AustLit

'As the Internet does today, the illustrated magazine significantly defined Australian readers’ knowledge of the nation and the world for much of the 20th century. Magazines graced domestic spaces and dentists’ surgeries; magazine stands filled busy city street corners and transport hubs; and publishers, government departments, and tourism bureaus sent magazines overseas to attract migrants, business investments and tourists. Up to 800,000 Australians read the Australian Women’s Weekly by 1961, with many other titles regularly achieving large circulation figures in a commercial market that in 1963 included 900 journals and magazines. The Weekly continues to provide new avenues for scholarly research, from education to art history to Cold War politics, as well as food and fashion histories. Our themed section for the Journal of Australian Studies forms part of a research project designed to diversify magazine studies in Australia, to broaden the sources and understanding of their significance in Australian cultural history, and to connect scholarship across disciplines and link it to new international developments.' (Introduction)

'During R. G. Campbell’s 30-year tenure as editor of the Australian Journal (1926–1955), he drew on the work of many freelance writers and artists. This article identifies some of the major contributors of cover art and illustrations published during Campbell’s editorship of the Australian Journal to provide an expanded view of the cultural networks that converged in the pages of the magazine. Drawing on Campbell’s advice published in The Australian Writers and Artists' Market, along with his reflections in unpublished autobiographical notes, the article reveals the magazine’s intersections with the commercial and fine art world, particularly the networks of commercial artists who honed their skills in Melbourne’s art schools and artists’ studios during the early to middle decades of the 20th century. Combined with previous research on writers of the popular short story, this article demonstrates the significant position that R. G. Campbell and his Australian Journal claimed in mid-20th-century Australian print culture, and it encourages further research into the large network of freelance writers and artists that radiated from the magazine’s Swanston Street offices.'(Publication abstract)

'The photographs that fill the pages of the Australian illustrated magazines The Home and Decoration and Glass offer new insights into the connections between urban development and citizenship in 1930s Sydney. This article focuses on two sites in which urban citizenship was represented and contested in these magazines: symbolic images of white Australian construction workers as builders of the nation, and debates about the lived experience of urban citizenship associated with the rise in flat construction. The multivocal quality of these illustrated magazines provides a means of addressing the complex interconnections between the built environment and cultural conceptions of citizenship. Examining work in and for these illustrated magazines shows that citizenship was neither understood nor lived as a fixed status defined and conferred by the state, but a contested series of values, obligations and modes of social participation.' (Publication abstract)

'Despite its reputation as a frivolous and licentious magazine, Pix (1938–1972) published a large number of documentary photo essays on work and the daily strife of the Australian labourer. More importantly, the popular magazine promoted a stern work ethic, presented as a sign of patriotism and moral virtue. Pix’s politics are hard to pin down insofar as the magazine never endorsed specific parties or social movements; instead, it adopted an apparently neutral stance in relation to political issues, giving equal coverage to the three mainstream parties of the time. If the national narrative of work that Pix glorified was, fundamentally, a bipartisan narrative, was Pix really apolitical and value-free? I say no: the locus of Pix’s politics has to be found in the way the magazine mobilised the discourse of the work ethic. By reducing work to a moral obligation, Pix tended to individualise and normalise waged work, concealing the unequal and coercive relations informing the social space of the factory. In so doing, the magazine conveyed and championed values such as independence and entrepreneurship that were central to the liberal ideology that found expression in Robert Menzies’s contemporary speeches.' (Publication abstract)

'This article analyses coverage of the visual arts in the Australian “barbershop” magazine Australasian Post. It traces the function and position of art history and the visual arts in the magazine, exploring how they were communicated to audiences by a publication that self-consciously negotiated a delicate balance between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” content and style. The article focuses on the contributions of the magazine’s most significant art critics, including Alan McCulloch in the mid-1940s and, in most detail, Arnold Shore in the early 1950s. It considers how the visual arts articles changed in style over this period and the multiple ways the magazine addressed its audiences. By analysing other features of the magazine, especially its letters from readers, I make clear that not only were audiences engaged with the arts content, but they also sought to influence its approach. In this way, Australasian Post provides a case study for how the arts have been presented to broad audiences and how art-historical knowledge can be communicated to increase audiences’ understanding and visual literacy. With recent sector research showing that the arts are still perceived as elitist for significant portions of Australian society, understanding accessible communication strategies is more important than ever.' (Publication abstract)

'Men’s magazines have formed a significant part of Australian illustrated magazine publishing since 1936. In this article, I broadly survey the field up until 1971, concentrating particularly on bikini and nude photography, which defined the category. I then focus on the period of the 1960s, when men’s magazines were most relevant to Australia’s rapidly changing sexual politics and its censorship debates. I reveal that, although they were by their nature visually repetitious, far from being a marginal or trivial category, they were deeply implicated in the development of broader Australian visual culture and its sexual politics, and fundamental to wider innovations in publishing, as well as the careers of several important Australian photographers.' (Publication abstract)

'Media images of heroic, hard-working Australian achievers have often accompanied stories about an upbeat national work ethic to boost public morale in times of massive upheavals and crisis. The concept of an Australian work ethic has not been a natural creation, but it has been actively developed in the media. This article reveals a turning point in the media portrayal of the crucial area of work that helped cultivate diverse expressions of Australia’s image. The article focuses on the era of momentous disruption in World War II that led to an unprecedented idealisation of workers and changed the traditional roles of the prime minister, journalists and the public. Wartime prime minister John Curtin became an egalitarian partner and a collaborator with media teams. Journalists created increasingly inclusive media experiences to encourage the public to identify with the fashionable new ethos of working-class thrift. Wartime citizens enthusiastically contributed to the varied media expressions of collective work ethics, overturning the traditional notion of a passive public sphere. Using the concept of the emotional public sphere, this article provides a rare perspective on the media’s role in shaping and extending popular attitudes towards Australian workers, collective service and inclusive communities.'(Publication abstract)

