Perth Cultural Studies

The importance of Communication Studies and Media Studies

At the beginning there was no such institutional beast as Cultural Studies. In his 2003 article discussing the origins of Cultural Studies in Australia, Bob Hodge writes that:

In 1983, there were no ‘cultural studies’ courses in Australia, and no Professors [sic] in the field. The few Communications departments were located in marginal tertiary institutions, either in new universities (e.g. Murdoch and Griffith), institutes of technology (what were later to be Curtin, Queensland and Sydney Universities of Technology), or in colleges of advanced education, such as the now Edith Cowan University. (2003: 89)

Toby Miller, who arrived at Murdoch University in 1986 to take a Master’s in Public Policy, provides this informal history of the evolution of Communication Studies there:

There had been a struggle in the early 1980s over what Communication Studies and Comparative Literature at Murdoch would be. The warring factions within Comparative Literature were a great-books tradition versus a Marxist and phenomenological one, and in Communication Studies, a positivistic, US, effects-oriented tradition contra a continental, semiotic one. This struggle was won by Horst Ruthrof and John Frow in Comparative Literature and Bob Hodge in Communication Studies. (Miller quoted in King and Williams, 2014: 298)

In Perth, as I have suggested, perhaps the most important line of development of Cultural Studies was from Communication Studies into Media Studies, and from there into Cultural Studies. ⁷ Demonstrating the early rapprochement between Communication Studies and the as yet quite amorphous academic area of Cultural Studies, Noel King and Stephen Muecke guest-edited an issue of the Australian Journal of Communication in 1984. Maras notes that this ‘marked a point at which the ACA [Australian Communication Association] was attractive to cultural studies figures who felt that the association should represent the work they do, and also that the ACA needed greater theorisation and politicisation’ (2004: 37). King had completed a BA in English at the University of Newcastle (New South Wales) in 1975 before moving into the study of film. After completing degrees in Canada and the United Kingdom he arrived at WAIT in 1986 having finished a PhD at the University of Adelaide. Muecke had come to Perth in 1974, having spent time in Paris taking a Master’s degree at the Sorbonne, to teach linguistics at UWA (see Muecke, 1999) and completed his PhD in 1981. He published the foundational Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology in 1984, introducing French theory to anthropology, the same year that he coedited the issue of the AJC with King and the year before he left Perth and took a position in Sydney at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (NSWIT).

In the lineage I have outlined, what the development of Cultural Studies required, as Miller signals, was a shift away from the kind of empirical Communication Studies practised in the United States, an institutional discipline founded on Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver’s ‘sender-message-receiver’ communication model first elaborated in 1949, towards a more audience-oriented approach typified in the kind of semiotics popularized by the French theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes’ foundational Mythologies had been partially translated into English in 1972. While at Murdoch this shift required a theoretical revolution, at WATC/WACAE and WAIT Communication Studies had developed in the context of practical disciplines such as drama, and film and television production which emphasized the importance of the audience as consumers of the material being produced. At WATC/WACAE this emphasis was reinforced by the brief of the institution to produce teachers. Indeed, Shoesmith had himself worked for a short time as a teacher at Balcatta Senior High School, a school which in the early 1970s had large numbers of children from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds for whom communication in the most literal sense, and the understanding of cultural difference, were of great importance.

There was no clear program for the development of Cultural Studies in Perth, no manifesto for what Cultural Studies should be. Turner tells us that: ‘I put all my efforts into teaching and developing a major that was a kind of cultural studies major (although I didn’t know it then) during that time’ (Turner quoted in King and Williams, 2014: 47). Turner had prior experience teaching popular culture. His first teaching position was at Mitchell College of Advanced Education at Bathurst in New South Wales. In his words:

I was teaching mainly literature there and doing some stuff on English method for teachers and so on. But I was starting to teach a lot around the rising field of contemporary American fiction, which was really popular culture stuff, people like Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut, that sort of cross-over where literature moves away from the respectable and the conventional.… In my last year at Mitchell I set up a popular culture course, which I think was the first popular culture course in the country. (quoted in King and Williams, 2014: 45–6)

Literary Studies and the textualizing of Cultural Studies

As his teaching of literature suggests, Turner’s first degree was taken in the English Department at Sydney University. He was, he recounts, a Leavisite at a time when the worldview of the English literary critic FR Leavis was considered revolutionary in Australia’s sandstone universities. Leavis was highly critical of what he saw as mass culture but, at the same time, was also critical of the impact of industrialization, which he saw as debasing workers and paving the way for the lack of insight and moral heft that characterized popular culture. It is possible to see in Leavis’s albeit conservative concern for the culture of the working class an incipient radicalism, and the faint beginnings of Cultural Studies, as compared to the out and out celebration of literary high culture to which he was opposed. Turner’s intellectual trajectory led to him critically engaging with popular culture at WAIT. At the same time, Turner’s focus, founded in his literary training, was on texts.

