Media and popular modernism around the Pacific War: An inter-Asian story

‘What is new? What is old? What is rearticulated?’(Grossberg, 2010: 6)

Engaging with memory studies is a new experience for me, and I am grateful for the opportunity to consider familiar research projects in the light of unfamiliar debates. I have worked for many years on two distinct but related Australia-based studies: one is a critical biography of the Australian journalist, travel writer and novelist Ernestine Hill (1899–1972), and the other is an account of action cinema as a mode of historical fiction, using Hollywood and Hong Kong materials that are part of Australian popular culture. I think of these projects as related by the genre description, ‘action adventure’ – a term that can frame much of Hill’s writing and a form of cinema that was popular internationally in the decades around the Pacific War when she produced much of her work. Featuring places and times in more or less violent crisis, action stories generally pose questions of hope; they ask what people can do to achieve survival in difficult or threatening circumstances. Both projects involve issues of cultural memory, and in what follows, I draw obliquely on memory studies to outline a new way (at least, new to me) of developing their relationship.

To frame this, I dwell in the first part of this article on the word ‘new’, and on the idea that the proliferation of media technologies in recent decades has not only transformed our archives and practices of memory but has also induced a singular, satiating ‘condition one can term new memory’ (Hoskins, 2001: 334). For Hoskins, who affirms this floating idea with particular bluntness and clarity, ¹ this condition is exemplified by television with its capacity for manufacturing, manipulating and mediating the ‘collective’ in the contested ‘present of today’. Now, I am always sceptical of annunciations of newness. I want to be clear about what is held to be old, and why, for whom and where. For Hoskins (2001), ‘old memory’ is whatever went on anywhere ‘before the time of our intensely visual culture’ (p. 344). I remain unsure about this time, what it was like and when it ended. Since a third of my life was lived ‘before’ television, when rural Australians were linked by radio supplemented by print media that might arrive a day late, I feel I should remember intimately what that old memory was like. Yet, whenever I encounter Pierre Nora’s influential account of that ‘before’ presumed by Hoskins, I know that I have no clue. In my pre-televisual life of the 1950s and early 1960s, visual culture consisted of weekly comics, coloured game boards (see Healy, 2008: 1–28), ‘going to the pictures’ once or twice a month and sneaking into the library with friends to study the sex in art books (Hieronymus Bosch was a favourite). Otherwise we sang, climbed trees, played charades with old clothes and acted out stories improvised from the comics. This way of life was widespread at the time and in most respects continuous with the popular culture of previous generations. Yet, I have no sense of having had then a ‘solid and steady past’ or any ‘continuity of memory’ (Nora, 1989 cited in Hoskins, 2001: 334). For transient White settler families like ours, the past was just something you did not want to ‘rake over’.

If I were to continue in this vein of reminiscence, I could explain this strategically forgetful ‘memory formation’ by invoking what Radstone and Schwarz (2010) call its ‘conjunctural conditions of existence’ (p. 6). These might include the irrevocable nature of migration to nineteenth-century Australia for economic refugees who left home knowing they would never see their families again; those who were raised to emigrate, like my Irish great-grandmother, must have formed their subjectivities from childhood by preparing for this break in their lives. Then there was the religious strife that could tear families apart without the salve of silence applied to memories (‘let bygones be bygones’) as well as to debate (‘no politics or religion at the tea table’). There was war and its impact on ‘laconic’ modes of masculinity, shaping three generations of fathers who did not talk about the past (Greer, 1991), the growth of a Public Service after World War II that sent people like my parents to distant country towns at a time when ‘going home’ was costly in the vastness of Australia, and, underpinning all this, an odd regime of colonialism that told white children no stories about indigenous resistance on the frontier because there was ‘nobody’ there (terra nullius). All these conditions (plural) have changed in my lifetime. To the extent that media as well as transport technologies have enabled this change, however, they have brought me closer to apprehending the kind of memory that Nora laments and Hoskins consigns to the past by sharing other people’s memories and historical experiences – those of indigenous Australians in particular (Morris, 2006: 105–124). Such conditions are highly variable matters of context, and it is these that Grossberg (2010) has in mind when he defines the basic question that Cultural Studies brings to conjunctural analysis as: ‘What is new? What is old? What is rearticulated?’ (p. 6). ²

