Presidents reflect on ANZCA: Past and future ^
First published in the Australian Journal of Communication 30(1) 2003: 1-24.Steven Maras
What follows is an edited transcript of a session from the 2002 Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) held at Greenmount Resort, Coolangatta, Queensland. This session [organised by Mary Power and chaired by Caroline Hatcher] appeared in the program as 'Past Presidents Reflect' and on the conference website as 'New Directions from Past Presidents'. It sought to bring together the past presidents of ANZCA who were present at the conference to reflect on the organisation and their period of involvement. As someone with a research interest in the history of communication studies in Australia, I took an interest in trying to bring the session to publication, which has happened thanks to the promptings of Mary Power and the efforts of Roslyn Petelin.
During this time, I was also working on 'An ANZCA Dossier', an information resource about ANZCA that is now accessible, thanks to Mary Power and Joanne Jacobs, on the ANZCA website at http://www.anzca.net/dossier.htm. Given Bruce Molloy's comment below that 'we've had a hell of a job trying to work out who was president and when', the appearance of the dossier is, hopefully, timely.
The session itself requires only a brief introduction. The timing is worth noting. At my first ANZCA conference in Perth in 2001, I was startled to attend the Annual General Meeting to find the demise of ANZCA talked about as a serious possibility. Helen Wilson and Lelia Green tell that story below, but it is fair to say that this most recent crisis makes the issue of ANZCA's history more [Page 1 Ends] pressing, and it is natural in this context to, as Caroline Hatcher puts it in her introduction, 'reflect on how things are going, on what we have achieved, and where we want to go'. In the discussion, there is a strong sense of people taking stock of what they have given and received from ANZCA in the formation of their professional careers.
It is worth noting that the speakers were president in the post-1989 period of ANZCA--although, of course, many were active in the association prior to that and I hope there is occasion to hear more from earlier presidents at another time. The activities of ANZCA are not identical to the activities of the entire field of communication, media, and cultural studies more broadly, but they are, of course, closely linked. Numerous observations in the session about the state of the field, its origins, and past conflicts confirm this. The attraction of a session such as this is the potential insight it gives into the running of ANZCA. A major theme of discussion is the role of the president and their capacity to speak about important issues of the day. Some speakers are not convinced about the significance of the role of president. Having worked on the dossier, I would make the point that the effect of the presidency should perhaps be seen in the longer term, in relation to the efforts and custodianship of the executive. With limited resources, it took more than three years for the change from the Australian Communication Association (ACA) to ANZCA to take place. The process of incorporation took several more years. The mooted changes to the constitution in relation to regional representatives, discussed below, have been on the table for two years or more. Long-term change of this kind is a challenge to manage.
At the same time, the session shows how the contribution of individuals can be important in the middle of particular crises and changes. It seems to me that ANZCA has always been defined within a network of relations (between individuals, the executive, research centres, and the journals, for example), and there have been times when this network has required maintenance and expansion (in relation to the ACA-ANZCA change, or the International Communication Association, for example). Within this network, many ANZCA members have a desire to make communication scholarship more relevant to public, political, and policy debate, especially in this age of communication. From this emerges the idea of the president as spokesperson. The problem remains that speaking for this network, and representing a body like ANZCA appropriately in public discourse, is a difficult thing to do. [Page 2 Ends]
The history of ANZCA should not be reduced to a list of presidents. That said, it is timely to hear these perspectives in order to work out new directions, but also as a step towards a broader understanding of the history of the organisation, and its uniqueness.
Caroline Hatcher: Good morning everyone. Thanks for coming, because I think today is an important session. Every now and again it is time for an association to stop and reflect on how things are going, on what we have achieved, and where we want to go. Today we are really very lucky to have some of our presidents from past years here, and so I would like to ask you to welcome them all before we hear them speak.
We start with Bruce Molloy, who was our president 1989-1990; then Peter Putnis 1992-1993; Warwick Blood 1994-1995; Sue Turnbull 1997-1998; Shirley Leitch 1998-1999; Helen Wilson 2000-2001; and, of course, our president for this year, and our most wonderful speaker from a few moments ago, Lelia Green for 2001-2002.[Note 1]
I would like to ask each of the presidents to speak for between five and seven minutes, and then at the end of that time to engage in discussion. Bruce, Peter, Warwick, Sue, Shirley, Helen, and Lelia all promise to be provocative, so we intend it to be fun as well.
Bruce Molloy: When I asked what the session was about I was told that I could talk about anything I liked. So I thought I would talk about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is my favourite film. But then someone said that wasn't really appropriate.
On the other hand, when you consider what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is really about, it's about the vagaries of history, the power of the myth, and the fallibility often of memory. And I think this might be quite appropriate, given some of the reminiscences and recollections that you're about to hear. We've had a hell of a job just trying to work out who was president and when.
Based on last night's quiz question about the start of Communication Studies as a degree-level program in Australia, and seeing I was involved in planning that first degree, I'd like to start by telling the story of what happened there. Well, let me say first of all that in 1968 I started tertiary teaching at the then Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT), which means I've been involved for over 30 years, and, as Judith Wright says in one of her poems, 'South of My Days', I feel like Old Dan with 'thirty [Page 3 Ends] years of stories, hived in him like old honey'. I think there are 30 years, and many, many stories hived up here, not like old honey, sometimes more like old vinegar.
In a meeting back in 1972, Tom Dixon, myself, Keith Bain, and Robert Kelly sat down to try to work out how we could advance our careers. Tom would become Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology; Keith is now Professor of Political Economy at the University of East London; Robert, whom I've lost track of, was last heard of as a Senior Lecturer in English at Adelaide and writing a handbook on plain English for South Australian Parliamentarians; and me--I'm still here at Bond University.
