Victorian Periodicals Review

Similar to its counterpart volume, The Transnational Voices of Australia's Migrant and Minority Press (2020), Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully's Voices of Challenge in Australia's Migrant and Minority Press focuses on Australia's migrant and minority press. While the previous volume examined these periodicals within a transnational framework, Voices of Challenge takes a closer look at how the migrant and minority press "unsettled and challenged the predominant narrative of colonial, national, and cultural homogeneity" (12). After an introduction by the volume's editors, eleven different chapters address a wide range of newspaper and periodical titles published by minority and migrant groups. While the chapters contain some excursions to the nineteenth century, most of the titles discussed were published in the twentieth century.

The editors rightfully credit the "digital revolution" for providing the necessary infrastructure for posing "new questions and reframing discussions about the printed press' history" (3). They observe that Trove, Australia's repository of digitized newspapers and periodicals, includes more than two hundred publications in languages other than English. This large number leads them to question to what extent researchers can and should distinguish between the majority and minority press. As this collection shows, they decided to use a broad view of these two concepts. Next to a chapter on Indigenous press enterprises, the volume contains contributions on the newspapers and periodicals of Chinese, Italian, and French migrants, as well as those of socialist, feminist, and "privileged minority" groups such as doctors (11).

In her chapter on Indigenous media, Lara Palombo notes that the press not only suppressed these cultures but also provided them a voice. While most of her chapter focuses on the Abo Call, an Aboriginal-focused publication printed in 1938, she uses this historical example to describe how contemporary Indigenous media "reterritorialise and create dissent and opposition to the reconfigurations of a racial insular imaginary" (16). By focusing on the "insular imaginary" of the Abo Call, Palombo shows that it can be seen as the first publication to politicize the struggle for "Aboriginal peoples' human rights and social changes" (18, 21). However, the reader is left wondering what happened to Indigenous press culture before and after the Abo Call. A traditional historiographic overview would have been helpful here.

The fourth and fifth chapters provide a clear view of the role of the Chinese-language press in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. [End Page 145] Mei-fen Kuo examines the "ownership, corporate structure and commercial strategies" of the three Chinese newspapers published in Sydney around the turn of the century: the Chinese Australian Herald, the Tung Wah News, and the Chinese Republic News (65). Published in a period of intense White Australian nationalism, these publications managed to survive despite a lack of capital, a small advertising market, racial discrimination, and vigorous competition. Kuo argues that the minority "print capitalism" of these publications played a significant role in establishing a sense of "belonging in the broader Chinese diasporic community" (65). Examining Chinese-Australian news ventures in the period leading up to World War II, Caryn Coatney describes how these ventures were able to "recast their community identity from a former threat to that of a loyal patriot" (84). Through their criticism of Japanese expansion in the Pacific and the presentation of China as a political ally, titles like the Chinese Republic News, the Chinese World's News, and the Tung Wah Times could present themselves as partners of the Australian state against a powerful enemy.

The next three chapters explore three titles of the Italian immigrant community. Angela Alessi uses the Sydney-based Italian newspaper La Fiamma to examine Adelaide's little Italy community in the postwar period (1947–63). She notes how, in the period of mass migration that followed World War II, the publication helped maintain the Italian language and culture in Australia. In a mostly descriptive business historical overview, Bruno Mascitelli writes the history of Il Globo, which, in the late 1970s, became the "showpiece of Italian media in Australia" (128). Finally, Simone Battison's chapter examines the history of the Nuovo Paese between 1974 and 1981, a publication that was long viewed "as the leading alternative voice within the Italian-Australian print press" (147). During the Cold War era, a period of fervent anti-communism in Australian politics, Nuovo Paese gave a voice not only to Italian migrants but also to left-leaning political minorities.

This collection makes a strong case for studying the newspapers and periodicals of migrants and minorities. Influenced by the work of Benedict Anderson, print capitalism has often, maybe too often, been linked to the formation of monolithic national communities. Examining the press of minority groups not only demonstrates that newspapers and periodicals were used to carve out a space within these imagined communities but also that their borders—both the real ones that require a passport and the imagined ones—were permeable. The editors convincingly argue that the concerns of migrant and minority groups expressed in the press might often seem local at first glance, but, especially in times of the massive migratory waves that have characterized global modernity, they are transcultural and transnational in essence. [End Page 146]

The volume would have benefited from a more precise definition of what "migrant" and "minority" mean. Surely, the periodical of the "privileged minority" of doctors (chapter 11)—which seems a contradiction in terms in every way I think of it—cannot be discussed within the same conceptual framework as the Indigenous media of the second chapter. More generally, the editors provide no clear rationale for examining the press of Indigenous cultures, migrants, and left-leaning political groups (chapters 9 and 10) in the same volume. Besides being marginal to an undefined majority, these groups must have had very different and contradictory political objectives, especially in times before intersectional politics. This is an especially pressing problem in the Australian context, where the Anglo-Saxon majority started as a small group of migrants. The editors rightfully underline this definitional problem in their introduction, which makes it all the more disappointing, at least for this reader, that only one chapter describes Indigenous media. [End Page 147]