Image Of Australia Research Articles

The Politics of the Visual: Immigrant Architecture in Melbourne’s Tourist Brochures

ABSTRACT This paper investigates “immigrant architecture” 1 in Australia and argues that the reception of the “architecture of the other” is mediated by the visual appearance of this architecture. The paper investigates the politics of multiculturalism and migration in Melbourne, Australia, and more specifically its representation in Melbourne's tourist brochures. We argue that tourist brochures portray the image of the city to both national and international audience, and that the decisions around which architecture to include (and exclude) correspond with that image, and are hierarchical. The inclusion and exclusion of Melbourne’s architecture in selected tourist brochures are central to this paper, juxtaposing the reality and diversity of Melbourne’s architecture, to the selection of architecture which is represented in the brochures. This corresponds with the collision of two different images of Australia as a nation, the first being the image of Australian as hegemonic and related to white, Anglo-Celtic culture, and the second as image of Australian culture as multicultural, diverse and in flux. The paper proposes that mainstream tourist brochures rely on out-dated colonial-settler narratives and selectively represent the contributions of Indigenous and minority ethnic immigrants to Australian society.

Refugee children, boats and drownings: a history of an Australian ‘humanitarian’ discourse

What are the stories of humanitarianism that Australians tell? What are the ‘collective narratives’ that create an imaginary of Australia as shaped by a culture of humanitarianism? This article explores one such story: that ‘we must stop the boats of asylum seekers so the children don’t drown’. This is a twenty-first-century narrative told by governments, media and the public that has served to create an idea of a ‘we’ who are in control and know best. In this article I move through the history of the development of this narrative, providing an exploration of when and how it emerged. I think through this narrative’s reliance on, and exploitation and further production of, humanitarian discourses and cultures, analysing the ways that it invokes a highly sentimental and racialised idea of who refugee and asylum-seeking children are and what they are imagined to need from the Australian state and public. Finally, I locate this narrative and discourse within a history of settler-colonial projects that work to create an image of Australia as a nation of ‘white saviours’, policy-makers as ‘good caring humanitarians’, and non-white children as requiring the ‘benevolent care’ of white governments.

SOVIET UNION AND AUSTRALIA IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1940S: EACH OTHER’S PROVINCIAL IMAGES

The main task of this article is analysis of mutual perception of Soviet people and Australians during the first part of the Cold War. Situation in provincial centers of USSR and Australia (Urals region and Western Australia) is at the center of author`s attention. The article is based on the materials of Orenburg region`s Center of contemporary history documents, newspapers «Uralsky Rabochy» (Sverdlovsk) and «The West Australian» (Pert). The author proves that formation of images of these countries had special characteristics due to their roles in world policy and their political regimes. The author concludes Australians had complex but controversial image of Soviet Union. There was no real image of Australia among ordinary Soviet people. Originality of this article is connected with its first attempt to analyse mutual perception of Soviet people and Australians during the first part of the Cold War studying situation in provincial centers of USSR and Australia. Importance of this article is also connected with high relevance of the problem of formation of the images of nations in contemporary conditions of development of international humanitarian contacts.

The Reception of Spain in Australia through Translation: a Linguistic, Cultural and Audiovisual Overview

The geographical distance between Spain and Australia is not an obstacle to a historical relationship that is developing at linguistic, cultural and audiovisual levels in Australia. This work presents a study of the position of the Spanish language and culture in the Australian social panorama and reflects on the audiovisual media as the main means of conveying this foreign culture and language. From the identification of the elements that participate in the process of translation of the Spanish audiovisual products in Australia, significant conclusions are derived related to the effect that the translation of these audiovisual products can have on the creation of a Spanish cultural image in Australia.

