Histories of the Illustrated Magazine in Australia

Abstract

As the Internet does today, the illustrated magazine significantly defined Australian readers’ knowledge of the nation and the world for much of the 20th century. Magazines graced domestic spaces and dentists’ surgeries; magazine stands filled busy city street corners and transport hubs; and publishers, government departments, and tourism bureaus sent magazines overseas to attract migrants, business investments and tourists. Up to 800,000 Australians read theAustralianWomen’s Weekly by 1961, with many other titles regularly achieving large circulation figures in a commercial market that in 1963 included 900 journals and magazines. The Weekly continues to provide new avenues for scholarly research, from education to art history to Cold War politics, as well as food and fashion histories. Our themed section for the Journal of Australian Studies forms part of a research project designed to diversify magazine studies in Australia, to broaden the sources and understanding of their significance in Australian cultural history, and to connect scholarship across disciplines and link it to new international developments. The best and brightest minds contributed to modern magazines (alongside newspapers and radio, and often across media platforms). Writers and travellers such as George Farwell, Ernestine Hill and Ion Idriess earnt a living that underwrote other creative projects, while anthropologists including Donald Thomson and Ursula McConnell used magazines to communicate their work with Indigenous communities to the public. First Nations communities themselves used newsletters to build connections, and magazine titles such as Identity emerged in the 1970s to forge a new Indigenous public sphere. Scientists and naturalists such as Charles Barrett, Tarlton Rayment and