'This article examines how Aboriginal conceptions of time and space in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster affect representations of personal, cultural and ecological trauma through privileging sites of wounding that embody Country. The four elements of air, water, earth and fire are central to understanding how each text navigates the complex relational matrices of Aboriginal traumas and respond to ongoing issues of genocide and dispossession that are part of Australia’s tragic history. Elemental energies in these novels are connected to powerful spaces that pain inhabits and moves through, providing insights into the significance of their engagement with Aboriginality and trauma, particularly when situated within the context of legislature including the Native Title Act of 1993 and the Wik decision of 1996. Elemental motifs perform a cyclical function that begins with deep connectedness to oceanic imagery in Carpentaria, then transitions to trauma inflicted on Country and culminates in a cathartic watery Armageddon. While Oyster’s consideration of elemental traumatic space is primarily attributed to land, cartography and wounded bodies, the novel’s narrative threads reach a similar apocalyptic denouement. Oyster’s cataclysmic fires of destruction are eclipsed by the regenerative potencies of water that rejuvenate Country and supplant horror with beauty.' (Publication abstract) 

'This article presents research from an ongoing collaborative project between two women—an Aboriginal woman and senior Wayilwan cultural knowledge holder, and an academic of European descent—that aims to closely and critically re-read Australian colonial and later historical sources for Wayilwan women’s knowledge of Country and community. In this article, we specifically focus on the journals of colonial explorers John Oxley, Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, who travelled through Wayilwan Country in the early to mid-19th century. We begin by outlining our collaborative methodology, contextualising Wayilwan Country and introducing these journals. We then examine the journals in terms of four interlinked Wayilwan women’s knowledges: river knowledge, fire knowledge, grain and yam knowledge, and care of children and the elderly. In undertaking this research, we aim to contribute to decolonising methods and methodologies, address harmful disengagements with Aboriginal women’s practices, and respectfully carry forward Wayilwan women’s knowledge.' (Publication abstract)

'This article presents and discusses an experiment with Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu as an inaugural case study of how we might apply the International Integrated Reporting (<IR>) Framework to an Australian book title. It represents a novel approach to the question of how to be attentive to the problem of value in Australian culture, building on recent research by Meyrick, Phiddian and Barnett and complementing contemporary work on Australian book industry economics by Zwar, Throsby and others at Macquarie University. The results of this experiment indicate that integrated reporting, and in particular the <IR> framework—an established, rigorous and internationally recognised form of reporting—can be effectively applied to a single local book title, drawing exclusively on publicly available data in a manner that effectively and efficiently articulates types of value that exceed the economic. While the <IR> framework has its limitations, my overarching conclusion is that this form of value reporting has strong potential to contribute to timely and effective local book industry advocacy into the future.' (Publication abstract) 

'Stan Cross’s “For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!” (Smith’s Weekly, 1933) is the symbol and bellwether of the Australian cartooning tradition. It is often lionised as a national treasure, but its archival history has been perilous in a way that shows a lack of care amounting almost to national negligence. The original of this most famous cartoon of the Depression era was lost for 80 years before being rediscovered in 2014, and this article notes for the first time that Trove Newspapers lacks a record of its initial publication. We use this troubled material history of one significant cartoon to raise a range of issues about the quality and purpose of collecting and presenting Australian cartoons as a resource for Australian studies in fields ranging from media and humour studies to cultural and political history.' (Publication abstract)

'Harold Holt has been the subject of only one biography and a significant amount of conjecture. The former is arguably the result of a lack of personal papers that might flesh out the life of Australia’s 17th prime minister; the latter is certainly thanks to the bizarrely banal circumstances of his disappearance and presumed death in 1967. Stories of Chinese submarines and suicide so occluded the real question posed by these events that Holt’s first biographer, Tom Frame, felt it necessary to spend a litany of pages debunking them. Why Holt decided to ignore his health problems and enter waters that were notoriously dangerous for even the fittest of swimmers has always been hard to fathom but—in what speaks to the opportunity that biography provides—Ross Walker’s Harold Holt: Always One Step Further offers a convincing and artful answer.'  (Introduction)

'Half a century after Katharine Susannah Prichard’s death, it is more than timely that the first biography of the woman once hailed as a leading Australian writer is published. Her fame was at its peak in the 1930s; later, her novels were regularly set on school syllabuses. Today, however, her work is largely forgotten. To some, she is remembered for the hardline communism she maintained until her death, earning the notoriety in Western Australia that is reflected in this book’s title.' (Introduction) 

'There is a minor industry in the life of John Curtin. We have had hagiography as well as biography, long and short and in between; studies of his early years, his wartime leadership and his relationship with the media; collections of letters, speeches and press conferences; and there has even been a TV movie, starring William McInnes.'  (Introduction)

'Overland and Meanjin, Australia’s longest-running literary journals, have already been chronicled in a depth befitting their statuses, and that of their venerable foundation editors, Stephen Murray-Smith (1922–1988) and Clem Christesen (1911–2003): Meanjin in the form of a (semi)approved history, Just City and Mirrors by Lynne Stahan, and Overland thanks in large part to the accumulated efforts of former editor John McLaren.'  (Introduction)