Introduction to MIA's 200th issue feature topic: remembering Graeme Turner

Media International Australia (MIA) journal has a keen sense of its history as a collaborative endeavour to platform media and communication studies in Australia and internationally.

For its 50th issue in 1988, MIA innovatively published (for the first and so far only time) a multi-authored monograph, The Imaginary Industry. This was to showcase a great achievement in Australian scholarship – a third volume by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka of their monumental study of the Australian screen industry, this time also including chapters by ‘up-and-comers’ Tom O’Regan and Stuart Cunningham.

The 100th issue was reached during the editorship of Graeme Turner. (He was MIA editor from 1998 until 2002.) Fittingly, he noted, it occurred at the turn of the century year 2001. But, typically for him, Graeme was more concerned realistically to document the institutional and funding challenges MIA faced than to be presumptively celebratory about the milestone. He did note, however, that ‘[t]his issue continues [the journal's] fine tradition that works across the boundaries of the academy and the industry’.

For the 150th issue, editors Gerard Goggin, Bridget Griffen-Foley and Sue Turnbull published a veritable cornucopia of media and communication scholarship celebrating the strength and diversity of the field under the call of the iconic Australia country and western anthem by Slim Dusty ‘Looking forward, looking back/[We]’ve come a long way down the track/Got a long way left to go’. It included several commemorative pieces by past MIA editors, including Graeme Turner.

Once again, his piece ‘Reflections on MIA on the occasion of its 150th issue’, concerned itself with fundamental questions, including internationalisation of the journal's contributors, institutional and ideological battles to grow the journal's disciplinary scope but keep it sustainable as an enterprise, and the gradual erosion of founding editor Henry Mayer's deep commitment to the publication being read in the media industry. Of the latter issue, Graeme is critical but realistic: ‘This is to be regretted, certainly, but it looks as if it may have been the price we had to pay for the development of a more intellectually mature academic field’.

Approaching its 200th issue, the custodians of MIA faced a difficult but transparently clear task: how to adequately respond to the untimely and very much unexpected death of Graeme Turner in November 2025. This would be a difficult task as it meant clearing the decks to meet tight deadlines for publication of the issue in August 2026. But it was also an easy, heartfelt and unanimous decision as Graeme was one of the journal's greatest allies and leaders.

This special issue will pay detailed attention to Graeme's work and achievements in the broad fields of media and communication studies and in the wider battles over the humanities’ role in public life. MIA's brief to authors was wide and welcoming – the contribution could be as analytical or as personal, or as analytical and personal, as each chose.

Crystal Abidin reflects on Graeme's disciplinary and editorial mentorship. Mark Andrejevic delves into Graeme's shaping of Critical Cultural Studies. Anthea Taylor focuses on his work in Celebrity Studies, and Anna Cristina Pertierra and Amanda Lotz pay attention to his achievements in Television Studies. Graeme regularly turned his attention to the fourth estate as a critical bulwark of a democratic public sphere and Matthew Ricketson assesses this work. Graeme's Media and Communications Educational Leadership is the subject of Bridget Griffen-Foley's contribution.

In an Afterword, Gerard Goggin and Jean Burgess offer a personal reflection considering Graeme's impact as a contemporary public intellectual.

My task before all that is to set the scene by outlining Graeme's stature and achievements ‘in the round’.

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Graeme Turner AO FAHA FQA, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, was one of Australia's most distinguished humanities scholars. In an early Obituary, the Australian Academy of the Humanities remembered Graeme, one of its past Presidents, as:

that rare figure who combined exceptional scholarly distinction with an unwavering commitment to strengthening the humanities and Australia's higher education sector. Internationally recognised for his pioneering work in cultural and media studies, he was equally admired at home as a sector leader, policy advisor, innovator and mentor. His advocacy for the value and contribution of the humanities to national life was tireless and truly without parallel.

The major early works Myths of Oz (1988, with Bob Hodge and John Fiske), National Fictions: Literature, film and the construction of Australian narrative (1993) and Making it National: Nationalism and Australian popular culture (1994) make the case for the importance of studying popular culture as it is here that the contradictions of nationalism with greatest relevance for the greatest number of citizens are played out. Graeme never left these large-scale topics – he returned to them often and in 2023 with a vengeance in The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it. In this regard, he was always looking to address large-scale national issues as a cultural nationalist who reserved the right and necessity to call the nation to account.

In Shrinking Nation, Graeme takes on more expansively the mantle of cultural historian, considering the political effects of a media environment swamped by misinformation, the social consequences of neoliberal economic policy and the divisive legacy of the culture wars. But the Jeremiad also offers a call to action, considering how we might strengthen the bonds of community and belonging that tie our nation together.

A bundle of Graeme's major works across the decades was dedicated to the media, especially television as industry and as (until its dramatic fragmentation) pervasive popular culture: Television studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era (edited, with Jinna Tay), Locating television: Zones of consumption (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) and Re-inventing the media. In these and many other places, Graeme's accounts of the roiling fortunes of an industry under successive disruptions were always an astute blend of realist political economy and nuanced cultural and textual analysis.

