The ‘utility of ideas’: Graeme Turner and his leadership in media and communications

Graeme Turner was integral to the development of media and communication studies – institutionally, intellectually and pedagogically – in Australia and beyond. His work, informed by cultural studies and bridging disciplines (including literature, sociology and history), helped to define media and communications as an interdisciplinary field of study and shape educational curricula. This article sketches Graeme's research contributions to the field since the 1990s, considering his work in critical industry studies, as well as his interest in the nation, and his views on issues including technology and the creative industries. Along the way, it touches on his support for my own endeavours in media studies.

Graeme's whole career reflected ‘faith in the utility of ideas’, a term he used in an article about the ABC television current affairs program This Day Tonight (Turner, 2003: 149). Initially a literature scholar, Graeme increasingly turned his attention to the media, from film to television to radio. His first book, National Fictions, was about literature, film and Australian narrative (Turner, 1986). He then edited Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies for both a domestic and international readership, as part of an attempt to ‘de-centre’ cultural studies by looking beyond Europe and the United States (Turner, 1993). Another monograph, Making it National, about national identity and Australian popular culture, followed (Turner, 1994).

While Graeme's considerable influence on cultural studies is dealt with elsewhere in this issue of MIA, it must be said here that cultural and media studies cannot be separated. As he noted in an interview with James Hay in 2013, Graeme had worked as a producer in the music and cultural industries, ¹ and while writing about film worked alongside people who were training film students for the industry, so he had a strong interest in production. ‘[T]here is no enormously clear division between media and cultural studies in Australia much of the time’ Graeme went on; examining media as a social practice, he maintained, required understanding the political economy and regulatory environment (Turner, 2013: 148).

As his work helped to establish media and cultural studies as legitimate fields of research in Australian universities, Graeme was commissioned by publisher Patrick Gallagher and editor Elizabeth Weiss at Allen & Unwin to produce a book on the Australian media. Graeme brought in Stuart Cunningham, six years younger and also in Brisbane, as co-editor. They dedicated The Media in Australia, which appeared in 1993, to Henry Mayer as the ‘pioneer and patron of media studies in Australia’. The book set out to explain how the media in Australia worked as industries, through texts, with and for audiences, and ‘as a major focus within cultural and communication theory and policy’. Covering newspapers, broadcasting and film, along with book publishing, popular music, and advertising, The Media in Australia invited readers to become more informed about how the media operated in all their cultural specificity:

[T]o understand the recent past, our current period, and the media's future in Australia, one really has to try and understand what is specific about the media industries, their production processes, their products, and the way they are used by and contribute to Australian society (Turner and Cunningham, 1993: 5).

Two parts dealt with industries and production processes, with Graeme contributing to sections on radio and on audiences. Amidst contributions from nine other authors, two separate parts of The Media in Australia were contributed solely by each editor. Graeme's 61-page section ranged across media texts, messages and theories (Turnbull 2024: 4). It reproduced lengthy passages from other works that he regarded as key and, as an example of content analysis, extracts from Philip Bell, Kathe Boehringer and Stephen Croft's (1982) investigation of television news and current affairs coverage of the 1980 federal election. Attractively laid out, the book included tables and graphs in most sections, along with a timely appendix on media ownership in Australia following ‘the media shake-up’ of 1986–87 with regulatory changes, buy-outs, takeovers, and piratical new players – or, simply put, ‘crazy times’ (Cunningham and Turner, 1993: 3–4). It concluded with 21 pages of ‘References and Further Reading’.

The book really was an indispensable introduction for students, teachers and anyone interested in how the Australian media works. Contextual reading for my own PhD thesis, which I commenced in 1993 on the history of Australian Consolidated Press, began with Mayer's classic The Press in Australia (1964) and The Media in Australia, hot off the presses. My copy is covered in earnest pencilled notations.

Allen & Unwin produced a second edition in 1997, with updated contents and new material on magazine publishing, convergence, the effect of new technologies, including electronic publishing and the internet, and the development of the information society. The first edition of a retitled and expanded The Media and Communications in Australia was published in 2002, with a second edition in 2006 and a third in 2010. MACA, as the shorthand went, was now divided into three sections: Approaches, Industries and Issues. It featured more clearly defined chapters contributed by a greater number of authors, including me from 2006 onwards on the radio. Graeme also took on a new industry chapter (on public relations), and one of the issues (celebrity). As Stuart notes in the introduction to this MIA special issue, MACA was adopted by 19 universities at its peak, shaping curricula nationally.

