Academic literature on the topic 'Special libraries Victoria Melbourne Marketing'

The Getting It Together Rural Health Promotion project was established by a group of community health providers in Gippsland, Victoria. The overall aim of Getting It Together was to extend and improve health promotion practice amongst participating organisations. This was achieved through collaboration around health promotion training and planning. Complementary strategies addressing Cardio-Vascular Disease (CVD) were developed across four Local Government Areas (LGAs). Central resourcing was provided for coordination of the project, and for marketing and network support tasks. The project was based on an integrated and coordinated health promotion model, which contained overlapping strategies combining to create a broadly based partnership of action. At the commencement of the project, health promotion workers from each LGA were provided with a three-day training course conducted by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT). Participants developed Action Plans based around the three driving strategies of community wide-strategies, targeted strategies and marketing. A special feature of Getting It Together was a common media strategy, to support and reinforce action at the local level. An overall slogan was adopted, 'Slicker Ticker - A Gippsland Healthy Heart Project'. Uniting themes included 'Stress Less Week' and 'Gippsland Get Up and Go'. Latrobe Community Health Service facilitated the project and senior managers from the partnering agencies formed a Steering Committee, which met at key intervals to monitor the project.

IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. Bannerman, Colin. Seed Cake and Honey Prawns: Fashion and Fad in Australian Food. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008.Bell, Johnny. “Putting Dad in the Picture: Fatherhood in the Popular Women’s Magazines of 1950s Australia.” Women's History Review 22.6 (2013): 904–929.Bird, Delys, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee. Eds. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950-2000. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 2001.“Bistro at Chadstone.” The Magazine of Good Living 4.3 (1960): 3.Brien, Donna Lee. “Powdered, Essence or Brewed? Making and Cooking with Coffee in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.” M/C Journal 15.2 (2012). 20 July 2016 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/475>.Brien, Donna Lee, and Alison Vincent. “Oh, for a French Wife? Australian Women and Culinary Francophilia in Post-War Australia.” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 22 (2016): 78–90.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.“Changing Concepts of Cooking.” Australian Wines & Food 2.11 (1958/1959): 18-19.“Coffee Beginnings.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 37–39.“Cooking with Cheese.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 25–28.“Cooking with Wine.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 24–30.Crosby, R.D. “Wine Etiquette.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 19–21.“Curry and How to Make It.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 32.Duruz, Jean. “Rewriting the Village: Geographies of Food and Belonging in Clovelly, Australia.” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 373–388.Fox, Edward A., and Ohm Sornil. “Digital Libraries.” Encyclopedia of Computer Science. 4th ed. Eds. Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly, and David Hemmendinger. London: Nature Publishing Group, 2000. 576–581.“Fresh Frozen Food.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.8 (1959): 8.Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria. “Wine Makes the Recipe: Gas Makes the Dish.” Advertisement. Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 34.Gilbert, V.J. “Striving for Perfection.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 6.———. “The Woman’s Workshop.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines & Food 4.2 (1960): 22.“High Praise for Penfolds Claret.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 13.Hodder, Ian. The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1994.“How to Cook Frozen Meats.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.8 (1959): 19, 26.Johnson-Woods, Toni. Pulp: A Collector’s Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2004.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Kennedy, H.E. “Be Adventurous with Cheese.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 18–19.Keown, K.C. “Some Notes on Wine.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 32–33.Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.“Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wines and Food 4.2: 23.Lindesay, Vance. The Way We Were: Australian Popular Magazines 1856–1969. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1983.Luckins, Tanja. “Pigs, Hogs and Aussie Blokes: The Emergence of the Term “Six O’clock Swill.”’ History Australia 4.1 (2007): 8.1–8.17.Ludbrook, Jack. “Advocate for Australian Wines.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 3–4.Ludbrook, Jack. “Present Mixed Licensing Laws Harm Tourist Trade.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 14, 31.Kelvinator Australia. “Try Cooking the Frozen ‘Starter’ Way.