Richard Scully and Catherine Dewhirst
Image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6180, 24/10/75/72
Australian historians are a pretty spoiled bunch. Sources for all manner of themes are absolutely abundant, and many are easily-accessible thanks to resources like our world-leading, home-grown, friendly neighborhood aggregated-search-engine: Trove.
For the longest time, the stuff of Trove has been the Anglophone, Anglo-centric mainstream press we’re all so familiar with, but recently, the non-Anglophone migrant presses have been a welcome addition – accounting for nine percent and climbing, according to Hilary Berthon of the National Library of Australia. While more has yet to be digitized, new light is thus being shed on all kinds of migrant and minority communities, and the study of the migrant and minority press is entering a new phase of accessibility and importance.
That this is happening at an historical moment when the press is entering a new phase of its own means there has never been a better time to take stock.
In two edited volumes of essays – published via Palgrave’s ‘Studies in the History of the Media’ series – some fascinating untold stories are emerging that will shape the field for some time to come (and hopefully inspire a broader engagement with Australia’s migrant and minority press).
Both volumes are based on the 2017 conference convened by Catherine Dewhirst, Jayne Persian, and Mark Emmerson at USQ in Toowoomba (22-23 November); and “Voices of the Australian Migrant & Minority Press” was itself convened to commemorate the golden jubilee of Miriam Gilson and Jerzy Zubrzycki’s groundbreaking The Foreign language Press in Australia, 1848-1964 (1967). That book not only charted the extant and available corpus of migrant and minority papers for the first time, but did so at the dawning of multicultural Australia. It hardly needs saying that Gilson and Zubrzycki’s legacy looms ever-larger today.
Published at the end of 2020, The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press will be followed in late 2021 by Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press. With research from 25 authors, and 23 chapters between them, each charts all sorts of remarkable press cultures, with the Italian-language papers featuring prominently amongst the contents of both volumes; the Chinese-language papers complementing this focus in particular in volume 2. Each chapter further reflects on the relevance of such histories to on-going questions of prejudice, racial discrimination and minority-group influence in Australia today.
For instance, Marianna Piantavigna’s transnational revision of the history of the first Italian newspaper – Sydney’s L’Italo-Australiano (1885) – connects the editor’s constructed ideological narrative of belonging to political and cultural mythmaking. Dewhirst draws from the archives to investigate the pro-Fascist reputation of Brisbane’s missing L’Italiano, tracing the life histories of its two separate editors whose responses to the regime’s pressures tell another story about Italian-community factionalism. Clare Johansson and Simone Battiston turn to an early decade of multiculturalism to trace how the editor of Melbourne’s Il Globo applied a counter-narrative to the racial stereotyping of Italians as criminals from mainstream society; defending ‘Italian’ identity, and by negating the rise of organised crime.
The first volume also includes studies of the early Russian-language press, as well as that emerging from Australia’s Polish- and Spanish-speaking communities. Kevin Windle’s analysis of seven short-lived radical Russian newspapers in Brisbane, from 1912 to 1919, assesses the entangled relationship between their community leaders, Russia’s politics, and the Queensland authorities, reflecting the racial and political intolerance that worked in tandem with Australia’s official anti-socialism.
It is fascinating to note that the Polish-migrant and Spanish-migrant newspapers were influenced by unique cultural and literary traditions. Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams and Mary Besemeres discuss the creation of an émigré identity – based on the influences of language, culture and literature – as central to Wiadomości Polskie and other Polish-language presses: the ‘felieton’ column drew readers into cultural and literary discussion. Such regular columns appeared elsewhere in the migrant press, as Michael Jacklin’s case study of El Expreso also reveals; the entertaining ‘crónica’ tradition facilitated the exposure of the hypocrisies within Australian society and multiculturalism.
The tensions around issue of immigration also come through in Max Kaiser’s study of three post-war Jewish magazines and Karen Agutter’s analysis of the letters published in The New Australian in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. While the Jewish magazines – Unity, The Zionist and Australian Jewish Outlook – combatted each other for political influences over Australia’s Jewish community, in contrast, a cacophony of voices emerge from the letters of Displaced Persons, reflecting similar disunity but one that points to the inadequacies of the Australian government in managing non-British migrants.
Reconceptualising belonging; articulating counter-narratives; shaping trans- and multi-cultural community identities; exposing the myths of colonial and national unity: the second volume continues the focus on the numerous ways the migrant presence and press has both challenged and contested Australia’s imperial and national narratives.
Alexis Bergantz shows how belonging was reconceptualised by and for French-Australian settlers, and others, within the first five years of Le Courrier Australien from 1892; that is, deliberately as a strategy through the cosmopolitan ideal under the logic of settler colonialism. And, Andrew Bonnell takes the case of one German migrant in Queensland to unpack the extensive influences of German socialist and Australian labour-movement periodicals on influencing the growth of working-class strength before the outbreak of the First World War.
Mei-fen Kuo connects the three earliest Chinese migrant-press ventures in Sydney – the Chinese Australian Herald, Tung Wah News (Tung Wah Times) and Chinese Republic News – to shared experiences and their use of diaspora solidary both to facilitate migrant voices and buffer against anti-Chinese reactions, a history also subject to the vagrancies of economic change. Caryn Coatney discloses a concealed story of the Chinese-Australian social change through community-press enterprises in the interwar period: their journalists made significant connections with the Australian government and news organisations to change perceptions of racial inequality and lower-class status, reflecting modern journalistic practices.
