Travelling Home, 'Walkabout Magazine' and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia

By Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation; as a result, this analysis produces complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783085392

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Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture

Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specialises in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.

Series Editors

Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia

Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board

Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia

Delia Falconer – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia​

John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia

Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China

Ian Henderson – King’s College London, United Kingdom

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia

Ivor Indyk – University of Western Sydney, Australia

Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia

James Ley – Sydney Review of Books, Australia

Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia

Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, United States

Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia

Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia

Brigitta Olubus – University of New South Wales, Australia

Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia

Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Australia

Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia

Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany

Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia​

Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia

Mitchell Rolls and

Anna Johnston

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston 2016

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rolls, Mitchell, 1960– author. | Johnston, Anna, 1972– co-author.

Title: Travelling home, Walkabout magazine and mid-twentieth-century

Australia / Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston.

Description: London, UK ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, an imprint of

Wimbledon Publishing Company, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022363| ISBN 9781783085378 (hardback) |

ISBN 1783085371 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Walkabout – History. | Australia – Description and

travel – Periodicals. | Travel – Social aspects – Australia – History – 20th century. | Periodicals – Social aspects – Australia – History – 20th century.|

Literature and society – Australia – History – 20th century. | National

characteristics, Australian – History – 20th century. |

Nationalism – Australia – History – 20th century. | Australia – Description

and travel. | Australia – Social life and customs – 20th century. |

Australia – Ethnic relations – History – 20th century. | BISAC: LITERARY

CRITICISM / Australian & Oceanian. | HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand. |

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture.

Classification: LCC DU80.W33 R65 2016 | DDC 919.9404/05—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022363

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 537 8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 537 1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Hunter and Ruby, who we hope will grow up with a similar sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around them that Walkabout encouraged in its readers.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Prefatory Notes, Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction: Making Mid-Twentieth-Century Opinion

1. Walkabout : The Magazine

2. Writing Walkabout

3. Peopling Australia: Writers, Anthropologists and Aborigines

4. Advertising Australia: Development, Modernity and Commerce

5. Transforming Country: Natural History and Walkabout

6. Knowing Our Neighbours: The Pacific Region

Conclusion: ‘Walkabout Rocks’

Notes

Index

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Long before we began work on this project, we frequently discussed how much we would like to undertake research on Walkabout. A number of things and people contributed to our being able to ‘align the planets’ in such a way that we could at last commence. First, the University of Tasmania provided seed funding through its Institutional Research Grant Scheme that facilitated the pilot project that served as the foundation for a successful Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant (DP0984449). We are thankful to both the University of Tasmania and the ARC for these grants that made this project possible. The university supported two related PhD scholarships, and we have enjoyed supervising two graduate students – Petrina Osborne and Robyn Greaves – who have brought new perspectives in their research on Walkabout. We are also thankful for the interest of ABC local radio and ABC RN. Hearing one of the radio interviews, Pru Jackson of Hobart contacted us and offered her late husband’s extensive collection of Walkabout magazines. Thanks also to Bill Gammage, who when finding an occasional spare issue forwarded it to us through the post. Ken Ryan sent a key anecdote that helped shape the conclusion and alerted us to Michael Cook’s photography. Others throughout Australia emailed (and continue to do so) enquiring as to our progress. This interest has helped sustain us.

Lucy Frost and Sue Sheridan were careful readers of our early project proposals, and we are very thankful for their advice. The interdisciplinary Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tasmania provided the sort of supportive research environment needed for this project, and through its small grant funding scheme contributed to its timely completion.

We also thank the State Library of Tasmania (Hobart), now known as LINC, and in particular the staff of the ‘History Room’, who have seen much of us throughout this project. Similarly, the staff of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, provided professional and courteous assistance at all times, and Mitchell Library remains a delightful place in which to work. Much work was also completed in the Petherick Room at the National Library, Canberra. It too is a delightful place in which to work, and its staff always helpful. Thanks also to the staff members of the manuscript room at the National Library, and in the National Archives, Canberra, who went out of their way to assist us. The Fryer Library at the University of Queensland also provided terrific assistance with accessing writers’ papers in its collection. The Morris Miller library at the University of Tasmania has almost an entire run of Walkabout. We thank Graeme Rayner, a former collections manager, for his interest in the project and attempts to procure missing issues. We also thank the current staff for retrieving Walkabout when it was in danger of being de-accessioned. Marilyn Hawthorne and staff of the Northern Territory Library kept in touch throughout the project.

