Cultural commerce: How media exports made the British world in Australia, 1850–1990

Abstract

This dissertation was completed and conferred in 2024 at Northwestern University under the supervision of Professor Deborah Cohen, Professor Joel Mokyr, Professor Tracy Davis, and Professor Michael Stamm (Michigan State).

This dissertation was financially supported by Graduate Research Grants from Northwestern University, the Dorothy W. Collin Fellowship in the History of the Book from the University of Western Australia and a Postgraduate Scholarship from the National Archives of Australia/Australian Historical Society. The full dissertation can be accessed by communicating with the author via email.

This dissertation examines the role of business practices in making British media dominant in Australia from 1850 to 1990. Drawing on archival research including business correspondence, sales catalogues, photographs, TV guides, and financial statements, it argues that commercial relationships played a critical role in developing and maintaining the cultural similarities between Britain and Australia.

The questions of why and how Australians came to consume British media as soon as it was produced in Britain, why British media was regarded as superior to all others, and why its popularity lingered so long, still remain inconclusively answered by scholars (Curran & Ward, 2010). Some historians have argued that the dominance of British media in Australia was the product of state-driven initiatives to export British culture, or ‘cultural imperialism’. Other scholars have seen it as an inevitable consequence of commodity export, migration and imperial institutions such as the Anglican Church and universities. My dissertation argues that this phenomenon was neither as accidental nor as wholly ideological as it has been portrayed by scholars who have neglected to consider media export on its own terms—as a business.

Foregrounding the commercial nature of media circulation, this dissertation argues that British media came to predominate and persist in Australia because of the path-dependent consequences of business relationships. Drawing on five case studies from 1850 to 1990, it argues that British media export followed a common pattern. Initially, British media producers sought out Australian markets as a convenient source of additional income. Australian intermediaries such as book importers, theatrical impresarios, and television executives purchased British goods because they were marketed as (and often were) high quality, and because they could cultivate beneficial business relationships with British firms. Only later did Australian businesspeople find themselves in a bind of their own making. Having convinced consumers that British media was the ‘highest quality’, they were economically driven to continue importing British media even when it became scarce or expensive, as the costs to redress chronic underinvestment in domestic media were prohibitively high. British media persisted in Australia initially out of mutual business benefit, and later out of the absence of any viable alternative.

The five research chapters of this dissertation follow distinct media products in their journey from Britain to Australia over a span of several decades each. In each chapter, I explore an aspect of political economy that entrepreneurs exploited to make these products successful: copyright law, distribution networks, monopoly, supply chain and outsourcing. The first chapter explores the household guides of Mr and Mrs Beeton in the Australian bookselling market from 1850 to 1895. In this chapter, I examine how Australian book wholesaler George Robertson petitioned to maintain a highly restrictive copyright regime in Australia, keeping cheaper American books out of the market and helping to reinforce the dominant position of British books in Australia. I also chart how Robertson's wholesaling book business, reliant as it was on close connections to British publishers, laid the groundwork for its own destruction. Once British publishers realised that Australian middlemen were unnecessary in the late nineteenth century, they opened international sales offices and drove the Australian firms out of business.

Chapter 2 examines the case of garden design books and periodicals in Australia from 1869 to 1935. It studies how the periodical import/export firm Gordon and Gotch circulated British gardening periodicals in Australia, preempting the development of a domestic market for Australian periodicals on the same topic. I particularly explore how the garden polemics of William Robinson and the columns of Gertrude Jekyll were received in Australia, and how their work continued to shape the form and ideas of Australian garden writers once a market finally developed for Australian garden literature in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 3 follows the dramatic history of J.C. Williamson Ltd. (the Firm) in Australia and of the Carte family, custodians of Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy Operas in Britain, from 1879 to 1950. J.C. Williamson's steadfast belief that Australian audiences would only tolerate imports, combined with his belief that monopoly was stronger than competition, yielded a theatrical landscape in Australia dominated by British, and later British and American, theatricals. There was popular interest in something Australian, but the Firm refused to waver from their strategy, even as it proved expensive, unwieldy and interpersonally disastrous.

In Chapter 4, I study the export of two different but interconnected products—newspaper design and newsprint—from Britain to Australia from 1914 to 1960. British newspaper style travelled easily from Britain to Australia, often through the editorial offices of men like Keith Murdoch, but newsprint was another matter altogether. Though Australian newspaper moguls originally purchased British newsprint for reasons of imperial loyalty, they came to see domestic production as critical for their success in times of global conflict. This decision, however, came too late, and problems of war, international finance and technology continued to tie Australian newspapers to British newsprint.

Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on comedy television exports from ITV and the BBC in Britain to Channel 7 and the ABC in Australia from 1960 to 1990. Over this period, British comedy continued to retain a prominent position on Australian television stations. Its appeal for Australian producers was financial and cultural—imported British programmes were much less expensive than original Australian ones or American programmes, and they were understood by audiences to be a ‘high quality’ product. But the strategic choice to outsource comedy had consequences, as Australian stations later discovered. When popular interest in domestic comedies grew during a rise in Australian national sentiment, Australian producers could not countenance paying the high costs in human capital needed to redress years of underinvestment in comedy programming. Imported British programmes became a financial necessity even as they became politically passé.

As a complete work, this dissertation argues that cultural globalisation in Australia was no byproduct of commodity export and that its scale far exceeded that of state-sponsored cultural export—that entrepreneurs, in short, played a critical role in making British media predominant in Australia. In addition, this dissertation offers a new explanation as to why British media predominated in Australia for so long. As my cases reveal, British media continued to be purchased by intermediaries in Australia, not because it was necessarily desirable, but because other options proved cost-prohibitive or inaccessible.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.