The notion of rearticulation is crucial because it prompts us to ask what older elements are doing in complex new contexts, rather than positing a shift between historical eras. I find it more helpful, then, to think about ‘new media’, rather than new memory, although some parallels in usage are clear. In journalistic contexts today, for example, new media talk suggests that one set of innovations will displace another (‘the death of the book!’): a typically modern story of heroic or tragic development. The reality of practice is messier than this: while some old media decline or change their business models (as newspapers are doing by enlisting subscribers online), others are reinvented interactively with new ones. Less resilient than ‘media’, old technologies die or become museum pieces, such as the audio cassette, the Sony Walkman and the VCR. However, they can be novel in some contexts, such as a working telephone in rural Australia as in the developing world, or find new uses in combination with others (‘rearticulation’): arguably, the most powerful medium of politics in the English-speaking world for a time at the end of the twentieth-century was the telephone-radio hybrid called ‘talk-back’ or ‘call-in’ radio. Ageing media wander around in space as well as mutating with time: Corrigan (1991) saw a cinema ‘without walls’ emerging in the 1980s with VCRs, while McCarthy (2001) found TV monitors dispersed well beyond the home, helping to shape the multi-screen city of today (Berry et al., 2010). Borders are unstable and, above all, impermanent in a media ecology: while Acland (2003) revisits the film ‘theatre’ to find it has become a theme park, global Hollywood conglomerates use cinema to test new digital applications. Correspondingly, Burgoyne (2003) sees cinema acquiring a new authority over the past because of its digitally enabled impact, ‘immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be burned in’ (p. 223).

If it is difficult to ‘periodize’ media technologies and their uses in an empirically plausible way, then surely it is challenging to trace changes in memory involved not only with those technologies but also with much else – for example, changes in education, migration, family organization, gender role distribution and community formation processes. How, then, to avoid a thicket of particulars so dense that no patterns of movement or lines of connection may be discerned? Precisely because change is a constant feature of mediated cultural economies, I share LeMahieu’s (2011) caution that ‘emphasis on historical change too often and too easily forecloses historical continuities’ (p. 98); the difficult study of the latter in popular culture can be the best way to make more measured sense of the former. It is easily overlooked, for example, that their relative cheapness and accessibility give old media a key role in narrating the advent of social and cultural changes and thus in shaping the popular uptake of new technologies and their significance when they arrive; millions of readers acquired their first ‘memories’ of experiencing cyberspace from a novel, William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer.

Since all media are mixed in their historical make-up and their uses, to explore their import in terms of memory, we might ask, first, how ‘continuity and change’ (Hannerz, 1996) are negotiated in specific local, national and regional formations that are also subject to transnational media influences. How do people produce continuity through rearticulation? Eric Michaels (1994) showed powerfully in his study of the Warlpiri ‘invention of television’ in Central Australia that continuity takes imaginative work; it is not a given even in cultures devoted to denying change. Second, when the material facts of film and media economies involve transnational dimensions of experience, how do we understand this in multilateral terms? As Stephanie DeBoer argues in an eloquent account of the history of film co-production after World War II and the emergence of ‘New Asia’, any border-crossing cultural phenomenon rearticulates communities with varying perspectives and investments, and these will not easily be grasped by a univocal narrative or ‘theory’ of technological change (DeBoer, in press). Indeed, Harbord (2002) suggests that socially distinct settings and the sedimented layers of individual and collective histories may in fact still have the most influence on how we make sense of media and put them to social use.

Media-based memories may conflict or fail to connect in a shared consumer space. Take the expanding cultural economies of East Asia, creating flows of images and stories across a region increasingly envisioned as such at a popular level in ways that can exceed state control (Chua, 2004, 2012). While Meyrowitz (1986) long ago predicted that electronic media in the West would free community from spatial location, it is nonetheless striking that across a region fraught in living memory by war, religious strife, ethnic hostility and Cold War antagonism, all still generating sparks today, this process is affecting how ‘consumer communities’ (Chua, 2006) imagine an ‘East Asian’ past and with whom they share what matters about it. Today, the smart phone, tablet and laptop or home personal computer (PC) are vying with the TV set not only to promote new lifestyles along with new versions of old communal or national stories but also to circulate other people’s stories and ways of life, complicating notions of heritage and cultural affinity. The runaway success across the region of the South Korean historical epic Dae Jung Geum (Jewel in the Palace, 2003) is an example. Based on the ‘true story’ of a palace cook who became the first female royal physician of the intensely Confucian Chosun Dynasty, this TV series lavishly rearticulated a traditional relation between medicine and food with contemporary concerns about changing gender norms. Giving rise to a slew of nostalgia recipe books on the one hand and tourism initiatives on the other, Dae Jung Geum was acclaimed for affirming a ‘cultural affinity’ between Chinese, Korean and Japanese societies sharing a non-Western experience of capitalist development and rapid social change. However, reception studies (Leung, 2008) soon made clear that people’s reasons for loving the show and their beliefs about why it was popular in their own and other countries varied greatly across national media contexts in ways inflected by past experiences of intra-regional (or as we now say, ‘inter-Asian’) colonialism and racism as well asby diverging present priorities; in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there was even antagonism towards the Korean producers for ‘appropriating Chinese culture’ in making the show (Kim, 2009).