We thank Copyright Agency Member Services for its unequivocal advice on the use of images from the magazine. We had spent much fruitless effort seeking clarification on this matter beforehand.

A number of former Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) and Walkabout staff members and associates expressed interest in our work and were keen to chat. The ANTA records were to be destroyed, but Don Beresford intervened and donated them to the Mitchell Library. We thank Don for granting access to what was, at the time of archival research, still an uncatalogued collection, and for talking with us about Walkabout. We also thank Stan Marks for his recollections of the magazine. Graham Tucker, a former Walkabout editor and ANTA’s publications and promotions manager, was able to resolve the identity of a regular Walkabout contributor that had flummoxed us for years. Another editor, Basil Atkinson, provided helpful information. Many others have also shared information, memories and anecdotes, sometimes over lunch or a coffee, or by email. We’ve greatly appreciated this support and interest. Even though much has not found its way into this book, it helped paint the broader picture of the Walkabout years.

Toni Sherwood provided exemplary research assistance throughout the entire project, for which we are extremely thankful. Her meticulous work, particularly creating a comprehensive database, has enabled us to analyse a complex and diverse magazine in a coherent way.

Across the years of this project, children have been born and lives changed. We thank our families and friends for their support and tolerance, especially Haiqing Yu and Ron Spiers.

PREFATORY NOTES, ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Copyright Permissions

Portions of this text contain revised sections from previous articles: Mitchell Rolls, ‘Flora, Fauna and Concrete: Nature and Development in Walkabout Magazine (Australia: 1934–1978)’, Zeitschrift für Australienstudien 27 (2013): 3–28; ‘Reading Walkabout in the 1930s’, Australian Studies 2 (2010): 179–200; ‘Finding Fault: Aborigines, Anthropologists, Popular Writers and Walkabout’, Australian Cultural History 28, nos. 2–3 (2010): 179–200; ‘Why Didn’t You Listen: White Noise and Black History’, Aboriginal History 34 (2010): 11–33; ‘Picture Imperfect: Re-reading Imagery of Aborigines in Walkabout’, Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 1 (2009): 19–35. We thank these journals for permision to use this material.

Images

Except Figure 2.1, all images were sourced from the Walkabout collection held by what was formerly the State Library of Tasmania (Hobart) (now LINC), and were reproduced by LINC staff. We acknowledge and thank the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office for its assistance, and the staff of the ‘History Room’. Figure 2.1 was sourced from the National Library of Australia, and we thank the library for its assistance.

Note on Archival Sources

At the time of archival research the Australian National Travel Association records pertaining to Walkabout and held by the Mitchell Library, Sydney, were uncatalogued. The records were donated by Don Beresford in 2006 and comprised 43 boxes under the catalogue entry ML550/05. The authors gratefully acknowledge Don Beresford’s permission to access the uncatalogued files, and the assistance of Mitchell Library staff. These records have recently been catalogued. The citations used in this text refer to the uncatalogued collection. For this reason more detail is provided than is usual.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

From December 1940 to September 1954 ANTA changed its name to the Australian National Publicity Association (ANPA), then reverted again to ANTA. While the name ANTA is widely recognized, ANPA is not. Where relevant we name the correct association. However, when the overall activities of ANTA are cited, it is inclusive of the ANPA years.