The reason I wanted to point to our careers is because we figured, as General Studies lecturers, teaching English Expression and things like that, there was no great career track for us. We sat around and worked out that the only way to have a career track was if you had a terminating degree. I'd like to say we planned Communication because it was going to be a world-shaping, world-improving innovation, but that wasn't the real reason. We sat down and argued about the title at length. I came from an English/History background, Tom was from Linguistics and Mathematics, Robert was from Rhetoric and Classics, and Keith was a Political Economist and a poet and writer as well. It was out of that discussion that we decided that 'Communication' was the appropriate title because it was so amorphous, that it was able to accommodate all our different interests, and was eclectic enough to allow us to appropriate suitable theory to back up practice.
Peter Putnis talked in his masterly keynote address about growth and diversity, diffuseness and homogeneity. I think that was pretty well the pattern for the whole development of Communication studies in Australia.[Note 2] Over that period from the early 1970s, new paradigms emerged. From being a subversive activity practised in the corners of English departments, Cultural Studies became an academic orthodoxy.
Rod Miller, a colleague of ours, had already registered the name, Australian Communication Association, and started a journal called Australian Scan (which later became the Australian Journal of Communication). We had to negotiate with him to get access to the name, so we could set the Communication Association up, and there is some contestation about where the first meetings were and who ran them, but I honestly can't remember myself. The first one I went to was at the then Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education, I think, with Harry Irwin and people like that heavily involved. [Page 4 Ends]
Even in our little close-knit QIT environment, the tensions that were obvious throughout the whole development of Communication were there. I wanted a literary/cultural studies bent to our course. Tom Dixon was keen to be pragmatic and functionalist, and have lots of structural linguistics. Everybody had their strand and there were quite bitter ideological conflicts. We just thought at the time that they were interpersonal conflicts; we didn't realise we were part of an emerging, ideological struggle, contesting who should have the right to name and appropriate different theoretical perspectives.
When I became president in 1989, I tried to do two things. One was to try to mend the split in the association that had followed John Fiske's presidency, when almost all the Cultural Studies people had left. They thought they weren't getting a fair go in the conference programming, because it was being run by people who taught Business Communication, Corporate Communication, Public Relations--the functional, pragmatic areas. I did manage to get most of those people back to conferences that I was involved with, greatly helped by Roslyn Petelin, who can't be here this morning.
The other thing I tried to do was the study that Peter alluded to this morning called 'Communication Studies in Australia', because I thought that until Communication was recognised as a research category, the chances of being regarded as a respectable, academic activity--I wouldn't say discipline, because I don't think Communication is a unitary discipline--were negligible.[Note 3]
If I had to give my thoughts on where the association is now, and what I think we need to do now, I think we need to be very self-reflexive and critical, because I'm not sure that, after 20 or 25 years of Communication Studies, we have better television content. I'm not sure we have any better understanding of how the media works in society. I'm not sure that our Communication professions are more ethical, or more responsible than they have been in the past. I think they are much more competent, but I'm not certain that the professional standards have risen. It is interesting that Peter Putnis mentioned the question of credentialing: how can we control who calls themselves what? There are two sides to this. One is that if you have a strong professional Association, then you have a strong lobby group. The other side is that you also have people who try to constrain your activities, and many of the papers that have been given here, at this conference, would have trouble finding a place in a strongly credentialed association. [Page 5 Ends]
I think there is the need for us to be very heavily committed to theorisation. Now, I've always been a practical person, but I think until we adopt a practice of trying to locate our particular eclectic studies within some appropriate theory, we are never going to be taken seriously. As Stuart Cunningham said yesterday, it is very hard for us to speak with a unified voice, as scientists and information technology people can, because we have such widely divergent interests and such a diffuse approach to our basic activities.
I think we have to avoid trivialisation. We should resist the temptation to try for publicity by doing outlandish things. Doctors don't do this, information technology people don't do it, and I don't think communication people should do it either. I think we should be taken seriously for what we can seriously contribute, and we should concentrate on serious and theorised contributions.
I'd like to congratulate all the people who have worked so hard, especially Mary Power, for this conference, and Roslyn Petelin for the excellent standard of the Australian Journal of Communication. Except I would say that I wonder sometimes what the appropriate role is for a journal that is as eclectic as it is. When people elect to read journals, do they read them for a breadth of subject matter, or do they read them for a depth of material in a particular area? I think we have to look at some of these questions if we want to ensure we have a viable future.
Peter Putnis: Bruce started by saying that we found it quite difficult to recall what year we were presidents in. I've got an explanation for that, which is that the position of president of this association is structured so as to have, actually, minimal impact. This is because you become vice-president of the association and your main job then is to organise the conference, and as a kind of a reward after that you become president for one year. Given that you have to wrap up the conference, there's not a lot you can do in one year. I make that as a serious point in terms of continuity of some leadership. I think that has been a problem in the association with the way in which the position of president has worked.
Picking up on Bruce's biographical note, it might be of interest for me to parallel that a little in terms of my experience. I finished a PhD at the Australian National University in 1975 on 17th-century English Restoration drama. I then had to find a job, and I got one as a lecturer in Literature at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education. It was a bit of a shock to the system to find that, as well as teaching Literature courses, I had to teach General Studies and Liberal Studies. I actually found myself having the job of 'Coordinator of Liberal Studies' for [Page 6 Ends] the university, which involved trying to convince Science and Engineering people that they needed a dose of the Humanities. This was, I recall, one of the most stressful jobs I have ever had.
