I have just returned from the POPCAANZ (Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand) conference. There was a wide range of fascinating papers. One of the most interesting papers I attended was Melissa Bellanta’s paper on ‘The Sentimental Bloke and Australian Romance in the Anzac Years’, which showed the importance of sentimentality as part of Australian masculinity in Australian culture during the Anzac years. (See Melissa’s blog here.) This was one of several papers on the topic of the history of romantic love in Australian popular culture, a fascinating project being under taken by Hsu-Ming Teo from Macquarie University. A very different, but enjoyable, paper that stood out for me was Rachel Franks’ paper on Ellery Queen and Jessica Fletcher – she gave an entertaining account of how the TV series Ellery Queen (which failed) morphed into Murder, She Wrote (which was a huge success). Overall, the conference was an entertaining one that showed the vitality of popular culture studies in Australia at the moment.
I will report on ‘Revealing the Reader: A Symposium’ in my next blogpost.