INTRODUCTION: MAKING MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY OPINION

November 1934 sw the launch of a new Australian monthly magazine. For the purchase price of one shilling,¹ and bearing the title Walkabout – a more familiar and less pejorative term in 1934 than today – the first issue boasted a striking front cover (Figure 0.1). Stylistically it established a design that with minor amendments endured for much of Walkabout’s long run. The title Walkabout, appearing in white capitals across the top with the subtitle ‘Australia and the South Seas’ in smaller-font capitals immediately below, was imposed on a bright red background. This framed a close-up black-and-white photograph of a weathered, unnamed Aboriginal man’s head and shoulders, facing the camera, wearing a string headband and carrying a clutch of spears. It is an image that even today commands attention.

Figure 0.1   Walkabout, November 1934, cover image, ‘Head of Australian Aboriginal by E. O. Hoppé’ (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, TAHO)

Those opening the front cover found very high production values – a standard vigilantly maintained until the magazine’s final decade – and an eclectic mix of articles, photographs and advertisements. There were advertisements for the Jenolan Caves – ‘Nature’s Masterpiece across the Blue Mountains’ – AMP insurance policies, a number of shipping lines with various domestic and overseas destinations, Kodak cameras and colour film, Gilbey’s gin, railway travel – ‘cross the continent on one of the most comfortable and up-to-date trains in the world’² – Foster’s lager, opals, the benefits of installing a home telephone, hotels and various tourist destinations including Tasmania, Queensland and New Zealand. For reading there was an article by Arthur Upfield on droving,³ and one on the Kimberley region by Ion Idriess.⁴ Fulfilling the promise of the cover to be inclusive of the ‘South Seas’ were essays on ‘Undiscovered New Guinea’, ‘Tahiti To-Day’, ‘The Maori’ and the ‘British Solomon Islands Protectorate’.⁵ In addition to the many photographs illustrating the articles was a photographic centrepiece titled ‘… and the Cities’,⁶ featuring varied scenes from Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Near the end of the issue was a section titled ‘Our Cameraman’s Walkabout’. This included photos of a young woman holding a koala, a romantic couple on a cruise in the tropics, the Hume Reservoir, a mob of stampeding camels, tree-felling in Western Australia and Melbourne by night.⁷ In keeping with the magazine’s high production values, the photographs were of superb quality. Sixty-four pages in all, the magazine offered accessible, easy-to-read, informative details on the included topics. The first issue of 20,000 copies sold out, and the run was increased to 22,000 copies with the third issue in January 1935.⁸

Walkabout was published throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century (1934–78), a period in Australia commonly described as an era of conservatism, dull conformity and a lack of intellectual vigour. The diligence of the Literature Censorship Board in banning what were perceived as corrupting or morally degenerate books contributes to a dismissive accounting of these decades. An unpretentious geographic magazine might not be an obvious source for challenging the mid-century stereotype, yet Travelling Home shows otherwise.

Walkabout’s publisher, the Australian National Travel Authority (ANTA), sought to bring to city-based readers knowledge of the country beyond the urban boundaries, particularly the interior, rural and remote regions. Another aim was to promote Australia as an appealing place to live to potential immigrants, and as an attractive investment opportunity. From the first edition in November 1934 onwards, the latter aim was subsumed to a greater focus on natural history. The goal of educating readers about the lesser-known regions of the country in which they dwelt, and to a lesser but still significant extent about the nearby Pacific region, took precedence. A range of more incidental contributions on varying topics was included, and informed book reviews of recent publications also appeared regularly.

Many of Walkabout’s contributors were leading writers of their time, as well as some of Australia’s foremost natural historians. These contributors often moved across different media forms, contributing not only to other magazines, but also to specialist journals, newspapers and radio programmes. It is in this broad mix of contributions and in the intersections with other cultural industries that a more complex and challenging picture of this magazine and the era emerges. Walkabout did not provide simply a naïve or purposeful conformity iterating nationalist myths; rather, it regularly included material reflecting a genuine desire to be educative. Key contemporary issues were discussed and debated, including the status of Aborigines and of Aboriginal affairs more generally. The tension between progress and conservation was ever present. Marked throughout by a belief that the ‘real’ Australia was to be found outside of the cities, Walkabout nevertheless did not succumb to bucolic pastiche or nostalgia for the so-called pioneering values of yesteryear. And while generally supportive of further development and expansion of rural and pastoral industries, there was also a palpable sense of concern for Australia’s unique flora and fauna that transcended crude instrumentalist interests of, say, the touristic potential of the koala.

