The Empire Press Union and Antipodean Communications: Australian-New Zealand involvement 1909-1950

The Press and Public Service Broadcasting: Neville Petersen's News Not Views and the Case for Australian Exceptionalism

“…Its undoubted strength lies in its documentation of conflicts -both internal and external -that accompanied the protracted birth of the ABC as an independent news organisation. It is this historical perspective on old-new media rivalries, one established and politically powerful in the form of the Australian newspaper press, the other emergent and subject to the pressures of war-time officialdom, that will now be explored, drawing on the author's own research into the newspaper industry's international forum, the Empire Press Union (Cryle, 2002(Cryle, , 2004 and its Australian section over a similar period.…”

“…Research on the Australian press during this period, and the imperial press conferences at which it was represented (Cryle, 2007), tends to confirm the entrenched libertarianism of its proprietors, especially in the face of government wartime control. Moreover, Cryle (2002) identifies broadcasting as a significant ongoing preoccupation of the press, both in Australia and overseas, but it remains to be established what position Australian press delegations adopted towards the prospect of competition with broadcasting, and whether the Australian situation was especially problematic, as Petersen goes on to imply. What evidence of such united determination can be found in the records of the Press Union of this period, where delegations and powerful proprietors vied for leadership and exchanged opinions on broadcasting's rapid rise to prominence?…”

The Press Union at the end of empire: Anglo-Australian perspectives, 1946–65

“…Yet, despite its imperial character, the Empire Press Union had previously demonstrated a capacity for internal reform on behalf of its membership, largely under British influence but increasingly under pressure from Indian delegations. Cryle (2007), for example, writes of attempts to make its membership more inclusive during the 1920s, and of the growing presence of women not just as partners but as conference delegates in their own right. Similarly, Chandrika Kaul (2006) emphasizes the changing political character of Indian delegations to its conferences by 1946, as republican and nationalist editors came to dominate its membership within a relatively short space of time.…”