In 1983-1984, I had the opportunity of a one-year sabbatical in England--I think people had taken pity on me--so I worked for a year at Sheffield Polytechnic, which had the first master's degree in Communication Studies. While I was there I did a paper called 'Australia in the British Press', a very straightforward paper that I sent to Henry Mayer, and he sent me back one his characteristic notes, which some of you may have, kind of saying: 'Yeah, this is good stuff', etc. I then felt that I could reposition myself. In terms of this general theme of finding a space, finding a place where you can develop academically, I think ANZCA and the whole field of Communication and Media Studies has been actually quite extraordinary. Finishing a PhD in Restoration drama, and not really feeling comfortable with the English Literature scene, and trying to publish in Oxford journals, such as the Review of English Studies, it wasn't a real space to me. I never felt part of it, so I was looking for something else. If you are looking for a home, you don't want one that is too comfortable, and Communication and Media Studies never was. It was a site for contestation, debates, interesting positions, and always good fun in that sense.
Reflecting more specifically on the role of president, my recollection is that I didn't know what my responsibilities were. I guess one can raise the question: 'Is there anything one can say as president on behalf of ANZCA and its membership?' I do recall in the early days of ANZCA we took some positions, there was an academic called Tony Keulemans, whose courses at Chisholm Institute were being closed down by the management, and we all rallied together and tried to defend Communication/Media at Chisholm. It didn't work. But I can't recall too many other occasions when the association took that kind of position. Perhaps it never could, but it did mean that we were not in the business, and are still are not in the business, of putting in submissions on behalf of the interests of this particular group, say for example, to the process of review of higher education, such as 'Higher Education at the Crossroads'.
I did as president do some work on how the ACA, the Australian Communication Association, could become ANZCA. And I remember getting a colleague of mine at Bond University, Jim Corkery, who was in the School of Law, to do a legal opinion on what needed to be done to [Page 7 Ends] the constitution. He did a very good legal opinion that was useful, and I remember that ANZCA paid him, in, I think, three bottles of good-quality red wine, for that work.
In those early days, and I think now for people perhaps earlier in their academic careers, ANZCA did provide the space for a kind of legitimation, if you like. Everyone else was going to and speaking at conferences, so you had to have your conference as well. It did play a major role in validating one's academic work by being able to say that you were part of an association, and there is a group of people who actually value this work. That was a great help in one's own institution.
A final comment I might make is in terms of where we have got to. Bruce made a comment about recognition of research. We are now in the position where Graeme Turner and I are members of the Australian Research Council Expert Panel for Humanities and Creative Arts. That is quite an extraordinaryÉ I don't think 'representation' is quite the right word... It just so happens that there is a presence now, which I think is greater than the presence of other fields in that particular forum. It still may not translate into a mass of research grants in these areas, because there are far fewer submissions of research grants from our field, than there are say, from History. Nevertheless, it does signal a quite major shift in the recognition of this field, which is also reflected in changed attitudes in the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Warwick Blood: Some time in the early 90s, that's the 1990s not the 1890s, a very strange thing occurred on the west coast of America. The country was invaded by a dynamic duo, who came bearing gifts in a large box. In this box were many tiny koalas, and they'd been brought to the heathens in America by Bruce Molloy and Bill Ticehurst. They were searched by American Customs agentsÉ
Bruce Molloy: Indeed, I almost got arrested because of him [Bill Ticehurst].
Warwick Blood: It was part of a lobby effort to get a joint conference of ANZCA with the International Communication Association (ICA). Some of you will recall that conference at the University of Technology, Sydney. I often reflect on what happened there. One of the things that I found fascinating in all of my negotiations to get our program finalised was my problem in fitting what we wanted with the huge ICA conference program. If you have ever been to an ICA conference you know [Page 8 Ends] that some 20 parallel sessions cut across various aspects of Communication Studies. It struck me then, as it had before, how silly the divisions and titles were. I mean, what was Organisational Communication as they defined it? Or what was Political Communication? I had to convince my American colleagues that you could actually have a conference that didn't have everything divided up into neat little boxes like Mass Communication, Interpersonal Communication, or Health Communication, etc. I often think about that when I look at courses, or subjects that we are teaching, or textbooks in our field. In many respects, that is one of the great strengths of ANZCA and its conferences and of Australian Communication Studies as a field. We don't have those sorts of divisions and we are more inclusive in accepting various perspectives and positions. I recall my very first conference, which was at Macquarie University--and the wonderful role Henry Mayer played in organising that conference--and discussing that very topic with him. I have always been very happy that we have been--or tried to be--as inclusive as possible.
I would agree with Peter Putnis that I don't think there is any role for the president of ANZCA other than organising the conference. It is impossible to make policy or public statements because we are such a broad church. I note two other positive developments. We now have keynote speakers at our conference that don't come from somewhere else! I think that is wonderful. The other thing I notice, of course, is that if I am suggesting a textbook for a subject, I usually have the choice now of an Australian textbook.
Finally--and Peter Putnis referred to this--there is more openness now in terms of getting research grants and research consultancies. We now have representation on Australian Research Council panels. And in Canberra, I have noticed that government departments and agencies are very open to the fact that expertise in communication might add something to a particular problem that government is facing. I think that opens up many possibilities for the field.
Sue Turnbull: My first ANZCA Conference was in 1985, when John Fiske was President and it was held in Canberra at University House. It was, in fact, my very first academic conference. I had arrived from England in 1984, after being a secondary-school teacher, to take up a La Trobe University scholarship. I had the absolute luxury of having all my fees paid for me plus a living allowance--something that is unthinkable now. However, as a mature-age student it is the only way I could have done [Page 9 Ends] it. And so I attended my first ANZCA conference, and at the time John Fiske was one of the people that I really wanted to talk to. He was enormously encouraging about work that I'd been doing as a preliminary to my PhD on 'Young Women in Prisoner'. He asked me to send him my unpublished paper and later cited it, which was an enormous thrill and revealed to me the power of the ANZCA conference and the thrill of networking.
