Sybil Nolan

Reading The Discovery of India in the Library of an Australian Prime Minister

Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia from 1939 to 1941, and from 1949 to 1966, was an interested actor in the British Empire’s transition during the mid-twentieth century. His library of almost 4,000 volumes contains many books with imperial themes. Nolan uses Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ methods to map the imperial and postcolonial discourse formations in the library’s catalogue. She then focuses on Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946), which the Indian prime minister presented to Menzies. Several early pages in Menzies’ copy are unopened, suggesting he left off reading. By comparing the library’s discourse formations, and reading The Discovery against other texts, Nolan evinces Menzies’ resistance to the British Empire’s devolution. She also demonstrates methods for researching book history under conditions of restricted access.

The Snub: Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club

Bart Ziino’s scholarship illuminated some of the complex reasons behind thousands of Australian men’s failure to enlist for military service in the First World War. This article explores the corresponding complexity of the establishment’s response to non-enlistment. It focuses on the case of the barrister and politician Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club, to investigate how elite gentlemen’s clubs used the concept of ‘fitness for membership’ to punish young, able-bodied non-enlistees by excluding and/or publicly criticising them. It shows that clubs’ treatment of such cases was inconsistent and internally contested, and argues that the apparently honourable discourse of loyalty that was such a fixture of elite groups in the 1920s and 1930s often masked arcane, less honourable agendas. It suggests that the establishment was more likely to punish men like Menzies who had offended doubly: not only by failing to enlist, but also by directly challenging establishment values and power.

David Syme: Man of The Age

Throughout its 160-year existence, the Age’s owners and editors have jealously cultivated its image. ‘Independent. Always.’ its current slogan boasts, as if independence was as publicly desired as ...

Book Review: Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series (Second Edition)RettbergJill Walker, Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series (Second Edition), Polity, Cambridge, 2013, ISBN 9 7807 4566 3654, viii+196 pp., AU

Media International Australia approaches to today’s research on participatory culture and user-generated content. Media Audiences should prove to be a popular textbook for teaching because it takes a balanced approach to the different audience theories. It examines the usefulness of each theory as well as its blind spots, and looks at how it has been taken up and extended, and also how it has been challenged. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific approach and, although a research method may be 50 years old, Sullivan demonstrates how the theory can be applied today by beginning each chapter with a current example. Chapter 2, for example, deals with the media effects theory that emerged from the Payne Fund Studies of the 1930s; however, the chapter begins by applying this theory to the media coverage of the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute shooting. The media was quick to blame the shooter’s video game usage. By using a current example, Sullivan demonstrates how media effects theory is still very much alive. What makes Media Audiences particularly useful as a teaching text is the layout of the book, in particularly the dialogue boxes, which contain easy-to-follow examples, extra information at the end of each chapter that directs students to further readings and in-class exercises. I managed to test one of these exercises out in an Introduction to Communication studies course. I used the book’s exercise on media rituals, which asks students outline the room where they do the majority of their media viewing and then analyse it in class in terms of media rituals, use of space and social interactions. The students had fun doing this exercise, and it created a lively discussion. Finally, the book is not only useful for undergraduate teaching, but would be of great use for new postgraduate students embarking on a research project on audiences because it would help them identify where their project sits in relation to the different approaches to audience studies. – Teresa Rizzo, Media and Communications, University of Sydney Walker Rettberg, Jill, Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series (Second Edition), Polity, Cambridge, 2013, ISBN 9 7807 4566 3654, viii+196 pp., AU

31.95. Distributor: Wiley.

31.95. Distributor: Wiley.

Book Review: Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra NortonHallSandra, Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton, Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), Sydney, 2008, ISBN 9 7807 3228 2592, xiv+335 pp., A

No. 132 — August 2009 problem: the bourgeois nature of media research in this country.’ (p. 168) The authors critique the serious blind spots which prevail amongst the American ‘effects’ research community — most particularly, the unwillingness to engage with concepts like class and acculturation, the ideological nature of their work, and the unfortunate tendency of much of the research to deflect attention away from more significant factors, and more pressing problems. Some of us have been telling our American colleagues this for years, but it might be more effective coming from their more immediate peers. Grimes, Anderson and Bergen direct their attention to fellow American researchers (with frequent, welcome nods to research outside the United States) and the previously underacknowledged factors of careerism and funding determinism in the US research community. They cite L. Rowell Huesmann as a prime example of a researcher who has constructed a long and influential career out of an unswerving certitude. But this book avoids the personal attacks so often associated with the effects debate. It is an attempt to move beyond the recursive loop of ‘he said/she said’ impasse, to engage with the history of the research, its limitations, and ways of doing better research. It also attempts to open up the debate, by making it more accessible to a wider readership. The hypothetical conversation (‘mostly fiction but entirely feasible’) between three social scientists and a senior policy-maker which opens the book greatly assists this aim, as well as the authors’ endeavours to ‘scrub the narrative of jargon, technical terms, and other literary devices that make these sort of books generally difficult to read’ (p. x). There are also important discussions about questions of censorship and software restrictions, and the cost/benefit analyses of current or mooted policy interventions. The authors set out their Foundational Principles (the claims about media and media effects that they hold to be true; the claims they hold to be false) in Chapter 1, and develop their arguments from these foundations. I believe they have produced an important and persuasive book, but I did not need convincing. The real test of this book is whether it opens up a crack in a rather fossilised debate, and alters the mindset of unbelievers. — Geoff Lealand, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato