Cirrus@Austlit

'This article traces the history of feminist periodical publishing in this country between 1970 and 1988 and its role in the development of Australian women's history. It show that a distinctly Australian feminist historiography developed within the pages of journals such as Refractory Girl, Hecate and Australian Feminist Studies. While most studies of the evolution of Australian women's history since the 1970s signal the importance of such journals, there has to date been no major study of their history or their influence within Australian historiography. Source: Mary Sponberg.

'This article examines the intersection of the populist nationalism and popular modernity in Aussie (1920-1931), a commercial magazine of opinion, review and entertainment that flourished in Sydney between the wars. Aussie has been overlooked in comparison to its better-known contemporaries Smith's Weekly and the Bulletin, despite occupying the same public-commercial sphere and same discursive space as those magazines.

Aussie had a significant past as the main soldiers' paper of the First World War; in its post-war format it built a sizeable circulation on both sides of the Tasman; and for more than a decade it published the major Australian writers and cartoonists of the day. This article seeks not only to restore the magazine to its position as a significant player in the print culture of its period but also to use this case study to explore methodological questions about the historical interpretation of magazines as complex texts and the nature of Australian modernity. In particular it explores the gap between the nationalist editorial platform of the magazine and the investment in new forms of consumer and gender modernity found elsewhere in its pages. The magazine's ambivalence towards the modern was institutional, not merely ideological, a function of its position in a modernising print marketplace'. Source: David Carter.

'The presence in Australia of English and American magazines has not attracted significant critical attention in histories of magazines or writing. But the defence of imported magazines at a 1930 Tariff Board Inquiry stresses their importance to Australian magazine culture during the 1920s. This paper considers the evidence presented to the inquiry in conjunction with the magazine holdings of several libraries and a small newsagency. In the commercial and cultural operations of retailers and lenders a new idea of Australian magazine culture emerges; one that does not reject imported culture, but embraces it as a significant element of its very existence.' (Roger Osborne).