Voices of Challenge in Australia's Migrant and Minority Press ed. by Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully (review)

Reviewed by: Voices of Challenge in Australia's Migrant and Minority Press ed. by Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully Thomas Smits (bio) Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully, eds., Voices of Challenge in Australia's Migrant and Minority Press ( Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 293, $159.99/ €137.00 hardcover. 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...

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