Texts, and the textualization of the world, became a characteristic of Perth Cultural Studies. John Frow took his first degree in the English Department at the Australian National University where, he writes, he ‘spent three years of more or less wasted time in a Leavisite English Department’ (2005: n.p.). Frow goes on to write that he did use the time to read ‘widely outside the curriculum, however, in political and sociological theory, in philosophy, in anthropology, and in early structuralism’ (n.p.). It was here that Frow developed his interest in structuralist and poststructuralist theory, as well as his concern with cultural processes, which he subsequently brought to Murdoch and which influenced the form of Cultural Studies in Perth as it developed through the early 1980s. What Frow had in common with Turner, more fundamental than their disagreement over Leavis, was their assumption that textuality was foundational to cultural criticism. Frow had arrived at Murdoch in 1975, two years before Turner got to WAIT and the same year Shoesmith was employed at WATC. Frow left Murdoch in 1989 to take up a professorial position in English at the University of Queensland where a battle was raging between those who took pride in the department being one of the last traditional English departments in Australia and those who saw a future in the inclusion of structuralist, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, and some form of Cultural Studies.

John Fiske was employed at WAIT in 1981. He stayed until 1988 when he became Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fiske, like John Hartley, also studied Literature for his undergraduate degree. Both came from the United Kingdom where they met at the Polytechnic of Wales. Hartley had taken his first degree in English Language and Literature at University College, Cardiff, in Wales. He continued to work at the Polytechnic and took a position at Murdoch in 1985, staying there for a decade. In 1978, before either had reached Perth, they published a foundational book in the study of television, Reading Television. Fiske has commented:

John and I both came out of an English Literature background, and we were convinced that something like television, normally disregarded, could be analysed with the same degree of detail, the same concern that it was something important, as had traditionally been applied to literature. And I think that book was the first one to treat television seriously, as an important part of our culture. (quoted in Funnell, 2000)

Maras, who took his first degree at WAIT/Curtin between 1984 and 1987, and subsequently studied at Murdoch where he completed his doctorate in 1994 supervised by Alec McHoul, remembers:

when I reflect back on Curtin, I am struck at the way much of my education was strongly influenced by structuralism, poetics, and formalism. I remember doing structuralism and semiotics with John Fiske and Jon Watts – they had written about Video clips and MTV I think. I have several essays in my files that I did on S/Z, and indeed an applied S/Z form of analysis. So it was the middle period Barthes rather than the later. Camera Lucida and Pleasures of the Text were just becoming known. Ron Blaber gave real meat to post-colonial and metafiction theory. The course on Post-structuralism covered Freud, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Kristeva, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. The Leavisite angle was tempered there by an American critical influence in the Yale School mould (which itself had an interesting take on post-structuralism) and this meant that while not cultural studies they were theoretically aware of people like Homi Bhabha and Bakhtin, and I remember doing an essay on Althusser and interpellation in weekend magazines with Sally Stockbridge (although her comment was I didn’t need the Lacan). There was a lot of narratology breaking into Russian formalism and expanding into poetics. I did some film and TV and my sub-major was creative writing. There was a real sense of texts in flux. Noel King’s presence at Curtin was important here as he taught reader response theory and that is where I read a lot of debates whether there was in fact a ‘text in itself’ debates and Tony Bennett, Terry Eagleton and Stuart Hall. (Steven Maras, personal communication, 2015)

The Fiske and Watts article that Maras remembers was actually an early, path-breaking piece on video games which, rather than concentrating solely on video game texts, sought to place them in a socio-cultural context. ‘Video Games: Inverted Pleasures’ was published in 1985 in The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, of which more later. Using Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, Fiske and Watts argue that:

For the subordinate, then, the [video] parlours offer the opportunity to generate a subject position that, by inverting key social relations, can resist subordination within an overall acceptance of the society that produces that subordination. For others, those with the capital to equip their homes with the technology, the games offer the chance to develop skills, masteries and attitudes that the society which they are entering will reward and value. (1985: 103)

