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)

'When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage. The smoke came into view as we passed over the train line by the Bunnings on Albany Highway – the sky a bleached October blue, the kind that drains the colour from the world and makes the grass slump yellow, as if the earth was giving up for the season.' (Introduction)

'From zero you accelerate to cruising speed, motion suggesting itself, up to the legal limit.'  (Publication abstract)

'The student sharehouse might be dying out. When I say sharehouse, it's not with any particular address in mind, no long-decomposed couch dragged home from roadside collection, no TV with the sound gone. I mean the one in our collective imagination, the one that may have only existed in barely remembered stoned conversations on the couch, unanswered texts to heavenly Gumtree ads, or the House of Trouser that Toadie from Neighbours lived in. As personal and shifting as this idea has been, it's always hovered on the fringe of access, maybe over the next page of Gumtree listings, maybe stuck to the noticeboard at IGA, or residing exactly where your friends are moving into next weekend. While the dream remains bewitching, the reality that made it possible might be slipping away. But why does it mean so much? How did the sharehouse become the sharehouse? And if it's going, why?' (Publication abstract)

'Like embarrassing first email addresses, most of us have superannuation, but if you're under twenty-five in Australia, chances are yours has been cooked for a while now. When we talk about future planning, the idea of super being our 'safety net' is thrown around a lot, something as taken-for-granted as Harold Bishop. However, despite being designed to replace the old age pension as our soft place to land when we retire, our superannuation system is a more complex and skewed beast than most of us might realise, and we're already paying for not knowing how it works. As it stands, super is built to benefit the old and rich at the expense of everyone else, seeing youth, women and the already-disadvantaged disempowered significantly by the system that's meant to be protecting them.' (Publication abstract)