Kylie will be ok

Abstract

This article examines scholarly works published before and after Fame Games (2000) to investigate whether the development of Australian celebrity studies was one of the things that happened to Australian cultural studies. That book, written by Graeme Turner, P. David Marshall and Frances Bonner, observed the significance of an Australian celebrity's international profile to their national media coverage. Now, in an intellectual variant, Australian celebrity scholars disproportionately use foreign stars or Australians with international profiles to illustrate their arguments, with the exigencies of academic publishing providing one explanation. The article draws inter alia on Turner's several publications in the field in an attempt to discern whether there is an Australian inflection to celebrity studies or whether Australian scholars have been so significant in the international development of this subset of cultural studies that there is neither call nor space for a distinctively Australian approach.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• Australian
• academic publishing
• national/international
• Kylie Minogue
• Steve Irwin

It is with no little sense of hubris that I want to date the start of celebrity studies in Australia from the 2000 publication of Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, of which I was a co-author with Graeme Turner and P. David Marshall (Turner et al. 2000). Internationally, the field could not easily be said to precede that time by much either. Many relevant books and articles were published prior to that, of course, but as contributions to other fields. Marshall's (2006) collection The Celebrity Culture Reader has as its earliest piece Max Weber's essay first published in 1922 on charismatic authority, followed by Daniel Boorstin's study of ‘The Human Pseudo-event’ first published in 1961. Its earliest Australian writing is John Langer's (1981) article on ‘Television's “Personality System”’. None of these authors envisaged themselves as being located in celebrity studies, but in sociology, history or media studies. Altogether 26 of 41 chapters in that collection were published prior to 2000, and two of those were by Australian authors (not counting Marshall's written while he was not an Australian resident). It is clear just from this collection that much work had been done, in Australia as well as elsewhere, to provide a grounding on which the new field could draw.

This essay addresses the issue's theme by investigating the possibility that one thing that has happened to Australian cultural studies is the development of a sub-discipline, Australian celebrity studies. It considers Australian writing on celebrity, to which Turner has made such a substantial contribution, before and after that watershed date. It looks for any signs of change once the field became identifiable, having shifted from being just an area that media and cultural studies scholars, and some others, wrote on from their own disciplinary traditions. That celebrity studies is now an established arena for scholarly endeavour is clear; whether there is a recognizably Australian variant, less so. The major approach to identifying an Australian inflection to celebrity studies will involve considering the nationalities, arenas of renown and reception of the celebrities used by Australian scholars to illustrate their arguments. It seems a reasonable element given the importance to cultural studies work of context, here seen as the nation, its institutions and people. Certainly Australian audiences follow non-Australian celebrities; famous Australians are not a sine qua non for Australian celebrity studies, but they represent a straightforward place to start, not least because their production was at the heart of the Fame Games study.

The essay explores the establishment and location of celebrity studies in general, and some of Turner's own pronouncements on the field before considering the Australian scholarly setting into which Fame Games appeared. The survey of celebrity writings by Australian scholars before and after 2000 both looks at how the emergence of the field has had an impact on what is produced and explores the useful role in this of Australian celebrities of international standing, looking especially at the singer Kylie Minogue and animal adventurer Steve Irwin. Changes in international academic publishing have complicated the process of identifying the characteristics of a national sub-disciplinary shift. The essay concludes with the problem posed for a national inflection when many of its scholars are international leaders in the field.

The development and location of celebrity studies in and out of Australia

My nominating Fame Games as the first instance of Australian celebrity studies is retrospective. In the Introduction to the first chapter, we place our work as a contribution to media studies. The 1990s had been quite productive in terms of Australian books considering celebrities as part of their concerns. Two of them came from people who provided back cover endorsements for Fame Games. Catherine Lumby (1999), whose Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World was identified as her qualification for comment there, and Mackenzie Wark (1999), whose Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace functioned likewise, could jointly be seen as providing an alternative start date. I will discuss these and earlier books by John Langer (1998), the Re:Public (1997) collective and John Hartley (1996) later. The books were all located in media and/or cultural studies, but the appearance of so many in just four years is meaningful in terms of the field's coming into being. There had though been earlier precursors in a sequence of journal articles from the 1980s. They too will be examined later together with a perhaps more idiosyncratic precursor, Meaghan Morris's (1992) study of then Australian Treasurer, Paul Keating.

