A "Civilised Amateur": Edgar Holt and His Life in Letters and Politics (original) (raw)

An agent of change: Public relations in early twentieth-century Australia

Routledge eBooks, 2014

This chapter explores the origins and development of Australian public relations practices and practitioners and the nomenclature used to describe them in the period spanning second half of the 19 th century to the start of World War II. It challenges the conventional historical accounts, which have claimed that public relations was only really practiced in Australia from the mid-twentieth century onwards and that it was imported from the United States. By focusing on these practices and the changing nomenclature used to describe them, this chapter demonstrates how a lack of nuanced understanding of these terms and their evolution has resulted in a narrow understanding of public relations history in Australia. In addition to demonstrating a significant evolution, this chapter's practice-focused approach also reveals that the pioneers of public relations practices were to be found in Australia's public sector. Rather than simply mimicking American approaches, Australian public relations practitioners and the methods they utilized were primarily grounded in local conditions. To this end, they also performed a vital role in Australia's national development both as an independent and interdependent part of the British Empire. In a 1973 interview, Asher Joel explained how he established one of Australia's first public relations consultancies in the years immediately following World War II: I set myself up as a public relations consultant-the first public relations consultant, I think, in Australia. There had been before me, George Fitzpatrick, who advertised himself as a persuader in public opinion. But ... the words public relations had never been heard of until then. I only found out what public relations meant because I was on [General Douglas] McArthur's advanced echelon public relations staff … I decided that this was a field that … as a result of my journalistic training, I could perhaps become fairly successful in (de Berg, 1973).

The When, Where, Why and How of The Melbourne Partisan Magazine

Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, 2014

My association as co-publisher and co-editor of The Melbourne Partisan began after Laurie Clancy in the Melbourne University paper, Farrago, attempted to lay waste the censorship policies of the Menzies and Bolte governments. He wrote reviews under the nom de plume Horace A. Bridgfunt to discuss the many books then banned in Australia. Paperbacks for review were dissected in Hawaii and separate pages mailed to Melbourne in dozens of envelopes. This beat the Customs Department but was too slow so I offered Laurie a solution. Working on the Melbourne waterfront repairing scales and aided by a knowledgeable wharfie mate, a denizen of that notorious Commo front, the International Bookshop, I could sneak through the gates with a few banned volumes.

Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997): Journalist, Communist, Intellectual

This thesis explores aspects of the life, times, and career of Australian journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997). During the Cold War, Lockwood was one of the best known members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), variously journalist, commentator, author, editor, orator, pamphleteer, broadcaster. His name is inextricably linked to the Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), as an unwilling, recalcitrant and hostile witness. In histories and commentaries Lockwood is generally referred to, often in a pejorative way, as “the communist journalist”. This thesis is an exploration of the life and the sixty-year career of Lockwood as a journalist and writer, in which membership of the CPA was but part (1939-1969). A general chronological framework is adopted, and the account developed with regard to three aspects of his life and career– as a journalist, as a communist, and as an intellectual. By contextualising the communist period of Lockwood’s life in his overall life and times, the portrait of a significant Australian journalist emerges, one who chose to leave the capitalist press for the adversarial and counter sphere of labour movement journalism, the latter the site of his work from 1940 until retirement in 1985. The thesis also explores Lockwood’s considerable intellectual activity, and mounts a case for recognition of the originality and sophistication of his largely unacknowledged research and writings in the areas of Australian history, politics, and political economy. Overall, this thesis contributes empirical knowledge and understandings to a number of aspects of Australian history: to labour movement history generally, and specifically to communist and labour biography; to journalism history; and to intellectual history. In so doing, it also contributes to the understanding of Australia between the two World Wars, and during the Cold War.

Disciplining the Popular: ‘Professional’ Criticism and Editorial Policy in Oxford University Press’s Australian Writers and Their Work Series, 1966-1974.

Publishing Studies No 6 (Autumn 1998): 14-20.

Australian literature, the field largely belonged to nationalist-minded, left-leaning liberal intellectuals such as A. A. Phillips, Vance Palmer, and Stephen Murray-Smith, as well, of course, as an increasingly interested group of writers and cultural workers involved with the CPA. Within a decade the academics, frequently fortified with old world qualifications and a confidently specific critical practice, were shifting the paradigms in which the national literature was discussed and negotiating authoritative access to the publishing and editing networks through which Australian writing was produced and received. In this way the professional critical discourse of the academics was to effectively disenfranchise the social interests of the liberal-nationalist critics in general and the political concerns of the CPA in particular. This process of critical and institutional negotiation, as a number of critics have now pointed out, was significantly overdetermined by both the Cold War ideological struggles that transected Australian society in the 50s and the related internal developments of an expanding professional discipline within a growing university system. 1

Writing Upwards: Letters to Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister, 1949–1966

2020

Robert Gordon Menzies received approximately 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term of office as Australia’s Prime Minister (1949–66). This article examines the corpus as an example of “writing upwards,” a distinctive epistolary genre in which the weak wrote to the powerful, to praise them, berate them, abuse them, or perhaps wish them a happy birthday. From this perspective, the Menzies correspondence takes its place alongside the correspondence of other twentieth-century leaders that has already attracted scholarly and popular interest (the Belgian monarchy, Hitler, Mussolini, Mitterrand, Obama). After surveying this literature and establishing the Australian context, I give a brief presentation of the corpus as a whole. I then focus on one fundamental assumption of letter writers engaged in “writing upwards”: they believed their leader or superior was directly accessible and that they could establish a personal connection with him. By cutting through bureaucratic r...

Journalists Writing Australian Political History

Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2010

There has been a considerable increase in the number of political histories written by journalists since the 1960s. Three types of journalistic political histories have emerged in this period: the quickie, the longer history and the investigative work, and the works of Warren Denning, Alan Reid and Paul Kelly have been particularly influential in the development of the genre's present characteristics and concerns. This article finds that the genre's increase is the result of a combination of factors: the expansion of a tertiary-educated readership; the introduction of university training for journalists; increasing economic pressures faced by publishers, and the rise of celebrity culture.

Before Alternative Voices: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 20 (1): online. ISSN: 1441-2616, 2017

In 1802 George Howe (1769-1821), the recently appointed Government Printer, published Australia’s first book. The following year he established Australia’s first newspaper; an enterprise that ran counter to all the environmental factors of the day, including: 1) issues of logistics and a lack of appropriate equipment and basic materials to produce a regularly issued newspaper; 2) issues resulting from the very close supervision of production and the routine censorship by the Governor; and 3) issues associated with the colony’s primary purposes as a military outpost and as a penal settlement, creating conflicts between very different readerships. The Sydney Gazette was, critically for Howe, the only newspaper in the infant city for over two decades. Alternative voices would not enter the field of printed media until the 1820s and 1830s. This article briefly explores the birth of an Australian industry and looks at how a very modest newspaper overcame a range of serious challenges to ignite imaginations and lay a foundation for media empires.

Curtin’s Circus : the Prime Minister and Canberra news correspondents, 1941-1945

2011

Whenever possible, the place of publication has been included in the references of this thesis. Occasionally the place of publication has not been specified in the case of some online and print sources. 4 Throughout this thesis, the term "labour" (using British spelling) has been used to describe the broader movement comprising the ALP, unions, Trades and Labour Councils and left wing groups such as socialists. The term 'Labor' (using American spelling) is used to refer to the Australian Labor Party. The ALP adopted American spelling for its name from the beginning. See Bobbie Oliver, "Shaping the Nation: John Curtin and Australia" [hereafter "Shaping the nation"],