Media and popular modernism around the Pacific War: An inter-Asian story

Abstract

Across much of the Asia-Pacific today, the smart phone, the tablet and the laptop or home personal computer are vying with the humble TV set not only to promote new models of lifestyle and to distribute communal and national stories but also to circulate other people’s stories and ways of life, complicating notions of heritage and cultural affinity. The proliferation of media technologies and their rapid spread across populations hitherto remote from or hostile to each other has transformed the conditions for the practice as well as the study of memory in this region as elsewhere. Yet, there are precedents for these developments; ‘new waves’ of media culture responded to technological change, colonial conflict, war, revolution and the growing influence of Hollywood across the Asia-Pacific region after the Pacific War. In Australia, one such ‘wave’ was a boom in travel writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, and another was the ‘new Australian cinema’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on work in progress about Ernestine Hill, a mid-twentieth-century writer preoccupied with technology, this article suggests that asking how ‘old’ media have circulated ‘new’ memories of community in the past also opens up a way of situating old Australian national stories in a regional frame today.