Marshall's (1997) Celebrity and Power is not in the list above since it was primarily written while he was still in Canada, from a disciplinary location in politics, and refers to Australia only in the Acknowledgements and the author's biography. The inclusion within Australian celebrity studies of works by a number of key authors – Marshall, Morris and Hartley, among those mentioned already – who published works dealing wholly or partly with celebrity while working in other countries attests both to academic mobility and just some of the difficulties at the heart of specifying a national inflection to a sub-disciplinary field. I follow Turner (1992) in seeing Australian cultural studies as ‘cultural studies in Australia’ (p. 426, his emphasis) and apply the formulation to Australian celebrity studies as well. First though I will consider the location of celebrity studies more generally.

A very common tracing of the genealogy of celebrity studies internationally begins in film studies with Richard Dyer's (1979) Stars. Almost immediately it was taken up beyond film. In Australia, Langer (1981) called on it, and Gabrielle O’Ryan and Brian Shoesmith (1987) show its continuing use by some Australian cultural studies scholars. Dyer had a strong influence on Fame Games too. In other countries key precursor works came from history (Boorstin 1987/1962), sociology (Alberoni 1962, Gamson 1994) or English (Braudy 1986, though English here encompasses cultural history and film). This disciplinary diversity was rarely the case in Australia.

I am thus probably on more contentious grounds in asserting that celebrity studies are a subset of cultural studies internationally than in Australia, though Marshall's naming his British and American Routledge reader a Celebrity Culture one supports this placement. Somewhat more equivocally, so does Turner's (2004) Preface to Understanding Celebrity, where he notes the limitations of cultural studies’ consideration of celebrity as a field of representation before asserting his intention to consider also its production and consumption, but he still concludes by seeing celebrity as located firmly in culture. He maintains this belief in his contribution to the launch issue of Celebrity Studies (Turner 2010).

The public recognition of the existence of a scholarly field is usually marked some years after it has come into being by the publication of readers following publishers’ recognizing that teaching in the area requires servicing. In addition to Marshall's mentioned above, Sean Redmond and Su Holmes’ collection Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader appeared in 2007. The appearance of a dedicated journal is probably a final seal. The journal editors’ foundational introduction (Holmes and Redmond 2010), while acknowledging the many disciplines that contribute studies and insights, locates the journal primarily within media and cultural studies.

This conjoined disciplinary field is common – in University administration, research assessment and funding, publishing practices and self-description. Distinguishing between them is obviously possible, but not of great value for celebrity studies: there is much more to the study of celebrity than media studies alone can handle, but ordinary people's main encounters with celebrities and the industry which produces and manages them are mediated ones. My personal predilection is to see cultural studies as the dominant partner. Whether Turner would agree is unclear. In his essay monograph What's Become of Cultural Studies? (Turner 2012), he mentions celebrity only once as a ‘topic’ instanced in a description of the debased (imaginary) introductory course Cultural Studies 101. It does not make the index. Celebrity has though remained prominent in his publications – there are three books and many articles, though none is mentioned in the 2012 monograph.

In an interview with Noel King (2010), Turner was asked about his relationship with another field, Australian Studies, and in a long answer traces how after a period in the early to mid-1990s focused on international work, he became concerned with Australian topics on current affairs, talk-back radio and celebrity: ‘they were all very much a critique of media performance from a left political point of view, but it was not a particularly theorized or sophisticated thing’ (p. 149). When asked if there is a single theme unifying his work, he acknowledges the formative power of structuralism and then adds ‘a continuing commitment to understanding Australian popular culture’ (p. 150). Understanding Australian celebrity is obviously part of this. The preface to the second edition of Understanding Celebrity (2013) places the work still as for ‘media and cultural studies scholars’ and notes the changes in celebrity studies since the first edition as involving the need for ‘better understanding of the cultural and political consequences of celebrity's prominence in our media culture’ (p. x). I am taking that here as an endorsement of cultural studies’ dominance, if not exclusivity.