In Melbourne in 1990 I gained enough courage to present my first paper. Henry Mayer was sitting in the audience. Part of my research was the observation of girls in schools, and I was talking about the ethnographic approach I had taken to understanding the role of media in their lives. Afterwards, Henry Mayer came up and said: 'That was really good, I'd like to publish your paper'. Once again, I was thrilled with the power of the ANZCA conference. Unfortunately, Henry had just decided that he was going to have all the papers refereed for Media International Australia, but he hadn't quite cottoned on to what blind refereeing actually entailed. So my paper was sent out, without my name on, to someone--only one person. Henry then returned my paper to me with unedited and signed copies of all the correspondence involved, which included the question 'Who do you think wrote this paper?' Unfortunately, the comments of the referee (who guessed right) were so disparaging that I actually became immobilised both in my PhD research and in my ability to write for two years. So much for the power of the ANZCA conference.
However, by 1993, I had recovered sufficiently to present a paper on the completion of my research at the ANZCA conference held at the Victoria University of Technology in Footscray. James Carey, the American scholar, was in the audience, and was very complimentary. That was the moment when I realised how insecure I was as a mature-age postgraduate and how vital ANZCA had been to my development as an academic, both in terms of the conference experience and in terms of its journals. And at this point I'd like to say a big thank you to Roslyn Petelin for her work on the Australian Journal of Communication, which has been so important to ANZCA and its conferences over the years.
My own year as president had its own excitement: there was a moment when the journal Media International Australia lost its funding relationship with the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. There were some anxious discussions about where MIA would go. It ended up being bid for, as it were, by Tony Bennett, who intended moving its operations to Griffith University and merging it with another journal. There were many anxieties expressed during that year about what this [Page 10 Ends] shift might mean for MIA and ANZCA. However, when Graeme Turner took over as editor, he and I engaged in some serious correspondence and managed to ensure MIA's continuing relationship with ANZCA. And I'd like to thank Graeme Turner most sincerely for his efforts at that time and his sterling work as editor of MIA. Helen Wilson is to be the new editor of MIA and I am hoping that this will ensure the ongoing relationship with ANZCA.
The last thing I want to say is that I haven't been to the ANZCA conference for the last two years and coming back this year has been a real pleasure for two reasons: first, the delight of meeting all the old friends; and second, seeing so many new faces. There were a lot of people that I had not seen before at the conference, which demonstrates to me that new blood is coming into ANZCA. I'm also delighted about the fact that I can still come to an ANZCA conference and get passionately engaged with people who care about the same things that I care about. That for me has been a real joy this time, and continues to demonstrate the importance of ANZCA and its conferences to the ongoing professional development of both its fledgling and more fully launched communication scholars.
Shirley Leitch: I became president for one reason and that was to assist in building the field of Communication in New Zealand. Other speakers have already spoken about the bringing of New Zealand into what was then the ACA and creating ANZCA. When I first went to the University of Waikato in 1990, there were no Communication courses as such. There was one Business/English course, which was called 'Communication,' but was really just teaching management students how to write memos to one another and doing it in a traditional Business/English way. Communication was not being taught in any universities in New Zealand. I saw very quickly that there was going to be a lot of resistance within both the School of Management and the university, and within the broader academic community in New Zealand, to the introduction of Communication. So I set out, I guess, a little agenda. We started off with some courses. We moved from courses to a major in a Management degree. From that, we went to creating a whole department, and then eventually managed to get a Communication degree. At every step of the way there was a huge amount of resistance. Now, there is a kind of irony in all of this because I have been a major critic in New Zealand of the sort of market-demand-led education. I see that as a very bad thing. But I have to say that Communication has been the beneficiary of that. When I put on the first Communication course at Waikato at third-year level I was told: 'Well, you can have this course, but if you don't get [Page 11 Ends] 20 people we'll cancel it'. I got 70 in that first year, which made it, I think, the biggest optional third-year course in the degree. After that, there were no more comments of that nature. So, market demand actually created Communication at Waikato.
I saw, though, that the worst thing that could happen to Communication was that we would become isolated. There are only eight universities in New Zealand, and they are good universities, but that's about as many as in a medium-sized city in other parts of the world--very insular. There is a New Zealand Communication Association, and they do a good job, but I didn't think that that was enough, and so I was a real supporter of the move to bring New Zealand into this association. And I think you'll see that around about a quarter of the people here at the conference are actually from New Zealand. So I think that shows that bringing New Zealanders into ANZCA did two things: first, it broadened the field in New Zealand and opened this conference and the journals much more to New Zealanders; second, I think it has also helped ANZCA to thrive and survive because I think that it has become an important part of the membership base, and so forth, for ANZCA. Once New Zealand became part of ANZCA, the next thing to do was to actually bring the conference to New Zealand. In doing that, we again brought a lot more New Zealand members into the association and they have stuck around and are big fans of ANZCA. So, it was a political agenda, and one that has paid off hugely well for ANZCA, for New Zealand communication scholars, and for the University of Waikato.
Helen Wilson: Like many of us here, I feel as though I also have quite deep roots in the Communication field in Australia and in ANZCA. I used my presidential address last year as an excuse to parade all that, so I won't say anything more about that now.[Note 4]
The question about what presidents do... I do think that Peter has made some quite telling comments there. What comes into my mind was an occasion when I was driving home and some talk program introduced the President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, Alan McKee, commenting on the incident of John Hopoate. I remembered thinking at the time: 'OK, this is what presidents do ...'. Because we had been having these conversations about what presidents do, and whether we should be making comments about public issues. I was thinking, 'OK, well this is a terrific example, but I don't have the talent'. But I do think that it is an issue: about having a profile and what are appropriate issues to be commenting about that are in ANZCA's interests. I think that that is a topic that we have to talk about. [Page 12 Ends]
I was on the editorial board of MIA when the crisis that Sue Turnbull referred to happened, and, indeed, Sue was a great stalwart then, and we owe a lot to Sue that that journal is still going strong, and is still connected with ANZCA. When I was president there was a financial crisis that brewed because we had a dramatic drop in membership, and needed to address our accounting procedures. The whole incident took us too close to the wind for comfort, and should never, ever happen again. That was a really low moment in ANZCA's history. Indications are that we have bottomed out and that ANZCA has a positive future. But we do need more members; we do need to get bigger. I agree with what everybody says about how open we are, how flexible we are, how relevant we are, but we have got to translate that into more members, and we have got to figure out how to do that.