Audience and critical reception research are important ways of grounding the study of ‘prosthetic’ (Landsberg, 2004) or ‘alimentative’, that is, absorbed (LeMahieu, 2011) mediated memories in transnational circulation. However, I am also interested in how people dealt with earlier periods of media innovation and expansion. From the 1930s to the 1990s, diverse ‘new waves’ of visual and media culture responded not only within East Asia but around the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, to what were then recent experiences of rising nationalism, especially in the 1930s; to war on the Chinese mainland and then across the Pacific; to post-war recovery, revolution, decolonization and migration and, vitally as far as media memory is concerned, to the unevenly growing power of American popular culture and Hollywood cinema in particular. ³ By ‘people’, I mean here the media practitioners who in the first instance did the work of ‘rearticulating’ old stories to new contexts and agendas for popular memory formation.

Legacy ladies: memory-catching in mid-twentieth-century Australia

One such practitioner active in Australia between the late 1920s and the early 1950s was Ernestine Hemmings, and to proceed, I need to mention a few aspects of her life (Bonnin, 1996). Writing under the assumed name ‘Hill’, she was one of Australia’s best known writers and an important figure in the emergence of a national media culture before and after the transformative event of World War II. Born in Rockhampton in 1899, she began a literary life with Peter Pan Land (Hemmings, 1916), a precocious book of poems and essays first written for the Catholic Advocate as a Brisbane schoolgirl. In 1919, she moved to Sydney as personal secretary for J.F. Archibald of the Bulletin magazine, and for the next four decades, her journalism played a role in the public debates of her day: the status of Aboriginal people, relations with Asia and the peoples of the Pacific, immigration policy, the growth of an American-inflected consumerism and the state’s role in nation-building. An ardent proponent of big development schemes (mining, irrigation, airborne medical services and ‘populating the North’), she wrote action stories about them to capture popular imagination; among these, The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) have remained in print and are still read today.

Her work had a modest international success in the Anglophone world, selling well in the United Kingdom. Retitled Australian Frontier (1942) and heavily edited for passages of racism that might offend African-Americans, The Great Australian Loneliness was issued as a guide to US troops in Darwin during the war; more recently, The Territory lent its name to the Darwin pub in Baz Luhrmann’s transnational blockbuster film, Australia (2008). Hill herself never left Australia, believing that there were too many cultural riches unexplored at home to make overseas travel worthwhile. Counting Mary Gilmore and Mary Durack among her closest friends, she spent most of her life making national folklore based on a romantic historical vision of the West and the North of Australia, commemorating the lives of Aboriginal and Chinese as well as white pioneer ‘characters’. At the same time, she played a role in shaping myths of Aboriginal people as a ‘dying race’ (a thesis that she did not entirely believe in the 1930s, explicitly renouncing it later in life) by ‘rediscovering’ Daisy Bates (1859–1951) in her desert camp at Ooldea in 1932 and creating a wave of national publicity about her in the popular press. ⁴ In her posthumously published Kabbarli: A Personal Memoir of Daisy Bates (1973) – an uneasy reminiscence of the controversial nineteenth-century woman journalist, pioneer ethnographer and adventurer who was in some ways Hill’s model – Hill claimed that she had ghost-written Bates’ memoir, My Natives and I. Serialized by the Adelaide Advertiser in 1936, this text was revised by other hands and published in London as The Passing of The Aborigines (Bates, 1938; see Reece, 2004).

