Cirrus@Austlit

'The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham's bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, 'You're the Voice,' has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia's unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article focuses upon the context within which much of Tom O’Regan’s early work took place, and which this work helped to frame. The importance of a particular formation of cultural nationalism to the beginnings of media and cultural studies in Australia is no longer front of mind for most of us today as we confront the challenges of a dramatically reconfigured transnational media landscape. However, it was particularly important to the development of these fields over the 1980s and 1990s. Initially most closely collected with the case being made for government support of the resurgent Australian film industry, it also became crucial to what was a distinctive field of concentration of work in Australian media studies: the link between a critical media studies and an interest in the formation of cultural policy in the national interest. The article discusses this tendency in, and its influence upon, Tom O’Regan’s pioneering contribution to Australian film, media and cultural studies, before turning to the more recent shifts that took place in his work as it went beyond cultural nationalism to engage with the emerging issues around the rise of the platform.' (Publication abstract)

'It was a great pleasure and an honour to be asked to contribute to the Meaghan Morris Festival at the University of Sydney in 2016, to acknowledge and celebrate Meaghan Morris’s foundational contribution to cultural studies in Australia, and internationally. What follows is, more or less, what I said at the time.'  (Introduction)

'Australian cinema was rediscovered by international audiences in the mid 1970s, and, for a decade or so, Australian film-makers exploited their slight competitive edge over other national industries. Images of the Australian landscape were a cinematic exotic, and the stories being told were often new – even to many Australians. The dominance of the historical period drama during the first decade of the Australian revival, though, meant that the film industry’s representation of Australian culture was formed largely of a series of snapshots through the nation’s rear-view mirror.' (Introduction)