In their introductory chapter for the first edition of The Media in Australia (1993), Graeme and Stuart had identified three disciplinary approaches to the study of media, especially in Australia: sociology, political science and ‘mass communications’; media history; and textual analysis. While singling out some works that provided valuable background to the textbook's focus on contemporary media, the author-editors concluded that there were ‘large gaps’ in institutional histories of radio and television, advertising, book publishing and music (Cunningham and Turner, 1993: 14).

By now I’d met Graeme in person, and I asked him if he might participate in a 2-day conference at the State Library of New South Wales – Australian Media Traditions: Historical Perspectives – in July 1999. Co-convenor David McKnight and I were honoured Graeme agreed, even though we had no budget to even cover an airfare for him. But I wasn’t really surprised, as Graeme's support for the media history ‘cause’ was evident (and I sensed his support for my work too). The conference was a simple affair, with no parallel strands, but I’m still proud that it kicked off with a plenary session chaired by Ann Curthoys (who’d helped David and me cook up the idea of a media history gathering over another conference's morning tea) that included Graeme discussing ‘Writing Media History’. It also featured a Personal Reflections panel with industry veterans Nigel Dick, Margaret Jones and Robert Raymond.

The conference was the first Australian gathering Graeme could recall where ‘historians, media studies academics and journalism educators [and, he might have added, practitioners] set out to explore common research topics and issues’. He and other attendees found it sufficiently useful and productive to support the idea of further media history conferences (Turner, 2001: 1). Thus, Graeme was present at the creation of another tradition: Australian Media Traditions Conferences, which became a biennial affair, with the 14^th iteration held at RMIT University in 2025. He also supported David and me in editing a special Australian Media History issue of Media International Australia based on some of the presentations at the inaugural conference (no. 99, published in May 2001). Graeme edited the journal from 1998 to 2002, taking over after the merger between Culture and Policy and what had been Media Information Australia.

By now the media critic and educator Keith Windschuttle, who had founded Macleay College, had published numerous pieces advocating the removal of media and cultural studies approaches from journalism programs. This led to a conference on Media Wars: Media Studies and Journalism Education in Brisbane in 1998. Graeme was among those who rejected reactive opposition to the role of theory in ‘new humanities’ disciplines and pointed out that the relevance of cultural studies work on, for instance, news and current affairs to the study and practice of journalism. ‘Opting for a principled acceptance of the legitimacy of the different disciplinary histories while acknowledging shared disciplinary and strategic interests’, he concluded simply, ‘may be a more productive and certainly a more respectful way to proceed’ (Turner, 2000).

Graeme was becoming increasingly interested in television and in talkback radio – a ‘range of practices and texts that had been largely left to fend for themselves, in spite of their enormous audiences’ (Turner, 1999: 75). In 2000, Graeme and Stuart Cunningham edited The Australian TV Book, painting the ‘big picture of the small screen in Australia’. Television, went the blurb, ‘is blamed for creating alienation and violence in society, yet at the same time regarded as trivial and unworthy of serious attention’. Each editor wrote an introductory chapter, after which came sections on Sectors and Genres; Graeme chose to focus on the news and current affairs genre by homing in on the satirical program Frontline (Turner and Cunningham, 2000). Then came Graeme's Ending the Affair, about the decline of television current affairs in Australia since the 1980s and framed partly against the innovations and achievements of TDT since 1967 (Turner, 2005).

But radio (especially commercial radio) really was the poor relation of Australian media history and other areas of media and cultural research, as Graeme explained (for example, Turner, 2007a: 73–79). Early in 2002, I headed off to a conference in South Africa via Perth with a good deal of preparatory work under my belt for my first ARC application, for a postdoctoral fellowship on a history of talkback radio in Australia. When I mentioned the project at a lunch, one of the guests said he thought he’d heard of someone else proposing something similar. After arriving in Cape Town, I dialled in from my hotel to shoot an email to Graeme asking if he knew who the academic might be – yielding a reply to the effect of ‘I’m sorry, it's me!’ as he ruefully explained he was writing an ARC Discovery application. He was of course reassuring, suggesting we could propose complementary projects (for instance, his would be less historical), or perhaps he could build a fellowship for me into his application. I was concerned the latter possibility would blow out his budget, and by the time I returned to Sydney, I had started to envisage a broader historical project, on Australia's commercial radio industry since the 1920s, and I had mere weeks to shape the project and its pitch. Happily, both our ARC applications were funded.