As the Fiske and Watts article signals, the media-oriented, text-based analyses that were developing in Perth also had a cultural grounding. This would become more important through the decade of the 1980s and be a crucial element in the description of the work being taught and published by these intellectuals as Cultural Studies. As they started publishing so the work of these academics was inevitably grounded in the background traditions that I have outlined above. Fiske’s first book after he arrived at WAIT was Introduction to Communication Studies, published in 1982. As the Acknowledgements signal, much of the book had been drafted when Fiske was still working at the Polytechnic of Wales. This introductory text outlined both traditional communication theory based in the Shannon and Weaver model and the newly developing semiotic style of Communication Studies being elaborated in Perth under the rubric of Cultural Studies. In his introductory essay to Routledge’s re-publication of Introduction in 2011, Henry Jenkins remarks that it ‘is the book where Fiske is most focused on the cornerstones of a semiotic approach to culture’ (Jenkins, 2011: xxi). Fiske organized the book historically, starting with Shannon and Weaver and moving into the semiotic model in Chapter 3. What this narrative also achieved was the giving of primacy to semiotics as the model that supersedes the traditional communication model.

In 1986 Turner published National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. In Turner’s own words in his Preface to the second edition (1993):

National Fictions argues that there are formal and ideological patterns in Australian narratives that cut across representational forms and media. These patterns are the product of those myths and meanings which have been culturally constructed as Australian: they are the ‘national fictions’ of the title. (Turner, 1993: xiii)

This is well explicated in what might be identified as an early intellectual culmination of Perth Cultural Studies as a shared project, the book written by Fiske, Hodge and Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, published in 1987. The title signals the authors’ debt to Barthes. Myths of Oz offers readings of a number of diverse Australian cultural sites including the pub, the suburban home, the beach, tourism and the Australian accent. In the Introduction, Fiske, Hodge and Turner start by canvassing various descriptions of culture and suggest,

there are other definitions of culture that are more populist and more comprehensive. These definitions see culture as concerned with the whole way of life of a people, their customs and rituals, their pastimes and pleasures, including not only their arts but also practices such as sport and going to the beach. (1987: viii)

It is worth noting that there is little of the influence of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS) here. There is also little sense of the relevance of Karl Marx’s work or that of either Louis Althusser, who gets one mention in the book’s index, or Antonio Gramsci, both of whom were important influences on Hall. Perhaps the most obviously Marxian chapter is ‘Out of Work’, which discusses the experience of unemployment and what was at that time called the Commonwealth Employment Scheme. The chapter begins with a brief Marxian outline of Australia as a capitalist society. The chapter also includes a reference to a chapter by Paul Willis in the Tony Bennett edited collection Culture, Ideology and Social Process. Willis, who also came from a literary background, completed his doctorate at the BCCCS. The work cited by Fiske, Hodge and Turner relates to Willis’s book Learning to Labour, a Marxian ethnography of, in the words of the subtitle, ‘how working-class kids get working-class jobs’. Myths of Oz’s emphasis on the semiotic decoding of everyday life involves a shift away from a discussion of the economic order. When class appears in Myths of Oz it is related to taste and consumption, not to production. ⁸ Rather, influences come from Williams, who, we should remember, also published a foundational work on television in 1974, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, and Richard Hoggart, whose appreciation of lived culture in The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, pervades the assumptions of Myths of Oz. In their emphasis on popular texts, and bearing in mind Turner’s previous Leavisism, Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s work might best be described as left-Leavisite with a Marxian tinge.

This is not to say that Marxism was not important to anyone in Perth Cultural Studies. Frow’s first book, published in 1986, was titled Marxism and Literary History. Here, as Frow begins his Preface: ‘I try to theorize the concepts of system and history for a Marxist theory of literary discourse’ (n.p.). Frow describes himself as working ‘within an antihumanist, antihistoricist, and anti-Hegelian tradition, but am also intellectually close to the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida’ (n.p.). Frow’s work is much more imbricated with the philosophical ideas of recent French philosophy than that of Fiske, or Hodge, or Turner. In this, he has more in common with the film theorists such as the early, Griffith University-influenced work of Tom O’Regan and that of Lesley Stern, whom Frow invited to Murdoch, and Muecke, the anthropologist who had studied in Paris.

