Turning up to Play

Abstract

Reviewing the ‘all-round’ nature of Graeme Turner's academic practice and its impact on the development of Cultural Studies in Australia since the 1980s, this introductory article explores the relationship between Turner's institutional effectiveness and the mode of creativity fostered by the game of Rugby League.

Keywords:

• Graeme Turner
• Australian cultural studies
• cultural research policy
• academic service
• Rugby League
• institutional creativity

On 31 August 2012, a capacity crowd turned up to the University of Queensland for a symposium on ‘Building Australian Cultural Studies: the work of Graeme Turner’. Many of the speakers assembled to honour the legend widely known around Australia as ‘GT’ had worked in Brisbane with Graeme through one of his crowning achievements as an institution-builder, the UQ Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies that was hosting the event. It was my task to kick off and, as a blow-in from Sydney (one of many from other cities in attendance that day), I felt unusually nervous in front of GT's home crowd – given some of the memories I might have drawn on in my speech.

Graeme Turner and I did not spend our youth building Australian Cultural Studies together. Passing the 1980s on opposite sides of the continent, we did not even meet in Australia. Our first encounter was a hit-up in print over feminism, populism and national culture following the publication of Myths of Oz (Fiske, Hodge and Turner 1988).¹ When we finally occupied the same space-time continuum for the 1990 ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ conference at Urbana-Champaign in the USA (Grossberg et al. 1992), our mutual friends expected to see a bit of biff.² So, I daresay, did we: Graeme had just written an introduction to British Cultural Studies (Turner 1990) while I had published a polemic about ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’ (Morris 1990b) that took a good swipe at both Baudrillard and the British. Yet we got on like a house on fire, sharing then and to this day a chemical consensus about what matters, what's important about academic work and how you go about doing it. As I came to know Graeme better I realized that our shared love of Rugby League explains something of this chemistry. GT is probably the only scholar I know who would offer me tickets for a Brisbane Broncos game that clashed with his farewell party. He is certainly the only one for whom I would turn those tickets down.

As the legendary commentator, coach and former player Phil Gould remarks on a more or less weekly basis, ‘it's a funny game, Rugby League’ (Chesterton 1996; Gould 2013). Like all great games, League is a philosophy of life. In all forms of rugby you progress by directing energy (throwing the ball) backwards or sideways while charging and dodging numerous large, threatening obstacles coming at you full-tilt from all sides. However, one of the harsh particularities of the modern game of League is that the set of tackles in possession is limited to five. It's a hard, grinding game that requires immense reserves of stamina, patience, finesse, parochial fire and single-minded ferocity of purpose to avoid obliteration, sustain momentum and, occasionally, score – self-evidently (it seems to me) a great preparation for creative life in the Australian academy. Parochial energy can be a resource for pulling off the impossible in institutions as it is in Rugby League (Morris 2005, p. 23). While we are well past the time when one's town or state of origin forever circumscribed belonging, unalterably grounding identity, the capacity to care ferociously about the place and community for which you are trying to make space is a force for innovation in any social contest. This capacity marks the difference between a legend and a star or celebrity player who arcs through a world of fame. Sonny Bill Williams is a star but Wally Lewis is a legend.³ Legends serve the people; they are loved and remembered for the lasting gifts their struggles bring to others. Undoubtedly a star in several academic fields, not least celebrity studies (Turner 2004), Graeme Turner is a legend in this sense.

In recognition of this, the Symposium organizer Gay Hawkins asked us to reflect on the collective achievements of Cultural Studies in Australia over the decades co-extensive with Graeme Turner's career. So let me look backwards to ask what has changed in the big picture since we had that early collision over Myths of Oz. I think it's fair to say that at the time this circulated as a stoush between ‘Australian feminist criticism’ (me) and ‘blokey Anglo-Australian Cultural Studies’ (Graeme). In retrospect, much more solid themes that would dominate the field for the next 20 years are manifest in Graeme's response to his critics, ‘Return to Oz’ (Turner 1991). There he discussed the relationship between academic knowledges and popular audiences; the pedagogic function of academic books written accessibly for students and general readers; how to create a version of Australian Studies founded on the multiplicities of cultural meanings active across the nation rather than on the pursuit of a mythic ‘essential core’ of identity; and the role of government reports and professional infrastructure initiatives (associations, conferences) in shaping a discipline's future. The importance of the latter in particular was not widely appreciated at the time and ‘Return to Oz’ reads now as a visionary document. However, what also strikes me forcibly is how pre-national most of us were in the 1980s. Accessible air travel across Australia was still a relative novelty and our networks, our thinking and our practices were primarily regional in the sub-national sense.