In several publications about talkback radio and its content, audience and influence, Graeme considered its social, cultural and politics functions; how it had become a crucial part of the structure through which contemporary party politics was prosecuted; and how hosts and producers chose the calls that went to air and framed discussions. He had particular interests in John Laws and Alan Jones, showing for instance how the latter created an on-air persona and demonstrating that he talked more than his callers (Turner, 2007b). Graeme edited a special issue of MIA (no. 122) in 2007, marking the 40^th anniversary of the legalisation of talkback radio, that included historical articles by myself and also my student Liz Gould, whose PhD thesis he later examined. As I’d realised since my summertime panic of a few years earlier, Graeme was helping to create and shape a field, not just lead one project, where so much research needed to be undertaken from scratch (see Turner, 2007a: 77–78).

Graeme had been tickled to see my biography of Sir Frank Packer in airport bookshops, and I in turn was tickled when he chose it as one of his ‘best books’ of 2000 for a newspaper feature. When he established the ARC Cultural Research Network (CRN) in 2004, its Media Histories node was run by Liz Jacka until her retirement in 2006, when I took over the node at Graeme's invitation. Continuing until 2011 under a one-off ARC scheme, the CRN brought together researchers from cultural geography, cultural anthropology, cultural history and cultural studies who shared an interest in culture as their central problematic. This network enabled a range of interdisciplinary activities centred on its 75 members, but supported dozens of early career researchers, and in my own area seeded the Australian Media History Listserv (which continues with more than 200 subscribers) and a Media Archives Project Database (Turner, 2015: 211). When Macquarie University established the first Centre for Media History in Australia with me as Director in 2007, Graeme was the senior external academic appointed to its Advisory Board.

On the release of Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio two years later, he invited me to deliver the Henry Mayer Lecture to mark the publication of a ‘landmark’ book. Fittingly, Graeme chaired MIA's Editorial Board and, as publisher of the journal now based at the University of Queensland (UQ), was responsible for hosting the annual Mayer Lecture. I have only just discovered Graeme's extraordinarily generous review of Changing Stations, in which he was hopeful that more than a century of neglect of media history was starting to be reversed (Turner, 2010a).

In 2006, the ARC awarded Graeme a Federation Fellowship for a study of television in the post-broadcast era, leading to a substantial edited book with a younger colleague in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ, Jinna Tay. It crossed a range of media industry and formats, as well as markets (beyond the US and Britain to Asia and Latin America) (Turner and Tay, 2009). With the ‘rare and wonderful opportunity’ to work solely on research, Graeme also produced Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (Turner, 2010b).

Two milestones for Australian media studies in 2014 involved Graeme. When I’d assembled an Editorial Advisory Board for A Companion to the Australian Media, Graeme had agreed both to serve on it and to contribute entries: on A Current Affair, celebrity, current affairs, Frontline, and variety. ‘Now THAT's a book!’ he emailed on receiving his copy of the 415,000-word reference work in 2014. And MIA marked its 150^th issue, 50 years after the publication of The Press in Australia by the journal's founder, Henry Mayer. As Graeme wrote in a special anniversary issue in February 2014, there was much to celebrate about the journal, including its move into a cross-disciplinary space, and incubating the work of early career researchers, although the journal had become less connected to and with the media industries than it had been under Mayer – perhaps the price for the ‘development of a more intellectually mature academic field’ (Turner, 2014: 30). That year Graeme also ‘retired’ as editor of MACA, handing over the reins to Sue Turnbull to work with Stuart.

By 2015, MIA was transitioning from UQ to Monash University, and to SAGE as publisher. Graeme himself was invited to present that year's Henry Mayer Lecture, partly to coincide with his new book Re-inventing the Media, an attempt to better understand the scale, diversity and complexity of change evident in media environments around the world (Turner, 2016). He had become concerned that the ‘creative industries’ and other expanding new/digital media offerings, seen as having greater employment linkages than cultural studies, lacked a strong intellectual project and were ‘unnecessary instrumentalist’. He thought that some scholars of new media were naive ‘techno-romantics’ and was sceptical about some of the rhetoric around the democratising role of, and participatory affordances provided by, new media. He had long sought to understand media as a social practice by exploring the political economy and regulatory environment (Turner, 2016: 141–142, 148).

Graeme's commitment to demonstrating (nay, practising) the ‘utility of ideas’ had seen him play a leading role in critical industry studies during 40 years of writing about, and fostering interests in, the media and ‘the nation’. The State of Things section of his blog, focused on media, culture and society, featured only one post, on Succession, before his untimely death. One of the last encounters I had with him was at the International Communication Association Conference on the Gold Coast in June 2023. He popped by the publisher's booth for the launch of the 5^th (really the 7^th) edition of The Media and Communications in Australia to toast the volume's editorship by Sue Turnbull and myself, who’d come in as a neophyte editor in place of Stuart Cunningham Griffen-Foley and Turnbull 2024. That was Graeme: always thinking, always supporting, always there, and on our shelves and in our minds for decades to come.