Living a decentred life

A feature that almost all Perth Cultural Studies practitioners had in common was that they had spent significant amounts of time outside of Australia. Writing about Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, Ien Ang and I have argued that:

They all have backgrounds marginal to hegemonic British culture. Richard Hoggart comes from a northern working-class family, Raymond Williams was Welsh, and Stuart Hall is a black Jamaican. All three occupied contradictory positions within the British social formation: as social subjects who stood in a decentred relation to the dominant national culture they entered the sites of the very elite of the English academic world. (1996: 376)

Fiske and Hartley had both, as I have already discussed, come from the United Kingdom. Specifically, they had been working in Wales, itself marginal to the British core of England – Williams himself had been born and raised in Wales. Originally from England, Shoesmith had spent time in Canada and in the United Kingdom before returning to Perth. As he tells the story, Shoesmith gained much of his basic education in film while holed up in Saskatchewan (Shoesmith quoted in King and Williams, 2014: 270). It was no doubt his Canadian experience that formed the basis of Shoesmith’s later collaboration with the Canadian scholar Ian Angus on the work of the unjustly neglected Canadian pioneer of communication and media studies, Harold Innis. In 1993, Angus and Shoesmith co-edited an issue of Continuum: An Australian Journal of Media and Culture titled Dependency/Space/Policy: An Introduction to the Work of Harold Innis. In their introduction to the issue, Angus and Shoesmith write:

The project began with a letter one editor wrote to the other inquiring about the current place of Harold A. Innis in North American communication and cultural studies. Shoesmith thought that Innis may have some relevance to Australia, especially in the light of the pioneering work by Tom O’Regan on communication policy in that country. (1993: 5)

O’Regan was a Queenslander. He was educated at Griffith University and was appointed to a position at Murdoch in 1984, two years before completing his doctorate at Griffith (quoted in Williams, 2009). O’Regan’s interest was in film. In coming to Perth he began an interest in local film. In 1985 O’Regan coedited with Shoesmith a collection of articles titled The Moving Image: Film and Television in Western Australia 1896–1985. The book complemented an exhibition on the history of film in Western Australia held at the Western Australian Museum. O’Regan’s interests complemented those of the scholars I have already mentioned. In 1996 O’Regan went on to publish the compendious Australian National Cinema, which placed the history of film in Australia in a cultural context. While it is clearly generically a film book, Australian National Cinema can also be understood as a Cultural Studies book in the textual and cultural terms that have been central to Cultural Studies in Perth.

I have already noted Turner as arriving in Perth from working at Bathurst in New South Wales, having completed his undergraduate degree at Sydney University. This, though, by no means does justice to Turner’s travels. Turner went to Queens University in Canada to study for his Master’s and then wrote his doctorate at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, completing it in 1976. John Frow was originally from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. Having completed his undergraduate degree at the ANU he spent a year in South America before studying for his PhD at Cornell University in New York state between 1971 and 1975. Hodge was born and raised in Perth but after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Western Australia went to Cambridge University in England where he finished his doctorate in Intellectual History in 1972. He then worked at the University of East Anglia until 1977 when he returned to a lectureship at Murdoch.

We could describe all these scholars as cosmopolitan – most came to Perth from elsewhere, either in Australia or the United Kingdom. Most had lived, studied and worked in other countries, often in more than one, before taking up academic positions in Perth. Their critical take on culture as an object of study, and sometimes on Australian and also on Western Australian culture, reflects this sense of not belonging, of being an outsider to Western Australian, and in the cases of Fiske and Hartley, outsiders to Australian culture.

Hartley expressed this sense of outsiderness, if not alienation, from Perth in one of the early Cultural Studies articles on Western Australia. Hartley wrote ‘A State of Excitement’ as, in part, a commentary on the running of the America’s Cup off Fremantle in 1987. At that time, the Perth-Fremantle conurbation had a population of almost a million of whom around 25,000 lived in Fremantle. The America’s Cup gave a visibility to Fremantle, and Western Australia more generally, that was disproportionate to the city’s size and self-image. Hartley described Western Australia as:

a sign in need of a referent. The size of western Europe with the population of, say, greater Croydon, it is the site of mines and other holes in the ground, surrounded by, well, nothing. Its metropolis, Perth – according to a 1986 advertisement broadcast on local television on behalf of the Roy Weston Real Estate company (the ‘HouseSold Name in Real Estate’) – is the ‘loneliest, most isolated capital city in the world’. (1988: 117)

Coming from the United Kingdom, Perth appeared not fully real; a small city on the edge of nowhere. Hartley adds:

In the familiar, white, Western economy of knowledge, Western Australia must be tamed, shorn of its realities and then spun and woven into realism; it must be transformed from nature to culture. As it stands, it cannot stand for; to white, Western eyes, it is a giant, fearful, unthinkable Other – the only remaining vestige, perhaps, of the old imperial Heart of Darkness, ‘the horror, the horror’? (1988: 118)

