Vale Professor Graeme Turner AO FAHA
As the AANZCA 2025 conference attendees were gathered together at the University of the Sunshine Coast listening to the opening keynote on 26 November, the sad and shocking news arrived that Graeme Turner had passed away after a short illness. The following day, we were asked to offer some brief remarks to the conference attendees. What follows is an edited and expanded version of those remarks.
We are honoured to have this opportunity to acknowledge our shared loss and, just as importantly, to express our collective gratitude for all that Graeme has given to the field and to our lives.
Graeme was a giant in the field of communication, media and cultural studies, and an active member of the scholarly community with longstanding connections to AANZCA. Graeme was also a national leader in and for the humanities, and a powerful and effective public advocate for the role of universities in society.
Graeme’s scholarly contribution was profound across an extraordinary range of topics, laying the foundations for research, teaching, and influence across the academy for decades to come, especially in his underpinning disciplines of cultural and media studies. His germinal work spanned film studies, nationhood, Australian studies (especially Australian culture, media, society, and politics), popular culture, popular music, television studies, celebrity studies, news and current affairs, media reinventions, humanities, and universities.
Graeme’s impact on the field and the lives and careers of generations of academics extends well beyond his individual work as a scholar. He also did the hard and often invisible practical work of field-building: making and protecting the spaces for others to do their best work.
Graeme helped build the field of cultural studies as a teacher of then-novel courses on popular media and culture, delivered to students (many of whom were the first in their families to engage in tertiary education) at technical colleges: Mitchell College of Advanced Education (now Charles Sturt University), the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University), and the Queensland Institute of Technology (now Queensland University of Technology). Through this pedagogical practice, largely building on work from British Cultural Studies, he modelled and taught generations of undergraduate students and future academics that popular culture and media texts and practices were powerful resources that could be used, with the right theories and methods, to understand the historical and political dimensions of contemporary conditions (or historical conjunctures).
Later in his career, Graeme shaped the field of communication and cultural studies at the institutional level through his leadership roles, including as Head of the English Department at the University of Queensland, as founding director of its Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS), and by securing the funding for and directing the ARC Cultural Research Network (CRN). The CCCS and CRN were truly transformative, not only advancing communication and cultural studies, but also connecting a range of humanities and social science disciplines together in unprecedented ways, and building collaborative relationships not only within but across institutions, thereby enabling the development of new national research capabilities.
The scope of Graeme’s influence was further expanded through his term as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Here Graeme’s strong advocacy of humanities became widely known across the full academic field, in policy, and by the wider public. When humanities scholars were pilloried for their research, by the conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in his famous November 2003 ‘Grants for Grumbling’ article, and recommended ARC funding for various projects was rejected by Ministerial veto, Graeme went into bat in trenchant terms. He offered an important, sophisticated account of cultural research, which he saw as intellectually profound and adventurous, politically attuned, but also critical to providing the knowledge and tackling major social questions. Well beyond his term as President, Graeme became a mainstay of the Academy of Humanities, a reference point for many of its positions, policy interventions, and strategy – working closely with its members and staff, up until recent weeks.
A particularly significant milestone was when Graeme was invited to become a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC). Graeme is still the only humanities scholar to have served two terms as a member of PMSEIC. In all of these leadership roles, Graeme exercised a frank and fearless approach to dealing with the politics and pragmatics of institutions from the university to the national level, including the judicious use of swear words when the situation warranted them.
Alongside his advocacy and policy work, an impressive feature of the late period of Graeme’s storied career was his distinctive emergence as a major public intellectual. He was deeply frustrated with Australian political life and institutions, and the state of democracy – an abiding motif of his work in the 2010s on media (such as his 2010 Ordinary People and the Media and 2016 Reinventing Media). So, he wrote the book The Shrinking Nation (2023) – in a way returning to where he started, critically examining the nation. The Shrinking Nation did reach an appreciative audience, but the book was not as expansive or as catalytic as he wanted. Graeme reflected explicitly on this, and experimented with making his writing more accessible – hence launching his blog (https://graemeturner.org/#blog), and through it offering regular critiques of politics. Where things really came alive was in his writing on the state of universities, and what had happened to them as they shrugged off academic leadership and their purpose, practice, and governance became degraded. So it was a joy and a great sustenance when, in the annus terribilis that became 2025, Graeme’s searing book Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good was published. Broken has not only proven to be a cracking read, but has also created the framework, concepts, vocabulary, and critical idiom for a wide range of people who care about ideas, education, and research, helping us all to understand what’s happening and what we can do about it.
Equally important are Graeme’s personal qualities as a generous and incisive mentor and a gifted and committed teacher. The many AANZCA members who have worked or studied with Graeme at some point will treasure these experiences. No doubt they will also be able to recall with searing clarity particular pieces of advice or phrases from conversations with him – his disdain for ‘theory only dogs can hear’ is a particularly memorable example.
For all the gravitas, Graeme was down-to-earth, enabling and kind. He always had the time and intellectual curiosity to learn more about what early career colleagues and students were doing in their own work. The rest of us can only attempt, however imperfectly and incompletely, to emulate the model of mentorship he provided.
Jean Burgess and Gerard Goggin
Resources:
An excellent introduction to Graeme’s work can be found in the books he wrote and edited.
See also the special 2015 issue of Cultural Studies, ‘What’s become of Australian Cultural studies: The legacies of Graeme Turner’: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcus20/29/4. Its contributions comprise:
Goggin, G., Pertierra, A., & Andrejevic, M. (2015). What’s become of Australian Cultural Studies: The legacies of Graeme Turner. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 491–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000608
Morris, M. (2015). Turning up to play: ‘GT’ and the modern game. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 503–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000611
Miller, T. (2015). Dependencia meets gentle nationalism. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000610
Bonner, F. (2015). Kylie will be ok: On the (im-)possibility of Australian celebrity studies. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 527–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000606
Bennett, T. (2015). Cultural studies and the culture concept. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 546–568. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000605
Byron, J. C. (2015). Politics as scholarly practice: Graeme Turner and the art of advocacy. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 569–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000607
Gregg, M. (2015). The effective academic executive. Cultural Studies, 29(4), 590–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000609
Turner, G. (2015). Afterword: So … what has become of Australian cultural studies? Cultural Studies, 29(4), 609–614. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.1000612