The outbreak of the Pacific War from late 1941 marks a watershed in Hill’s life. Her glowing nationalist journalism of the 1930s had brought her wide recognition, and during the early years of World War II, she edited the women’s pages for the ABC Weekly (1940–1942), becoming an ABC commissioner in 1942 with a brief from Prime Minister John Curtin to ‘Australianise’ the culture of the British-styled national broadcaster. Her romantic historical novel about the explorer Matthew Flinders, My Love Must Wait (1941), was a bestseller; on radio, the future Hollywood star Peter Finch voiced Flinders. Hill’s job as editor was to stiffen the resolve of Australia’s mothers to sacrifice their own loves by sending husbands and sons away to war. However, when Hill’s son Bob was conscripted in 1944, they fled to the outback, whence Bob was forced back by the Army. Months of lobbying secured his release as unfit, but Hill resigned from public office. From this time, her wandering became compulsive and her work began to falter, although Flying Doctor Calling followed in 1947 and The Territory appeared after years of struggle in 1951. Her last 20 years were marred by illness, emotional suffering, writer’s block and poverty as her lush, folksy style went out of fashion and royalties dried up. She died leaving a typewriter, a camera, debts of AUD$712.92 and manuscripts that had been carted around in boxes, as were those of Daisy Bates.

For students of cultural memory formation, Hill is of interest in part for her role as a purveyor of colonial ‘knowledge’ translated into popular belief. She collected hearsay as well as the reminiscences of people she met on her travels, and this was a passion she shared with Bates, a pioneer of ethnographic fieldwork (White, 1985) who felt that she had a vocation to use every moment of her ‘sojourn in the dreamtime’ to catch the languages and life-ways of the Aboriginal peoples with whom she lived before they ‘passed’. Hill would later call herself the ‘Legacy Lady’ (Morris, 2006: 40–79), writing down the stories of strange characters drifting by. She shared with Bates a structural dependence on ‘exotic’ lives used and often sensationalized to sustain herself as a white woman with an independent income (however small) and a public voice. Syndicated across Australia, some of those stories – such as the tales of Aboriginal maternal cannibalism (Hill, 1932), with which Bates was obsessed – made such an impact on urban Australians with no experience of indigenous life that, despite their ‘old’ print media origin, they may deserve to be called ‘prosthetic’ memories (Landsberg, 2004); they were certainly absorbed (in LeMahieu’s sense) into non-indigenous Australian folklore where they hardened into a racist belief rearticulated as recently as 1997 by the populist politician Pauline Hanson (Merritt, 1997).

While Hill may have over-stated her role in writing Bates’ notorious book, the industrial friendship between these women of different generations who shared a background in the ‘old’ (Bates) and the then ‘new’ (Hill) print media is a complex one, not least because both of them wrote a memoir about Daisy Bates. Curiously, one line of continuity linking the media practices of these two memory catchers was a propensity (mythomaniacal in Bates’ case, self-protective in Hill’s) for fabricating stories about their own lives that lodged for a while in official histories. While Bates’ unreliable memoir in The Passing of the Aborigines is narcissistic and self-promoting to an outrageous degree, the legacy that Hill left with her writings was all about other people and what she called ‘the travel’. She practised an ethic of extreme personal reticence and self-effacement, and while her ‘personal memoir’, Kabbarli, has passages of possessiveness (about authorship, friendship and knowledge) and of self-exculpation, the text is all about Bates. Like the women in my family, Hill did not ‘rake over’ her past; piercingly eloquent when she wrote to friends who were suffering distress, her correspondence tells us little of herself and nothing about her early life. Oddly, in the age of Paris Hilton and reality TV, this makes the Edwardian Daisy Bates in some ways seem the more contemporary figure, with her flamboyantly anachronistic dress and her readiness to fashion her own legend as a public personality (variously ‘Great White Queen’ or ‘Grand Dame’ of the desert). It also makes a conventional biography of Ernestine Hill quite difficult to write.

And for whom would I write it, even if I could? It can be difficult today to publish any monograph on an exclusively Australian subject. Yet, thinking of a national readership, for a long time, I thought in two Australia-centred ways about the Hill project. On the one hand, I imagined a biography organized around her working life as a writer, extending historically back through her friendship with Bates to explore white women’s journalism and practices of ‘public’ knowledge production in colonial conditions; I saw (and still see) these women’s ethnographic and memory work as part of a genealogy of Cultural Studies in this part of the world, however confronting this might be. On the other hand, I was thinking forward from the ‘descriptive, landscape and travel writing’ practised by Hill and other writers between the 1920s and the 1950s to the ‘new’ Australian cinema that responded to the globalizing impact of Hollywood from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. I was (and still am) interested in the cinematic use of landscape and the narrative use of action in relation to national storytelling from the early films of Peter Weir (The Cars That Ate Paris, 1974), Brian Trenchard-Smith (The Man from Hong Kong, 1975), Phil Noyce (Backroads, 1977) and Dr George Miller (the Mad Max trilogy, 1979–1985) to the feminist ‘anti-adventures’ of Tracey Moffatt (Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, 1989), Pauline Chan (Traps, 1994) and Margot Nash (Vacant Possession, 1995).