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 10–12.Mackay, Colin. “Entertaining with Wine.” Australian Wines &Foods Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 3–5.Le Masurier, Megan, and Rebecca Johinke. “Magazine Studies: Pedagogy and Practice in a Nascent Field.” TEXT Special Issue 25 (2014). 20 July 2016 <http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue25/LeMasurier&Johinke.pdf>.“Melbourne Stages Australia’s First Wine Festival.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 8–9.Newton, John, and Stefano Manfredi. “Gottolengo to Bonegilla: From an Italian Childhood to an Australian Restaurant.” Convivium 2.1 (1994): 62–63.Newton, John. Wogfood: An Oral History with Recipes. Sydney: Random House, 1996.Pain, John Bowen. “Cooking with Wine.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 39–48.Postiglione, Nadia.“‘It Was Just Horrible’: The Food Experience of Immigrants in 1950s Australia.” History Australia 7.1 (2010): 09.1–09.16.“Regional Shopping Centre.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 12–13.Risson, Toni. Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill: Greek Cafés in Twentieth-Century Australia. Ipswich, Qld.: T. Risson, 2007.Ross, Laurie. “Fantasy Worlds: The Depiction of Women and the Mating Game in Men’s Magazines in the 1950s.” Journal of Australian Studies 22.56 (1998): 116–124.Santich, Barbara. Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage. Kent Town: Wakefield P, 2012.Seabrook, Douglas. “Stocking Your Cellar.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 19–20.Seppelt, John. “Advance Australian Wine.” Australian Wines & Foods Quarterly 1.3 (1957): 3–4.Seppelt, R.L. “Wine Week: 1959.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.10 (1959): 3.Sheridan, Susan, Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett, and Lyndall Ryan. (2002) Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years. Sydney: UNSW P, 2002.Supski, Sian. “'We Still Mourn That Book’: Cookbooks, Recipes and Foodmaking Knowledge in 1950s Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies 28 (2005): 85–94.“Sydney Restaurant Challenges World Standards.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.4 (1957/1958): 33.Tingey, Peter. “Wineman Rode a Hobby Horse.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.9 (1959): 35.“Violinist Loves Bach—and Birds.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 3.12 (1960): 30.Wallace, Donald. Ed. Australian Wines & Food Quarterly. Magazine. Melbourne: 1956–1960.Warner-Smith, Penny. “Travel, Young Women and ‘The Weekly’, 1959–1968.” Annals of Leisure Research 3.1 (2000): 33–46.Webby, Elizabeth. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.White, Richard. “The Importance of Being Man.” Australian Popular Culture. Eds. Peter Spearritt and David Walker. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979. 145–169.White, Richard. “The Retreat from Adventure: Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s.” Australian Historical Studies 109 (1997): 101–103.“Wine: The Drink for the Home.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 2.10 (1959): 24–25.“Wines at the Lausanne Trade Fair.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 15.“Your Own Wine Cellar” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.2 (1957): 19–20.

At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).Unlike Homer’s Penelope, who stayed at home for twenty years waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, women have always been on the move to the same extent as men. Their rich travel stories (Riggal, Haysom, Lancaster)—mostly written as letters and diaries—remain largely unpublished and their experiences are not part of the public record to the same extent as the travel stories of men. Ros Pesman argues that the women traveller’s voice was one of privilege and authority full of excitement and disbelief (Pesman 26). She notes that until well into the second part of the twentieth century, “the journey for Australian women to Europe was much more than a return to the sources of family identity and history” (19). It was also:a pilgrimage to the centres and sites of culture, literature and history and an encounter with “the real world.”Europe, and particularly London,was also the place of authority and reference for all those seeking accreditation and recognition, whether as real writers, real ladies or real politicians and statesmen. (19)This article is about two Australian writers; Helen Seager, a journalist employed by The Argus, a daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and Gwen Hughes, a graduate of Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne, working in England as a lecturer, demonstrator and cookbook writer for Parkinsons’ Stove Company. Helen Seager travelled to England on an assignment for The Argus in 1950 and sent articles each day for publication in the women’s section of the newspaper. Gwen Hughes travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s recording her impressions, observations, and recipes for traditional foods whilst working for Parkinsons in England. These women were neither returning to the homeland for an encounter with the real world, nor were they there as cultural tourists in the Cook’s Tour sense of the word. They were professional writers and their observations