Russia-Australia Relations before and after the Ukrainian Crisis

The crisis of Australian-Russian relations after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the set of factors that caused it have received little attention from scholars of international affairs. The article contributes to addressing this research lacuna. It examines the 2014–2015 crisis in bilateral relations from the point of view of both Moscow and of Canberra. The author analyses the evolution of these relations before 2014 to understand whether the Ukrainian crisis was the cause of their sharp deterioration in 2014–2015, or it only accelerated the process that began much earlier. He demonstrates that Australia had no close political and economic ties with Russia, and the two countries did not consider each other as priority partners. The article finds that in 2014–2015 the Kremlin did not take into account a number of factors, such as very limited interest of Australia in commercial exchanges with Russia, Canberra’s growing suspicions about Moscow’s foreign policy intentions and view of Russia as a revisionist power (especially after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war), a strong sense of solidarity with the West among Australia’s political elites, and Russia’s increasingly worsening public image in Australia, that negatively affected Canberra’s stance towards the Kremlin even before 2014, and which greatly contributed to the crisis in bilateral relations. As for future development, the author identifies two factors that may have a negative impact on Russian-Australian relations: 1) rising energy demand in China and India, making Russia and Australia potential competitors in Asia’s gas markets; 2) a too close rapprochement of Moscow with Beijing, fraughtwith the risk of embroiling Russia in a web of conflicts in the Western Pacific.

Banking on BANJO: business, bias, and belonging in rural social imaginaries

ABSTRACTSocial imaginaries, like those in the work of A. B. “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson, reinforced by contemporary ideas of a bucolic rural idyll, reflect images of Australia shared in contemporary media. These images are often used in marketing rural places. This research examines the social imaginaries used to create marketing for a wide-ranging area around Stanthorpe, Queensland. These marketing ideas promote stereotypes of Australia’s rural areas as rugged, adventurous places filled with “authentic” people and experiences. Promotion of these autochthonous social imaginaries, however, brings with it challenges, including the exclusion of those who don’t fit normative ideas of a predominantly white, male, heterosexual society. This research uses proximity ethics to challenge the notion of using the past to sell the present and contributes to ideas about current rural discourse. Findings may be used to raise awareness within rural Australia about the exclusionary nature of these social imaginaries.

Il surfista, eroe romantico nell’Australia contemporanea. Un’analisi etnografica a partire dal caso della Gold Coast

Through the ethnographic analysis of surf culture on the Gold Coast, this paper examines the relevance of the surfer’s image in Australia’s representations. In fact, surfing epitomises some of the cultural traits that symbolically define the national identity such as the relation with nature, the beach, fitness and “larrikism”. Among these qualities, bravery represents the cornerstone of an exclusive and mainly manly — and white — sporting culture. As a seductive echo of the Romantic hero, surfers embody the ideal appeal of “fun” and freedom, as well as the competitive attitude of sport and the athletic allure of youth; with no contradictions, they also exemplify the individualism of the “neoliberalist ethos”, a virile kind of brotherhood and the discriminating dynamics which have characterized the history of sport in Australia. The Gold Coast is an ideal context to observe these processes in fieri , for its role in promoting competitive surfing and surfers’ representations in the Country.

Recovery of heritage software stored on magnetic tape for Commodore microcomputers

Digital games make up a significant but little known chapter in the history of the moving image in Australia and New Zealand. Beginning in the early 1980s, the Australasian software industry developed a remarkable record of content creation. The ``Play It Again'' project is conducting research into the largely unknown histories of 1980s game development in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring that local titles make it into national collections and are documented and preserved, enabling the public to once again play these games. Microcomputers from the 1980s made extensive use of compact audio cassettes to distribute software as an inexpensive alternative to the floppy disk technology available at the time. Media from this era are at risk of degradation and are rapidly approaching the end of their lifespan. As hardware platforms and peripheral devices become obsolete, access to the data for future scholars and other interested parties becomes more difficult. In this article, we present a case study, wherein we investigate the issues involved in making digital copies with a view to the long term preservation of these software artefacts. A video game title stored on standard compact cassette for Commodore's popular VIC-20 machine, ``Dinky Kong'' by Mark Sibley was recorded using both inexpensive amateur and professional playback equipment. The audio files obtained were processed using freely available software, alongside a customised decoder written in MATLAB and Perl. The resulting image files were found to be playable using an emulator. More importantly, the integrity of the data itself was verified, by making use of error detection features inbuilt to the Commodore tape format, which is described in detail. Issues influencing the quality of the recovered image files such as the bit rate of the digital recording are discussed. The phenomenon of audio dropout on magnetic tape is shown be of some concern, however there exist signal processing techniques to compensate for such errors. The end result of the imaging process was a file compatible with a popular Commodore VIC-20 emulator, the integrity of which was verified by using inbuilt checksums.

