"Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives." Australian Historical Studies, 52(4), pp. 658–659

This article explores a general question – why and how we do media history – by examining a recent case, the ‘Australian Broadcasting’ entry in Oxford Bibliographies, prepared by this author with research assistance from Rosemary Curtis. Four questions are posed for this bibliography and the wider project of media history: why do we do it? For whom? Where and how do we make resources accessible and comprehensible? And finally, the question that occupies most of this article, what resources do we preserve and curate? The processes used to select and organize the ‘most important sources’ for the Australian Broadcasting entry are discussed, emphasizing the sources most relevant to Australian Journalism Review: News, Currents Affairs, Documentary and Talkback Radio programming.

This article considers five options for the future of television transmission in Australia. We begin by describing the unprecedented threats to broadcast television’s business model and power. We then set out the global picture for terrestrial TV broadcasting and options for modernising the Australian system. We do this within a framework that asks what now constitutes “television”, because the services that viewers and users now treat as TV are broader than the subset that have carried most of the public policy freight for decades. The five options we consider are: first, do nothing much apart from adopting further improvements in compression technology; second, replace the current transmission system with a new, specialised terrestrial broadcast platform; third, migrate terrestrial TV to a direct-to-home satellite platform; fourth, move over-the-air TV online; fifth, design some sort of hybrid of Options 1 to 4. Finally, we arrive at some tentative conclusions.

This article re-evaluates Australia's transition to digital television. Earlier analysis in this journal, conducted after about a third of the vacated digital dividend spectrum remained unsold following an auction in 2013, found the whole policy had resulted in a net cost to government revenues. After a further auction in 2017 where the remaining spectrum was sold at much higher prices (A$/MHz/pop), this article repeats the evaluation. It finds that digital switchover, now virtually complete, has produced a significant net increase in government revenues. Other conclusions from the original article about the complexity and difficulty of ex ante cost-benefit analysis, the influence of industry structure, and the capacity of government to plan and complete a large spectrum re-farming project, despite contested and shifting ideas about the purpose of the whole project, are confirmed and emphasized.

The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0308-5961(17)30331-2. The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal.

This article analyses the evolution of multinational enterprise through a case study of the Australasian wireless company, AWA, in the first half of the twentieth century. Ownership, location, and internalisation advantages explain aspects of the industry's rapid internationalisation, but other factors, including restrictive domestic legislation and oligopolistic competition, are also important. The imperialism of the era encouraged globalisation while binding companies to host nations' strategic imperatives and coordinated policy frameworks. Location factors included government desires to control wireless, especially once broadcasting developed in the 1920s, and to expand local manufacturing capacity for the emerging consumer electrical economy.

The book Madras Studios is a finely crafted narrative of the Tamil cinema industry intertwined with the social, cultural and political history of the linguistic region. The author traces the cinematographic history since the 1930s using a cultural and political background of Dravidian ideology. This book focuses on analysing the films produced, directed and processed in five major studios in Madras. The use of the phrase ‘Madras Studios’ evokes a nostalgia in the minds of film lovers as it represents the cultural and creative prosperity of the city. Eswaran Pillai delineates the growth of a powerful medium of cinema and an industry equivalent to Hollywood in terms of production as well as entertainment, though the medium itself has been ignored by academics in the state and the country. The history of Tamil cinema, rather South Indian cinema, is explored in chronological order in six chapters, with each chapter focussing on various aspects of films produced in five different studios. While significant films produced by Modern Theatres under the leadership of T.R. Sundaram are used to analyse the early years of the South Indian film industry in Chapter 2. The landmark movies of AVM and Gemini Studios are discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter further deals with the evolution of the narrative style, influence of music, social revolution in the immediate post-colonial era, the influence of Dravidian ideology along with the evolution of theatrical influence and rise of prominent actors such as ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan, which marks the influence of theatre and the Dravidian cult in South cinema. Chapter 4 deals with the significant films produced by the studios Vijaya-Vauhini and Prasad studios. This chapter gives us an insight about influence of the state reorganisation and how films produced by the studios reflect the linguistic identity. This chapter also analyses how the print media had discussed the lives of the actors and actress of the film industry that in later years have evolved as popular gossip columns. While Chapters 2–4 are about the studios, pioneers of the industry and films made, Chapter 5 traces the legacy of studio system of the Tamil film industry. Chapter 6 discusses about the contemporary utopia and dystopia of Dravidian influence and culture in the Tamil movies. This chapter also touches upon the raise new narratives and genres in Tamil film industry with the entry of film directors of the younger generation with different mindset. Eswaran Pillai is successful in taking the reader through a nostalgic journey of Tamil film industry as well as commercially successful studios which no longer hold its grandeur in the modern digital and corporatised world of film industry. Although the films analysed and discussed fall into different genres across various eras, there is a significant lack in analysis about the films made by film prodigies such as K. Balachander or Balu Mahendra. This could be because their films do not reflect the Dravidian ideology or might be outside the purview of narrative and genre explored by Eswaran Pillai. The intended omission in no way impacts the content but might be a led to certain readers who are more connected to the movies of 1980s or 1990s. The attention given to the films of early years is missing while discussing the films made from 1980. Similarly, one should not fail to notice the comparisons to the Hollywood than to Bollywood cinema. However, these are insignificant as neither the omission nor the references hinders the story weaved by Eswaran Pillai.