Imagining Australia: Community, participation and the 'Australian Way of Life' in the photography of the Australian Women's Weekly, 1945-1956
Date
2018
Authors
Deas, Megan Elizabeth
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Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
While the cultural history and practices of press photography in Australia have gained scholarly attention in recent years, the contribution of other forms of photography published in magazines—including editorial, advertising and readers’ photographs—to burgeoning concepts of nationhood has been largely overlooked. This thesis examines the role of photography in visualising a post-war ‘imagined community’ in a study of The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, the highest-circulating weekly publication in the country, between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the introduction of television in 1956. In its examination of these photographs, the thesis asks: What narratives of national identity were evident in the photographs? What subject matter and framing techniques were frequently employed to construct a national photographic language? And what does this reveal about the values the Weekly’s publisher and editors attached to being Australian? I argue that the Weekly was not passively depicting or reflecting a national community and its ‘Way of Life’, but that it actively constructed an Australian identity through the thousands of photographs it published, while simultaneously instructing its readers what good citizenship looked like—and how to perform their belonging to the nation. Visual analysis of over 200 photographs highlights the predominant narratives during the period, including an emphasis on the practice of family photography to reinforce ideals of urban, family life as centred within the modern home. Representations of immigration and Aboriginal Australians, the repetition of photographs of families participating in community events, and a valorisation of the rural worker’s relationship with the land were intertwined with the concepts of ordinariness and of the ‘Australian Way of Life’. These core ideals were deployed to enable multiple and potentially oppositional narratives to coexist on the pages of the magazine. Analysis of a series of readers’ colour travel photographs published in the later years of the study foregrounds the Weekly’s encouragement of its readers as collaborators by providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate their performance of national identity. The magazine thus became a platform through which readers contributed to the visual narrative of Australianness, via the medium of photography as a form of participatory citizenship. The thesis foregrounds the implementation of a high-speed printing press in 1950 as a turning point at which readers saw a significant increase in the publication of colour photographs of native flora and fauna, and specifically photographs of ordinary Australians within the landscape. I argue that Alice Jackson and Esme Fenston, the Weekly’s editors during the period of study, positioned it as the mediator of knowledge about Australia, and constructed a relationship with readers based on notions of intimacy and authority. Situated within the multidisciplinary field of visual culture, and drawing from photography studies, visual anthropology, cultural history and media studies, the thesis highlights the cultural work of photography in the process of imaging, and imagining, post-war Australia.
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Keywords
Australian Women's Weekly, national identity, photography, community, visual culture, vernacular photography, Australian history, popular press, middle class, Australian Way of Life, imagined community, post-war, 1950s
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Thesis (PhD)
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