Later, Hartley refers to the return of Fremantle after the America’s Cup to being a dock city exporting Western Australian primary produce including live sheep: ‘As the smell of shit pervades the city, the citizens are reminded of just how close they are, from the point of view of the state, to sheep’ (1988: 124). For Hartley, the Western Australian state keeps its citizens passive and uninformed. Fremantle, and especially Perth, is suffused, he is implying, with middle-class values such as respectability. Here, the comparison with Croydon becomes clear:

When David Bowie wanted to summarise all he found dreary, drab and stifling, there was only one place he could turn. ‘It [Croydon] represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,’ he told Q magazine in 1999. ‘I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something: “God, it’s so fucking Croydon”.’ (Watts, 2015)

Hartley’s essay was published in the second volume of Cultural Studies. It stood alongside another article considering the impact of the America’s Cup on Fremantle, Stern’s ‘“Cup City”: Where Nothing Ends, Nothing Happens’. Stern was another cosmopolitan arrival from elsewhere. She had a degree from what was then the University of Rhodesia where, showing a similarity with many other early Cultural Studies practitioners in Perth, she studied English Language and Literature, a degree which included some linguistics (Stern, 2010). At Scotland’s Glasgow University, where the high-profile film journal Screen started in 1969, she was accepted into the doctoral program, developing her interest in film. She came to Australia in 1976 for a position specializing in film in the Media Studies department at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Stern completed her PhD at Sydney University. She took up a lectureship in Communication Studies at Murdoch University in 1985, teaching both film production and theory. Commenting on her time in Perth, Stern says:

But it was kind of tough because for me it was a very isolated academic community. There were great colleagues, but you didn’t know anybody else outside of the academy. It was far from everywhere – desert on one side and ocean on the other. (Stern, 2010)

Stern’s ‘Cup City’ was not a direct discussion of Fremantle and the America’s Cup but, rather, was a textual analysis of the photographs in an exhibition by Kevin Ballantine, who worked at WACAE. This textualization of the world was common to these scholars who had originally trained in literary analysis. One of Stern’s themes in her analysis is the lack of people and yachts in Ballantine’s photographs. What does this emptiness evoke? Stern writes that Fremantle is:

On the edge of Perth (linked by sprawling suburbia), it is also on the edge of the continent, facing towards the Indian Ocean rather than the rest of Australia. Perth is nowadays also the home of those who have ‘arrived’ – the self-made millionaires, the nationalistic sporting tycoons – and of those who are always about to leave (sacrilegiously ungratified by the laid-back lifestyle) in search of a ‘real’ city. (Stern and Ballantine, 1993: 283)

Again, in Stern’s description, we have the idea of Fremantle-Perth as being unreal, or unrealized. Stern goes on:

So people hang around in these photos, never quite arriving or departing, in transit yet posed, in vague expectation of movement, of something happening. They look out to sea and appear to see bugger all. If there are yachts out there, there is no sense of a race, no sense of departure and arrival, nothing happens, nothing ends. (Stern and Ballantine, 1993: 283)

Women, and the lack of, in early Perth Cultural Studies

Stern was one of the few women involved in pioneering Cultural Studies in Perth. Coming from England, Rita Felski, the feminist literary critic, arrived at Murdoch in 1987 from Monash University to work in English and Comparative Literature. Her first book, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, was published in 1989. ⁹ Having taken her undergraduate degree at the University of Calcutta, in 1987 Krishna Sen completed a PhD at Monash University in the Centre for South-East Asian Studies and subsequently took a position at Murdoch where in 1989 she taught a unit called Issues in Cultural Studies. Sen and Felski, then, both fitted the Perth Cultural Studies pattern of coming from another city, or indeed in both their cases, other countries. In 1988, while still at Monash, Sen published an appreciative review of a one-day conference on ‘Why Gender Matters’ in South East Asian politics that had been held at Monash (Sen, 1988: 62–3). At Murdoch, Sen’s emphasis on cultural practice, and particularly her interest in Indonesian film exemplified in her book Indonesian Cinema, published in 1994, which meshed well with the screen emphasis of early Perth Cultural Studies, meant that she was a good fit with the Cultural Studies developments in Perth. Her feminist work, alongside that of Felski, helped develop a new focus of concern. While at Murdoch in 1998 Sen coedited Gender and Power in Affluent Asia.