Two further enduring avenues of enquiry, into journalism and celebrity, saw Graeme delve deeper into the industry on the one hand and into broader cultural forces transforming the media on the other.

Ending the affair: The decline of television current affairs in Australia (2005) sees Graeme taking no prisoners in his critique of the tabloidisation of television current affairs since its breakthrough heyday of the 1960s.

Fame Games: The production of celebrity in Australia (with Francis Bonner and P. David Marshall) (2000) is a major research monograph detailing key trends and identifying key figures in the then-emerging Australian ‘celebrity industry’. Graeme followed this up with Understanding Celebrity, a field-defining international monograph-cum-textbook in 2004, updated in 2014 to deal with rapid developments in digital, social and global mediascapes, while drawing media and celebrity studies into complex critical, political and cultural debates. In Ordinary people and the media: The demotic turn (2005), Graeme considers the seemingly endless possibilities of media visibility for ordinary people through processes of ‘celebrification’. But the book turns on the rigorous distinction he then makes between the demotic and the democratic, insisting that we maintain the distinction if we are to hold the media to its enduring function as the fourth estate.

In the same way Graeme turned a forensic lens on Australian society and culture, he also regularly took the temperature of the discipline he had done so much to develop. In What's become of cultural studies? and in numerous articles and essays (many collected in 2020 in Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In transition), he is unabashed in calling out diversions from what he insisted was the original mission of media and cultural studies as a core and indeed central disciplinary cluster of the critical humanities.

Over the career span, Graeme was as committed to teaching and the scholarship of teaching through the production of textbooks as he was to research. His textbooks were directed at a broad international (British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, and Film as Social Practice (1999)) as well as an Australian (The Media in Australia) student readership and typically went through numerous editions – the signal mark of success.

One of the many projects from which I benefited greatly working with Graeme was based on an offer he made 35 years ago that I couldn’t refuse – the opportunity to edit with him what became Australia's first university textbook on The Media in Australia (later The Media and Communications in Australia). At its peak, it was adopted in 19 universities and went through five editions before he handed the baton on. First published in 1993, its seventh edition was published in 2024 under the editorship of Sue Turnbull and Bridget Griffen-Foley.

Film as Social Practice was outstanding amongst these textbooks. Another titan of Australian cultural and media studies, Meaghan Morris, who used it annually in her decade teaching in Hong Kong, where students are reading in English as a second or third language, noted that:

Film as Social Practice really is written for students, not for the politically monitoring gaze of colleagues. It is a book for people who want to learn directly about film and society, not about where the author stands in a range of esoteric disciplinary debates or what he or she thinks about Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. Remarkably few ‘textbooks’ in Cultural Studies can meet this classroom relevance test.

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Graeme was recognised through major honours, including an Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship (a precursor ARC scheme to the present-day Laureate Fellowships). His establishment of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland, and his leadership of the ARC Cultural Research Network, trained a generation of scholars and cemented Australia's global standing in the field.

He served as President of the Academy of the Humanities and was the only humanities scholar to have served two successive terms as a member of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He had extensive engagement with higher education policy, research assessment and commentary on the sector, advising on Australia's research agenda at the highest levels of government; chairing Expert Working Groups for the Chief Scientist; contributing to the Australian Research Council; and co-authoring (with Kylie Brass) high-impact national studies such as Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia.

He was invested as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2019 in recognition of his pioneering work in cultural studies and his contribution to higher education, and earlier was one of five inaugural fellows of the new Cultural and Communication Studies disciplinary section of the Australian Academy of the Humanities when it was created in 1998. His expertise was further acknowledged internationally. Graeme was the first Australian appointed to the prestigious Holberg Prize Committee – a testament to the global esteem in which he was held.

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I said I would set the scene for this issue by outlining Graeme's stature and achievements ‘in the round’. There can be no better account of Graeme's all-round excellence, impact and inspiration than Meaghan Morris’ tribute to Graeme I have already drawn on. It demands further citation.

In ‘Turning up to Play: “GT” and the modern game’, Meaghan brilliantly narrates Graeme's career through their shared love of the Australian football code rugby league. He was ‘the total package’: the front row forward making the hard yards in the ruck, the half back strategically managing the game, the brilliant winger scoring the crucial breakthrough try.

She meant he was outstanding in his dedication to the trifecta of teaching, research and service to the discipline, to the humanities, and in building centres and networks (through ‘advanced coaching’) where the next generation could thrive.

‘How does he do this, when many of us find it hard to make common ground with colleagues in other factions of Cultural Studies, never mind in other academic disciplines or with scientists?’ she asks. ‘Graeme kept his eye on the ball and taught us by example the importance of getting involved, rather than hanging round the sidelines whinging. This is the true meaning of that great sporting cliché, “turning up to play”’.

And with that, Meaghan ends her tribute to Graeme by quoting Tina Turner's anthem adopted by the rugby league in Australia.

He was ‘Simply the Best’.