Travelling Home, 'Walkabout Magazine' and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia

by Mitchell Rolls, Anna Johnston

Overview

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation; as a result, this analysis produces complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783085378
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	07/06/2016
Series:	Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture,Anthem Studies in Australian History , #2
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mitchell Rolls is senior lecturer and programme director of Aboriginal Studies in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, and president of the International Australian Studies Association. With a background in cultural anthropology, he works across disciplines to draw attention to the contextual subtleties underlying contemporary cultural constructions, identity politics and related postcolonial and settler colonial exigencies. He has published widely on these issues.

Anna Johnston is associate professor of English literature in the Institute for Advanced Studies, Humanities and the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. She is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. A literary studies scholar specializing in colonial and postcolonial studies, she has a long-standing scholarly commitment to understanding Australian literature and culture in a transnational context and to working across disciplines to explain the aftermath of colonialism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Making Mid-Twentieth-Century Opinion; 1. Walkabout: The Magazine; 2. Writing Walkabout; 3. Peopling Australia: Writers, Anthropologists and Aborigines; 4. Advertising Australia: Development, Modernity and Commerce; 5. Transforming Country: Natural History and Walkabout; 6. Knowing Our Neighbours: The Pacific Region; Conclusion: ‘Walkabout Rocks’

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'Walkabout magazine was one of the most influential and innovative Australian magazines across much of the twentieth century and it is long overdue for an extended, appreciative study of its internal and external dynamics. Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston provide the significant and innovative study the magazine deserves drawing attention to its complex engagement with the natural environment and the land as resource, with history and heritage, with Aboriginal and Pacific Island cultures.' —David Carter, Fellow at Australian Academy of the Humanities

Editorial Reviews

Transnational Literature

From the Publisher