The continuities linking these phases of media culture are stronger than might be supposed within a framework simply opposing an affirmative White nationalism in the mid-twentieth-century to the critical multiculturalism of more recent times. While that shift is real and consequential, in both periods, Australia was involved in Asian wars (with Japan and Vietnam, respectively) that intensified old anxieties about race, immigration and population policy, giving them new contexts to flourish. Translating these anxieties in differentiated ways (‘discovering the outback’ in the 1930s became ‘populating the North’ in the 1950s), Hill’s landscape writing consistently shares with, for example, the apocalyptic vision of Miller’s Mad Max, and Moffatt’s revision of pastoral frontier history (and film memories) from an Aboriginal woman’s perspective in Night Cries, an interest in the legacy of historical conflicts and policies as they affect ordinary lives; a sense of the international forces (including Hollywood) shaping Australian stories and a passion to dramatize cultural legacies in ways that challenge and interest people.

Memory and popular modernism after the Pacific War

While the project I have just described is still with me, it takes a small effort of memory to re-establish the insular framework within which I conceived it. In 2000, I moved to Hong Kong to help develop the first Department of Cultural Studies in the Chinese world, and with no means to copy or cart my voluminous archive materials, sustained work on Hill became impractical for the next 12 years. This turned out to be a gift as well as a challenge; with no one around who cared about my ‘inward-looking’ national stories, I had to rearticulate my old research projects with the interests of new colleagues in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies movement and thus to find ways of situating them against a wider historical horizon. This was all the more transformative in that this movement is a methodological field (Chen, 1998, 2010) rather than a simple branch of Cultural Studies covering a specific area. Two aspects of this method are, first, that scholars speak from their local environments and experiences, whatever these might be, instead of aspiring to accumulate expertise on the other or to totalize regional ‘areas’, and second, that scholars work to create over time a shared frame of reference by engaging with other localities that we initially know nothing about.

Given this context, some changes were predictable. I discovered how broadly the travel genre Hill practised was distributed around the British Empire; the mix of picaresque adventure with personal memoirs and of landscape description with racial typologies was a means for Anglophone Western scientists, journalists, architects and other professional folk to make a place in strange worlds for themselves and their cultural values (see Ommaney, 1962). I also learned more about the limitations of a self-centring Western auto-critique of colonialism: cognate forms of colonial travel writing were practised during the Qing dynasty in China (Teng, 2004) and descriptive as well as narrative genres of popular culture furthered the colonial project of the Japanese empire as well (Mason and Lee, 2012). More precisely, while Hill was writing her reflective ‘race portraits’ of Afghan, Chinese and Aboriginal people in Central Australia in the 1930s, one of her contemporaries, the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960), was in the same period using his travels in India and China to develop a racialized ‘climatology’ of cultures that laid foundations for a new Japanese nationalism (Sakai, 1997). While I was aware of some of these things before I left Australia, having access to conversations about them made issues of inter-Asian nationalism and racism in popular culture move from the periphery to the foreground of my frame of enquiry.

It was more surprising to realize that one way of making new sense of my projects was to include Ernestine Hill in the wave of popular modernism that swept around the Asia-Pacific, including Australia, after the Pacific War. In a European context, Hansen (2001) describes popular modernism as ‘a new culture of leisure, distraction, and consumption that absorbed a number of artistic innovations into a modern vernacular of its own (especially by way of design) and vice versa’ (p. 212). Anyone who doubts the pertinence of transferring this definition to many post-war Asian contexts might look at Wen Yi’s Hong Kong musical Mambo Girl (1957), in which the heroine’s chequered Capri pants in the opening song and dance sequence match the design of the floor. However, outside the PRC, though often in response to events occurring there, the products of this popular modernism often wore period costume. New kung fu cinemas took shape in Hong Kong, in Cantonese and black and white in the 1950s then in Mandarin and in colour in the 1970s. A Japanese TV show, The Samurai, became a hit in 1960s Australia and, dodging around war in Korea, in Malaya and in Vietnam, Japanese, Korean and diasporic Chinese film companies essayed (sometimes with Western partners) co-production and transnational marketing experiments forming a template for a global cinema that in the 1960s was already a dream of the Shaw Bros. Studio (first founded in Singapore in 1930). I knew of these experiments not only as a working film critic in 1978–1985 but because I had lived through some of it earlier as a fan and a consumer; in high school, we would rush home to watch The Samurai and ‘play ninjas’ all the next day. Yet, it had never crossed my mind to think of this in continuity with the writing of Ernestine Hill, whose books I was given as school prizes in the 1960s, and with whom I associated the mysterious pull of the dark, musty shelves my parents loaded with Australian popular literary classics of days gone by.