Turner is not alone in identifying the lacunae in the field, nor are they specific to Australian celebrity studies. Although not apparently responding to him, David Beer and Ruth Penfold-Mounce (2010) analyzed the state of academic study of celebrity noting both the major increase in journal articles since 2002 and the need to find ways to make such study more valued in the academy. They coin the term ‘glossy topics’ to describe ones like celebrity which, having high public interest but low public value, are used to berate humanities and social sciences as overly concerned with frivolous matters (p. 363). Perhaps implicitly acknowledging this, in the editorial celebrating three years of Celebrity Studies, Holmes and Redmond (2013) wrote of their desire to publish more empirical audience studies as evidence of the political consequence of the field (p. 113).

There is considerable irony in seeing celebrity studies emerging from cultural studies, which in its Birmingham School model was founded in a concern with the underprivileged. The core of celebrity is its privilege, its excess of attention and its exhibition of conspicuous consumption. It is promoted and perceived as an opportunity to escape the constraints of class and race, the very constraints studied in their oppressiveness by early cultural studies scholars. Turner's (most recently 2013, p. 156) insistence on the need to do more in celebrity studies than analyse celebrities as texts (most recently 2013, p. 156) leads him not just to again advocate studies of production and ‘the current performance of democratic media ideals through the media’ (2013, p. 157), but also to admit the need to know more about celebrity–fan relations. The first two of these require national inflections, but the last does not. An Australian fan may feel no relationship with Australian celebrities and aggregate with other fans digitally as part of a global phenomenon. However focusing on the audience for celebrity and what needs and desires of theirs are being exercised in the relation does take us back closer to our cultural studies origins.

Studies of Australian celebrity before 2000

Examining how celebrity was written about in Australian research before Fame Games was published means starting with Langer's (1981) highly influential article on television personalities. It was primarily concerned with establishing television's difference from film along axes such as distance/intimacy and familiar/exceptional (p. 363). His personalities are found in both fictional and non-fictional programmes, primarily American or British, though the list of factual programmes is principally Australian. It does not study any individual in any detail, looking instead at the system, its ideological foundations and consequences. Soon after, in a chapter on mass market magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly, cultural commentator Humphrey McQueen (1982) wrote about its editor, Ita Buttrose, in ways that are recognizably celebrity-based, mentioning both her work and her private life (pp. 139–142).

Following this, a long-running news story led to the creation of a very different celebrity, Lindy Chamberlain, initially, in Chris Rojek's (2001) term, a celetoid, but now too long lasting an Australian media presence for the term to apply. Two articles on Chamberlain, wrongly convicted of murdering her baby Azaria, published in Australian Journal of Cultural Studies (Johnson 1984, Craik 1987) were early contributions to the long sequence of scholarly and popular publications largely in law, feminism and biography examining the related cases and the various national myths the representations drew on.

The first sustained cultural studies work on pre-existing celebrities centred on businessman, Alan Bond, starting with O’Ryan and Shoesmith (1987), tellingly subtitled ‘businessmen as stars’, and culminating in Turner (1994). Bond was ideal as an exemplar of changes in the popular Australian representation of capitalists in the 1980s, not only because of the heavy media coverage of his takeovers and private life, but also because he led the successful challenge for the America's Cup in 1983, which was a powerful component in ‘the alignment between representations of the interests of business and those of the nation’ (Turner 1994, p. 23). Although both pieces talk of him as a celebrity and a star and trace elements of his media profile, that is not their purpose; rather the authors discuss how business itself and the markets became aestheticized sites of performance (Turner 1994, pp. 18–19). The America's Cup made it possible for sports sociologist Jim McKay (1991) to contribute to this analysis, though inasmuch as he engaged in celebrity study it was of then Prime Minister Bob Hawke as much as of Bond (pp. 24–29).

Despite being about Federal Treasurer, later Prime Minister, Paul Keating, rather than Bond, Morris (1992) is related to that project. Examining her own reactions to Keating's televised performance speaking about the economy during the late 1980s, in the light of shifts in the representation and practice of economics itself, Morris asserts that more than ‘aestheticizing politics, Keating was “eroticizing economics”’ (p. 50). Although thoroughly located in Australian data of the early 1990s, it remains both one of the most sophisticated examinations of a fan's response to a celebrity and most powerful contributions to cultural analysis of an economic shift available from any scholar.

Running in parallel with this was Wark's (1988, 1993, 1999) consideration of music and politics looking at singer and politician Peter Garrett. The study of Midnight Oil frontman Garrett, modulated across three appearances all concerning his environmental politics as much as his music. It first appeared (1988) not long after Garrett's failed bid for a Senate seat for the Nuclear Disarmament Party, changed title only for the 1993 collection and was expanded for its 1999 appearance, which predated his shift to the Australian Labour Party, election and subsequent appointment as Minister variously for Environment and School Education. Wark called Garrett an organic intellectual, though the essay mainly examined authenticity through distinguishing popular from pre-packaged music. There was no mention of Garrett's private life or his appearance. In the 1999 book, the study comprised part of a larger section on music celebrity with another chapter looking at the internationalization of singers Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave, and an introductory chapter mentioning more domestic musicians, a couple of scandals of the day and a long précis of Marshall's (1997) Celebrity and Power. Later sections of the book on Australian Federal politics included a discussion of Paul Keating with elements addressing his celebrity.

John Hartley's (1996) Popular Reality considered changes in journalistic practice including much greater personalization and centring discussion around the media treatment of Nelson Mandela and Australian actor, Sophie Lee. Of the works mentioned in this section, this is the first since Langer's Media Culture and Society article to have been published neither by an Australian publisher (or the Australian arm of an international one) nor in an Australian journal.

Langer's (1998) Tabloid Television included a chapter entitled ‘The Especially Remarkable’, Langer's second major contribution to the field. Locating himself and the book in media studies and journalism, he conducted a survey of four weeks of news on four Australian television channels to underpin his examination of the ‘other news’, those ‘soft’ stories which customarily conclude a bulletin. His discussion of celebrities is determined by their occurrence in his sample and includes international entertainers and members of royalty visiting Australia, as well as the then Australian cricket captain, Graham Yallop, marathoner Tony Rafferty, and actor Reg Livermore. The actual identity of the celebrities is unimportant to his argument, since they are included in a discussion of a distinctive and regularly overlooked type of journalism, rather than being the focus of his analysis. They do however help ground the work, published internationally, as Australian.

A year earlier than that, the Re:Public (1997) collection Planet Diana explored the ‘Global Mourning’ over the death of Princess Diana, focusing both on the popular response and on ‘the icon’. Lumby (1999) on changes in the tabloid media in the 1990s targeted both an academic and a (an educated) popular audience. She is concerned quite extensively with celebrity, using international, national and internationally known Australian examples, like model Elle McPherson and actor Nicole Kidman. Both books came from Australian publishers.

I have concentrated on books more than articles here, in part because it was possible to do so for that period more than is now the case, but one of the most thoughtful interventions in the study of celebrity by an Australian was John Frow's (1998) International Journal of Cultural Studies examination of Elvis Presley. The value of this piece lies in its outlining a method for cultural analysis of the conjunction of celebrity and religion, a method sadly not adopted in subsequent forays into the conjunction. Frow talked of stars more often than celebrities and while he acknowledged his Australian location, he named no Australian celebrities. Jon Stratton's (1997) study of the art of Brett Whiteley for an Australian journal obviously did, but it is principally concerned with the Australian artist's attitudes to Romanticism. The emphasis on his biography, contextualized politically, and his reputation, move it towards a consideration of his celebrity, though that word is not used.

The dominant characteristic of the work of this period is that the analysis of individual celebrity figures was in the service of more general contentions: about the economy or other aspects of politics, injustice, art appreciation or changes in journalistic practices. Alternatively the focus was on the reactions of consumers of celebrity, whether Morris herself, those who mourned Diana, or who revered Elvis. Overwhelmingly the work was Australian published. Yet even in those few pieces that were not, where non-Australian celebrities were mentioned, they were examined in Australian texts or through their Australian reception. The self-sufficient analysis of celebrity texts that was later to become so common was foreshadowed only by Wark's (1999) discussion of Kylie and Cave.

