AustLit

'In the mid-1960s pioneering media scholar Henry Mayer famously complained that Australian historians had shown little interest in the press. So, while primarily a political scientist, Mayer felt compelled to do his own historical spadework to document Australian press history. The result was his ground-breaking The Press in Australia (1964) which remains to this day a much-consulted classic of Australian media studies. Since then there have been numerous scholarly works on aspects of press history – works on individual newspapers and press proprietors, state-based histories, histories of the country press, a history of the Australian Journalists Association, and volumes on the press and politics amongst them. There has, however, been nothing quite so ambitious and wide-ranging as the volume under review, which covers nearly 140 years of corporate and political press history across all Australian states. It begins with the establishment, in 1803, of Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, and ends (somewhat arbitrarily) with an analysis of the role of the press in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Menzies during World War II.' (Introduction)

'This well-researched volume documents the experiences of the more than thirty Australasian women who worked as war reporters for the Australian and overseas press between 1900 and 1975. It focuses on the challenges they faced as females working in the undeniably masculine realm of war correspondence. Some of these, such as restricted access to combat zones, were physical. However, the main challenge they faced was attitudinal, particularly the prevailing view that women were unsuited to war reporting and should confine their efforts to the ‘softer side’ of war news given their assumed inherent affinity with the domestic sphere. The theme is introduced with a comment from Sydney journalist Iris Dexter who in 1941, in response to an invitation to write a war-related column, exclaimed, ‘I suppose they want what is rather loosely known as the woman’s angle … and there’s nothing I hate more than the woman’s angle on anything’ (1).'  (Introduction)