AustLit

'Over several decades, Bridget Griffen-Foley has produced a foundational body of work in Australian media studies. Ranging from that comprehensive history of Australian radio, Changing Stations, the definitive books on the Packer family (with apologies to Paul Barry's paperback), to editing A Companion to Australian Media – with many varied smaller stops between and beyond – Griffen-Foley's contributions to the discipline have foregrounded primary research and the relationality between the minor and the major in telling the histories of Australian media. This, her latest volume, continues this decades-long effort by engaging with Australian radio and TV listening and watching practices across five decades, and is an ambitious and rewarding collection of historical vignettes.' (Introduction)

'Media historian Bridget Griffen-Foley’s most recent monograph traces the archival remnants from the 1920s to the 1990s of Australian broadcast media audiences. This ambitious project, covering radio listenership and television viewership, might at first appear unwieldy, yet Griffen-Foley has carefully assembled a series of “perspectives” (1) where traces of media audiences’ fandom, complaints, club membership and involvement in television and radio programming offer a rich picture of how “ordinary” Australians interacted with broadcast media throughout the 20th century.'(Introduction)

'I was excited to review this book after using Bridget Griffen-Foley’s Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio (2009) in my own research on women in Australian radio. Griffen-Foley is a major researcher of Australian media history and Changing Stations presents a thorough history of Australian radio from the 1920s to the introduction of digital radio in 2009. Her new book, Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives (2020), builds on and extends this important work and will be of major interest to popular culture researchers in terms of both its content and methodology.' (Introduction) 

'What traces did Australian radio and television audiences leave when their listening and viewing was over? Today, registered users of audio and video streaming services make indelible digital imprints everywhere they go. Earlier listeners and viewers of ephemeral broadcast signals did not. Audience research arose to quantify and understand their behaviour. Bridget Griffen-Foley has gone looking for evidence about that behaviour in unusual places.'  (Introduction)