journalism
Kate Macdonell
Sharyn Pearce
Shameless Scribblers:
Australian Women's Journalism 1880-1995
Central Queensland University Press
$24.95pb, 286pp, 1 8759 9850 0
AT A TIME WHEN the often uneasy relations between journalists and
academics have been highlighted by acrimonious debate about the
importance and meaning of cultural icons and literary texts, it
is refreshing to see Queensland academic, Sharyn Pearce,
negotiate the writings of several Australian women journalists
in an informative and unabashedly celebratory manner.
In this long-awaited work, Pearce argues that the journalistic
writings of Australian women have not, until very recently, been
granted the recognition given to the writings of their male
counterparts. Pearce maintains that critical lack of interest in
journalism has to do with the way it has often been regarded in
the Academy as 'popular' (a term which is now being recuperated
for 'serious' analysis in the interrelated fields of both
cultural and literary studies). And she also suggests that the
general lack of interest in writings by women journalists in
particular owes much to how the very image of the journalist has
often been conceived of in masculinist terms.
Pearce positions Shameless Scribblers in relation to the ground-breaking works by Susan Magarey on Catherine Helen Spence and
Susan Sheridan on Louisa Lawson. But whereas those books are
subject specific, Shameless Scribblers aims to trace the
development of women's journalism in Australia from its
beginnings in the nineteenth century through to its modern day
manifestations. Further, and relatedly, Pearce links the
`progression' of women's journalism to the changing roles for
Australian women in the twentieth century.
The journalists whose work Pearce analyses in detail include
Louisa Lawson whose entrepreneurial prowess made the Dawn a
commercial success, the often outrageous Dulcie Deamer whose
column in the Australian Women's Mirror during the 1930s provided
its readers with both witty and yet also ideologically spurious
comments about relations between men and women, and Anne Summers
whose accomplished investigative work for the National Times
during the 1970s saw her not only reflect and promote the
concerns of second wave feminism, but also reveal and derail the
systematic abuse levelled at prisoners in the NSW penal system
by their warders. Other journalists whose work Pearce covers
include Mary Gilmore, Elizabeth Webb, Charmian Clift and two
arguably less well-known but no less accomplished journalists,
Adele Horin and Sue Neales. While in the introduction Pearce
acknowledges the book's focus on the journalism of Anglo-Celtic
Australian women, those journalists whose work she covers have
different political persuasions and come from varying socio-economic backgrounds and age groups. Further, Pearce makes a
point of negotiating the ways in which indigenous Australians and
migrants, for example, are represented in the work of her
writers.
Individual chapters are devoted to each of these journalists and
two separate chapters provide socio-historical information about the 1880s and 1950s respectively. And while Pearce's rather
lengthy negotiation of the socio-historical climate of the 1970s
within the chapter devoted to the work of Anne Summers is
structurally inconsistent with the earlier chapters and also a
marker of that chapter's comparatively thin focus on the actual
work of Summers, the book as a whole is meticulously researched
and articulately written. Indeed, although Shameless Scribblers
is a book that could be usefully deployed by academics working
in the areas of both Australian women's journalism and twentieth
century Australian feminism, it is also very much a book whose
accessibility is targeted at the interested general reader.