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Media, communications and cultural studies form a rapidly growing part of secondary and tertiary education in Australia, yet there have been few books dealing specifically with Australian television. This is the first wide ranging study of television in Australia, and includes a coverage of the cultural and institutional history of Australian television as well as examining a wide range of television programming.
Prisoner,
Perfect Match,
Hey Hey It's Saturday,
A Country Practice,
Vietnam and
Beyond 2000 are some of the programs described and analysed. Issues are raised such as the relationship between children and television, the role of the television documentary and the function television serves in constructing communities.
The contributors to
Australian Television: Programs, Pleasures and Politics include some of the leading researchers in Australian television and cultural studies and their articles employ a wide range of methods - from semiotic analyses to cultural histories. Despite their dealing with often quite sophisticated problems, the chapters are written in an accessible and lively manner. This is an important collection which opens out space for more informed and challenging discussions of Australia's television culture - its programs, its meanings, its pleasures and its politics. It will be an invaluable text for all tertiary television, media studies, communications studies, Australian studies and cultural studies programs.
List of contents
General Editor's Preface
Preface
Contributors1 Three stages of Australian television
2 The converging of film and television
3 Transgressive TV: From
In Melbourne Tonight to
Perfect Match4 Textual innovation in the Australian historical mini-series
5 In praise
of Prisoner6 Everyday quizzes, everyday life
7 Television documentary
8 Publicising progress: science on Australian television
9 Soaps and ads: flow and segmentation
10 Continuous pleasures in marginal places: TV, continuity and the construction of communities
11 Children and television
12 Changed times, changed tunes: music and the ideology of the news
13: Afterword: approaching audiences - a note on method
Index
About the author
JOHN TULLOCH and GRAEME TURNER are two of Australia's leading writers, researchers and teachers in the field of media and cultural studies. JOHN TULLOCH is Associate Professor in Mass Communications at Macquarie University and his books include
Legends and Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative and Meaning. GRAEME TURNER is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Queensland Institute of Technology and he is the author of
National Fictions and co-author of
Myths of Oz.
Summary
Australian Television is a comprehensive study of television in Australia, covering the cultural and institutional history of Australian television and examining of a wide range of television programming.
