Conference Paper: The Contested Frontier - Comic Book ‘Westerns’ and Cultural Identity in Post-War Australia

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the 13th annual Works in Progress conference, held at the University of Queensland during 4-6 September. The theme for this year's conference was 'Pockets of Change: Cultural Adpatations and Transitions'. The broad aim of WIP is to bring recent postgraduate students together from Australia and overseas to discuss their current research interests, and provide them with an opportunity to participate in what, for many, will be their first academic conference experience.

The WIP conference is oragnised under the auspices of the University of Queensland's School of English, Media Studies and Art History (EMSAH), and provided a forum for a diverse selection of speakers, whose research interestes ensured a broad range of responses to the conference theme of cultural adaptation and transition. I found the WIP conference an overwhelmingly positive experience and would encourage any current or prospective postgraduate students to participate in next year's event.

Presented below is the abstract from my own conference paper, which was based on a section from my recently completed honours dissertation.

The Contested Frontier: Comic Book Westerns and Cultural Identity in Post-War Australia

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the American ‘western’ proved to be a remarkably adaptable genre, successfully migrating from one mass medium to another, and continually reaffirming its public appeal in mass-market fiction, cinema, radio and television.

Comic books, too, were highly receptive to the ‘western’, which briefly displaced the costumed superhero as the medium’s most popular fixture in the years immediately after World War II. The popularity of ‘cowboy comics’ was by no means confined to the United States; western titles were amongst the most popular published in Australia from the mid-1940s onwards, appearing as they did at the peak of the domestic comic industry’s post-war ‘boom’.

Comic book westerns, however, found themseles at the centre of hotly contested debates about Australia’s sense of national identity. For some, the archetypal cowboy embodied the Cold War-era politics of the United States, while others saw in western comics further evidence of the corrupting influence that American culture exerted over Australian society. The public debate over comic books reflected the ongoing tensions in a triangulation of influence exterted by both British and American culture on Australia’s post-war sense of national identity. More importantly, such arguments tended to highlight class-driven distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the generational biases of their participants. Intriguingly, Australian publishers, writers and illustrators successfully appropriated the image of the American cowboy to their commercial advantage. They innovatively adapted the genre to meet Australian audiences’ tastes in ways that they were unable to achieve with the historically familiar, but morally problematic, figure of the Australian bushranger.

(Illustration courtesy of the Rare Book Collection, Monash University, Victoria.)