Catherine Fisher Catherine Fisher i(11340267 works by) (a.k.a. Catherine Horne)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Catherine Fisher Review of Kylie Andrews, Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945–1975 Catherine Fisher , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , no. 8 2024;
— Review of Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 Kylie Andrews , 2022 multi chapter work criticism 'An exciting development for both feminist and media history is the current boom in studies of women’s contributions to broadcasting. Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars have uncovered previously ignored experiences and achievements of women in the industry. They have also revealed how broadcasting contributed to achieving women’s equality more broadly. Key scholarship includes the work of Kate Murphy on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Christine Ehrick on Argentina and Uruguay, and work on Australian broadcasting by Jeannine Baker, Justine Lloyd, Yves Rees and myself.1 Kylie Andrews provides a rich addition to this growing literature with her study of four postwar women producers at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).' (Introduction)
1 8 y separately published work icon Sound Citizens : Australian Women Broadcasters Claim their Voice, 1923-1956 Catherine Fisher , Acton : Australian National University Press , 2021 21933630 2021 single work biography

'In 1954 Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives, argued that radio had ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’ as it brought the public sphere into the home and women into the public sphere. Taking this claim as its starting point, Sound Citizens examines how a cohort of professional women broadcasters, activists and politicians used radio to contribute to the public sphere and improve women’s status in Australia from the introduction of radio in 1923 until the introduction of television in 1956. This book reveals a much broader and more complex history of women’s contributions to Australian broadcasting than has been previously acknowledged.

'Using a rich archive of radio magazines, station archives, scripts, personal papers and surviving recordings, Sound Citizenstraces how women broadcasters used radio as a tool for their advocacy; radio’s significance to the history of women’s advancement; and how broadcasting was used in the development of women’s citizenship in Australia. It argues that women broadcasters saw radio as a medium that had the potential to transform women’s lives and status in society, and that they worked to both claim their own voices in the public sphere and to encourage other women to become active citizens. Radio provided a platform for women to contribute to public discourse and normalised the presence of women’s voices in the public sphere, both literally and figuratively.'

Source : publisher's blurb
1 Let’s Talk It Over : Colloquial Language and Women’s Print Media Cultures in Australia, 1950–1966 Catherine Fisher , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Outskirts : Feminisms along the Edge , May vol. 36 no. 2017; 'This article examines how postwar Australian women’s magazines promoted a modern ideal of Australian femininity through the use of colloquial language. The postwar years saw a shift in media representations of femininity which enabled colloquial language to become associated with ideal Australian womanhood. Although women, especially working-class women, had been using slang in their day-to-day lives for a long time, a new ideal of postwar womanhood represented in middle-class women’s magazines brought this language into the public sphere and gave it respectability. Through an analysis of readers’ letters to New Idea this article shows that women’s magazines became a space within which readers could formulate a distinctive identity as modern middle-class women through their use of informalities and colloquialisms. The centrality of colloquial language to postwar women’s magazines was a significant shift from the interwar years, when slang use was actively discouraged and therefore absent from the content of women’s media, except as a trend to be denounced. This change demonstrates that language played a central role in media representations of Australian femininity in the 1950s and 1960s.' (Publication abstract)
X