Fame Games and Australian celebrities

It seems not unreasonable to trace part at least of Turner's insistence on attention being paid to the industrial dimension of celebrity to the work done for Fame Games, but such work, like the audience studies Holmes and Redmond call for, requires serious funding if it is to have representative rigour, and the ‘glossy topic’ quality of the field makes attracting this difficult. We were fortunate the Australian Research Council supported our investigation of the celebrity industry from 1997 to 1999. In the final chapter of the book, having demonstrated the major presence of celebrity coverage in the increased role of publicity in Australian media and warned of the limitations of wholesale condemnation or celebration, we noted some important aspects of the consumption of the celebrity commodity. The first was that for most of the audience of celebrity stories, the celebrity is the only commodity being consumed; that there is no follow through to their other cultural products (p. 169). Furthermore even in contemplating the functions of celebrity in identity formation, most consumption of publicity is distracted, diluted and simply not of great moment (pp. 169–170). In this we were in accord with Joke Hermes’ (1995) work on the reception of celebrity in Dutch magazines. On the other hand, particular celebrities carry significant meaning for individual consumers and are used by the industry and the audience to convey identifiable values, so the specificity of critique of selected instances remains important (pp. 178).

The survey of celebrity stories across a sample of Australian television and print media conducted in 1997 as the first stage of the Fame Games investigation was limited in how much it could claim by the size of the sample and the paucity of earlier data, although a substantial growth in the presence of Australian celebrities compared to 20 years earlier was clear. When looking at the geographic origin of the individuals in those stories, 36 percent of the Australians mentioned had international links of various kinds, Mel Gibson being the example cited there (pp. 17–18). Given that the great majority of Australian celebrities had no element of international recognizability, this indicates an over-representation of stories about those who had. There is nothing odd about this. Figures like Gibson, Nicole Kidman or Michael Hutchence had celebrity of greater magnitude and thus newsworthiness than, for instance former test cricketer Max Walker or comedian Wendy Harmer, no matter their domestic recognizability. We identified the former grouping as ‘national–international’ and probably continued their over-representation as examples in the resulting publication, but most of the individuals discussed still had only national celebrity.

Kylie Minogue as celebrity example

The cover of Fame Games uses a photograph of Kylie Minogue at London's Madame Tussauds with her arms around her own waxwork figure. It is a very rich image encapsulating many of the themes of the study, both the promotional work celebrities engage in for themselves and other entities and, more implicitly, the creation of the separate persona of the celebrity behind or beside which a ‘real’ person may exist. Whoever the celebrity depicted – and such pictures are a standard promotional tool for the waxworks attraction – the photograph would have served well, but a study of Australian celebrity required an Australian figure and Kylie had the international (or at least British, given that the book's publisher was Cambridge University Press) recognizability that meant she was ideal. That we actually discussed aspects of the management of her career while she was appearing on the television soap Neighbours was probably unimportant to the cover's graphic designers. Kylie is the go-to Australian celebrity more widely. She appears (collaged with Paul Keating) on the cover of Wark (1999) and is discussed inside, Lumby (1999) considers her more briefly, but Hartley (1996) uses her across three chapters (though Nicole Kidman appears on his cover). The only essay in Philip Hayward's (1992) collection From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism to provide a scholarly analysis of a celebrity was Idena Rex (1992) talking of Kylie.

It may be that referring to Kylie in non-condemnatory ways is a distinguishing feature of Australian cultural, and subsequently celebrity, studies. Her usefulness may be diminishing, though; the three references to her in the first edition of Understanding Celebrity are reduced to one for the 2013 version and there have been few studies since those occasioned by her breast cancer (see e.g. Bonner and McKay 2006). John Carroll (2010) mentions her as an instance of the ‘sneering condescension’ with which celebrities may be treated, though leaving unclear whether he too is sneering (p. 489). Celebrity scholars from other countries do not discuss her very often at all. She is referenced occasionally in scholarly writing on popular music, usually in unfavourable terms. British academic Helen Davies (2001) uses her in an analysis of the dismissive treatment of female performers in the British musical press. On a personal note, when I was writing a chapter for the (UK) Open University text Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Bonner 2005) I had to fight the course team to use her rather than yet another (American) male singer as an example. There was no similar complaint about my inclusion of Kidman or the Australian cricket team.

The impact of changes in publishing practices

I have already indicated that Australian book length works discussing celebrity were more common before than after 2000. In part this is a consequence of changes in publishing practices. Several publishers producing cultural studies-related material ceased operation, others narrowed their lists substantially, while yet others closed their Australian branches. Australian scholars now have few local publishing options for monographs or collections. Morris (2006) describes the situation accurately as one where international publishing consortia pressure ‘Australian critics who seek an academic base to sell their work in the first instance to trans-Atlantic readers as a condition of its publication and thus, in the fullness of time, its distribution to Australians’ (p. 4, her emphasis). The wider readership international English-language publication brings is accompanied by the potential for a commensurate reputation but at the expense of a fully Australian focus. Editors all too often ask for, at the least, comparative American material and authors quickly learn to exemplify their argument's claims with celebrities drawn from Hollywood's A-list or sporting or musical equivalents.

