Cirrus@Austlit

'Historians have long understood ocker cinema in terms of a more distinct and assertive national identity in Whitlam’s 1970s, yet only recently have begun to consider the context of the women’s liberation movement unfolding at the time. Adding to this emerging body of scholarship, this article reads the rise of ocker cinema both in the context of, and as a response to, second-wave feminism. Turning to the films Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Alvin Purple (1973), this article argues that the cinematic articulation of the ocker in the 1970s not only asserted a masculinist national identity, but also positioned this national masculinity as the victim of (and in danger from) threatening feminist challenges.' (Publication abstract)

'In Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, Catherine Kevin presents an elegant and engaging insight into the social, political and personal terrain upon which Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film Jedda was made. Jedda continues to endure in Australian cultural and intellectual life. The film is remembered as a classic piece of Australian cinema and has received significant attention from scholars of film, gender and race alike. Kevin extends this rich body of literature. Dispossession and the Making of Jedda is at once a detailed account of the film’s production, release and reception, a rigorous examination of how the settler colonial project operates and a powerful encounter with Kevin’s own family’s history. Begun from ‘fragments of family stories’ (4), Kevin has written a book that suggests what it is to understand your family as agents of settler colonialism and how such agency has ‘generated privilege that travelled through the generations and into the present’ (113).' (Introduction)

'The Transported Imagination, an elegantly presented offering from Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, explores the intersecting themes of modernity, colonialism, glamour and travel in three ‘culture and leisure’ magazines in interwar Australia. Through their engagement with the varied content of Home (1920–42), The BP Magazine (1928–42) and MAN (1936–72), the authors argue that representations of travel functioned as a means for these magazines to both construct and negotiate what it meant to be modern in interwar Australia, particularly at a time where, they argue, ‘the Pacific was at the fore of the nation's consciousness and imagination’ (18). Organised across three parts – Geography, Cultural Value, and Temporality – the book endeavours to show that it was not just physical travel that was so crucial to interwar ideas of modernity but imagined travel as well. Indeed, the authors engage with the concept of ‘geographical imaginary’ and the ‘outward gaze’ to contend that, as cultural texts, magazines enabled readers to forge a connection to a world beyond Australian shores and understand themselves as on the cutting edge of global fashion, cinematic, literary, and artistic trends – even if they never left their armchairs.' (Introduction)

'Set against the shifting social and political backdrop of a nation throwing off the shackles of one war yet faced with the instability of the new world order, Reel Men probes the concept of 1950s masculinity itself, asking what it meant to be an Australian man at this time. Offering a compelling exploration of the Australian fifties, the book challenges the common belief that the fifties was a 'dead' era for Australian filmmaking. Reel Men engages with fourteen Australian feature films made and released between 1949 and 1962, and examines the multiple masculinities in circulation at this time. Dealing with beloved Australian films like Jedda (1955), Smiley (1956), and The Shiralee (1957), and national icons of the silver screen including Chips Rafferty, Charles 'Bud' Tingwell, and Peter Finch, Reel Men delves into our cultural past to dismantle powerful assumptions about film, the fifties, and masculinity in Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Enduring popular narratives posit the 1950s as a time of gendered oppression and conservative stability. While previous historians have pointed to the social and political changes of the period, their work has understood culture as a passive reflector of these transformations. Through analysis of four Australian films, this article argues that the contemporary cultural landscape was a dynamic space that actively negotiated between competing ideals. Exploring the representation of distinct albeit legitimate models of masculinity in these films, this article reveals the complex and unsteady gender order unfolding in the cultural world of the 1950s.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the representation of masculinity and race in the 1955 film Jedda. Popularly remembered as a ‘classic’ Australian film, Jedda is best known for its explicit critique of Indigenous affairs in the assimilation era. This article, however, contends that the film’s treatment of differing masculinities reveals its anti-assimilationist meanings, both through its affirmation of white, radical nationalist masculinity and its portrayal of Indigenous male sexuality as dangerous. Ultimately, Jedda concluded that assimilatory efforts were futile, and affirmed the cultural imagining of Australia as a white nation in which Indigenous people could make no claim for legitimacy.'  (Publication abstract)

'In the aftermath of Second World War and in the beginning years of the Cold War, newly elected Prime Minister Robert Menzies reaffirmed the institutional relationship between masculinity and breadwinning that also spoke to a specific national ideal. In accordance with the ‘national narrative of work’, this article looks to historicise the relationship between historically specific understandings of gender and work, and how that relationship was represented in the 1954 Australian film King of the Coral Sea. Based around the pearling industry in the Torres Strait, the film’s narrative shows the introduction of new technology and the management of the workplace; both these representations functioned in accordance with post-war middle-class values. This article argues that King of the Coral Sea’s engagement with gendered ideals of work and class not only carries specific national meanings but also had broader implications for understandings of masculinity in the context of the Australian 1950s.'

Source: Sage Publishing.

'This article examines the representation of masculinity in Man, a men’s magazine, in post-war Australia. While the notion of the “sleepy 1950s” has implied a period of social conservatism and gender stability, the representation of (and commentary on) men’s social, cultural and familial worlds in Man tells a rather different story. In a period in which Menzies’s breadwinner masculinity idealised work and familial life as the source of men’s satisfaction (and civilised society more broadly), Man positioned its imagined reader as desperately unhappy and frustrated by the confines of suburban life and marriage. There were limits, however, to the generosity of this critique. While trying to provide Australian men with an escape from the rigid confines of hegemonic masculinity, Man remained attached to a near-misogynist attitude to women. The distress and anguish of men, in this case, became another way to restrict the lives and choices of women.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.