Born in Melbourne? Considerations on the origins of Australian political science

ABSTRACTIn a pioneering academic discussion of Australian politics written just before the First World War, William Harrison Moore reinforced the image of Australia as an increasingly autonomous part of a slowly evolving but essentially liberal British Empire. In this 34-page account of ‘Political Systems of Australia’ published in George H. Knibbs, ed., Federal Handbook (Melbourne, 1914), the Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Melbourne arguably created the ur-text of the Australian Politics textbook. It is argued that there is an unbroken thread of Cambridge-inspired political science teaching and writing at Melbourne from Harrison Moore onwards. The early Australian politics textbooks and ‘Political Systems of Australia’ are cut from the same cloth, making the latter an important precursor.

Stwarzanie Australii

The review of Magdalena Bąk’s „Gdzie diabeł (tasmański) mówi dobranoc. Wizerunek Australii w literaturze polskiej” (Where a (Tasmanian) devil says good-bye. The image of Australia in Polish literature) outlines a well-researched presentation of Australian interests in Polish literature in the historical context. The publication is recognized for its pioneering attempt to show a diversity of Australian topics in a variety of literary genres (travel books, memoires, personal accounts, novel and poetry). The reviewed book is also valued for its focus on the forgotten chapter of the 19th century Polish works dealing with Australia.

'Dust Bowls', TVAs and Snowy River Waters: John Heyer, The Valley is Ours and an Early Post-War 'Image of Australia'

Abstract This paper introduces the story of the 1940s debate between the Australian state of Victoria and the north-bordering state of New South Wales, over Australia's Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme. It describes the campaign imagery generated by the state of Victoria and the Murray Valley Development League (MVDL) to promote their vision for a Murray Valley TVA. The focus is on Australian documentary film-maker John Heyer and The Valley is Ours (1948). The Valley was created to support the MVDL's claims that a scheme to benefit their valley would be the best post-war scheme for both New South Wales and Victoria, and for the nation. This paper takes a transnational and cultural approach to investigating this story. This is because Heyer used nationalist US concepts to strengthen Australian national myths - the film's transnational content was set to a nationalist purpose. This paper describes the environmental imagery - not just images, but sound and text, used by Heyer and the MVDL campaign, to convey a transnational set of ideas. It retrieves a material record from the archives, of what these transnational environmental ideas actually looked and sounded like. And it sheds light on the cultural influences and political forces behind the Murray TVA campaign and the film's creation.

New Cultural Landscapes: Australian Narratives in Literature and Film

Australia. Terra Australis Incognita. Even before its oicial inding by Captain James Cook in 1770, the “land down under” already circulated in the European imagination. he giant mass of land necessary to balance a lat Earth (as antipodal to Europe) could only be home to a great many monstrous fauna and lora, as it was also the cultural counterpart to Europe. However, giant one-eyed monsters and sea serpents were not found by Captain Cook upon his arrival on Botany Bay, now part of Sydney. By declaring the land terra nullius, Cook ignored the many Aboriginal communities that had lived in Australia for over 75,000 years and such act has given way to one of the core elements in the development of Australian culture and history: the relationship between whites and Aborigines in the development of the nation.Also, the fact that the individuals transported to Australia as part of the First Fleet in 1788 were, for the most part, convicts (Australia had been established as a penal colony following the loss of the American colonies in 1776, which had been used for that purpose by the English crown) whose criminal records ranged from murder to stealing cheese. In fact, as Robert Hughes reminds us, in his thorough study he Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (1986), “[n]ever had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied” (1). he ignorance of the land combined with the sociological beliefs of Georgian England that there was a “criminal class” being established in Britain turned Australia, in Hughes’s words, into “a cloaca, invisible, its contents ilthy and unnameable” (1-2). he gathering of British rejects in a faraway place, so diferent from the landscapes of Britain and Ireland, did not mean the relationship to an idea of Britishness was simply severed. In fact, it took the irst inhabitants the best part of half a century for the acknowledgement and active development of an Australian culture that distanced itself, albeit slowly though not thoroughly, from its European origins (2). Literature has been in the core of the early Australian settlements from the beginning. In part of the introduction to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), edited by Nicholas Jose, Elizabeth Webby reminds us that “[b]ooks arrived in Australia in January 1788 with Governor Phillip’s First Fleet, along with paper, ink, type and a printing press, though it was to be a few more years before the new British colony could boast a printer” (16). Next to the multiple travel reports that needed to be produced in order to both inform the British crown and feed the average British imagination, the irst forms of actual literature produced in Australia dealt with the longing of home, the strangeness of the landscape, its fauna and lora, the praise of the convict, and the contact (not always peaceful) with indigenous Australians. he image of Australia as a nation in which only the strong would survive (given the complete lack of material resources and the initial diiculty of establishing agriculture in the early colonies due to the harshness of the land) and, thus, where the British would have to adapt and become Australians, can be seen in one of the