It did not happen abruptly as the millennium arrived; two books closer to the precursor publications in cultural studies demonstrate the transition. Susan Hopkins’ (2002) Girl Heroes examines the Girl Power phenomenon in the wake of the success of the Spice Girls, though drawing more on women's studies than celebrity frameworks. Publisher, Pluto Press Australia, categorized it as ‘Feminist Studies/Popular Culture’. While it draws on many international examples, it is solidly located as an Australian work, calling on Australian television and magazines and referencing national and national–international celebrities (including Kylie) substantially. Toby Miller's (2001) Sportsex from an American academic publisher, but by a then long-term American-resident Australian, argues optimistically that changed attitudes to gender and sexuality were observable in Australian and American sporting celebrities.

The paucity of Australian monographs subsequently has occurred at a time of considerable growth in the numbers of relevant journals internationally. Although a couple of these have an Austral(as)ian focus, some local ones have moved offshore or folded, so there has not been much increase in Australian located and edited outlets. Continuity is provided by Media International Australia and Cultural Studies Review, for which celebrity is only occasionally a topic, as well as by Continuum and the Journal of Australian Studies that have both more often carried relevant articles. While Continuum has always been editorially located in Australia, it publishes much with neither content nor authorial connection to the country, though still more with such connections than journals located offshore. The Journal of Australian Studies has carried many articles on famous Australians in both of the periods considered here. The majority is of historical figures and employ historical methods, but ‘celebrity’ is more likely to appear in the title of articles published after 2000, as it does for Jacqueline Zara Wilson's (2004) study of Chopper Read and dark tourism.

A potentially hospitable recent addition is the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. Of the eight issues published at the time of writing only three articles had concerned celebrities, none were by Australian academics or about Australian celebrities. Lindsay Neill and Claudia Bell's (2013) fine examination of New Zealand celebrities in stories promoting pie carts (mobile food vendors) in the period 1950–1970 is similar to material carried in Journal of Australian Studies.

It is understandable, but the practice of Australian scholars writing on internationally recognizable celebrities, including ones with no Australian connection, rather than ones familiar only to Australians has intensified in the recent period. The number of international journals carrying articles by Australian scholars or (less commonly) on Australian celebrities means that the survey that follows is necessarily selective, although particular attention has been paid to journals editorially located in Australia, especially those mentioned above.

This is not solely an Australian problem, but shared with others outside the English-language publishing centres of the UK and USA. Wanting to write on celebrities lacking recognition beyond the home nation becomes even more problematic for smaller geographic areas. Ruth McElroy and Rebecca Williams (2011) coin the term ‘localebrity’ (p. 190) and explore its implications in a study considering reality television participants on a programme screened only in Wales. Olivier Driessens (2012) has conducted extensive research on celebrity in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. At the 2012 International Celebrity Studies conference in Melbourne, he sensibly chose to speak about the methodological implications of his work rather than its case studies. The burden of his argument was the importance of interviewing the celebrities themselves, which chimed with McElroy and Williams’ practice and showed an advantage of small locations. Access to localebrities is easier to obtain than to those of greater magnitude. Difficulties of access mean that almost all celebrity studies scholars in major English-speaking countries have drawn their material for analysis from celebrity news and profiles.

Australian studies of celebrity post-2000

Fame Games was thoroughly located in the Australian situation. Comparisons with the UK and USA were made, but the national specificity of the industry examined was the primary concern. Only as a consequence of providing the Australian data were wider claims about celebrity made. The book thus differs substantially from Turner's subsequent solo celebrity publications where celebrity is considered as a global phenomenon and the overwhelming majority of celebrities instanced have international fame. Eight Australian celebrities and one pop group are mentioned in each edition of Understanding Celebrity (2004 and 2013), six and the pop group recur; Dannii Minogue and Nicole Kidman are only in the first edition, while Cate Blanchett and Peter Garrett are added for the second. With the exception of the two actors just mentioned, Kylie Minogue and possibly comedian Barry Humphries/Dame Edna Everage, the Australians mentioned need the explanatory introductions for a non-Australian readership to understand the points they are illustrating. Understanding Celebrity is aimed at an international market by an international publisher; it is located in Australian celebrity studies only because Turner is its pre-eminent practitioner.