Certainly, on the West Coast academics based in Perth were editing an innovative national journal. Founded in 1983, the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies (AJCS, the precursor to Cultural Studies) included Graeme, John Fiske and John Frow on its editorial board and drew contributions from what now looks like a stellar line-up from across the country (Tony Bennett, Stuart Cunningham, John Hartley, Sylvia Lawson and Tom O'Regan, among others).⁴ Yet for me on the ‘East Coast’ – a generous construal of links between handfuls of people mostly based in Sydney and Melbourne – the activities of AJCS were remote. Still a free-lance journalist and part-time teacher in 1983, I bought AJCS because I collected ‘little magazines’ in the old literary manner. I do not remember reading it back then. My intellectual networks arose from the social movements of the 1970s (Anti-Psychiatry, Gay Liberation, Residents'Action and Women's Liberation); from Communist Party reading groups; and from the self-organizing world of anarchist pub debate that had thrived for many decades in Sydney. Elements of these fed into the lively public culture surrounding the 1970s Australian film revival (Murray 1980, Hodsdon 2001) and then the ‘art world’ fever of the 1980s (Sangster 1987, Foss 2009). In those days I felt sorry for people who were ‘only academics’ and did not pay their writing much attention.

Writing about this period in our discipline's history, John Frow (2005) points out that intellectual ‘clusters’ that seem highly visible now were always transient and marked as much by disconnection as by overlap or intersection; people whose work seems to ‘belong’ together historically were barely aware of each other's existence. In retrospect the most cosmopolitan Australian cities of the 1980s were probably Adelaide (the Arts Festival capital) and Brisbane, where young scholars from the bigger cities were washing up in the first significant post-war wave of academic labour migrancy. While international events provided a platform for Sydney or Perth people to become ‘Australian’ together elsewhere, a disconnection in theoretical and political orientation meant that those who were involved with British Cultural Studies did not travel the same routes as we who followed French and Italian debates directly in those languages – that is, not until ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ made a bridge of the US academy that not only enabled new trans-Australian encounters to take place but ultimately opened the way for a new wave of academic expatriation across the Pacific from the mid-1990s.

When I expatriated myself in 2000 I took a different path, following the trajectory of Inter-Asian Cultural Studies north to Hong Kong just three years after the enclave's return to China. There, as in many parts of the world, a long-term struggle over the terms of becoming ‘national’ was and is inextricable from the challenges of globalization and international policy-sharing in educational institutions (Morris 2010). With 13 years in China rather than the USA shaping my perspectives now, I am awed by the expansion we have seen of Australian national institutions, organizations and initiatives in higher education, the media, the arts, broadcasting and in cultural industries broadly conceived – with a National Education Reform Agreement for secondary schooling (the ‘Gonski’ reform) and a National Broadband Network scheme still contested as I write. This change is a concrete product of policy work as well as of representation campaigns and related shifts in consciousness, and in the first edition of Making It National (Turner 1994) Graeme began to consider in a systematic way the changing conditions in which that work was becoming possible. The ‘it’ nationalized in his title included the larrikin entrepreneurial culture unleashed by the deregulation of the Australian financial system under the Hawke Labor Government of 1983–1991. Paying close critical attention to popular representations of economic values, after earlier work devoted to ‘national fictions’ in literature and film (Turner 1986), Making It National importantly extended the project initiated by Donald Horne in a book that for me is the founding text of Cultural Studies in Australia, Money Made Us (Horne 1976). Writing almost 20 years after Horne's biting account, Graeme was able to ‘multiply’ Australian hypotheses about national identity by combining a critique of the public uses of nationalism by business heroes pursuing private gain with a positive vision of the democratic and diversifying potential of the media and the public cultural institutions that Horne's policy-minded generation had earlier begun to build.

Another two decades down the track since Making It National first appeared, we have seen much un-making as well as remaking of the national during the globalizing years in between. Throughout this period Graeme has documented, analysed and above all generated new ideas for ‘making it national’ in concrete areas of cultural practice. Within higher education in particular, Graeme Turner has played a role that has extended his influence well beyond our discipline – in the process helping to give Cultural Studies an institutional heft and solidity in Australia that is rare in Western contexts although increasingly achieved in parts of Asia (Morris and Hjort 2012). As President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2005–2007), for example, he indefatigably and with much success lobbied a hostile federal government to recognize the social and economic claims of the Arts and Humanities to relevance for our national life. Subsequently, he served consecutive terms from 2008 on the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council as only the second Humanities scholar to be appointed to that influential body. I can attest from experience in Hong Kong how frequently he has been called upon in the Inter-Asian world as an expert adviser for universities involved in their own struggle to ‘make it national’ in education while absorbing the imperatives of a globalizing policy sphere. At Lingnan University alone he acted for three years (2003–2006) as External Examiner for our BA Cultural Studies programme (2003–2006), helping us revise in practical detail our approach to assessment strategies, and then gave postgraduates as well as academic staff advice on coping with changes in higher education policy during intensive visits in 2009 and 2012.