A couple of things that I've been involved in that I'd like to push . . . One is about changing the rules of the association, which will come up at the annual general meeting. I think that the federal structure that we've got, where we have State representatives and a New Zealand representative, really doesn't work because there aren't State-based activities by and large. We quite often ask for reports and there is nothing to report. So, what we have proposed in the draft, which will have to go through a process of getting approved, is to change the term 'Regional Representative', which is right through all the rules now, to 'Section Head'. We've talked about changing the structure to something more like the ICA, where you have sections that are thematic.[Note 5] What we decided in the executive meeting last night was that we would just call it 'Section Heads'; we wouldn't say anything more about what a 'Section Head' is, so that the AGM every year will just decide what the sections are. So, that's on the agenda, and up for debate. What I'm wanting to argue for is the most open, flexible structure possible. We need to have an executive and those executive members need to have some responsibility. We have got to work on that.
The second thing that I want to push is the question of postgraduate students. What everybody has said really underlines the importance that an association like this has in encouraging postgraduate students, giving them recognition, and helping in their careers. I think this is incredibly important. The Grant Noble Prize, which I have been responsible for organising the judging of for the last few years, is important. There are issues about that prize, about who is eligible to enter that prize. That is another thing that will come up in the AGM. I do think that there would be a consensus among us that that's a very important part of our activities and we've got to grow that. [Page 13 Ends]
A couple more things that are more speculative. We talked at last year's AGM about, at some stage, having a combined conference with other associations. The last two conferences have been relatively small, and it's just too nerve-racking. If you lose too much money you are stymied. So, that is one option, especially if we have it in a venue other than Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, or the Gold Coast, where the received wisdom is that they are the only venues that can make money.[Note 6] There was a thought that we would try to have a combined conference with the Cultural Studies Association in New Zealand, but that didn't happen. I hope that something like that could be considered in future.
The final thing to mention is the promises of the Web. If we can get more members, if we can have a more open structure, hopefully we can use the Web more creatively and more extensively in future.
Lelia Green: I'll use my few minutes to talk about why people should join ANZCA. I'm currently the president. I weathered all the financial troubles, which were just terrifying to suddenly see. We are looking at our accounting procedures and we now have many more members. The crisis was very valuable, however, because what it meant was that we went back through our pocket diaries and we contacted our friends in ANZCA, who perhaps we hadn't seen for a conference or two, and said: 'Look, ANZCA's under threat. Does it matter? How hard should we work to make something happen in the ashes of this moment?'. And people immediately came forward and said things like: 'Actually, when I come to think about it, it's been incredibly important to my career, and I owe ANZCA'. And they not only said it, but they put in the hours to make the resurrection happen.
I must say ANZCA has been incredibly important to my career, too. I hadn't realised I had so many parallels with Sue Turnbull's story, but when I arrived from the UK in 1986, I was recruited by the then Western Australian College of Advanced Education (now Edith Cowan University) from the BBC as a television director. I was recruited as a craft/skills person rather than as an academic. I had in my heart of hearts given up the BBC not to do the same job in Western Australia in an under-resourced, under-financed, under-supported role, but because I wanted to become an academic. I wanted to start thinking more and, if you'll excuse it, doing less, if you know what I mean. I found incredible resistance to this. I hadn't quite realised how hard it was to recruit production teachers, but the first time I said to somebody: 'I'd really like to do some research on this area', that person, who wasn't, I must admit, at my university for very much longer after that, but who was a [Page 14 Ends] senior person at the time, turned to me and said: 'My dear, that is such a bankrupt paradigm'. Now, I was talking about audience studies, and I felt tiny. I wasn't even sure that I could use the word 'paradigm' appropriately.
When I came to my first ever ANZCA conference, which was a year after I arrived in Australia, I found all these people were so interested, and they were so energising. I came to the conference feeling down at heel, down in the mouth, and really very uncertain about what I'd been doing with the previous 12 months, and I left full of energy. I left with a vision of the sort of contribution that I could make because I could see how other people were living that vision for themselves within a supportive community. I could see how all the different interests that each of us had--because there are very few carbon copies in ANZCA--actually fed the enthusiasm and the knowledge and the wisdom of each other. I learned so much at that conference, and I found myself really looking forward to the next conference because it was the high point in my academic life. Not only did it give me a deadline, so I was bound to contribute something, but it also gave me the energy to keep me going through the next two semesters of what I consider to be the hard work of academia, which is the weekly lectures, the marking, the looking for signs of growth, interest, and enthusiasm among 150 students, say, and trying to nurture them.
I would recommend ANZCA as being a wonderful place. The fact that we now have Australian Research Council assessors, journal editors, and people on the boards of other international journals is not, I think, a coincidence. It is because part of the dynamism of ANZCA has been such to support visions of careers that have finally seen fruition. It's a cause-and-effect thing, a chicken and egg, but it is the case that ANZCA has been terrifically fertile in terms of feeding careers and ideas and new directions. I would hope it continues to be in the future, and I would encourage all aspiring PhD students, new academics, people transferring from, as it were, the craft industries into theoretical practice, to make a contribution and to see just how much ANZCA can contribute to you.