about the places they visited offer fresh and lively versions of England and Europe, its people, places, and customs.Helen SeagerAustralian Journalist Helen Seager (1901–1981) wrote a daily column, Good Morning Ma’am in the women’s pages of The Argus, from 1947 until shortly after her return from abroad in 1950. Seager wrote human interest stories, often about people of note (Golding), but with a twist; a Baroness who finds knitting exciting (Seager, “Baroness” 9) and ballet dancers backstage (Seager, “Ballet” 10). Much-loved by her mainly female readership, in May 1950 The Argus sent her to England where she would file a daily report of her travels. Whilst now we take travel for granted, Seager was sent abroad with letters of introduction from The Argus, stating that she was travelling on a special editorial assignment which included: a certificate signed by the Lord Mayor of The City of Melbourne, seeking that any courtesies be extended on her trip to England, the Continent, and America; a recommendation from the Consul General of France in Australia; and introductions from the Premier’s Department, the Premier of Victoria, and Austria’s representative in Australia. All noted the nature of her trip, her status as an esteemed reporter for a Melbourne newspaper, and requested that any courtesy possible to be made to her.This assignment was an indication that The Argus valued its women readers. Her expenses, and those of her ten-year-old daughter Harriet, who accompanied her, were covered by the newspaper. Her popularity with her readership is apparent by the enthusiastic tone of the editorial article covering her departure. Accompanied with a photograph of Seager and Harriet boarding the aeroplane, her many women readers were treated to their first ever picture of what she looked like:THOUSANDS of "Argus" readers, particularly those in the country, have wanted to know what Helen Seager looks like. Here she is, waving good-bye as she left on the first stage of a trip to England yesterday. She will be writing her bright “Good Morning, Ma'am” feature as she travels—giving her commentary on life abroad. (The Argus, “Goodbye” 1)Figure 1. Helen Seager and her daughter Harriet board their flight for EnglandThe first article “From Helen in London” read,our Helen Seager, after busy days spent exploring England with her 10-year-old daughter, Harriet, today cabled her first “Good Morning, Ma’am” column from abroad. Each day from now on she will report from London her lively impressions in an old land, which is delightfully new to her. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Whilst some of her dispatches contain the impressions of the awestruck traveller, for the most they are exquisitely observed stories of the everyday and the ordinary, often about the seemingly most trivial of things, and give a colourful, colonial and egalitarian impression of the places that she visits. A West End hair-do is described, “as I walked into that posh looking establishment, full of Louis XV, gold ornateness to be received with bows from the waist by numerous satellites, my first reaction was to turn and bolt” (Seager, “West End” 3).When she visits Oxford’s literary establishments, she is, for this particular article, the awestruck Australian:In Oxford, you go around saying, soto voce and aloud, “Oh, ye dreaming spires of Oxford.” And Matthew Arnold comes alive again as a close personal friend.In a weekend, Ma’am, I have seen more of Oxford than lots of native Oxonians. I have stood and brooded over the spit in Christ Church College’s underground kitchens on which the oxen for Henry the Eighth were roasted.I have seen the Merton Library, oldest in Oxford, in which the chains that imprisoned the books are still to be seen, and have added by shoe scrape to the stone steps worn down by 500 years of walkers. I have walked the old churches, and I have been lost in wonder at the goodly virtues of the dead. And then, those names of Oxford! Holywell, Tom’s Quad, Friars’ Entry, and Long Wall. The gargoyles at Magdalen and the stones untouched by bombs or war’s destruction. It adds a new importance to human beings to know that once, if only, they too have walked and stood and stared. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Her sense of wonder whilst in Oxford is, however, moderated by the practicalities of travel incorporated into the article. She continues to describe the warnings she was given, before her departure, of foreign travel that had her alarmed about loss and theft, and the care she took to avoid both. “It would have made you laugh, Ma’am, could you have seen the antics to protect personal property in the countries in transit” (Seager, “From Helen” 3).Her description of a trip to Blenheim Palace shows her sense of fun. She does not attempt to describe the palace or its contents, “Blenheim Palace is too vast and too like a great Government building to arouse much envy,” settling instead on a curiosity should there be a turn of events, “as I surged through its great halls with a good-tempered, jostling mob I couldn’t help wondering what those tired pale-faced guides would do if the mob mood changed and it started on an old-fashioned ransack.” Blenheim palace did not impress her as much as did the Sunday crowd at the palace:The only thing I really took a fancy to were