Abstract
Over several decades, Bridget Griffen-Foley has produced a foundational body of work in Australian media studies. Ranging from that comprehensive history of Australian radio, Changing Stations, the definitive books on the Packer family (with apologies to Paul Barry's paperback), to editing A Companion to Australian Media – with many varied smaller stops between and beyond – Griffen-Foley's contributions to the discipline have foregrounded primary research and the relationality between the minor and the major in telling the histories of Australian media. This, her latest volume, continues this decades-long effort by engaging with Australian radio and TV listening and watching practices across five decades, and is an ambitious and rewarding collection of historical vignettes.
The threads here are disparate but linked by the titular theme, of describing audiences in historical perspective, and focusing on the practices of ‘everyday life’, after de Certeau. Chapters on fan mail mingle with the incipience of reality TV in dating shows like Perfect Match. The research here is typically forensic, while remaining enjoyable and accessible outside the ivory tower context; throughout, Foley's attention is on primary sources, creating a densely textured patchwork of letters to editors, internal minutes and memoirs – as well as hitherto unused archival material – that reveal the complexity of audience engagement during the broadcast era.
In doing so, Griffen-Foley dismantles any sense of there being something purely novel about digitally enabled audience participation, dispelling the notion Australian audiences were ever ‘passive’ before say, voting on Big Brother or Bachelor stan culture. The threads here reveal an ever-evolving, ever-dialogical relationship between media producers and audiences, and in the case of the ABC, an especially fascinating and vexed one.
The detail supplied here is, at times, stunning – laments of the thrills of radio serials contra the thrills of radio cricket (I will agree to disagree), debate (and confusion) as to whether broadcasting Mozart was unpatriotic in 1940, and how romantic game shows (2GB's Blind Date, 1946) were the roots for present ubiquities like Married at First Sight.
Griffen-Foley also circumspectly draws attention to the shifts in power dynamics around how the audience themselves were imagined, in particular at the ABC – Chapter 5, which discusses Television Viewers’ Committees run to between 1959 and 1965, dominated by ‘the great and good’ standing in for the audience at large is an edifying episode on the long road to ‘Your ABC’ and – unexpectedly – also for the gulf between Western Australia and the rest of the nation in general.
As the broad title implies, this is a selection of case studies – a series of vignettes linked by their nature. Deeper historical perspective is somewhat elided, but this is a set of microcosms; the desire for a deeper dive is the mark of the quality of the scholarship.
There is, perhaps, another, more compelling narrative to be shaped across and beyond these somewhat isolated cases, but the parataxis between the margins here simply demonstrates how insightful each chapter is.
Overall, this is an enjoyable and insightful volume, as well as a valuable primer for audience studies in Australian media, which both serves as a possible introduction to (or a valuable reminder of ) Griffen-Foley's enduring interests and powers as a dynamic researcher of the unseen and out-of-sight in Australian media history.
