Thirty years! I don’t think we ever imagined such longevity when we launched the journal. Our concerns were mundane; where to get the money to publish, meeting deadlines, talking to printers, sorting out our differences, deciding content and a host of other issues confronting naïve but keen self-publishers.
The division of labour was a matter that had to be resolved quickly. Tom demonstrated great aptitude in soliciting articles from friends and rising stars of the academic firmament. His work gave Continuum direction and character, which marked its subsequent success. I focused on the money, distribution and marketing. After a couple of years, Tom took complete control of the journal and we agreed control would revert to me after five years. When that time came, I knew I couldn’t match Tom’s prodigious output; two huge volumes of essays a year on ground breaking topics. The bar had been set too high.
When I assumed the editorship, I was fortunate to have the support of colleagues, in particular David McKie (at Auckland now, I think) and Alan McKee (now at UTS). We reorganised the editorial structure and Alan became the editor while I assumed the lofty role of Senior Editor with an open brief. It was my firm belief that we couldn’t continue to self-publish so I began the search for a commercial publisher.
In retrospect this proved easier than anticipated. I was chatting to David Birch (then editor of Social Semiotics) at a conference in Melbourne about the issue when he pointed to a man across the room and said something like ‘There’s your answer’. Jerry Mayer was the Carfax representative in Australia and they were actively seeking journals to publish. After a brief discussion, we signed Continuum to the Carfax stable and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Carfax became Taylor and Francis, which became Routledge, and so it goes. It was always a pleasure to work with Jerry and David Green, the Director of Journals at Carfax/T&F/Routledge but the move was not without its critics. For a start subscriptions tripled! From an editorial position, however, it was a huge relief with all the minutiae of editing taken away leaving us to edit the journal.
When you begin a media and cultural studies journal you need to find something that distinguishes it from its competitors. In our case, we made several decisions quite early on that I think shaped Continuum for the future. We decided the journal would be identified with Perth (to counter what we perceived to be a distinctive bias in Australian academia) but at the same time be resolutely Australian. Our previous effort, The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies was handed to Methuen, who promptly internationalized it creating Cultural Studies, which became the preeminent journal in the field. We like the idea of being eminent and even international but we also theorized in a globalizing world that localism had its advantages.
Our second major decision was to create an active advisory board of established and emerging scholars. We were fortunate that so many of the people we approached agreed to come on board and give generously of their time. For us it was a godsend as they formed the basis of our review panels, which allowed us to publish so many incisive articles from the outset and helped establish the reputation of Continuum.
Another important decision was to publish themed issues. In fact, our very first issue covered Australian cinema of the 1950s, which Tom correctly identified as a neglected era; I found the issue being cited recently in a piece on Australian cinema. The success of thematic publishing encouraged us to look for emerging topics and subjects and scholars working in what appeared to be marginal areas. For example, we were among the first to publish a sustained critical look at Asian cinema and Buffy the Vampire Slayer later on.
To achieve these aims, we also decided to encourage young scholars making Continuum a vehicle for new, fresh and sometimes contentious views, which was, I think exciting.
The active pronoun in this piece is ‘we’: Continuum was never the preserve of one person or one school of thought. Indeed Tom O’Regan, Alec McHoul and Toby Miller once went to great pains to declare that they did not subscribe to any metatheoretical position (I think I was excluded from this statement because of my interest in Harold Innis, a totalising thinker if ever there was one). The point here is that Continuum was and has always been a collective effort produced through the hard work of people like Alan McKee, Mark Gibson, Ian Hutchison, Greg Noble and Panizza Allmark in editorial positions and Ken Staples and other who acted as editorial assistants. This is why Continuum has lasted for thirty years.
Finally, regrets? Many, but one in particular. At early stage, we commissioned Sam Rohdie to review Graeme Turner’s book on Nationalism. Sam didn’t like it and wrote a harsh review. We agonized over whether to publish or not but of course we did and immediately recognized the error of our ways. Such are the perils of inexperience and self-publishing!
Honorary Professor, ECU/University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh
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