The enemy of music : modeling the behavior of a cultural industry in crisis

The purpose of this explorative study is to contribute to the understanding of current music industry dynamics. The situation is undeniably quite dramatic: Since the turn of the millennium, the global music industry has declined by $ US 6.2 billion in value—a fall of 16.3% in constant dollar terms. IFPI, the trade organization representing the international recording industry, identifies a number of exogenous factors as the main drivers of the downturn. This article suggests that other factors, in addition to those identified by IFPI, may have contributed to the current difficulties. A model is presented which indicates that business strategies which were designed to cope with the challenging business environment have reduced product diversity, damaged profitability, and contributed to the problem they were intended to solve.

Indigenous cultural values and journalism in the Asia-Pacific region : a brief history of Māori journalism

A number of scholars in the Asia-Pacific region have in recent years pointed to the importance that cultural values play in influencing journalistic practices. The Asian values debate was followed up with empirical studies showing actual differences in news content when comparing Asian and Western journalism. At the same time, such studies have focused on national cultures only. This paper instead examines the issue against the background of an Indigenous culture in the Asia-Pacific region. It explores the way in which cultural values may have played a role in the journalistic practice of Māori journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past nearly 200 years and finds numerous examples that demonstrate the significance of taking cultural values into account. The paper argues that the role played by cultural values is important to examine further, particularly in relation to journalistic practices amongst sub-national news cultures across the Asia-Pacific region.

Re-presenting the past : authenticity and the historical novel

This project involved writing Turrwan (great man), a novel set in Queensland in the nineteenth century, and an investigation into the way historical novels portray the past. Turrwan tells the story of Tom Petrie, who was six when he arrived with his family at the notorious Moreton Bay Penal Colony in 1837. The thesis examines historical fiction as a genre with particular focus on notions of historical authenticity. It analyses the complexities involved in a non-Indigenous person writing about the Australian Aboriginal people, and reflects on the process of researching, planning and writing a historical novel.

Re : Why optometry must work from urban and regional Aboriginal health services

We are writing to support the recent Viewpoint written by Anjou, Boudville and Taylor ‘Why optometry must work in Aboriginal Health Services in urban and regional Australia’.[1] We are a group of optometrists who provide optometric services within Aboriginal Health Services in urban and regional settings and we agree that access to optometry in Aboriginal Health Services should be supported and expanded in an effort to ‘close the gap’ for vision.

The curious case of the embedded creative : creative cultural occupations outside the creative industries

This chapter is concerned with innovation that involves creative cultural occupations, but not within the creative industries. Rather, we examine the operation of cultural creative occupations that exist outside the creative industries - so-called 'embedded creatives' who work across all industry sectors (Cunningham and Higgs 2009). In doing so, we concur with Bilton (2007) that the separation of creative industries from other industries is a 'false step'. All industries must be innovative; however, they also must be able to combine both scientific and artistic creativity, and that creativity comes from the intersection of different thinking styles (Kurtzberg 2005). Moreover, we suggest that there are now detailed empirical studies, as well as a nascent theoretical base, to suggest that the transdisciplinarity which results from embedded cultural creativity is an engine of growth in the broader economy. Thus, it is relevant to both policymakers and managers. This chapter addresses the following questions: What is the role and significance of the embedded creative? Given a paucity of detailed empirical work in the area to date, what can be deduced from what extant literature there is about the nature of employment and management of these workers? And what are the practical implications of these consideration?

Cultural forces in journalism : the impact of cultural values on Māori journalists’ professional views

Social system-level analyses of journalism have tended to focus on political and economic influences, at the expense of other factors, such as the role that culture and cultural values play in shaping journalists' professional views and practices. This paper identifies cultural values as a particularly fruitful area for providing a more nuanced analysis of journalism culture. It examines this issue in the context of in-depth interviews with 20 M?ori journalists from Aotearoa New Zealand. The study finds that Indigenous journalism in that country is strongly influenced by M?ori cultural values, such as showing respect to others, following cultural protocols, and making use of culturally-specific language. Cultural limitations are also identified in the form of the social structures of M?ori society, and journalists' strategies in working around these are discussed. The paper highlights the implications a renewed focus on cultural values can have for the study of journalism culture more broadly.

