeneity concerning business dealings to do with TV formats, even while there is increasing linguistic diversity so far as the cultural reception and understanding of formatted programs are concerned.
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David Robie
Diversity reportage in metropolitan Oceania: The mantra and the reality
Aotearoa/New Zealand has the largest Polynesian population in Oceania. Three Pacific microstates now have more than 70 per cent of their population living in New Zealand. Projected demographics by Statistics New Zealand indicate that the Pacific and indigenous Māori populations could grow by 59 and 29 per cent respectively by 2026. The Asian population will increase even more dramatically over that period, by almost doubling. Māori, Pasifika and ethnic media in New Zealand are also steadily expanding, with major implications for the ‘mainstream’ media industry and journalism educators. For more than two decades, diversity has been a growing mantra for the Aotearoa/New Zealand media. Initially, the concept of biculturalism — partnership with the indigenous tangata whenua —was pre-eminent in the debate but, as the nation’s Māori, Pasifika and ethnic media have flourished and matured, and demographics have rapidly changed, multiculturalism and multicultural media strategies have become increasingly important. This paper examines the regional trends in Oceania, the growth of the indigenous and ethnic media, and their impact on the mainstream in New Zealand as an outpost of globalised media. It also looks at the evolving initiatives to address the challenges.
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Damian McIver
Representing Australianness: Our national identity brought to you by Today Tonight
Since first being broadcast in 1995, Today Tonight has become one of Australia’s most watched current affairs programs. It has also arguably become one of the most talked about and controversial programs on Australian television. This article explores the links between Today Tonight and discourses of Australian identity. By placing this program within a theoretical tradition that views television as a cultural storyteller, this article explores the complex and somewhat contradictory representations of the Australian identity made by the Today Tonight text. It will argue that, throughout a range of representations — from the discourse of the ‘Aussie battler’ to contrasting depictions of Australian society under threat and in decay, or as a place of opportunity — Today Tonight maintains a steady focus on ‘ordinary Australians’ as its main target audience and the bearers of our true national identity.
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Mike Lloyd
Nerds in the city: Flight of the Conchords makes good television humour
First screened in 2007 on HBO television, Flight of the Conchords has received the best international reception of any New Zealand-based television comedy. The series shows the two Kiwis, Bret and Jemaine — a musical duo — bumbling their way through trying to make it in New York. The failure scenario could have led to the typical sitcom fare of conflicting personalities with specific character types as the butt of humour; however, Flight of the Conchords avoids this standard route, and this may partly explain its popularity. Details are provided of exactly how the series makes ‘good’ humour, with a beginning contrast made to the Australian television series Kath and Kim, which has ridicule at its heart. Turnbull (2004) has pinpointed some unease about comedy based on ridicule, and specifically identifies genre mixing as a source of concern in Kath and Kim. In contrast, Flight of the Conchords, while getting close to ridicule, successfully avoids condescension by a different mix of genres and material.
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Michelle Arrow, Bridget Griffen-Foley, and Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Australian media reception histories
As the field of Australian media history expands, so too does the need for a broader and more innovative range of questions, issues and debates. This special issue of MIA responds to that need by considering the sources and research questions raised by media reception historians working on film, radio, television and the press. From print to new media, the papers assembled highlight the ingenuity of Australian historians working to recover the experiences of audiences in urban and regional settings.
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Sophie Loy-Wilson
‘Reading in brown paper’: Beckett’s Budget and the sensationalist press in interwar Sydney
This article addresses the audience reception of sensationalist newspapers in interwar Australia through a case study of Sydney weekly Beckett’s Budget. During a libel trial brought against Beckett’s in 1928, readers came to its defence and their testimony reveals overlaps between reading and political allegiances: reading Beckett’s equated with voting Labor. While histories of sensationalist media in Australia have rightly emphasised illicit sexuality and public outcry, connections between sensationalism and working-class political movements remain on the margins of academic interest. Responding to the question ‘Do you read Beckett’s?’ readers’ evidence at the trial constitutes an audience response and invites debate over the ways gender and class could inform political engagement in the 1920s. Viewing Beckett’s Budget outside of ‘brown paper’ and beyond the sensationalist genre reveals a shift in Australian political culture as party strategists embraced a broader electorate, using Beckett’s Budget to tap into the culture and concerns of interwar society.
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Kate Bowles
Limit of maps? Locality and cinema-going in Australia
Cinema-going is a cultural experience shaped by logistics and mobility, as film distributors and exhibitors operate to enable films to be screened in places and at times when audiences can physically assemble to view them together. A historical understanding of the geography of cinema distribution, exhibition and attendance can therefore help us to understand what factors other than the choice of film title may have shaped the experience of the cinema audience. This article uses samples of trade commentary on small country cinemas in the late 1920s from the Australian trade journal Everyones, and suggests that historical GIS maps could help us to understand regional differences in the cinema-going experience, or track phenomena such as the diffusion of racial and social segregation in cinemas. Nevertheless, we need to remain mindful of the limits of maps to adequately explain the cultural experience of encountering these phenomena.