The other woman who made a major contribution to Perth Cultural Studies in its early phase was Zoe Sofoulis, who also publishes as Zoe Sofia. Sofoulis had been born and raised in Kalgoorlie, the mining city almost 600 kilometres from Perth which in the 1970s had a population of a little under 30,000. She had a Greek background. She finished her undergraduate degree at Murdoch in Human Communication and Social Inquiry in 1979. She then left Perth to take her doctorate in the highly regarded History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), returning after completing her PhD in 1988. Once again, then, there is the time spent outside of Australia that provides a critical space for analytical work. Sofoulis introduced issues associated with gender and technology to a predominantly masculine Perth Cultural Studies more preoccupied, as we have seen, with communications and media matters. In 1984, while still at UCSC, Sofoulis published ‘Exterminating fetuses: Abortion, disarmament, and the sexo-semiotics of extraterrestrialism’ in Diacritics. This article includes, in common with the textual preoccupations I have outlined, a reading of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sofoulis’s thesis was titled Through the lumen: Frankenstein and the optics of re-origination. Continuing her research interest in gender and technology, Sofoulis published ‘Of spanners and cyborgs: ‘De-homogenising feminist thinking on technology’ in Barbara Cain and Rosemary Pringle’s Transitions: New Australian Feminisms in 1995. What we see with Sofoulis’s work is a very different set of preoccupations to those that had formed Perth Cultural Studies, feminist preoccupations that marginalized her from the masculine core of Perth Cultural Studies. ¹⁰

It was not until the arrival Ien Ang in 1990 that the issues of gender raised by Felski, Sen and by Sofoulis were successfully meshed with the communication and media concerns of the male pioneers of Perth Cultural Studies. This was not least because Ang’s focus was on Anglo-American television and therefore had a commonality with the work of Hartley – and historically, Fiske and Turner, who had already left Perth. The connections can be seen in the report on the Dismantle Fremantle conference organized from Murdoch University and held in Fremantle in June, 1991. The complete list of presentations can be found in Cultural Studies (vol. 6, no. 3, 1992). The conference might be taken as the formal establishment of Cultural Studies in Perth. Many of the people I have discussed presented including Hartley, Hodge, O’Regan and Turner. Ang offered ‘Hegemony in Trouble: Hazards of Postcolonial Europe’ and Sofoulis presented ‘The Return of the Expressed: Ethnocentrism in Psychoanalytic Cultural Critique’. Ang had arrived a year earlier, invited to Murdoch by Hartley. She took her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. Of Chinese heritage, she had come from the Netherlands to where her family had migrated from Indonesia. ¹¹ Thus, she too came to Perth with a well-developed sense of cultural difference. She was already internationally known as the author of Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, translated from the Dutch and published in English in 1985. The book offered a feminist discussion of the female audience reaction to the prime-time American soap opera Dallas. In her biographical sketch for Radio National, Ang (2014) explains that,

in 1990, I travelled to the other side of the world to participate in a symposium on soap operas at the Festival of Perth. This was my first time in Australia. I met some great like-minded academics, and I decided to take a job at Murdoch University. My friends in Amsterdam thought I was mad. They would have understood if I had gone to New York or London – but Perth?

At the beginning of this essay I wrote that I would be focused on the decade up to the late 1980s – that I have had to move into the 1990s signals sharply the lack of female involvement in early Perth Cultural Studies, a lack which may well have had an impact on the kinds of matters that provided the central concerns of early Perth Cultural Studies where, for example, issues of gender and identity were not on the agenda. I am reminded of what Stuart Hall has written about the impact of feminism on the work of the Birmingham Centre. He calls it an interruption. He writes that it ‘reorganized the field in quite concrete ways’ including ‘opening the question of the personal as political, and its consequences for changing the object of study in cultural studies’ (Hall, 1992: 282). The interruption provoked by Stern, Sofoulis, Sen, and especially by Ang, should not be seen in quite such dramatic terms because there was not a stable grouping of Cultural Studies academics in Perth. By the time Ang arrived, Fiske, Turner and Frow, and indeed Stern, had already left the city. Nevertheless, Ang’s evolving scholarly preoccupations, along with the work of Felski, Sen and Sofoulis, signalled a shift in Perth Cultural Studies to include matters connected with gender and race.

Two Cultural Studies journals in Perth

Another sign of the maturing of Perth Cultural Studies was the establishment of a journal devoted to Cultural Studies. The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies (AJCS) was founded in 1983. By this time the project across the Perth campuses was being described as Cultural Studies. The journal came out of a collaboration between Fiske and Turner at WAIT and Hartley and Frow at Murdoch. It was produced in-house at WAIT, typed up by departmental support staff, with help from Murdoch. The AJCS lasted four years until 1987 when it was taken over by Taylor and Francis who supplied printing and distribution facilities. In the negotiations for the move of the journal there was a change of name to Cultural Studies, signalling a more international focus. In the final issue of the AJCS there was an announcement headed: ‘From The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies to Cultural Studies’. The first paragraph reads:

The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies will undergo a transformation in 1987. It will become an international Journal with the title Cultural Studies and will produce three issues a year, normally one from Australia, one from the UK and one from the USA. It will be published by Methuen (London) Limited, which will relieve the board of our permanent problems of finance and marketing.

