Frances Bonner

Telling stories: Breast cancer pathographies in Australian women's magazines

Womens magazines provide an important source of health information for their readers. This information is published across a variety of texts including personal narratives of illness and disease (pathographies). This study examines a recent set of such stories specifically related to breast cancer and finds that these have particular tabloid characteristics. It compares narratives of various celebrities with those of ordinary women, finding that the latter are more sensationalised. Both types of pathographies over-emphasise certain risk factors, but nevertheless provide a mechanism for women to share the experience of serious illness

Evaluating Illness in Women’s Magazines

Traditionally, mass-market women’s magazines have been a significant source of health information for their readers and include information about raising children, maintaining health, and growing older as well as dealing with grief, chronic illness, and disability. This information occurs in medical information articles, advice columns, and stories that relate the personal experience of illness. This study focuses on the last category, personal illness narratives, and looks at these stories over the past 20 years in three high-circulation Australian mass-market magazines to investigate their characteristics and possible functions. The approach used is qualitative with an emphasis on textual features and discourse structures and investigates the evaluation phase of the narratives. It finds four major themes in the evaluations and suggests that these are used to demonstrate the resilience of the human condition and to give inspiration to the readers.

Personalizing current affairs without becoming tabloid The case of Australian Story

The television programme Australian Story is located in the News and Current Affairs section of the Australian public broadcaster, yet it does not follow a conventional current affairs format. Each week, it presents a personal profile of either a high-profile or an ordinary Australian, and it does so without the on-screen presence of an interviewer. The paper argues that this more documentary approach represents a feminizing of the current affairs format rather than a shift into a tabloid approach. It considers a number of examples to demonstrate the persistence of themes such as altruism, perseverance and the importance of family, but also human weakness. It demonstrates that Australian Story is able to operate as a current affairs programme both by augmenting contemporary news coverage and being a rich site for working through a range of issues.

The first encounter: Observations on the chronology of encounter with some adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books

The article argues for the necessity of taking into account not only the chronology of adaptation but also the chronology of encounter, using as a starting point an instance of an adaptation student who had seen the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland as a child many times, long before her subsequent encounter with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It considers a selection of adaptations of Carroll’s work, including the 1950 Disney television promotion of its 1951 film and the 1966 Jonathan Miller’s BBC adaptation, to explore the probable consequences of different sequences of encounter.

EARLY MULTI-PLATFORMING: Television food programmes, cookbooks and other print spin-offs

Early examples of the re-purposing of material from one medium to one or several others are examined through various cases of television cooking programmes and associated print materials. The presenter was the key property uniting the materials and the first television cook to be examined here is Philip Harben, who started on the BBC in 1946 and whose first spin-off book appeared in 1951. A small discussion of Julia Childs American work precedes the main focus, which is on the British-born Graham Kerr, from his first television work in New Zealand in 1961, through his period in Australia from 1965, to his move to Canada in 1969. During this period the serious hardcover publications were not directly associated with television, while those which stressed the televisual relationship had lower production values and needed to justify their existence with explicit commentary on the service they were providing to viewers. It is these latter however which provide valuable information about the early everyday experiences of watching television.

Fixing relationships in 2-4-1 transformations

Most makeover shows, whether they take houses, gardens, bodies or behaviour as the site of the transformation to be effected, do so on the assumption that the lives of their subjects will thereby be improved. A life with a redecorated house or a redesigned garden is presented unproblematically as a better life, just as one with larger breasts, a reshaped nose or quieter children will be. The improvement comes not so much from getting the ‘free stuff’ as from the lifestyle benefit in the way one’s identity is more accurately indicated by the new presentation. Occasionally a small comment in the set-up or the reveal will mention easier entertaining in the newly provided spaces, more dates from the enhanced appearance, or a more relaxed family life with the tamed toddlers. For the most part, though, this goes without saying unless there is a very strong component of what I have elsewhere called the ‘fairy godmother’ role of television (Bonner 2003, 127–8). In these cases, because the recipients of televisual largesse are presented as particularly deserving (the heroic firefighter whose damaged face is rebuilt in a cosmetic surgery makeover, or the family recovering from the early death of a breadwinning father given a full house and garden renovation), the presenters have the opportunity to expatiate at greater length on the consequent non-material benefits of their gifts. This paper, though, is concerned with programmes that deal with ordinary recipients but are actually designed around a two-part change; there is an explicit acknowledgement that the subjects have more than one problem and that something more than a lifestyle solution grounded in a visible or material transformation is needed. This could be part of a nascent shift in attitudes to consumption. A particular concern is with the way in which the presenters of these expanded programmes handle this situation. For the most part, presenters have expertise in material transformations, so attention will be paid to how these people operate when the makeover is affective. The study will consider four primetime shows, two British and two Australian: in Trinny and Susannah Undress (UK, ITV, 2006) the well-known clothing arbiters fixed couples’ wardrobes and addressed their relationship problems; in the other British programme, Your Money or Your Wife (Channel 4, 2006), Cesarina Holm-Kander got tough on people in debt, also with a view to its benefit for their relationships; the Australian show DIY Rescue (C9, 2003) engaged in completing house and garden makeovers started earlier by the owners, and improved the relationships the unfinished renovations had disturbed; and Agony Aunts (ABC, 2006) dispensed advice aimed at improving the subjects’ finances and sex life. The paper thus analyses two programmes involving conventional material makeovers and two considering matters which aim to transform less material, or at least less visual, concerns. The combination makes it