Caroline Hatcher: Thanks very much to everyone. It has been just a pleasure, and really an honour, to listen to both personal stories and the important directions that we might remember for the future. In particular, the thing I want to keep in mind is that ANZCA is obviously an academic association, but the comment from most people was, in a sense, the way in which the association is genuinely supportive--as someone who started my first conference with ANZCA, I felt that too--and I know that is what we all [Page 15 Ends] look forward to in the future. Two other important points, from all of the points that were made, were, first, what will we do as advocate, can we do more? And second, that we do need to be proud. We are, I think, growing up, turning of age. The cultural cringe has gone, and we recognise that we are able to provide a really good space for academic meeting. We can stand proud, I think, and that's a great way to look forward.
Discussion
Mary Power: What we discussed at the executive meeting is the proposed change in the constitution. It cannot be done overnight and everybody will get a copy. How, we haven't decided. But I think it's very important that we don't make laws that are unworkable or restrictive. We sat last night for two hours, talking about some of the aspects of ANZCA and its structures--we thought structures was a soft enough word--and it seemed to me in the meeting that we didn't want to abandon the regionalism that ANZCA also includes. We didn't want to pre-empt what people might say in the future. I agree with Warwick Blood, having been to the National Communication Association conference in the USA, which is where I go, that people don't talk to one another across the areas. We are small enough in Australia to keep this about communication. Some great things have come out of all that you have said. Regarding Helen's comments about having experts: I wouldn't see the head of ANZCA, the president, as the only expert. I think we should have a panel of speakers and feed them to the media, and say if you want to talk on Media Communications, this person, or these people, will speak. We have wonderful expertise, and if it came out from a senior level of ANZCA, that would be better than just one person, because it spreads it across everywhere. I'm really asking Warwick and Helen to engage in a debate a bit about this idea of how do we have our executive representative of the broad church we want to be?
Helen Wilson: Can I throw that back to Alan McKee in the audience, just to talk to his policy as President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA)?
Alan McKee: I've been on the executive of the Cultural Studies Association for six years now, and I've been president for three years, and I'm leaving at the end of this year. My presidential address at the proceedings this year is going to be: 'What was the point of the Cultural Studies Association?', which is precisely why I'm here. I've found, exactly as everyone's saying here, that the role of being president has wonderful [Page 16 Ends] connotations of power, and no effect on anything whatsoever. As with ANZCA, people have fond feelings towards the CSAA, but they're not really interested in it as an institution. They are quite happy for it to exist and for it go on. They like coming to conferences. They don't care what the people who are running it are doing. They don't care what they're doing; it's not important to them; it's not part of their lives. Over three years I have tried to introduce dozens of initiatives to the association, none of which have caught on, or interested members at all. We organised a press release scheme, for example, so that members who would like their research to be more widely known in the media--which I thought would be quite common in Cultural Studies, where people often have some kind of desire for intervention and political participation--could e-mail us with the details and we would get a press release put together and sent out. Not one single person has taken this up.
We have put up an online publishing scheme for postgraduate work that would be fully refereed, professionally done up, and posted online. We have had no submissions for that. So, the role of being president of the CSAA is to make sure the conference happens every year and come up with ideas nobody is interested in. In terms of taking a public voice, again, we appointed somebody actually to be the CSAA media mapper and press release manager, who would look out for issues of interest for the CSAA, get voices from within the organisation to comment, and then send out press releases based on that. Great idea, I think. ANZCA might like to try it. It fell on its face. So, lots of great ideas but, in terms of actual practice, it doesn't really seem to matter. The example that you gave of me going on the radio, I do think it is my own personal capacity. I would do it anyway, and I stick my title on after it to try and get the association a more public presence, but that's it.
Warwick Blood: I'm not sure what the proposal is for changing from the regional or State basis in the ANZCA constitution. I would just caution everyone against coming up with labels that are close to ICA-type labels. Just to give you a personal observation: for years I have been a member of the Political Communication division, and I really can't think of anything that's happened in the Political Communication division that the International Communication Association finds of theoretical or even of empirical interest. Because it is not really about politics as we would define it. These labels sometimes become walls; that is all I'm cautioning against. [Page 17 Ends]
Peter Putnis: I just wanted to make a very brief comment. I also don't know the details of the proposal, but it just occurs to me that one might want to distinguish between the best strategy to get a functioning executive--and I take the point about people having responsibilities--and the idea of the structure of an association. When I was listening to your use of the word 'sections', I thought, well, is it necessary to talk about the structure of an association in order to get a functioning executive, or can one actually divorce those two issues and then not have to worry so much about what 'sections' mean? Helen Wilson: The fundamental point that I'm trying to make is that the State-based structure doesn't work, and we've got to have another basis for electing the executive. There are communities of interest within ANZCA; that's been really clear from the beginning. So, I just thought that we should recognise those communities of interest in this structure, and somehow have them more explicit in the program, so that you have a session on New Media Studies or Political Economy, or whatever.
Netra Khadka: Well, I've got a Health background, and it seems to me that the Health Communication side is missing in the association. What I'm saying is that in order to boost the membership you need to embrace those people working in the Health field. There are many people who have a Health Communication background--medical doctors, nutritionists, physiotherapists--but it seems to me that they are actually not impressed by this association. My advice is that there should be something in your structure so that those people that are working in the Health field could be embraced.
