Media

In May 1981, I joined The Age, where, more or less, I have stayed put. On my first night one of the news subeditors said, ‘Let’s have a drink’. Whereupon he led me away from the news desk, along the scrofulous green carpet, past the ramshackle assortment of desks and typewriters, and straight into the men’s room. Fleet Street used to have a bar, behind St Bride’s Church, called the City Golf Club, which was neither sporting nor exclusive in any way. But The Age went one better, with a late-night hostelry on the third floor of its ugly Spencer Street building that served as a drinking hole because the others were all closed by that hour.

In the mid twentieth century, American television was dominated by two talking horses called Mr Ed. The first, the equine hero of a sitcom also called Mr Ed (catchier than his real name, Bamboo Harvester), twisted his mouth more or less in sync with a dubbed basso profondo voice. He had lots to say, mostly preceded by an often disdainful reference to his hapless owner, Wilbur, the only person Mr Ed talked to, whose name came out as ‘Will-BURRRRRRR!’. This mildly popular series ran for six seasons.

Beginning as a voice on ABC radio, Ray Martin became a face familiar to most Australians. He reported from the United States for Four Corners in the 1960s and 1970s, was one of the original reporters on 60 Minutes from 1978, presented the Midday show from 1984 to 1993, and twice hosted A Current Affair (ACA). As he notes, he was the face of Channel 9 in the 1990s, also hosting Carols by Candlelight, election debates and assorted specials. But just in case anyone is in any doubt as to whom this book is about, Heinemann has plastered the cover with Ray: Stories of My Life: The Autobiography. Martin’s signature is added for good measure.

Movie Of The Week. The MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour. Helen Vatsikopoulos. Andrea Stretton. Tales From a Suitcase. Pria Viswalingam. Italian Serie A Football. Annette Sun Wah. These are just a few examples of SBS programs and personalities that helped me – and no doubt many others – negotiate the fetid swamp that was Australian television in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the swamp is a lot bigger and the stench even worse, but does SBS still provide an effective alternative?

Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.

Bob Burton is not one to pull punches: early in Inside Spin he describes the public relations (PR) industry as one dominated by a ‘culture of secrecy’ with its practitioners operating ‘on the basis that they are most successful when they are nowhere to be seen’. That the industry is largely unregulated adds to the sense of unease that many Australians feel about its activities.

Margaret Simons is a writer familiar to her readers. There she was in Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra press gallery (1999), first driving with her husband and young children to the national capital, then following Michelle Grattan’s blue dress around Parliament House. Here she is again in The Content Makers: Understanding the media in Australia, telling us about her experiences in daily journalism, her move into freelance journalism, writing for the e-mail news service Crikey, and attending last year’s infamous 2006 Walkley Awards dinner.

In October 2006, the Australian Literary Review published a list of the forty most influential Australian intellectuals, the results of a peer survey undertaken by the Australian Public Intellectual Network. Meaghan Morris ranked seventh, sharing her berth with Tim Costello and Inga Clendinnen. Leaving aside the problems, exclusions, and biases that attend the compilation of such lists, I was heartened to see Morris’s name in the top ten. Theory and cultural studies have long been demonised outside the academy, and their position within the university system remains subject to sniping. As a writer, critic and editor, Morris’s work over the last two decades has defined Australian cultural studies – indeed, she co-edited Australian Cultural Studies (1993) – and the results of this survey suggest at the very least a reluctant recognition of her contribution to Australian intellectual life. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture is neither a defence of cultural studies nor an overview of Morris’s prodigious career. Rather, it is an eclectic collection of essays, written between 1998 and 1999, which are all more or less obliquely concerned with questions of Australian culture and history. It offers a virtuosic demonstration of the capacities of theoretically informed cultural and historical criticism.

1980: a red-haired girl in my Year Ten art class at John Gardiner High School asked me if I knew there was a radio station that only played ‘that new wave music’. She said it with a measure of contempt in her voice – for me and for it. But I was tempted, and soon became part of 3RRR’s small, staunch audience. A quarter of a century on comes Mark Phillips’s lively, if listy (though no more than Ken Inglis’s ABC histories) narrative of this Melbourne institution’s first thirty years.