Perth Cultural Studies: A brief and partial intellectual history

In the early 1980s Perth was probably the most important city in Australia for Cultural Studies. Through that decade many intellectuals who became leaders in Australian Cultural Studies and important players in Cultural Studies outside of Australia worked in Perth. Among them were John Fiske, John Frow, John Hartley, Tom O'Regan, Lesley Stern, Graeme Turner and, a decade later, Ien Ang. This essay discusses the presence of these academics in Perth and advances some reasons why Perth became so important to Cultural Studies in Australia. It also discusses the kind of Cultural Studies that became privileged in Perth and considers some of the reasons for this. Perth Cultural Studies in the 1980s was primarily text-based and focused on screen-related popular culture, especially television programs and popular film. Cultural Studies in Perth developed in a city thought of as marginal to Australia, in institutions that were either not universities or, in the case of Murdoch University, was a very new university, by cosmopolitan academics who mostly came from either elsewhere in Australia or from the United Kingdom.