Representations of foreign places outside the news : an analysis of Australian newspaper travel sections

Despite continued growth over recent decades, travel journalism has so far gained little attention in journalism research, with scholars often ridiculing it and other forms of lifestyle journalism as not being real journalism. This paper aims to the shift the focus by arguing that non-news journalism is increasingly important as a site for research. It reports the results from a content analysis of Australian newspaper travel sections and examines the role they play in mediating foreign places. The results demonstrate that travel stories can be mostly classed as service stories in that they focus on destinations which are already popular with Australians. At the same time they report very little about local cultures at the destinations, demonstrating a focus on the tourist experience and a missed opportunity for improving inter-cultural understanding. A visual analysis of photographs shows stereotypical portrayals of destinations broadly in line with tourism promotion materials.

An opening : twelve love stories about art [Book Review]

Review(s) of: An opening: Twelve love stories about art, by Stephanie Radok 2012, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, xiv, 168 p., ISBN 9781743050415 (pbk).

Publishing, postage, and prizes : classic Australian children’s literature in the public eye

2012 saw the publication of competing and complementary lines of Australian “classics”: “A&R Australian Classics” (HarperCollins) and “Text Classics” (Text Publishing). While Angus and Robertson were key in establishing a canon of Australian children’s classics in the twentieth century, it was the Text Classics line which included a selection of young people’s titles in their 2013. In turn, Penguin Australia launched a selection of “Australian Children’s Classics”. In so doing, these publishers were drawing on particular literary and visual cultural traditions in Australian children’s literature. Public assertions of a particular selection of children’s books reveals not only contemporary assumptions about desirable childhood experiences but about the operation of nostalgia therein. In encouraging Australian adults to judge books by their covers, such gestures imply that Australian children may be similarly understood. Importantly, the illusion of unity, sameness, and legibility which is promised by circumscribed canons of “classic” children’s literature may well imply a desire for similarly illusory, unified, legible, “classic” childhood. This paper attends to public attempts to materialise (and legitimise) a canon of classic Australian children’s literature. In particular, it considers the ways in which publishing, postage stamps, and book awards make visible a range of children’s books, but do so in order to either fix or efface the content or meaning of the books themselves. Moving between assertions of the best books for children from the 1980s to today, and of the social values circulated within those books, this paper considers the possibilities and problematics of an Australian children’s canon.

Redrawing the Map : An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives

In this chapter we seek to interrogate the methods and assumptions underpinning geocriticism by engaging with and reframing dominant ways of analysing mediated representations of Australian space in cultural narratives, specifically film, literature, and theatre. What, we ask, might geocriticism contribute to the analysis of Australian texts in which location figures prominently? We argue a geocritical approach may provide an interdisciplinary framework that offers a way of identifying tropes across geographic regions and across media representations. Drawing on scholarship spanning Australian cinematic, literary and theatrical narratives, this chapter surveys published work in the field and posits that a refined geocritical mapping and analysis of the cultural terrain foregrounds the significance of geography to culture and draws different traditions of spatial enquiry into dialogue without privileging any particular textual form. We conclude by scoping possibilities for future research emerging from recent technological developments in interactive online cartography.

Pockets of Change : Adaptation and Cultural Transition

Pockets of Change collects fourteen essays that address issues of cultural adaptation and transition in the Arts. Based on insights into a range of primary texts and cultural practices—from visual art to film, from literature to theatre—these essays investigate the ways in which traditions, art-forms, cultures and ethics adapt to challenge established boundaries.

Never-Never Land : affective landscapes, the touristic gaze and heterotopic space in Australia

This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film’s characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past, and the present.

Acoustic, electric and virtual noise : the cultural identity of the guitar

Guitar technology underwent significant changes in the 20th century in the move from acoustic to electric instruments. In the first part of the 21st century, the guitar continues to develop through its interaction with digital technologies. Such changes in guitar technology are usually grounded in what we might call the "cultural identity" of the instrument: that is, the various ways that the guitar is used to enact, influence and challenge sociocultural and musical discourses. Often, these different uses of the guitar can be seen to reflect a conflict between the changing concepts of "noise" and "musical sound."