“It’s time”: revolution and evolution in Australian political advertising

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine two significant political advertising campaigns which used the “It’s Time” slogan and to reflect on how these related to official, popular and commercial nationalism in Australia. The paper is primarily concerned with two main issues: identifying and examining the variety of images of Australia in two key television advertisements, and exploring the methods by which advertising agencies created positive images of Australia and Australians in the two campaigns. It specifically highlights the significance of the “It’s Time” campaign, which is relevant for scholars and advertisers seeking to understand effective political communication. Design/methodology/approach This paper examines television advertisements by using semiotics as the principal methodology. The research methodology devised for the advertisements consists of two main components: a shot combination analysis, also known as a shot-by-shot analysis, and a semiological reading of the visual and acoustic channels of the advertisement. Findings This paper examines the use of commercial nationalism in television advertising. As one of many social and cultural influences, advertisements assist the individual in understanding their notion of themselves and their relationship with the wider community – be it local, national, regional or global. The primary focus of this research is the phenomenon of commercial nationalism – the adoption of national signifiers in the marketplace. However, by examining the more general discourse on nationalism, particularly the voice of official nationalism – the promotion of nationalism by the nation-state (or those aspiring to power), the symbiotic relationship between these two complementary brands of nationalism is explored. Originality/value The methodology adopted for analysing the two political advertising campaigns offers conceptual and practical value. It provides a consistent set of terms and concepts for further research to build upon. The paper provides insights for the marketing or examination of advertising campaigns. The paper demonstrates the power of market research to inform a framing strategy for a political campaign. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge in this area and thus society’s understanding of these important periods in the nation’s history. In particular, the paper provides an exploration into the “It’s Time” campaign and how it mobilised a broader cultural awakening to engineer success at the ballot box in 1972. The two case studies examined in this paper are relevant to political scientists and media and communication scholars.

Born in Melbourne? Origins of Australian Political Science

In a pioneering academic discussion of Australian politics written in 1913, William Harrison Moore reinforced the image of Australia as an increasingly autonomous part of a slowly evolving but essentially liberal British empire. In this 34 page account of “Political Systems of Australia” published in George H. Knibbs, ed., Federal Handbook (Melbourne, 1914), the Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Melbourne arguably generated the ur-text of the Australian Politics textbook. This paper will discuss the author and his text, and seek to evaluate the Melbourne claim to parentage of Australian political studies via this discussion.

Visual Image of the Continent in Russian Textbooks on Geography (1825-2013)

The research objective is the identification of dynamics and a ratio between figurative and rational ways of representation of a visual material in the example of didactic illustrations in the Russian textbooks on geography (1825-2013). As an example, the concept “image of Australia” as not adjoining to Russia, the far country-continent is used. A map as a visual representation of a territory is important for understanding the symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as regions, economic structures, activity of the population and the condition of natural resources. Authors of textbooks, using schemes and numerous charts, expand limits of the symbolical image of information.