Celebrity, work and the reality-talent show: Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars

The highly popular international format Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars is an example of those reality-television formats that put celebrities into direct competition with one another. The article considers why such shows, and indeed competitive reality-television shows generally, are popular with broadcasters in the post-broadcast era. The ability to cast celebrities as in-house promotions for other network shows is identified as one element of this. Examination of series of Strictly Come Dancing and the Australian version of Dancing with the Stars from 2010 to 2012 also reveals that the format provides a valuable site for the valorisation of work, although as is usual for celebrity discourse, the work of actually being a celebrity, including cross-promotion, is not part of this. A distinctive aspect of this particular format is a related sub-theme of incompetence, and this article explores the utility of this in terms of generating interest in this popular format.

Lifestyle television: Gardening and the good life

Community gardens or ‘organized gardening projects’ have of late received renewed impetus as a form of governmental intervention that responds to increasing concerns about (amongst other things) obesity, food security and community cohesiveness. Scholars have likewise responded with keen analytical interest, deploying manifold conceptual lenses including Foucaultian governmentality, which explores how and to what ends such interventions come about. In this chapter, we discuss empirical evidence of organized garden projects in Australia and the Philippines through a ‘realist governmentality’ approach, which examines the actual impacts of interventions on subjects, and potential ‘disjuncture’ between governmental aims and actual outcomes. We argue that these interventions can be read as enacting the disciplinary and normalizing intentions of contemporary modes of governing, in-keeping with the work of governmentality theorists. However, through joint action, exposure to shared vulnerabilities, and shifts in perspectives on the self and others, these interventions exceed their governmental intentions. This occurs not through ‘disjuncture’ per se, but through the proliferation of (potential) sites and connections of cultivating ethical praxis, which overreach the spatial and ontological confines of these projects’ initial intention.

Personality Presenters : Television's Intermediaries with Viewers

Personality Presenters explores the role of the television presenter, analysing the distinct skills possessed by different categories of host and the expectations and difficulties that exist with regard to the promotion of the various films, books, consumer and cultural products with which they are associated. Offering detailed case studies of internationally recognised presenters, as well comparisons between national presenters from the UK and Australia, this book provides a rich discussion of television presenters as significant conduits in the movement of ideas.

The mediated Asian-Australian food identity: from Charmaine Solomon to Masterchef Australia

This article considers the significance of food competitions, not just in helping ex-contestants to achieve careers in various food media sites, but also the consequences of this, together with televised food programs generally, in making Australian television more fully represent a multicultural nation, most specifically its Asian-Australian citizens. In 1964, Charmaine Solomon came second in a Womans Day recipe competition. This, combined with her earlier training as a journalist in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, led the magazines food editor, Margaret Fulton, to offer her a job. This began her long career as the leading Australian writer on Asian food. More recently, television and shows like MasterChef Australia have replaced magazine competitions in providing a breakthrough into a mediated career in the food industry. Again it was as second place-getter in the very first series of MasterChef that Poh Ling Yeow achieved her break and found her place. Television requires and bestows celebrity, and Poh provides a valuable counterpoint to Solomon here. Several other Asian-Australian contestants have similarly flourished after exposure on the program, like second series winner Adam Liaw. It has become evident that cooking competitions have become one of the principal sites in prime-time Australian television for Asian faces to be seen as a matter of course. While scholars of, and commentators on, Australian multiculturalism are rightly scathing about popular statements claiming a better Australian food culture as an index of the success of post-war migration policies, it appears that Australian television and other media continue to find this conjunction fruitful.