Centre for Media History, Macquarie University

22/04/2022

A talk from Dr Catherine Fisher at Parliament House NSW coming up May 2: 6-7pm. Fisher's first book is Sound Citizens: Australian Women Broadcasters Claim their Voice, 1923-1956, and was published in 2021 by ANU Press. Register here:

From the 1920s until the 1950s, radio provided a platform for women to contribute to public discourse and normalised the presence of women’s voices in the public sphere, both literally and figuratively. It was so significant that Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the Australian House of ...

28/08/2021

“The Skin of Others is about truth telling and history, and trying to seek a better agreement for the future of this country", says Macquarie University film-maker and CMH member Associate Professor Tom Murray. Interviewed here on the remarkable story of Douglas Grant, the protagonist of Murray's new feature documentary, we rediscover a forgotten Australian hero who was orphaned in a Frontier Wars massacre in Far North Queensland in 1887 and subsequently fostered by a Scottish immigrant couple. He became a World War I hero and was an outspoken advocate for the rights of Aboriginal people, a ‘bridge builder’ between black and white Australia. As well as a soldier and journalist, he was a reader of Shakespeare and a bagpipe player who could put on a fine Scottish brogue. Murray's film returns him at last to his rightful place in our national story.

Who is Douglas Grant? New film reveals hidden Australian hero Researcher Associate Professor Tom Murray Writer Sarah Maguire Date 23 August 2021 Faculty Faculty of Arts Topic Our StoriesArts and Society Share The Skin of Others by Macquarie University documentary-maker Tom Murray began as a film ab...

22/07/2021

New documentary film Ablaze, reveals so much more about the late Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta activist William Townsend “Bill” Onus Jr. While he was a larger-than-life activist, boomerang champion and theatrical entrepreneur, he might also have become as famous for the cinematic portrayal of the plight of his people, if only his documentary film work had seen the light of day. In this film made by his grandson Tiriki Onus and film maker and Centre member Alec Morgan, we discover how much Onus blazed other trails. The film is also a compelling argument for the need to preserve all our audio visual heritage, not just a small selection regarded as being 'important'. Without the unrecognized black-and-white silent film Morgan rediscovered in its nondescript tin at the National Film and Sound Archive – marked simply “Aborigines in the community” – and the beginning point for this film, Onus's achievement here, and as the first Aboriginal film-maker, might still be lost to us. This then is an example of the great value of our archives, and collaboration leading to discovery as intrepid filmmaker-researchers like Morgan noticed details that others did not, thus bringing back to to our culture, and film history, significant work we may have otherwise too easily disregarded. Congratulations to the film makers and sleuth Alec Morgan for this film premiering at the Melbourne international film festival in August.

Onus is remembered as a leading Indigenous activist – but a new documentary by his grandson reveals he blazed another trail

04/05/2021

The first edition of the Koori Mail newspaper was published in 1991 - now, more than 700 editions later the paper is celebrating 30 years of publication.

15/04/2021

VALE Australian born photographer June Newton aka Alice Springs (1923-2021). Newton was an award-winning actress and photographer, the President of the Helmut Newton Foundation and the former wife of the late photographer Helmut Newton. She died on April 9, 2021, at the age of 97 in her home in Monte Carlo. She began her career as a commercial photographer under the pseudonym Alice Springs in 1970. By 1976 she dedicated her work to portrait photography, publishing images in magazines like Egoïste, Vanity Fair, Interview, Stern, Photo and Passion. She photographed artists, writers and celebrities such as William S. Burroughs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nicole Kidman, Roy Lichtenstein, Anthony Burgess, Catherine Deneuve, Graham Greene, Christopher Reeve, Diana Vreeland, Yves Saint Laurent, and Brigitte Nielsen. She captured intimate portraits also of Audrey Hepburn, Charlotte Rampling, Anjelica Huston and more. ‘The roster of artists, actors and musicians depicted by Alice Springs over the last 40 years reads like a who’s who of the international cultural scene on both sides of the Atlantic,’ the Helmut Newton foundation said. Born June Browne in Melbourne, she first trained as an actress, with numerous engagements under the artist name June Brunell. British Vogue contributing editor Dana Thomas remembers June Newton/Alice Springs – and how she became one of the finest portrait photographers of our time: https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/june-newton
See also https://helmut-newton-foundation.org/en/alice-springs/

