AustLit

 (Publication summary)

'This article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.'  (Introduction)

'There has been a lot happening on Australia’s small screens. Neighbours turned 30. Struggle Street was accused of poverty porn. Pete evangelised Paleo. Gina got litigious. Netflix muscled in. The Bachelor spawned The Bachelorette. Peter Allen’s maraccas were exhumed. The Labor Party ate itself. Anzac was an anti-climax. And so much more...

'Join us as we survey the Australian televisual landscape, and try to make sense of the myriad changes transforming what and how we watch. We’ve come a long way since Bruce Gyngell welcomed us to television in 1956. We now watch on demand and wherever we want, in our lounge rooms and on our devices.

'But some things stay the same. The small screen is still a place for imagining Australia, for better or for worse. Small Screens challenges and celebrates our contemporary TV worlds.' (Publication summary)

'The common picture of the war correspondent is a heroic, male reporter on the frontline, but women reporters have been more numerous and significant than we ever knew. Against the vehement opposition of newspaper editors, their male colleagues and military hierarchies, twentieth-century women journalists grew increasingly determined to report war from conflict zones and have their stories printed beyond the women’s pages of the newspapers.

'In Australian Women War Reporters, Jeannine Baker provides a much-needed account of the pioneering women who reported from the biggest conflicts of the twentieth century. Two women defied the orders of Lord Kitchener to cover the fighting on the Western Front and others such as Agnes Macready, Anne Matheson and Lorraine Stumm witnessed and wrote about momentous events including the South African War at the turn of the century, the rise of Nazism, the liberation of the concentration camps, the return of Australian POWs, the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the beginnings of the Vietnam War. These women carved a path for new generations of women war correspondents who have built upon their legacy.

'Jeannine Baker deftly draws out the links between the experiences of these women and the contemporary realities faced by women journalists of war, allowing us to see both in a new light.' (Publication summary)