the Venetian cradle, which was used during the infancy of the present Duke and a fine Savvonerie carpet in the same room. What I never wanted to see again was the rubbed-fur collar of the lady in front.Sunday’s crowd was typically English, Good tempered, and full of Cockney wit, and, if you choose to take your pleasures in the mass, it is as good a company as any to be in. (Seager, “We Look” 3)In a description of Dublin and the Dubliners, Seager describes the food-laden shops: “Butchers’ shops leave little room for customers with their great meat carcasses hanging from every hook. … English visitors—and Dublin is awash with them—make an orgy of the cakes that ooze real cream, the pink and juicy hams, and the sweets that demand no points” (Seager, “English” 6). She reports on the humanity of Dublin and Dubliners, “Dublin has a charm that is deep-laid. It springs from the people themselves. Their courtesy is overlaid with a real interest in humanity. They walk and talk, these Dubliners, like Kings” (ibid.).In Paris she melds the ordinary with the noteworthy:I had always imagined that the outside of the Louvre was like and big art gallery. Now that I know it as a series of palaces with courtyards and gardens beyond description in the daytime, and last night, with its cleverly lighted fountains all aplay, its flags and coloured lights, I will never forget it.Just now, down in the street below, somebody is packing the boot of a car to go for, presumably, on a few days’ jaunt. There is one suitcase, maybe with clothes, and on the footpath 47 bottles of the most beautiful wines in the world. (Seager, “When” 3)She writes with a mix of awe and ordinary:My first glimpse of that exciting vista of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and the little bistros that I’ve always wanted to see, and all the delights of a new city, […] My first day in Paris, Ma’am, has not taken one whit from the glory that was London. (ibid.) Figure 2: Helen Seager in ParisIt is my belief that Helen Seager intended to do something with her writings abroad. The articles have been cut from The Argus and pasted onto sheets of paper. She has kept copies of the original reports filed whist she was away. The collection shows her insightful egalitarian eye and a sharp humour, a mix of awesome and commonplace.On Bastille Day in 1950, Seager wrote about the celebrations in Paris. Her article is one of exuberant enthusiasm. She writes joyfully about sirens screaming overhead, and people in the street, and looking from windows. Her article, published on 19 July, starts:Paris Ma’am is a magical city. I will never cease to be grateful that I arrived on a day when every thing went wrong, and watched it blossom before my eyes into a gayness that makes our Melbourne Cup gala seem funeral in comparison.Today is July 14.All places of business are closed for five days and only the places of amusement await the world.Parisians are tireless in their celebrations.I went to sleep to the music of bands, dancing feet and singing voices, with the raucous but cheerful toots from motors splitting the night air onto atoms. (Seager, “When” 3)This article resonates uneasiness. How easily could those scenes of celebration on Bastille Day in 1950 be changed into the scenes of carnage on Bastille Day 2016, the cheerful toots of the motors transformed into cries of fear, the sirens in the sky from aeroplanes overhead into the sirens of ambulances and police vehicles, as a Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as part of a terror attack drives a truck through crowds of people celebrating in Nice.Gwen HughesGwen Hughes graduated from Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy with a Diploma of Domestic Science, before she travelled to England to take up employment as senior lecturer and demonstrator of Parkinson’s England, a company that manufactured electric and gas stoves. Hughes wrote in her unpublished manuscript, Balkan Fever, that it was her idea of making ordinary cooking demonstration lessons dramatic and homelike that landed her the job in England (Hughes, Balkan 25-26).Her cookbook, Perfect Cooking, was produced to encourage housewives to enjoy cooking with their Parkinson’s modern cookers with the new Adjusto temperature control. The message she had to convey for Parkinsons was: “Cooking is a matter of putting the right ingredients together and cooking them at the right temperature to achieve a given result” (Hughes, Perfect 3). In reality, Hughes used this cookbook as a vehicle to share her interest in and love of Continental food, especially food from the Balkans where she travelled extensively in the 1930s.Recipes of Continental foods published in Perfect Cooking sit seamlessly alongside traditional British foods. The section on soup, for example, contains recipes for Borscht, a very good soup cooked by the peasants of Russia; Minestrone, an everyday Italian soup; Escudella, from Spain; and Cream of Spinach Soup from France (Perfect 22-23). Hughes devoted a whole chapter to recipes and descriptions of Continental foods labelled “Fascinating Foods From Far Countries,” showing her love and fascination with food and travel. She started this chapter with the observation:There is nearly as much excitement and romance, and, perhaps fear, about sampling a “foreign dish” for the “home stayer” as