Patsy McCarthy: When we were talking about the inclusivity of the various factions or sections, etc., it reminded me of the debate around multiculturalism. Is it more important for us all to be part of the wider group Communication, or should we claim our own ethnic origins, as it were? From my biased position as a Communication person in Speech Communication, I guess I have an insight into the difficulty of being looked at as an area that might be included in everything, and yet have nothing entirely of its own. The attitude is often that we can all speak, therefore we can put a bit of Speech work across the curriculum. This is a very useful way to do it, but makes it extremely difficult for the area to stand and have some sort of respect as a discipline in itself. I am aware that many people are keen to assert the individual power of their discipline area. I find this question one that is almost impossible to solve [Page 18 Ends], because I understand exactly what Warwick is saying about the inclusivity, and I really like to be able to have the multidisciplinary feeling that I get at ANZCA. Yet lots of people feel that they would like to have something that they can identify with more strongly as their own area, so that it does get a little bit more respect or symbolisation as an important area. I don't know if anyone would like to say anything more on that, because I think it is one of the big questions we face and that could cause breakaway groups. Obviously, our strength is in the fact that we do include so many different areas. But then there are a lot of areas that are of less interest to people who are focused on just their own specific topics.
Bruce Molloy: Being pragmatic about it, it seems to me that the membership has declined over the last decade, and that if you are trying to generate increased interest, then maybe you need to look at some initiatives like sectionalisation. I take Warwick's point. I have been a member of the ICA as well. The ICA conference is very heavily structured, often very erratically structured: a great big room with practically nobody, a smaller room with hundreds of people trying to get in. But at least there are hundreds of people trying to get in, which is a good thing. So, if it does broaden the base of the membership and attract people, I think that some restructuring would be a good thing.
Shirley Leitch: Can I make a comment? I think that the notion of bringing in other interests such as Health Communication is an excellent suggestion, but I think that might be conflating two separate things. On the one hand, I do support what you are saying. On the other hand, I don't think sectionalism is the way to go. There are two reasons for that. One is the reason that Warwick has explained. That this is a broad church. One of the things that I really like about ANZCA is I come here, and I sit and I talk with people, and I have got to know people who are from the whole field of Communication. That has really enriched my scholarship because I can't get away with saying: 'Oh, we don't look at that in my area', which is not an intellectually sound position to take. This is actually one of the few conferences where I have to actually listen to papers from right across the field of Communication, and where I have the opportunity to engage with people and discussions and debates right across that field. I think that Health Communication can gain a lot from talking with people who work in Organisational Communication or Public Relations or Media Studies, or whatever. And that's [Page 19 Ends] what you get from being part of ANZCA. If you go to ICA, you'll only talk to other Health Communicators, and you'll only know what you already know. It is not a broadening experience.
On the other hand, that is not to say that we can't be streaming within conferences, and we've always tried to do that anyway. So, I don't think it is a matter of either/or positions. Finally, I'd like to support the notion that the move away from regionalism actually means that when we're in the AGM and we say: 'Who wants to be on the executive?', if there are five people from one State in Australia who are really keen to put time and energy and so forth into that executive, for goodness' sake let them all be on it, because that's what we need. We don't need to say: 'Well, look I'm sorry... but we'll twist your arm, even though you're not going to do a damn thing and we all know it, and you don't want to be on the executive'.
Cathy Greenfield: I just thought that there were some parallels between general discussions in the broad church of Communication, and not surprisingly what Southern Review has faced. Southern Review started in 1963 as an interdisciplinary journal--so it has always been interdisciplinary. When it went to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology we were deciding at that stage, do we want to fold? We had also asked our advisory board, do we drop the focus on interdisciplinarity? Because interdisciplinarity was how we all started and it seemed to point out a fashion. A shift in disciplinarity has marked our efforts in Cultural Studies. Imagine Cultural Studies becoming a discipline. That has been the thing that has happened over the last 10, 15 years. Because of the way universities have gone, because of career structures, the structures of the courses that we are teaching, all those reasons, people have been forced down disciplinary paths in many ways. It's hard, I think. A lot of us maintain that we are still interdisciplinary, and that we've got that commitment, but it's not something that engages us all the time. Pulling that together with the issue of the missing advocacy at ANZCA, I'm wondering whether there is any value in thinking about where you get your membership from, and Helen Wilson mentioned the importance of postgraduates; I am wondering whether there is a role for advocacy back into what Communication, Media Studies, or Journalism degrees, or all the different areas, look like. Do we say that we have some kind of commitment to the overlapping nature of Communication?
The need, as Shirley said really crucially, is to have to listen to other people. OK, our students want to do new auteur film theory, but they need to know about the debates and directions in Communication Stud[Page 20 Ends]ies generally. That is what I've just been teaching in the last semester to an Honours research workshop. OK, you are Journalism students, you are PR students, you are Film Studies students, but it's not right for me to talk about developing your research literacy and let you go out without knowing something about where you sit in the broad field. One avenue might be to think about whether we are committed to the value of that kind of teaching, then we need to say that we are committed to that kind of teaching, and that is what we should have. Then you get your Honours students, your postgraduate students, who you can convince that they should come to this conference rather than just one with a narrower focus. I'm trying to think ahead how you build a constituency. We've all been built at an earlier time... However, our career structures, in the practicalities of getting on with what we have to do day by day, are not necessarily feeding into the kind of interdisciplinary philosophy ANZCA has been about. I know I got very worried yesterday at the number of times that Stuart Cunningham said I was very brave at Southern Review. Maybe we were being brave but you've got to make a decision whether you think it is worthwhile or not. That's just one possible strategy and an invitation to put advocacy back into kinds of teaching. At RMIT, and I suspect at other places too, the place where Communication Studies sits is all very fluid at the moment. Our main thing is about where we sit within Design. Are we actually in Design?
Lelia Green: I know it's wrong to assume that younger people are necessarily earlier in their careers than some of the older people, but are there any of the younger people that would like to say what they think ANZCA is going to potentially offer them, or why they're here?