The first issue of the AJCS carried a Mission Statement which shows well the intellectual directions of the journal’s founders. I shall quote it in full:

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES aims to provide a platform for research and debate in cultural studies. The Journal’s interests embrace the full range of the productions of the culture – accepting the value of analysis of such produced texts as television and film, of ‘lived’ texts such as sport and recreational activities, and cultural motifs such as the beach and the barbecue. The AJCS will encourage articles dealing with the theory and practice of culture, the reception and creation of texts, and the particular ways in which the Australian culture endows its members with a cultural identity, Australian ideologies and myths. There will be an editorial leaning towards articles with a linguistic, semiotic, or structuralist theoretical base, though this will not be an exclusive condition. The AJCS will not only serve Australian interests but will keep up to date with developments in theory and practice elsewhere; to this end, a regular feature will be the inclusion of a translation of a seminal European article hitherto unavailable in English and of theoretical articles by European and American authorities.

The journal would encourage theoretical work and, most probably reflecting Frow’s and perhaps Muecke’s interests, major European non-English language articles would be published in translation. In the second issue there was a translation of Jacques Durand’s ‘Rhetoric and the Advertising Image’ and in vol. 3, no. 1, Paolo Prato and Gianluca Trivero’s ‘The Spectacle of Travel’ appeared, translated by Iain Chambers. The Editorial Board for the first issue consisted of Peter O’Toole (Murdoch University), Brian Dibble and Graeme Turner (both from WAIT) and Brian Shoesmith (WACAE). Commenting in 1986 on the journal, Peter Putnis, the Communication Studies scholar, wrote that:

The impulse was to key in to exciting Anglo-European developments as soon as possible. The journal is less one of Australian cultural studies than the Australian arm of what is seen as an international, though Eurocentric enterprise. (Putnis, 1986, emphasis in original)

Showing the close alignment at this time between Cultural Studies and Communication Studies, Maras (2004) writes that:

At the 1983 conference at NSWIT [New South Wales Institute of Technology], organised by [Bill] Bonney, the ACA [Australian Communication Association] made the decision both to sponsor the newly formed Australian Journal of Cultural Studies (AJCS), and elect John Fiske as vice president.

The same year that the AJCS left the ownership of Perth Cultural Studies academics another journal was started in Perth. These days it is known as Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. When it started it was Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture. The dropping of ‘Australian’ signals the journal’s move into the international arena. Continuum was started by Shoesmith in association with O’Regan. As O’Regan puts it: ‘Brian Shoesmith had enlisted me to work with him on developing Continuum’ (quoted in Williams, 2009). Continuum was originally envisaged as a screen journal. As O’Regan tells us, ‘a place for dialogue and debate about screen studies’. O’Regan goes to explain that:

The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies morphed into the journal Cultural Studies and with that change came a sharp shift away from Australia/UK/US to a more USA-centric journal. So we were expected to become and partly did become a cultural studies journal. In addition students were now in a different head space. (quoted in Williams, 2009)

Here is part of a statement of intent for the renovated Continuum after its move to Shoesmith’s responsibility at WACAE. This was printed on the back inside cover of the first WACAE controlled issue (vol. 9, no. 1, 1996). Similar statements appeared in earlier issues:

Continuum is a thematically based cultural studies journal. The primary focus of the journal is upon screen media; but our understanding of ‘media’ also includes publishing, broadcasting and public exhibitionary media such as museums and sites. Journal editors are particularly interested in:

(1) the history and practice of screen media in Australasia and Asia;

(2) the connections between such media (particularly between film, TV, publishing, visual arts and exhibitionary sites).