In his institution-building work as well as his writing and teaching, Graeme puts into meticulous and exacting practice the ideal of ‘constructing common ground’ (Turner 1991, p. 27) so often invoked as a goal of activism in the academy as well as in our wider political life. It is easy to end an article rhetorically waving at that ideal, but GT pulls off the remarkable feat of doing it in reality –even in such inhospitable corners of our reality as the corridors of power in Canberra. How does he do this, when many of us find it hard to make common ground with colleagues in other factions of Cultural Studies, never mind in other academic disciplines or with scientists? No doubt being a certain kind of Aussie bloke has helped GT survive the scrums they have in those corners, but many a bloke can hang in there without scoring something real for our sector. I think Graeme's genius is very much a matter of ‘creativity in the gaps’. Graeme is a play-maker. Whether coming down the middle or veering towards the wing, he is always on the look-out for that chance to come up with something special, making opportunities for action where none are supposed to exist. Those opportunities are not only occasions to have input to university or government policy, important as these occasions are along with the interventions in the public sphere that he once called ‘passing on the benefits’ of theoretical critique (Turner 1996, p. 14). Opportunities are also chances that a great player produces in the gap between policy and its implementation. This gap is temporal as well as situational; while its duration, form and potential will differ with conditions, it is in the nature of the institutional game that the gap will always arise and something unforeseen can occur. The second aspect of Graeme's genius is then his clarity of purpose. As I see it, his game has always been about renewing both the principle and the real possibility of practising education as a ‘public good’, a value he has recently defined as ‘the idea that there is an intellectual, ethical-moral purpose behind the production and distribution of knowledge that is directed towards the social and cultural wellbeing of a society, and not just its economic development’ (Turner 2012, p. 104).

Neoliberal times are not meant to be propitious for promoting social and cultural well-being at taxpayers' expense. A third aspect of Graeme's way of doing what he does may explain why he has been able to pursue his purpose so effectively. This is his active solidarity with others as a scholar, as a teacher and as a ‘public servant’ in the old honorific sense of the term. Creativity in the gaps is not a self-centring practice; the play-maker's art is often hidden from casual spectators as he (or she) drops back to send someone else over the line. Graeme has assumed many roles in order to support and enable other people through his institution-building; a solid full-back when he is needed, he is also a heavy forward and a dazzling try-scorer combined. In recent years he has excelled at high-level coaching, most obviously through his creation of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, where under his leadership (1999–2012) early career researchers and mature scholars alike could enjoy the time and the conditions for shaping or renewing their professional vocations. I speak as a beneficiary of Graeme's coaching skills: when I first became a Head of Department he taught me how to fill my diary in advance so I could choose what meetings I might be ‘free’ to attend, thus preserving my good temper for the benefit of all. Years later, a month spent reading and writing at his Centre reminded me why I became an academic and decided me to stay in Australia. Multiplied through the lives of all the people he has helped, guided and backed up over the years, this kind of coaching has national quality impact; there should be a special performance indicator for government to recognize its worth. Graeme's is a practical and personal politics of promoting ‘well-being’ on a daily basis, and this is one of the reasons why even his most ambitious institutional experiments generally work. Academics now positioned as ‘research stars’ do not always understand this or the complexity of the work it takes. To shape a discipline it's not enough to build personal fame, raise grants or score big ‘points’ at research evaluation time. You need loving kindness and solidarity with staff at all levels. You need a wide range of versatile skills and the speed and finesse to use them well; and, come rain, hail or shine in the institution you work for, you have to turn up to play.

