Cultural nationalism, Australian media studies, and Tom O’Regan

ABSTRACT

This article focuses upon the context within which much of Tom O’Regan’s early work took place, and which this work helped to frame. The importance of a particular formation of cultural nationalism to the beginnings of media and cultural studies in Australia is no longer front of mind for most of us today as we confront the challenges of a dramatically reconfigured transnational media landscape. However, it was particularly important to the development of these fields over the 1980s and 1990s. Initially most closely collected with the case being made for government support of the resurgent Australian film industry, it also became crucial to what was a distinctive field of concentration of work in Australian media studies: the link between a critical media studies and an interest in the formation of cultural policy in the national interest. The article discusses this tendency in, and its influence upon, Tom O’Regan’s pioneering contribution to Australian film, media and cultural studies, before turning to the more recent shifts that took place in his work as it went beyond cultural nationalism to engage with the emerging issues around the rise of the platform.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian media studies
• Tom O’Regan
• Australian cultural studies
• cultural nationalism
• cultural policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This event is available online at https://communication-arts.uq.edu.au/memory-professor-tom-oregan

2. And at this point, I should acknowledge that much of my own work over the period I am going to be discussing would be appropriately described as developing a cultural nationalist’s agenda. I don’t claim to be unaligned myself and don’t deny this analysis does constitute something of a defence of a cultural nationalism that I shared with Tom O’Regan.

3. For an earlier elaboration of this argument, see my interview with Noel King (2014) on the relationship between film studies and the development of cultural studies.

4. Noel King and Deane Williams’ (2014) three volume history of Australian film theory is the most comprehensive account of this. Volume 2, which is comprised of interviews with key participants, adds flesh to the bones of this very brief summary.

5. He was also the editor of the first book series devoted to Australian cultural studies, with the local publishers Allen and Unwin.

6. Tom O’Regan gained his PhD at Griffith and secured his first academic appointment at Murdoch.

7. A number of academics, including Stuart Cunningham, Susan Dermody, and myself, received Department of Foreign Affairs funding to present lectures and teaching programmes promoting Australian cinema overseas

8. This is visible in Tom O’Regan’s various collaborative pieces dealing with the West Australian branch of the industry while he was at Murdoch University (cf O’Regan and Shoesmith 1985), but also in several reports he prepared for the Australian Film Commission (e.g. Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003; Goldsmith and O’Regan 2005).

9. Personally, I recall having an article rejected by the then Media International Australia because it was solely composed of textual analysis; for some time the submission requirements for that journal explicitly excluded such work from consideration for publication.

10. The public advocacy of Philip Adams is usually mentioned in this context but it is also interesting to think of the role played by, for instance, David Stratton through such activities as the various iterations of television’s much loved The Movie Show with Margaret Pomerantz which ran, with some intermissions, from 1986 to 2014.

11. The research programme has the title, Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountability and Media Design, and it can be located at this address: https://communication-arts.uq.edu.au/PlatformMedia

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graeme Turner

Graeme Turner AO is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Among the founding figures of cultural and media studies in Australia, he has published 25 books, and his work has been translated into 11 languages, His most recent publication is Essays in Cultural and Media Studies: In Transition (Routledge, 2020). His connection to Tom O’Regan’s career dates back to the early 1980s, when they both worked in Perth, to serving on the management board of Tom’s Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy at Griffith in the late 1990s, and then as a colleague at the University of Queensland from the early 2000s onwards