Each issue is devoted to the exploration of a particular cultural site. Sites have included indigenous media, television, Asian cinema, media discourse, film style, publishing, photography, radio, ‘Screening Cultural Studies’, electronic arts in Australia and ‘Critical Multiculturalism’. The journal is committed to articulating the energies, fragmentations, and loose coalitions that attend such cultural sites. ¹³

What makes the list in the statement of intent so important is the inclusion of the immediately preceding issue on Critical Multiculturalism. Published in 1994 while the journal was still under O’Regan’s management at Murdoch, this was the first thematic issue not directly related to presentation in the form of screen matters, museums or performance. The Critical Multiculturalism issue began Continuum’s movement towards a more general understanding of Cultural Studies as the critical explication of aspects of culture as a whole way of life, however those terms might be defined. The first eight volumes of Continuum, up to 1997, were published with financial help from the Australian Film Commission (Shoesmith quoted in King and Williams, 2014: 274). ¹⁴ The loss of that financing at the same time as the journal moved to Edith Cowan University may be taken as another signal of the journal’s shift of emphasis from screen to a more general understanding of Cultural Studies.

The early issues of Continuum were thematic. Reflecting the importance of Screen Studies for O’Regan and Shoesmith, the first issue was on ‘Australian Film in the ‘50s’. Showing O’Regan’s time at Griffith University, that issue had, in addition to articles by himself and Shoesmith, articles by Albert Moran and Stuart Cunningham, both of whom worked on media at Griffith. The second issue on ‘Film, TV and the Popular’ was edited by Philip Bell and Kari Hanet, who both worked in Sydney. The journal published roughly twice a year. Volume 2, issue 2, in 1989 headed ‘Performance Theory Australia’ and edited by Shoesmith and O’Regan included an article by Zoe Sofia, making clear her feminist credentials on ‘Masculine excess and the metaphorics of vision: Some problems of feminist film theory’. It also contained articles by Nick Zurbrugg and Stephen Crofts from Griffith as well as contributions from Jan Bruck and John Docker who worked at The University of Technology, Sydney, and Alicija Helman, who was Professor of Film Studies, University of Krakow, Poland. Contributions to the journal still tended to be predominantly from Murdoch, and to some extent from WACAE; with Turner and Fiske both having left WAIT/Curtin there was little input from there. There was also an increasing number of authors from elsewhere in Australia and even overseas.

It is in that first issue for 1996 that Shoesmith inserts a statement ‘Introduction to Transition’ that announces the shift in editorship to Edith Cowan University. Over this time there is a movement away from the journal’s screen concerns. In volume 11, issue 3, 1997, Shoesmith announces that from the first issue of 1998 the journal would be published by Carfax. That is because, he explains, that he and the volunteers helping him found self-publishing the journal too onerous. At this point, while the editorial collective remained primarily in Perth, the journal’s focus became more international and the descriptive subtitle changed to Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, completing the move from the early Screen Studies focus and, with the shift from ‘Culture’ to ‘Cultural Studies’ in the subtitle, acknowledging that Cultural Studies was now a recognized discipline. It is remarkable, and an example of the energy, commitment and research productivity of Perth Cultural Studies academics, that they were able to develop and support two Cultural Studies-related journals, both of which developed an international focus, through the period from 1983 to 1998 and beyond, albeit sequentially.

Conclusion

Many of the academics who were central to the establishment of Cultural Studies in Perth went on to senior positions in other cities in Australia and overseas. For example Ang, Felski, Fiske, Frow, Hartley, Hodge, Miller, Muecke, O’Regan, Shoesmith, Stern, and Turner all gained professorships elsewhere; Sen gained a professorship in Perth at UWA. That they were so successful suggests also the acceptance of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline. The gathering of these intellectuals in Perth early in their careers, albeit not all at the same time, was remarkable. As I have explained, Perth offered an opportunity, perhaps only equalled in Australia by Brisbane, for intellectuals to begin to think through from the margins, and from their own cosmopolitan experiences, what is meant by culture, and to comment on the productions and reproductions of culture, ¹⁵ often as expressed through visual media, as manifestations of Perth culture, Australian culture, or more generally as Western culture as subjectified in gender, race and – overarchingly – identity.

It was precisely because Perth was a relatively small and inward-looking city on the far western edge of Australia that it could offer these cosmopolitan academics the opportunity and the stimulus to look beyond the city’s horizon. They did so with the tools they had at their disposal, the emphasis on texts, the use of semiotics, the possibilities of the utilizations for critique of French philosophers like Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and especially Roland Barthes. In his 1989 collection of essays, Reading the Culture, Fiske writes that, ‘the theories that I use are European in origin, they originate in the works of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Barthes, Hall, and Bakhtin’ (1989: x). The Cultural Studies these intellectuals produced, Perth Cultural Studies, owed surprisingly little to the developments happening in England based on The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies – though those developments were known; in 1990 Turner published an introductory textbook titled British Cultural Studies. The worth of what these intellectuals produced can be measured in the high regard in which they are held and the ongoing importance of their work across Australia and other parts of the world.