AustLit

'The Sapphires was the most popular Australian film of 2012. Loosely based on history, the film tells the story of four Indigenous young women, three of whom move in 1968 from a country reserve to Melbourne, who are transformed from singing hymns and country and western to becoming a soul group in the mould of the Supremes and who then tour Vietnam during the war entertaining the American troops. This article analyses the reasons for the popularity of the film. I argue that beyond the feelgood drama, including a romantic comedy subplot, the film minimizes the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians during the 1950s and 1960s, elides the 20 years era of self-determination and suggests a positive continuity between the period of assimilation and paternalism and the John Howard Liberal-dominated government's neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility. To this end, the film also plays down the racism of the assimilationist period and, through the character of Kay, implies that the policy of taking children away from their families (the Stolen Generations) had positive results. The film denies the young women's agency by introducing the character of the Irish Dave Lovelace as the creator and manager of the Sapphires.' (Publication abstract)

'This article engages Bourdieu's work on the cultural field to ask how the bohemian identity helped an aspiring artist make sense of the opportunities and problems encountered in the Australian cultural market, and how competition between established and new cultural players over several generations constituted a bohemian tradition in denial. Bourdieu's concept of ‘the economy turned upside down’ does not merely critique the romantic claims of autonomy from the market explicit in the bohemian identity, but reveals how the performance of autonomy through transgression made cultural producers as diverse as Tom Roberts, Henry Lawson, the Angry Penguins modernists or the Oz satirists attractive to the bourgeois consumer. There are, nevertheless, significant ways that the Australian bohemian tradition differs from the Western European experience theorized by Bourdieu, namely in the areas of politics, popular culture and post-colonial national assertion.' (Publication abstract)

'The literary festival has been variously claimed to perform communicative, educative and social functions: it engages the public in literary and political discussions, thereby encouraging participation in ‘the Arts’ and promoting associated civic benefits. The audience of the literary festival, however, is typically represented as a body of populist and popularizing consumers, uncritically engaging with the mass-culture produced and propagated in the festival setting. Researchers have begun to refute such claims, demonstrating that members of festival audiences exhibit a deep and critical engagement with literature; but beyond this demographic-based research, little work has been conducted capable of interrogating audience experience, or mapping the broader culture of festival attendance. The diversity of literary festivals' sizes, locations, histories and stated goals is complemented by the equally broad ranges of programmed events. These events – and the festivals more broadly – are at once literary, theatrical, political and contemporary. As such, conceptions of audience, reader and readership from book history, communication and media studies, and performance and theatre studies, can all contribute to an investigation of the experience of the literary festival audience. This research compares work from these areas of study with individuals' personal accounts of festival experiences extracted from online weblogs to begin to conceptualise the variety and complexity of audience experiences at the literary festival, and outline the rich potential for further study in this area.' (Publication abstract)