June Newton – wife of the provocative Helmut – died last week at the age of 97. She was a gifted photographer in her own right, who captured intimate portraits of Audrey Hepburn, Charlotte Rampling, Anjelica Huston and more. Vogue contributing editor Dana Thomas remembers her

15/04/2021

How the making of a recent documentary TV series (My Journey through French Cinema) by the late senior cinema statesman Bertrand Tavernier helped to restore long neglected and overlooked great French films. The prolific French director, film scholar and campaigner for cinema passed away on the 25th of March, aged 79. See https://artsfuse.org/225737/film-interview-bertrand-tavernier-1941-2021-talks-about-what-else-french-cinema/ And also this ABC podcast interview by Jason Di Rosso who spoke with Tavernier in 2008 when he was in Australia for lectures and master classes in Canberra, Sydney and Perth. Listen https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-screen-show/bertrand-tavernier/13292150

An archival interview with prolific French director, film scholar and campaigner for cinema Bertrand Tavernier, who passed away on the 25th of March, aged 79.

12/03/2021

As the National Museum of Australia hit 20 yesterday, this story recalls the impact of just one small word embossed (in braille) on the walls of the new building by its architect, Howard Raggatt all those years ago. The new and monumental building in Canberra displayed many messages inside and out, but some of these ciphers remained hidden if you didn’t know how to read them. As it turned out, these coded signs were to be deciphered just as the building was about to be unveiled. Censorship of a specific word (not recognized until the last moment) was the unfortunate result as the government furiously objected to its inclusion on the building. Today, these obscured signs are once more being unveiled, although we may overlook them or may not know they are there, even as they were a part of the architect's original 'cheeky' design. This is a great story for us all, but it also reveals a media history and a media archaeology in progress: the unearthing of coded messaging built into the very walls and surfaces of one of our national cultural institutions, reclaimed and recited. These words and phrases, almost banal or predictable like 'mate' and 'she'll be right' – distinctive Aussie slang – we take note of, but we can now also sound out with pride and laughter the 'offensive' censored words – those literally plated over so they might be silenced. By resounding the repressed, we carry forward these traces of history while also fashioning a renewed architecture for our history writing. Architecture is as much a communicative medium and media site here as it is a physical structure or housing for our national 'collections' or our changing narratives of discovery and identity. It can also be renovated as we can see here without a lot of labour. So, read the ABC story, Happy Birthday to the National Museum of Australia as you renovate, and here’s a toast to all the mischievous architects and sign writers of history, the media and from contentious public institutions too!

Ahead of the National Museum of Australia's 20th birthday, the building's architect reveals the full extent of the Howard government's anger in reaction to a secret political message he emblazoned onto its walls.

27/11/2020

John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963 was conveyed in many ways by the media but this image by photojournalist Eamon Kennedy captured the mood not only of the United States, but of Ireland where JFK had visited only five months before his murder. The young girl weeping outside Parkland Hospital is of 12 year old Kathey Atkinson, her photo published in The Dallas Times Herald newspaper beneath the headline, "The Grief of a Nation". This documentary captures the power of the photojournalist in the tumultuous 1960s, taking us behind the scenes and into the world of one journalist whose image, becoming icon, not only touched people around the world, but arguably could replace "a thousand words". Eamon also photographed Lee Harvey Oswald, prior to Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby. The photojournalist covered Ruby's subsequent trial and the Warren Commission into the President's killing. Eamon's work was published widely including for 'Life' magazine. Listen to the photographer and media history in-the-making on RTE's long running quality radio program, Documentary on One.

In 1963, Eamon Kennedy photographed a young girl crying, just after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Published beneath the headline "The Grief of a Nation", the photo became iconic. But it also changed lives - and those effects ripple on (2020)

22/11/2020

The Centre for Media History held a Zoom talk with Cait McKinney Author of Information Activism

The Centre for Media History at Macquarie University held a Zoom talk by Cait Mckinney on their monograph Information Activism: A Q***r History of Le***an Me...

04/11/2020

The National Film & Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) exists at the intersection between culture, creative industries and the media. Three sectors that have been buffeted by the winds of change, as well as tectonic shifts to the digital landscape. Since 2015 the NFSA has hosted symposia exploring issues and opportunities facing digital cultural collections. In 2020 this event is going online. The Digital Directions Virtual Conference is a boutique offering of six sessions over two days, bringing practical case studies of digital transformation and adaptation in the cultural economy. 26–27 November.

The Digital Directions Virtual Conference explores practical case studies of digital transformation in the cultural economy.