The other major relevant monograph from an international publisher is Redmond's (2014) Celebrity and the Media, targeted, like Turner (2004, 2013) at the international textbook market. It takes a distinctively idiosyncratic approach, valuably concerning itself substantially with the emotional content of audience engagement with celebrities. Most examples are American, with British second and also a couple of Asian references. Only two Australia celebrities receive extended consideration: national–international Cate Blanchett, whose work promoting skincare brand SK-II allows a discussion of whiteness (pp. 58–62) and Charlotte Dawson, not an international name, demonstrating the damage celebrity trolling can do (p. 105). (This latter has become more powerful since the time of writing, following Dawson's 2014 suicide.) A few other national–international Australian examples, including Kylie, are mentioned in passing.

My (necessarily selective) article survey reveals that while it is not essential to use non-Australian or national–international celebrities to be published internationally, it is common to call on them both there and in nationally located sites. Even in instances where the celebrity is non-Australian, it is very rare for the Australian context of a study to be disavowed completely. Most commonly, as with Jeanette Delamoir's (2008) discussion of star bodies concentrating on Renée Zellweger, by drawing on Australian source material, here through her Australian magazine coverage. Patsy McCarthy and Caroline Hatcher's (2005) analysis of Richard Branson as a celebrity entrepreneur only briefly acknowledges his operations in Australia, but uses Australian newspapers for primary data.

Sometimes there is a more complicated approach. In the endnote to an essay on literary celebrity for the Redmond and Holmes Reader, Wenche Ommundsen (2007) acknowledged support for the project underpinning it and added, as if in apology: ‘A number of illustrations given in this paper reflect the specifically Australian focus of its empirical research, though most, we argue, are indicative of trends in public literary culture world-wide’ (p. 254). Even so, Salman Rushdie is her principal example and the (primarily non-pictorial) ‘illustrations’ were of writers’ festivals and other literary promotions. With the single exception of the non-celebrity Australian author Rosie Scott, all other writers named in the piece were British and the non-literary celebrities British or American.

The first two instances of national–international celebrity use come from Continuum, as noted above pitched more internationally than most other Australian located journals. Tania Lewis’ (2001) examination of the contemporary celebrity intellectual looks at Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes starting with the reception of his television programme Beyond the Fatal Shore in Australia (bad) compared to the USA and UK (good). It thus uses a (then) internationally recognizable figure to make a global case but against a decisively Australian setting.

Katrina Jaworski's (2008) examination of gendered representations of suicide is centred on the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. She uses Australian newspaper coverage as primary evidence. Internationally known Australian singer Hutchence anchors the article, its title and the analytic use of spectacle, even though more space is devoted to British celebrity Yates, whose accidental death/suicide carries the weight of the gender argument.

The next might be seen as a special case, since, while Social Semiotics has been editorially located in the UK since 2002, it began as Australian. Felicity Collins’ (2008) study of ‘ethical violence’ discusses Russell Crowe in an (Australian) chat show and indigenous actor David Gulpilil in a documentary, acknowledging her choice to be of ‘internationalized’ Australians (p. 194). She argues that these instances provide opportunities for both celebrities to reject conservative depictions of, respectively, Crowe's Australian masculinity and Gulpilil's ‘divided’ Aboriginality (pp. 198–199). The close attention to Australianness through the particularities of the two celebrities, the texts in which they appear and the time of screening complicates the view of the identity work celebrities perform discussed in other analyses.

That it is possible to publish national material in an international journal is evidenced by Brent McDonald and Daniel Eagles’ (2012) examination of Australian diver Matthew Mitcham as a gay sporting icon, and by Jason Wilson's (2011) brief item on celebrity and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Both appear in Celebrity Studies (the first in a special Olympics issue) which could be argued to be more understanding of an Australian viewpoint given the co-editorship of Sean Redmond and the status of Australian celebrity scholars generally. That does not apply to Media, Culture and Society where Jason Bainbridge and Jane Bestwick's (2010) study of celebrity presenters appeared. It is based in an empirical study of Australian newsreading, but draws on American comparisons to make internationally relevant points. In comparison, Bainbridge's (2009) solo article in an Australian journal is centred on national reporting of a local mining disaster. My own study (Bonner 2007) of a local lifestyle and fashion celebrity appeared in the resolutely national Australian Cultural History.