Steven Maras: I'm still in a sense finding out what ANZCA is all about. My involvement with ANZCA has really only been in the last couple of years. I look back at my own situation and ask, why was it the last couple of years and not the last eight years, or ten years that I've been working as an academic in the area? It comes down simply to members not saying that I should join, and these are quite senior people. The other comment that I'll make is that in last year's President's address, Helen Wilson picked up on James Beniger's phrase, 'embrace the subject and not the field'. Bruce made the point earlier that he doesn't think Communication is a discipline. I would want to reiterate that. Even with something like Health Communication, which is clearly an important area--every time I go to the doctor I wish it was more important--there is a danger that it could become a factionalised entity within ANZCA [Page 21 Ends], and ANZCA could become a factionalised entity all over again. That would be a negative step for me, and we need to continue to forge the idea that the subject of Communication is interesting.
Joanne Jacobs: Just to follow up on Steven's point. I've been presenting at conferences now for about five years, and never once was I told I should actually present at ANZCA. In those five years I've been doing conferences, I presented at three independent research forums and two Australian Broadcasting Authority forums, but no one has ever told me I should come to ANZCA. That is clearly an indication that young academics are not getting any direction at all from our mentors. My vision, I suppose, for ANZCA is partly to do with my proposal, which is going to the AGM tomorrow, for the production of the website, so at least we have a forum so that young academics can actually see what ANZCA does for the immediate community: the fact that you can get subscriptions to the major journals through ANZCA, and the fact the we can develop those networked communities. While I actually sympathise with Warwick's point of view that we don't want to have sectionalisation, I still feel that perhaps a sectionalisation shouldn't be Federal; it shouldn't be special interest groups; it should be where the nexus of interests meet. Rather than being about Political Communication, Business Communication, New Media Communication, the nexus should be where those various groups come together: where Business Communicators are arguing with Cultural Studies people, where New Media people are arguing with Print Media.
E. Sean Rintel: Although I was told to go to the ANZCA conference a few years ago, it was put to me as a practice run for the ICA. That is probably not a good thing. In terms of how you get young academics and PhD students involved, the one thing that universities, supervisors, and PhD programs sometimes do pretty badly is professional development. If ever there was a role for an association for advocacy, then professional development is one such area for it. I think associations could do so much more in terms of professional development. Sure, no one university wants to run particular courses in all the things that academics need to know particularly. But professional organisations, with all the people that are part of it putting in a little bit, that would be a good thing for associations to do. [Page 22 Ends]
Mary Power: Sean, I think that is really highly exciting, because last conference I heard Alan McKee talking to someone in a cafe and he said: 'too many papers on organisational communication'. Well, I thought there were a lot of Cultural Studies papers. So it's not good if we are going to go to the conference and see ourselves as bits and pieces of the whole thing. I hear what you are saying about 'young ANZCA', and how do we door-knock those people and get them here and fire us up, because the blood is running very thin, and it has got to be passionate again. Discussion needs to be shared and argued, and there have to be people around the pool until late at night, drinking if they have to, thinking about things and saying: 'we want it this way'. Shirley is right when she says get the people who are passionate, but get people with a range. Don't have any rules about it, but get people from everywhere and from different ages, who can come and move us along. I think that's what we should all be doing. Getting those postgraduates and saying: 'you're going to come and give a paper with me at the conference, or by yourself'. We have had some fantastic papers in sessions I've been to on Public Relations. Now, I don't know anything about Public Relations, but these were great papers, and they were clearly interdisciplinary. Health education and communication will clearly be the growth thing of the future. But we need to have you in here learning what we do, and we need to learn what you do.
Caroline Hatcher: Maybe we could close off by saying that when I was thinking about the theme for next year's conference, the diversity-convergence tensions discussed in Peter Putnis's keynote paper, but also today, would make a great theme for the conference. So the theme of the conference for next year is 'Designing Communication for Diversity', which explores the tensions that abound in the convergence-divergence mix, and is also a reflection on us as communications specialists and what we should be doing. Maybe this is an opportunity to bring that whole tension to the conference next year. Hopefully, some of these debates will start to happen.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Effie Rassos for her assistance in the transcription of the recording of the ANZCA session that forms the basis of this piece. Thanks also to the participants for their contributions. [Page 23 Ends]Notes
1. A full list of ANZCA presidents and conferences can be found at http://www.anzca.net/dossier.htm.
2. A version of this address was published as Putnis, P., & Axford, B. (2002). Communication and Media Studies in Australian universities: Diverse, innovative, and isomorphic. Australian Journal of Communication, 29(1), 1-20.
3. The study was published as Molloy, B., & Lennie, J. (1990). Communication Studies in Australia: A statistical study of teachers, Students and courses in Australian tertiary institutions. Brisbane, Australia: The Communication Centre, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology. A shortened version was published as Molloy, B. (1990). Communication Studies in Australia: Reflections and text. Australian Journal of Communication, 17(3), 64-94.
4. This address was published as Wilson, H. (2001). Towards a non-binary approach to communication. Australian Journal of Communication, 28(2), 1-18.
5. It may be of interest to note that the Australian Communication Association had encountered a similar issue previously. The ACA Newsletter, 2(2), June 1981, reports that the question of Special Interest Groups will be considered by the then bi-annual general meeting: 1) Interpersonal, small group and organisational communication; 2) Mass communication, information dissemination and human communication technology; 3) Teaching of communication and intercultural communication.
6. The panelists noted that conferences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, both made a profit.
First Upload 22nd January, 2004. © Steven Maras 2004
Referencing information. References to the AJC version (details above) is preferred. If necessary the correct information is, Steven Maras, 'Presidents Reflect on ANZCA: Past and Future'. An ANZCA Dossier. Date of access <http://www.anzca.net/dossier.htm>.
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