The Image of Australia: A Case Study on the Mental Maps of Turkish Immigrants in Sydney

In this study, mental representations of Australia were examined through mental maps in case of Turkish immigrants living in Sydney. The survey is based on 53 mental maps of Australia drawn by Turkish immigrants who reside in Sydney. The participants were asked to list the connotations about Australia, draw a sketch map of the continent and finally fill in an outline Australian map. A prominent difference between these two types of mental maps was in the number and in the categories (place names, natural-geographic elements and symbols) of the components that were displayed by the participants. On the other hand, a comparison of our study with similar academic works conducted from a European example shows that connotations on Australia are predominantly referred to the natural characteristics of the continent. This could be related to the physical isolation Australia as a continent and also to the political indifference tendencies of the urbanized part of the society because of a high living standard.

Out in the outback: Queering nationalism in Australian film comedy

ABSTRACTThe ‘ocker film’ was one of the defining subgenres of the revitalized Australian cinema of the 1970s. Characterized by bawdy humor and roguish escapades, these picaresque films satirically perpetuated an image of folksy Australian masculinity that countered and antagonized a queered image of British masculinity. To this end, these popular comedies rebuked the lingering British cultural influence in Australia while underscoring its distinctive humor and cultural identity, albeit one that was often sexist, anti-intellectual, and homophobic. In the 1990s, a series of Australian film comedies took up (and took on) the ocker tradition to revise this problematic image of Australian masculinity. In this essay, I argue that The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliott, 1994) re-appropriates and revises the ocker tradition, especially its pervasive heteronormativity. Though it falters in its treatment of women and ethnic minorities, Priscilla promotes a message of diversity that queers what I call the ‘andronationalism’—that is, masculinized nationalism—touted in the ocker film tradition to envision a more modern and more inclusive image of Australia.

‘I knew I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque’: The Warner Bros. Cartoon down under

ABSTRACTThere are many feature films made outside of Australia during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that attempt to represent or ‘imagine’ specific histories or features of the Australian continent, particularly as a ‘landscape’. This article examines an under-analyzed series of films (containing similar characteristics) produced by the animation departments of major Hollywood studios during this same period. Its particular focus is upon two series of animated short subjects produced by the Warner Bros. studio in the period between the late 1940s and the early 1960s featuring the iconic ‘Australian’ characters Hippety Hopper and the Tasmanian Devil. It examines the ways in which these cartoons reinforce and in some respects depart from conventional representations of Australia in ‘international’ cinema (and also scrutinizes how they rarely move past a ‘partial’ representation of place). It also explores the ways in which the animated film allows for a freer expression of what might be called the ‘imagination’ of Australia, and how this relates to the often wilful, bizarre and non-realistic characterizations and stereotyping that appear within the frame and on the soundtrack. This article further interrogates how such textual practices relate to the broader characteristics of the animated film, the ‘imagination’ and representation of ‘other’ foreign places in Hollywood cinema more generally, and the ‘painterly’ image of Australia.

Images of Australia and its Product in Korean Market: In the Case of Beef

The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, tries to validate the correlation between country image and information search behavior toward its product. Secondly, investigate the effect of country image on the purchase intention toward its product. Well-developed questionnaire was distributed to 168 consumers residing in Seoul metropolitan area. Results of survey provided empirical support that country image is correlated to information search behavior, and also country image significantly affects purchase intention. That is, the higher perceived country image, the lower the customer's information search effort and higher purchase intention toward its product. The research results provide important message to Australia and for its products marketed in Korea.

Chinese Student Travel Market to Australia: An Exploratory Assessment of Destination Perceptions

ABSTRACT Chinese students form the largest international student travel market for Australia and approximately a quarter of Australia's international student enrollments are mainland Chinese. Despite the significance of the market, little is known about Chinese student travelers. This study offers an exploratory assessment of the perceived image of Australia in the Chinese student market. Through a self-completion questionnaire, data regarding the pre- and post-arrival perceptions of Australia were collected from Chinese students on the Gold Coast. The study identified natural scenery/attractions and agreeable environment/climate as the strengths of Australia. Historical attractions and shopping related opportunities were the weaknesses of Australia as a tourist destination. A factor analysis was performed on both pre- and post-arrival perception data. Different structural patterns emerged from the two sets of data suggesting a modification effect of actual experience on the destination perception. The results also suggest that destination marketers should emphasize the general environment in Australia when marketing to the Chinese student market.