Dr Richard Scully, together with colleague Catherine Dewhirst from University of Southern Queensland, has co-edited a new book with broad cross-disciplinary appeal. 

The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press (Palgrave, 2020) looks at the history of Australia’s migrant and minority presses/newspapers/periodicals from a number of perspectives. The idea for it originated with a conference at USQ, Toowoomba, in 2017, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Miriam Gilson and Jerzy Zubrzycki’s The Foreign-Language Press in Australia (1967). A/Professor Scully was one of two keynote speakers (the other being Simon J. Potter, of Bristol University) at the conference.

The essays in the volume focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups’ newspaper ventures. They also demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces. And explore the diverse worlds of Australia’s migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day.

The book promises to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian ‘voices’ through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society

A second volume – Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press – is due out next year.