there is in actually being there for the more adventurous “home leaver”. Let us have a little have a little cruise safe within the comfort of our British homes. Let us try and taste the good things each country is famed for, all the while picturing the romantic setting of these dishes. (Hughes, Perfect 255)Through her recipes and descriptive passages, Hughes took housewives in England and Australia into the strange and wonderful kitchens of exotic women: Madame Darinka Jocanovic in Belgrade, Miss Anicka Zmelova in Prague, Madame Mrskosova at Benesova. These women taught her to make wonderful-sounding foods such as Apfel Strudel, Knedlikcy, Vanilla Kipfel and Christmas Stars. “Who would not enjoy the famous ‘Goose with Dumplings,’” she declares, “in the company of these gay, brave, thoughtful people with their romantic history, their gorgeously appareled peasants set in their richly picturesque scenery” (Perfect 255).It is Hughes’ unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written in Melbourne in 1943, to which I now turn. It is part of the Latrobe Heritage collection at the State Library of Victoria. Her manuscript was based on her extensive travels in the Balkans in the 1930s whilst she lived and worked in England, and it was, I suspect, her intention to seek publication.In her twenties, Hughes describes how she set off to the Balkans after meeting a fellow member of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) at the Royal Yugoslav Legation. He was an expert on village life in the Balkans and advised her, that as a writer she would get more information from the local villagers than she would as a tourist. Hughes, who, before television gave cooking demonstrations on the radio, wrote, “I had been writing down recipes and putting them in books for years and of course the things one talks about over the air have to be written down first—that seemed fair enough” (Hughes, Balkan 25-26). There is nothing of the awestruck traveller in Hughes’ richly detailed observations of the people and the places that she visited. “Travelling in the Balkans is a very different affair from travelling in tourist-conscious countries where you just leave it to Cooks. You must either have unlimited time at your disposal, know the language or else have introductions that will enable the right arrangements to be made for you” (Balkan 2), she wrote. She was the experiential tourist, deeply immersed in her surroundings and recording food culture and society as it was.Hughes acknowledged that she was always drawn away from the cities to seek the real life of the people. “It’s to the country district you must go to find the real flavour of a country and the heart of its people—especially in the Balkans where such a large percentage of the population is agricultural” (Balkan 59). Her descriptions in Balkan Fever are a blend of geography, history, culture, national songs, folklore, national costumes, food, embroidery, and vivid observation of the everyday city life. She made little mention of stately homes or buildings. Her attitude to travel can be summed up in her own words:there are so many things to see and learn in the countries of the old world that, walking with eyes and mind wide open can be an immensely delightful pastime, even with no companion and nowhere to go. An hour or two spent in some unpretentious coffee house can be worth all the dinners at Quaglino’s or at The Ritz, if your companion is a good talker, a specialist in your subject, or knows something of the politics and the inner life of the country you are in. (Balkan 28)Rather than touring the grand cities, she was seduced by the market places with their abundance of food, colour, and action. Describing Sarajevo she wrote:On market day the main square is a blaze of colour and movement, the buyers no less colourful than the peasants who have come in from the farms around with their produce—cream cheese, eggs, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Handmade carpets hung up for sale against walls or from trees add their barbaric colour to the splendor of the scene. (Balkan 75)Markets she visited come to life through her vivid descriptions:Oh those markets, with the gorgeous colours, and heaped untidiness of the fruits and vegetables—paprika, those red and green peppers! Every kind of melon, grape and tomato contributing to the riot of colour. Then there were the fascinating peasant embroideries, laces and rich parts of old costumes brought in from the villages for sale. The lovely gay old embroideries were just laid out on a narrow carpet spread along the pavement or hung from a tree if one happened to be there. (Balkan 11)Perhaps it was her radio cooking shows that gave her the ability to make her descriptions sensorial and pictorial:We tasted luxurious foods, fish, chickens, fruits, wines, and liqueurs. All products of the country. Perfect ambrosial nectar of the gods. I was entirely seduced by the rose petal syrup, fragrant and aromatic, a red drink made from the petals of the darkest red roses. (Balkan 151)Ordinary places and everyday events are beautifully realised:We visited the cheese factory amongst other things. … It was curious to see in that far away spot such a quantity of neatly arranged cheeses in the curing chamber, being prepared for export, and in another room the primitive looking