ABSTRACT Quack advertising was widespread in pre-Federation newspapers including those in rural New England (northern New South Wales). Between 1891 and 1892, Madame and Dr Paul Duflot and their Golden Chariot visited the New England area and attracted large crowds. At the same time, the practice of medical science was striving to establish its credibility and set itself apart from alternative health providers. They did this by pejoratively labelling alternative medicine providers as “quacks”. This article contributes to the New England media-history and news-framing literature on quack reporting. It draws on the framing theories of Robert Entman and Paul D’Angelo, alongside Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of the “stranger” and “strangerhood”. The analysis reveals a striking hypocrisy among local newspapers: while they prominently advertised the quacks and their cures—including the Duflots’ public appearances and private consultations—they simultaneously ran anti-quack news stories. Notably, the popularity of the Duflots suggests that New Englanders were not entirely won over by medical science. Instead, they prioritised personal autonomy, human agency and control over their healthcare decisions.

ABSTRACT The gendered discrepancy in income across the visual and craft arts is widely recognised. Female artists on average receive less for their sales of art than do male artists, and at auction in the resale market, work by female artists on average sells for less than that of male artists. These outcomes are compounded by lower earnings from waged employment in the visual arts and craft sector. This article draws on the results from a 2022 survey of the incomes and working conditions of 702 visual and craft artists and arts workers in Australia to explore how gender impacts the economic status of artists. The authors analyse the survey findings in conjunction with art-market outcomes for visual artists in Australia to assess the key moments in artists’ careers where their career progression is impacted by gender and how policymakers might respond to these challenges.

ABSTRACT The great interior deserts of Australia provide the setting for two important genres of Australian literature: exploration narratives and science fiction (SF). Both borrow heavily from, but also revise and challenge, the tropes about deserts European settler colonists brought with them. More recent Indigenous SF, however, has pushed back against these settler-colonist tropes, and thus introduced new approaches to the rich field of Australian SF.

ABSTRACT As a global city and commercial capital of Australia, Sydney occupies an important place in the national imagination. Attention is naturally drawn to the city, making it a valuable target for those seeking to present claims and challenge those in power. This article draws on a unique protest-event catalogue to examine patterns of environmental activism in Sydney over the 1997–2018 period. The article draws out the key issues, actors and actions, and shows how these have changed over time across the Sydney metropolitan region. The findings suggest that the affordances of the urban environment play an important role in shaping the patterns of protest. A central division is between actions in the City of Sydney and those in surrounding local government areas. The greater availability of targets in the City of Sydney facilitates larger-scale actions, whereas those in the wider metropolitan region are more closely tied to sites impacted by perceived threats.

ABSTRACT In 1940, wartime Prime Minister Robert Menzies established Australia’s first foreign legation to Washington DC, appointing his political rival, Richard Gardiner Casey, a move that marked a turning point in the importation of US public relations. This article examines formative exchanges between Casey, one of the Liberal Party’s most senior and capable members, and US public relations figure Earl Newsom, who authored a confidential report for Casey into overcoming American uninterest in, and ignorance of, Australia. Drawing on the Earl Newsom papers, we argue that Casey’s alliance with Newsom increased the visibility of Australian news in the United States; activated a bevy of cultural and travel relationships; and was conducted in a way to avoid the unpalatable taint of propaganda. Casey’s mission was contextualised by a political battle between US media industry players and democratic reformists and had ongoing implications for Australian political communication, separate from the histories of advertising, magazine and film connections. This interdisciplinary case study sheds new light on the cultural, social, economic and political flows stemming from Australia’s embrace of United States public relations at a moment when other roads might have been taken.

ABSTRACT Arid Australia is lightly peopled, and so in past eras its representation in art and literature has often been based on fleeting visits. The paucity of personally lived experience has encouraged commentators to use it as a blank canvas for a contradictory range of imputed meanings, from emptiness to plenitude. The country is occasionally benign yet is mostly hot and dry: the resulting attitude of deficit is exemplified by Sidney Nolan’s “Desert and Drought” paintings of the 1950s. Yet a subsequent explosion of Aboriginal art, and of written accounts revealing the appetite of Aboriginal people for connection with Country, has helped swing the pendulum towards mystique, and settler Australians have begun to interpret the deserts sympathetically. Even so, settler Australians struggle to see this tough country as habitable. Western ideals have run up against a landscape unusually inimical to industrial and agricultural purposes, such that now the inland may best be interpreted as a symbol of the limits to human endeavour.

ABSTRACT Worsening inequality worldwide has stimulated a renewal of scholarly work on the dynamics of elite recruitment, notably Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s large-scale UK study (2024), which found only modest change in the make-up of Britain’s elite between the 1890s and today. Cumulative advantage is shown to accrue to those who pass through more than one of Britain’s “precise channels of elite recruitment”. Reeves and Friedman’s underlying motivation is to identify how these channels “might be remade so the elites we get are the ones we need”—implicitly, elites interested in reversing current trends in inequality. Australia presents an opportunity to consider their findings in a situation where, compared with Britain, elite recruitment is more nebulous. Drawing on the life and transnational career of Australian economist John Hewson, this article responds to Reeves and Friedman’s invocation to evaluate “how elites think, and what elites do, rather than simply who they are”. The dynamics of Hewson’s elite recruitment and its relationship to his role in constructing consent for neoliberalism in Australia in the late 20th century—in the academy, the media and politics—is contextualised in the national and global history of neoliberalism.

ABSTRACT Rupert Murdoch stepped down from heading his company News Corporation in 2023 after a 71-year career as a media proprietor that has been as controversial as it has been financially successful. The life and career of Rupert Murdoch has been examined through many different lenses yielding insights into his ceaseless media deal making and his influence on politics and on other media, among other topics. This study draws on the eight biographies of Murdoch and the 34 books about his company’s activities to examine three questions: why is Murdoch so hostile to the Establishment and “elites”, however variously they are defined by him when he has been a member of both his entire life? How does his antipathy show up in his media outlets, especially in his populist rhetoric where simple “us and them” binaries are posited for complex issues, and do the biographical sources about him help explain his apparently contradictory behaviour?

ABSTRACT This article explores how Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978), framed his origin story as a child of the Victorian Mallee. By 1898, when Menzies was three, the Federation drought had begun. Local water trusts charged farmers and residents for water that often they were unable to deliver. The result was political conflict over water security. Although Menzies, who grew up in Jeparit, remembered the drought all his life, the water crisis itself received scant notice in his memoir, Afternoon Light (1967). This article considers the agency of elites in shaping public knowledge of the regions from which they rise and how critical elite history can use interdisciplinary approaches to produce new insights into elites and their social impact.