The survey reveals that Australianness is most evident in the source of the data drawn on rather than the celebrity's nationality or the journal's location, though all are significant.

An alternate way of making Australian celebrities internationally ‘legible’ is to analyze local versions of international television formats. Charles Fairchild (2006, 2008) looks at Idol, while Robert Payne's (2009) study of the performance of masculinity by Australian celebrities Tom Williams and Jake Wall examines local versions of Dancing with the Stars and Dancing on Ice. A variant considers an Australian programme sold offshore, as is the case with Julia Eberhart's (2013, 2014) work on the reception of the shows of Australian comedian Chris Lilley.

The Australian celebrity most discussed in the literature for this period was Steve Irwin. In contrast to the Australian cultural and celebrity studies use of Kylie as an internationally recognizable referent, examinations of Irwin's celebrity, embodiment of Australian national identity and role in the growth of the action-adventure-hero presenter in natural history television, are mainly written by non-Australian residents (Chris 2006, Rayner 2007, Brockington 2008, Brown 2010). Australian environmental researchers Jesse K. Northfield and Clive R. McMahon's (2010) argument that he functioned as an environmental celebrity is actually a riposte to Brown's article on reactions to Irwin's death naming him a conservation hero. The only major Australian piece, Folker Hanusch's (2009) examination of commemorative journalism through the coverage of Irwin's death approaches a celebrity study through considering the media's role in mythologizing him. The comparative silence by Australian scholars in conjunction with the atypical non-Australian interest leaves this an anomalous situation in Australian celebrity studies.

Conclusion

One of the problems posed for an analysis of the state of Australian celebrity studies is that so many of its researchers, most notably Turner, Marshall and Redmond, are leading international scholars in the field. They publish and speak internationally, do not disavow their nationality, but rarely use national examples. Even when they do, the point is rarely to talk of national concerns. Marshall (2010) devotes equal space to Tiger Woods and Australian yachtswoman Jessica Watson, but this continues his arguments about the (celebrity) cultural shifts occasioned by social media. It is not more about Australia through Watson, than it is about the USA through Woods. In conjunction with the publishing changes which have led to fewer local monographs and more scholars publishing internationally on internationally recognizable celebrities, the existence of Australian celebrity studies cannot be regarded as secure.

This need not be entirely deplored. Celebrity itself is more transnational, and not just through American dominance. Australians of varied ethnic backgrounds follow K-pop and J-pop celebrities, Bollywood stars and European or Latin American footballers. Our cultural studies’ heritage though properly requires us to pay attention to context. Turner's own work on the continuing significance of the national in television studies (see e.g. Turner and Tay 2009) should inform celebrity studies too. Transnational and international celebrity does not eradicate distinctive national manifestations and they need to be investigated, especially by people familiar with the culture in which they exist.

This article has examined whether one of the things that has happened to Australian cultural studies was the fracturing off from it of a sub-discipline of Australian celebrity studies, with a concomitant effect that some scholars who would once have contributed to the parent field now have another focus. The answer is far from clear-cut. Studies of Australian celebrities emerged in and from Australian cultural studies, as did Australian scholars of celebrity, but it is hard to identify distinctively Australian celebrity studies post-2000. Few if any Australian scholars sustain a career solely focusing on celebrity, but quite a few spend time writing on it. Yet the integration of celebrity into a broader analysis of Australian culture that characterized the earlier period is certainly less evident. We do not ‘do’ celebrity distinctively here now – or if we do, scholars are not paying attention to it.

Notes on Contributor

Frances Bonner is an Honorary Research Associate Professor in Television and Popular Culture in the English, Media Studies and Art History School at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on non-fiction television, celebrity, magazines and most recently, adaptation. In addition to many articles and chapters on these topics, she is the author of Personality Presenters (Ashgate, 2011), Ordinary Television (Sage, 2003) and co-author, with Graeme Turner and David Marshall, of Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.