As other essays in this issue attest, Graeme's career has been one of continuous movement between pedagogy, research, criticism, policy, administration, management and diverse kinds of mentoring. In sports we could call him the ‘total package’ but in Australian university jargon this range of capacities is now rather feebly linked to a figure called the ‘all-round academic’ – a consolation descriptor, as though having a single edge (‘research only’) is better than the trifecta of excellence in teaching, research and service. How misguided can we be? Sometimes I think this increasingly internalized misguiding is a conspiracy to ensure that in the future we may have no visionary, practical leaders of the Humanities who are, like Graeme, top-notch teachers and scholars as well. I believe that ‘research only’ pursued for more than a few successive years tends to make us stupid in cultural domains. We hear a lot, and rightly so, about the importance of research to teaching but the importance of teaching to the formulation of original research is gravely underestimated. We are not scientists in this decisive way: without the discipline of encountering new cultural influences in that ‘public’ space of a classroom, we very quickly lose touch with the social worlds we imagine ourselves addressing as well as analysing when we write.

The depth of Graeme's pedagogical skill shows not only in his copious and brilliant provision of textbooks but above all in the longevity of his multiply revised and re-issued texts. As I write, after 23 years British Cultural Studies is in its third edition and selling out of Amazon with ‘more on the way’. My personal favourite and long-term stand-by for teaching undergraduate courses in cinema is Film as Social Practice (Turner 1988), now in its fourth edition and selling out after a quarter of a century. Using it annually to teach in Hong Kong, I would sometimes look for a different textbook for a change. I never found a substitute, and this is why. Film as Social Practice really is written for students, not for the politically monitoring gaze of colleagues. It is a book for people who want to learn directly about film and society, not about where the author stands in a range of esoteric disciplinary debates or what he or she thinks about Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. Remarkably few ‘textbooks’ in Cultural Studies can meet this classroom relevance test for a context where students are reading in English as a second or third language (that is, the context of most students in the world) in countries where the configuration of disciplines and hence debate about what matters differs greatly from the Western Anglophone tradition. While my students often failed to recognize the English titles of the films the book discusses, furtively referring to the photocopied Chinese translations hidden under their desks, the plain and beautiful prose of Film as Social Practice never failed to inspire them to think for themselves.

At the same time, Graeme has a much more complex attitude than I do to the establishment of a national infrastructure for research production and evaluation, having been involved directly in building much of what we have through his work for the Australian Research Council and the learned Academies as well as the University of Queensland. I would certainly be just one of many Australian academics to regard his brilliant invention and convening (2005–2010) of the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network (CRN) as one of his greatest achievements. Federally funded, the CRN worked on two fronts: it put emerging as well as mid-career researchers in collaborative relationships across the continent at a time when travel funding had become sparse to procure; and it made scholars in Cultural Studies work productively with geographers, anthropologists, historians and social scientists. Despite my admiration, however (and my participation on the CRN's International Advisory Board), we did recently manage to have a bit of biff over what I stubbornly and not altogether rationally regard as the over-valuation in Australia of research relative to teaching. At a symposium hosted by Monash University's ‘Prato Centre’ in Italy,⁵ I went into one of my favourite rants about why the sidelining of textual analysis in research funding-driven Cultural Studies reflects the devaluing of teaching as a vocation (Morris 2006). My argument is that the ‘close reading’ of texts was primarily a way of teaching people to write. Graeme, whose task was to explain the current research development framework to emerging scholars, noted sternly (having taught thousands more students than I ever will): ‘that might be so, but that's the way it is’. No doubt because we had all enjoyed an outdoor screening the night before of Baz Luhrmann's Australia, in which these lines of dialogue occur, I flounced back: ‘just because that's how it is that doesn't mean it should be’. Alas: on balance I have to admit that my Nicole Kidman is an epic fail while GT squares up pretty well as Hugh Jackman.

His own research, as it happens, has always been engaged with the question of ‘what should be?’ in Australian cultural and media scholarship. He has a demanding view of what kinds of research that scholarship involves. Long ago he frightened me off writing a book about Australian TV drama with an eloquent argument that to understand television you have to study the lot, not just pick out the bits you find aesthetically engaging; his example of the knowledge it takes to be credible as a TV scholar happened to be my pet horror at the time – gardening shows. Practising as well as preaching this rigorous approach to constructing an ‘intellectual project’ (Turner 1996, p. 7), Graeme has over the years been able to produce an internationally influential body of scholarship that excels at constituting real objects of study along with concepts that others can carry into different empirical fields: celebrity, tabloidism, the changing role of news and current affairs in nation-formation, the ‘demotic turn’ (Turner 2010) to reality and opinion genres, ‘post-broadcast’ television (Turner and Tay 2006) and, most recently, the challenge of writing situated ethnographies of its consumption (Pertierra and Turner 2013). Through all of Graeme's work two institutional complexes, the media and education, encounter, test and creatively modify each other; in the process, bringing to Humanities-trained scholars a new model of what research could mean.