Part of Australia’s migrant-newspaper history continues to be informed by more than 120 years of the Italian migrant press, which witnessed a burgeoning in the post-war era. Angela Alessi looks through the lens of La Fiamma (1947-1963) to reinterpret the American construct of ‘Little Italy’ in Adelaide. While reinforcing regional Italian identities and cooperation, the newspaper helped to create inter-community connections, economic vibrance and cultural resilience. Bruno Mascitelli explores the longevity and inter-generational story of Il Globo (1959-), not only to reveal a series of challenges for Italian-migrant communities, but also to document transnational influences on the changing landscape of Australia’s society and politics. Simone Battiston focusses on the left-wing activism of those Italian migrants involved in the first six years of Nuovo Paese (1974-1981), launched under the auspices of Melbourne’s ‘Italian Federation of Migrant Workers and their Families’. The experiences of 10 Italian migrants emerge from his transnational, transcultural and oral histories, historicised by Australia’s Cold War, anti-communist surveillance.
Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press ends with John Budarick’s exploration of the question of democracy for ethnic minority communities today. Theoretically framed by Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, and informed by research and oral testimony from the African-Australian media, he identifies several layers within the ethnic media’s debates over the politics of liberal democracies, pinpointing what marginalises the voices of ethnic minorities.
What the chapters illuminate is of extraordinary value to migrant and minority historians; and let’s face it – aren’t all historians migrant and minority historians these days?! (They should be…).
Both the keynotes at “Voices of the Australian Migrant & Minority Press” – Simon J. Potter (Bristol) and Scully (UNE) – contextualized the migrant and minority press cultures in the larger, hegemonic culture of the “British world” – one of the largest and most sustained exercises in migration in global history. And the relationship between the hegemonic press culture and those of minority presses is an ever-present feature in both volumes. Case-studies of collaboration (for instance, between Chinese-language publications and Anglo-Celtic sponsors) as well as conflict (e.g. over the socialist and fascist fare found in some German- and Italian-language presses) weave the richest of tapestries.
Add to that the experiences of the earliest Indigenous press, the culture of Australia’s earliest satirical magazines, and Hilary Berthon’s exploration of Trove’s ever-expanding reach, and both the microhistories and big picture stuff come into ever-sharper focus.
What, for instance, ‘counts’ as a ‘minority’ press? Scully demonstrates how the earliest satirical papers in Australia were far smaller in terms of circulation, and there were fewer of them, but they nonetheless were firmly a part of that larger British world hegemony. That was a hegemony built as much on humour as on economic and military power, with an entire official and unofficial empire of Britons – from London to Melbourne and back – essentially laughing at the same things.
Jeremy Fisher explores the production and management of the press of an elite minority whose often-overlooked editorial staff were dedicated to maintaining high standards: the Medical Journal of Australia and its important role since 1914 (and, in earlier incarnations, reaching back as far as 1856).
Natasha Walker and Dewhirst make a case for Vida Goldstein’s feminist press: the suffrage movement was considered both embryonic and radical, which made The Australian Woman’s Sphere a target during her political campaign; they document how this first-wave feminist newspaper contested the negative coverage of Goldstein’s candidature printed in two mainstream newspapers.
Of course, no clarification is needed for Lara Palombo’s chapter on the second Indigenous Australian newspaper, The Australian Abo Call (1938). Yet, what all four chapters share with the migrant press is community building and the importance of belonging without losing that critical component of culture.
At what point do ‘migrant’ papers become part of the settled establishment? Increasingly it would seem that papers like La Fiamma and Il Globo cater for minorities within an ever-larger English-speaking population. Their longevity would suggest a strong economic base from subscriptions and advertising, as much as their defense of the Italian-migrant communities. This also highlights how the more radical a migrant press is, the more likely it attracts negative attention and political censorship.
The sheer importance of print capitalism for constructions of national identity makes migrant and minority presses particularly interesting as subjects for analysis (à la Benedict Anderson). Not all Jewish papers were overtly Zionist, for instance. German-language, Russian-language, and Italian-language papers have seen significant socialist and internationalist sub-categories flourish in Australia. The Italian and German presses have also had to negotiate their relationships to home-grown nationalist movements in a context of shifting nationalisms in Australia itself (to say nothing of the fascist and National Socialist periods in war and peace). The same goes for the Chinese-language papers faced with the complexities associated with a collapsing imperial regime, followed by a need to accommodate republican, Kuomintang, and then communist allegiances. Significant trans-national and trans-imperial themes are evident in a French-language paper like Le Courrier Australien (1892-1896), which is the subject of Alexis Bergantz’s chapter in Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press.
Jacklin makes a significant point in commenting on the crónicas as being as relevant to Australia’s literary traditions today as they are to migrant descendants from Chile, Spain and Uruguay, thus forming an important place in ‘our shared history’. The narratives emerging from the migrant and minority press likewise connect with Australia’s cultural, political and social heritage in a collective history of diversity.
Both volumes draw attention to alternative narratives from those of the dominant white-Anglo assimilationist pattern. With high praise from Ann Curthoys, Bridget Griffin-Foley, Mark Hampton, Cameron Hazlehurst, Marilyn Lake, and Simon J. Potter, the two volumes will inform any scholar interesting in the compelling voices of migrants and First Nations peoples, and the minority community narratives of our past and contemporary times.
Minority presses contribute to the ongoing conversation about the hidden lives, communities, and presses within Australian history.
Who knew!?
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Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully (eds), The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, Palgrave Series of the History of the Media, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully (eds), Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, Palgrave Series of the History of the Media, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, in press.
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