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Graeme Turner

Graeme Turner is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland and one of Australia’s leading cultural historians.

Graeme Turner reviews 'Jonestown: The power and the myth of Alan Jones by Chris Masters' by Chris Masters

December 2006–January 2007, no. 287 01 December 2006
This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something ... (read more)

Graeme Turner reviews 'One Man's Way' by Cecil Holmes

July 1986, no. 82 01 July 1986
Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addre ... (read more)

Graeme Turner reviews 'A History of Charisma' by John Potts

April 2010, no 320 01 April 2010
Nothing, it seems, is too small to have its own history. As academic disciplines such as the history of ideas have grown and prospered, popular non-fiction has followed suit, offering the history of a word, a concept, a technology. This has proven to be a highly effective method of opening up the processes of culture for closer inspection, and for revealing the contingent or motivated roots of wha ... (read more)

Graeme Turner reviews 'An Open Swimmer' by Tim Winton

September 1982, no. 44 01 September 1982
A sympathetic reader might feel that Tim Winton, winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, is a victim of one of the unkindest tricks Fate can play on a writer, with the publication of his first novel, An Open Swimmer, at the age of twenty-one. A first novel from a writer of this age is typically seen as, a ‘young man’s book’, full of the gaucheries and immaturities of the precocious, a ... (read more)