round balls of creamed cheese suspended from rafters. Later we saw trains of pack horses going over the mountains, and these were probably the bearers of these cheeses to Bitolj or Skoplje, whence they would be consigned further for export. (Balkan 182)ConclusionReading Seager and Hughes, one cannot help but be swept along on their travels and take part in their journeys. What is clear, is that they were inspired by their work, which is reflected in the way they wrote about the places they visited. Both sought out people and places that were, as Hughes so vividly puts it, not part of the Cook’s Tour. They travelled with their eyes wide open for experiences that were both new and normal, making their writing relevant even today. Written in Paris on Bastille Day 1950, Seager’s Bastille Day article is poignant when compared to Bastille Day in France in 2016. Hughes’s descriptions of Sarajevo are a far cry from the scenes of destruction in that city between 1992 and 1995. The travel writing of these two women offers us vivid impressions and images of the often unreported events, places, daily lives, and industry of the ordinary and the then every day, and remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pesman writes, “women have always been on the move and Australian women have been as numerous as passengers on the outbound ships as have men” (20), but the records of their travels seldom appear on the public record. Whilst their work-related writings are part of the public record (see Haysom; Lancaster; Riggal), this body of women’s travel writing has not received the attention it deserves. Hughes’ cookbooks, with their traditional Eastern European recipes and evocative descriptions of people and kitchens, are only there for the researcher who knows that cookbooks are a trove of valuable social and cultural material. Digital copies of Seager’s writing can be accessed on Trove (a digital repository), but there is little else about her or her body of writing on the public record.ReferencesThe Argus. “Goodbye Ma’am.” 26 May 1950: 1. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22831285?searchTerm=Goodbye%20Ma%E2%80%99am%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.“Exotiq Cosmetics.” Advertisement. Woman 20 Aug. 1945: 36.Golding, Peter. “Just a Chattel of the Sale: A Mostly Light-Hearted Retrospective of a Diverse Life.” In Jim Usher, ed., The Argus: Life & Death of Newspaper. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007.Haysom, Ida. Diaries and Photographs of Ida Haysom. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1637361>.“Healing Cycles.” Advertisement. Woman 27 Aug. 1945: 40. Hughes, Gwen. Balkan Fever. Unpublished Manuscript. State Library of Victoria, MS 12985 Box 3846/4. 1943.———. Perfect Cooking London: Parkinsons, c1940.Lancaster, Rosemary. Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France 1880-1945. Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2008.Pesman, Ros. “Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria.” The Latrobe Journal 58 (Spring 1996): 19-26.Riggal, Louie. (Louise Blanche.) Diary of Italian Tour 1905 February 21 - May 1. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1635602>.Seager, Helen. “Ballet Dancers Backstage.” The Argus 10 Aug. 1944: 10. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11356057?searchTerm=Ballet%20Dancers%20Backstage&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “The Baroness Who Finds Knitting Exciting.” The Argus 1 Aug. 1944: 9. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11354557?searchTerm=Helen%20seager%20Baroness&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “English Visitors Have a Food Spree in Eire.” The Argus 29 Sep. 1950: 6. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22912011?searchTerm=English%20visitors%20have%20a%20spree%20in%20Eire&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “From Helen in London.” The Argus 20 June 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22836738?searchTerm=From%20Helen%20in%20London&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “Helen Seager Storms Paris—Paris Falls.” The Argus 15 July 1950: 7.<http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906913?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Storms%20Paris%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “We Look over Blenheim Palace.” The Argus 28 Sep. 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22902040?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Its%20as%20a%20good%20a%20place%20as%20you%20would%20want%20to%20be&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “West End Hair-Do Was Fun.” The Argus 3 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22913940?searchTerm=West%20End%20hair-do%20was%20fun%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “When You Are in Paris on July 14.” The Argus 19 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906244?searchTerm=When%20you%20are%20in%20Paris%20on%20July%2014&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.

Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. Morris, John. “Notes on A Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. 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Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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