As Phil Gould always says of a brilliant player: ‘oh, he's a thinker, that boy! He's … a thinker’. In no area is Graeme's conceptual creativity more evident than in the so-called service domain. Graeme has shown us that service need not only be a matter of ‘doing the hard yards’, a necessary grind – although it certainly is that too. Service as Graeme has practised it is the very medium in which we can develop effective strategies in academic life for what Gould calls ‘the modern game’. Theorists of modernity might well pay attention to Gould's usage of that phrase. Gould thinks of modernity as Lyotard does; the beginning of the modern game in League is recurrent, and can be traced to whatever changes in rules and tactics that Gould has in mind for a particular argument. At big picture level we can trace the modern university game in Australia to the Dawkins (1988) report, with its call to tie tertiary education in Australia more closely to the needs of industry and national productivity. In the ensuing 25 years, however, we have seen an unending series of transformations in the game, following changes in government, in the placing of the tertiary education portfolio, in university leadership and organization, or simply in the composition of committees. Throughout this Graeme kept his eye on the ball and taught us by example the importance of getting involved, rather than hanging round the sidelines whinging. This is the true meaning of that great sporting cliché, ‘turning up to play’. It does not mean, cynically, ‘you have to be in it to win it’, although that is a logical precondition of any play at all. It means, participating in the effort with all of your heart and soul. Graeme's great gift as a leader is exemplary: he is able to show us what is possible on the basis of what he has learned and striven for himself, teaching us how to grasp changes in the rules, keep our eyes on the ball of what matters, and imagine new moves that are not supposed to be possible – how to find that gap opening up where creativity is possible, while not ‘surrendering the space’ (Turner 2011) that has already been made by Cultural Studies towards achieving the goal of the public good.

In the correspondence to organize this Symposium, Gay Hawkins explicitly asked the participants not to use PowerPoint for our presentations. It had never occurred to me to do that but as soon as I read Gay's request I began to imagine what my ideal PowerPoint for Graeme might be like. In no time at all I was envisaging a four-wall multimedia spectacle on the scale of Suncorp Stadium packed out for a Broncos game. On each wall, footage would be playing of great moments in the careers of four of my own favourite Queensland players, each of whom could exemplify an aspect of Graeme's achievement. On one wall would be the mighty Mal Meninga, making the stadium shake as he ran the length of the field to thunder over the line in a State of Origin match best forgotten by a New South Wales person like me. On the second wall, Gordon Tallis (my favourite Bronco) scrapping and dodging impossibly through a melee of players so terrified of his ferocity that most of them fell over. On the third wall, Petero Civoniceva, the endurance player who in 2009 had played the most international matches for Australia of any forward in history and who seemed always able to get up again no matter how many hard knocks he took. And on the fourth wall, Graeme's favourite: ‘King’ Wally Lewis, the wise one; the inspiring sportsman whose kindness and courtesy made him beloved even by those who played against him. For the soundtrack to my multimedia tribute to Graeme Turner, there is of course only one possibility: Tina Turner singing the song that she made an Australian Rugby League anthem before it was lifted by football codes and clubs worldwide – ‘Simply the Best’.

Notes on Contributor

Meaghan Morris is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong and Chair of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. Formerly Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan (2000–2012), she writes on the rhetoric of nationality in transnational conditions, and her books include Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (1998), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (co-ed. with Siu-leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, 2005); Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (2006), and Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies (co-ed with Mette Hjort, 2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Broadly about the relationship of Australian Studies to Cultural Studies, this debate went on for several years. See Morris 1990a, 1991, Turner, 1991, 1996.

2 In an early article for Cultural Studies I used the example of Rugby League to discuss the constraints imposed on the language of Australian Cultural Studies by the conventions of a British or American-based ‘international refereed journal’ (Morris 1992). Mercifully today we have Wikipedia (see ‘Glossary of Rugby League terms’).

3 On these two players, respectively, see Knox (2013) and McGregor (2004). Knox plausibly describes Sonny Bill Williams as a ‘consultant superhero, the model fly-in, fly-out free-lancer for these globalised times’ (p. 2). Where Williams switches between sports and football codes as well as between clubs, Lewis had a deep commitment to Rugby League in Queensland and to the Brisbane Broncos club. See also Headon (1999).

4 The first four issues of the journal are available online through Curtin University at http://humanities.curtin.edu.au/schools/MCCA/ccs/ajcs_journal.cfm

5 This symposium was Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television, organized by Therese Davis and Liz Conor, Monash Prato Centre, Italy, 8–11 July 2012.