Walkabout’s readers were exposed to a range of opinion through an accessible format. They were furnished with details that permitted better knowledge of the country in which the majority dwelt, better knowledge of Australia’s neighbours, familiarity with the often violent conflict over land and resources between Aborigines and settler Australians and an awareness of the richness of Aboriginal cultures, amongst much else. Walkabout encouraged readers to come to a better understanding of the national self by exploring the physical, topographical and environmental constituents of the continent. This self (Walkabout’s ideal reader) would be modern, knowledgeable about Australia’s flora, fauna and the lesser-known remote and interior regions and perhaps even have travelled there, know that these regions were already populated despite the white population being sparse, be aware of island neighbours, be interested in the conservation of species and preservation of unique landscapes, know of the rural, fishing and mining industries and recognize the need for progress and the capacity of technological innovation to increase productivity.

Travelling Home analyses how Walkabout modestly reached towards realizing these objectives across its long history. Its moderate aspirations were in keeping with its middlebrow status and its concerted effort to attract a broad range of readers. Readers’ letters were often published, and surveys were undertaken, providing an interesting snapshot of the magazine’s audience. Through both their published and unpublished letters, many readers reveal an almost intimate attachment to Walkabout, and it remains today a fondly recalled magazine. It graced suburban lounge rooms, doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, railway waiting rooms, ministerial offices, school libraries and overseas tourist offices. Walkabout’s mixture of entertainment and education ensured its influence across a spectrum of readers: across age, class, gender and educational boundaries. In Walkabout they could read a range of non-fiction: natural history, popular science, ethnography, travel writing, local and national histories and stories about the Pacific region. Much literary and cultural studies scholarship in Australia has traditionally focussed on canonical ‘high’ literature. The ‘lowbrow’ now also attracts considerable scholarly and press attention. The middlebrow, arguably the literature which attracts the greatest readership, is by and large neglected, as David Carter demonstrates in connecting Australia to international scholarship on this particular literary market.⁹ Following Carter’s lead, we demonstrate that Walkabout established and strategically developed a respectful, affective and educative relationship with its audience and in so doing made a major contribution to Australia’s cultural history.

Travelling Home seeks to account for the magazine across its long publication history, and across its multifarious internal components: feature articles, letters, editorials, advertisements and photographs and pictorial essays. Given Walkabout’s 40-year history, with monthly publications, and approximately 5,000 contributions (excluding advertisements), we have necessarily made choices about which elements to foreground in our study. A companion book could be produced which draws on the many rich resources we have not been able to include. We seek, however, to do justice to the magazine as a distinctive textual form in and of itself, in line with recent scholarship in periodical studies analyzing magazines as part of print culture. This relatively new field tries to account for magazines in their entirety, rather than mining them for a narrow range of material relating to particular topics. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes argue that scholars, anthology compilers and even recent digitizing projects have tended to extract, for example, the periodical publications of well-known writers for analysis, rather than understanding the periodical as a whole. Magazines, they suggest, are textual formations requiring analysis across their diverse contents and contributions: ‘we have often been too quick to see magazines merely as containers of discrete bits of information rather than autonomous objects of study.’¹⁰ They also suggest that such work requires collaboration and interdisciplinary expertise in order to do justice to the diversity of the material.

Working across Australian, Aboriginal, literary and cultural studies, we draw on a range of important developments in these fields to bring contemporary critical questions to bear on Walkabout. The magazine has attracted little scholarly analysis: that which exists has tended to cherry-pick individual contributions or specific themes, given the difficulty of accounting for the magazine as a whole. Some have focussed mostly on the images, paying little attention to the textual surroundings in which they appear. As discussed later, several scholars pigeonhole it as being complicit in boosterish nationalism championing progress and development, and as perpetuating racist stereotypes about Aborigines. It certainly is possible, with a selective eye, to substantiate such a reading, and thus to place Walkabout within