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Liz Gould
Beyond media ‘platforms’? Talkback, radio, technology and audience
Technology has had an important influence on the constitution and participation of the commercial metropolitan radio audience. The introduction of ‘open-line’ radio from the 1960s was heralded as a novelty for audience participation in radio programming, but was hindered by technical impediments to the quality of telephone and radio recording technologies. In the 1990s, the advent of mobile telephony liberated talkback listeners from their anchoring in the domestic sphere. This article examines how successive media technologies have influenced the experience of commercial radio audiences from the 1960s through to the present. Acknowledging the increasing convergence between traditional media platforms and content, it considers whether newer technologies such as the internet are fundamentally altering the shape and function of listener participation in commercial metropolitan radio programs.
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Megan Le Masurier
Desiring the (popular feminist) reader: Letters to Cleo during the second wave
The second wave of feminism in Australia became a popular reality for ordinary women through many forms of media, and especially through the new women’s magazine Cleo. The reader letters published in Cleo throughout the 1970s provide rich, if productively problematic, evidence for the media historian’s desire to interpret the meanings readers can make from magazines. In this case, the desire is to understand how younger, ordinary (non-activist) Australian women made sense of the immense challenge of feminism. Through letters written in response to Cleo’s feminist journalism (and journalism about feminism), it is clear that a popular feminism was being experienced in the period of the second wave.
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Susan Bye
Debating the barrel girl: The rise and fall of Panda Lisner
The letters published in Melbourne’s three TV magazines (Listener In-TV, TV Week and TV Times) during the establishment period of the city’s television service offer an insight into a number of the issues, concerns and interests that were a feature of the public negotiation of television during this period, as well as attesting to an understanding that the local production landscape was a shared enterprise answerable to the viewers who supported it. The vociferous discussions that took place in the public arena of the letters pages were not necessarily representative of any general response to the city’s TV service, but they unsettle the idea that TV was something that ‘happened to’ viewers who would soak up whatever entertainment was on offer. In this discussion, I explore the role and function of these print-based TV forums by focusing on the correspondence generated by In Melbourne Tonight’s most famous barrel girl, Panda Lisner, whose changing fortunes demonstrated the determination of a number of viewers to play a participatory, even regulatory, role in the Melbourne production landscape.
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Scott McKinnon
How to be a man: Masculinity in Australian teen culture and American teen movies
This paper examines the reception of American teen films by Australian audiences in the 1950s, focusing specifically on issues of masculinity and sexuality. Using material gathered from sources such as oral history interviews, autobiographical writing and Australian media reports, an attempt is made to locate the films as one element in a developing local culture based more on age than nationality. The paper argues that, screened within the context of a society which defined masculine behaviour in the light of the ideals of war, a range of popular American films and their stars acted to complicate the idea of what it meant to be male. Audiences were offered new, or at least more ambiguous, notions of gender and sexuality. These changes caused concern among some Australian adults, as they watched the teenage boys of the nation learn how to be men.
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Paula Hamilton
Remembering Changi: Public memory and the popular media
Media arenas are increasingly the place where most of our negotiation over the meaning of the past is carried out. Indeed, many commentators argue that television plays a particularly central role in the shaping of social memory. This paper seeks to examine how the various forms of media are changing the relationship between personal (and often silent) memories and public ones by asking what happens when personal memories of experience, which are not passed on within families — or only in a limited way — finally become public. I argue here that television and the internet, as increasingly interdependent cultural forms, have an important role in mediating between the personal experience and the public memory of events, as well as between genders and generations. As a case study, I examine the audience response to the television series Changi, aired on the ABC in 2001, using comments posted on the Changi guestbook internet forum. From this example, I examine how technologies of popular culture — especially new digital media — interact to create new ‘publics’, thus both increasing democratisation and access for individuals and also encompassing much larger collectives than in former times.
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Sally Young
The decline of traditional news and current affairs audiences in Australia
With attention focused on the battle for news ratings between Channels Seven and Nine, an underlying trend has tended to go unnoticed: audiences have been switching off televised news and current affairs programs since the 1990s. Drawing on detailed OzTAM ratings, this article shows how this is particularly true for specific audience segments. Allied with this is the longer-term decline in newspaper circulation. These data raise a central question: are Australians merely switching off ‘outdated’ media such as TV and newspapers (and getting their news from somewhere else such as the internet), or are they switching off the genre of news/current affairs altogether? This article weighs the evidence and concludes that the news audience is fragmenting in particular ways, especially by age, and that some (but certainly not all) groups are going online for news.
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Reviews edited by Susan Bye
In this issue:
Burchett, George and Shimmin, Nick (eds), Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett
Cunningham, Stuart, In the Vernacular: A Generation of Australian Culture and Controversy
Elder, Catriona, Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity
Gibson, Mark, Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies
Goggin, Gerard (ed.), Mobile Phone Cultures
Hartley, John, Television Truths
Hjorth, Larissa, Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile
Homan, Shane and Mitchell, Tony (eds), Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (ed.), Interface://Culture: The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form
Landry, Charles, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators
Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria
Lehman, Niels, Qvortrup, Lars and Walther, Bo Kampmann (eds), The Concept of the Network Society: Post-Ontological Reflections
Lewis, Tania, Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise
Marx, Karl, Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx
McChesney, Robert W., The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas
McQuire, Scott, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space
Poletti, Anna, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture
Siegel, Lee, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
Spurgeon, Christina, Advertising and New Media
Storsul, Tanja and Stuedahl, Dagny (eds), Ambivalence Towards Convergence: Digitalization and Media Change
Van Vuuren, Kitty, Participation in Community Broadcasting: A Comparison of Rural, Regional and Remote Radio
Williams, Linda, Screening Sex
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