I am startled, now, at how faithfully my thinking had reproduced the continental insularity consolidated by classic paradigms of ‘Australian Studies’, while locating the Asian popular modernism traversing Australian media space in a separate part of my memory. It seems clear to me now that both areas of my own post-war popular culture define a body of precedent of which we can ask how narratives and spectacles ‘about’ the past have in the past created and circulated memories and visions of community in conditions of political and cultural stress. To ask ‘how?’ certainly foregrounds large discontinuities. Like most of the Australian landscape writers, for example, Hill was keen on new technology but despised aesthetic modernism, an issue shaped quite differently in Asian contexts by the varying relations between linguistic, class and anti-colonial struggles. However, that ‘new culture of leisure, distraction, and consumption’ enabled and distributed Hill’s books just as it did those regional ‘new waves’ of popular film, music and television. Popular modernist culture was a zone of ambivalence for Hill, preoccupied as she was with preserving the memory of remote and materially primitive ways of life. She wrote furiously in The Territory about city women who preferred consumerism to doing their home duty as wives and mothers to populate the North. Yet, she dreamed that the Hollywood-savvy Charles Chauvel would film one of her books, and while she complained in 1942 that the prose of Australian Frontier had been ‘Yanked’, to write The Territory she borrowed riotously from American popular genres: the Western, the tropical romance, the Walt Disney fantasia.

Hill was not alone in either her ambivalence about the impact of Hollywood on popular memory elsewhere or in her eagerness to use the energy of that impact to revitalize local stories and cultural traditions; a history of the ‘instant remake’ in Hong Kong alone would be voluminous. To understand the role that appropriation plays in creating ‘new’ cultural memories, we need to know much more about how media practitioners transform the historical materials they put into circulation and in what conditions they do so. Today, I am particularly interested in the memory work performed by ‘translator figures’, those cross-cultural mediators who crop up in many places in times of great change to grapple with the relations between old cultural traditions and new cultural constituencies, often in the context of nationally formative struggles over social as well as cultural institutions. The annals of early twentieth-century feminism are full of these figures, and recent work on the ‘new woman’ and ‘the modern girl’ (Weinbaum et al., 2008) – figures vividly invoked in Korean cinema by Kim Soyoung’s extraordinary Women’s History Trilogy (2000–2004) –provides a research context in which the unsettling adventures of Daisy Bates as well as Ernestine Hill are at home. In later periods, Albert Namatjira (1902–1959), the Aboriginal Australian painter, and Bruce Lee (1940–1973), the Hong Kong-American martial artist and film star, are exemplary figures, each of them powerfully translating their cultural legacies, respectively, into the new media of Western landscape painting and American film and television in ways that formed new publics and new audiences long after their deaths.

I will end this sketch of historiographical possibilities with a very obvious example. It is well known that in old kung fu films made in Hong Kong, the technological emblem of a threatening modernity is the gun (Li, 2001). In the Australian travel writing genre, Hill worried rather about the deadly effects of radio, cars and planes on the ‘fast disappearing’ ways of life of white pioneers as well as Aboriginal people in the outback. While the phantasm of Aboriginal ‘passing’ consumed Daisy Bates (a woman born in Ireland just after the Famine of 1845–1852), for Hill that notion belonged, like Bates herself, to a wider scene of vanishing cultures and impending memory loss across the Australian continent. Partly, this was a matter of genre, rhetorical colour and spin; she was selling nostalgia as well as rattling good yarns to people in the city. My point, though, is that the idea of memory as a remedy for the disruptive impact of new technologies on ‘old days, old ways’ (Gilmore, 1934) was working comfortably as a popular cliché in the 1930s, a period when it could be rearticulated with ethnocidal fantasies uncomfortable indeed to read today. I prefer to ask today, how the tension in popular genres between nostalgia for what is being lost and the hope induced by action narratives allows practices of continuity as well as ways of negotiating change to flourish.