Professor Michael Bromley (with Karen Hasin-Bromley)
Michael is Professor and Head of Journalism. He has published widely on journalism
and the media and is a founder co-editor of the international journal Journalism.
The Fourth 'F': Newspaper Representations of People's Day at the Ekka
The idea evolved in the middle of the nineteenth century that 'the people' might be dissuaded from participation in animated and riotous amusements in favour of the far more docile act of 'gazing in amazement' at exhibits presented in a variety of more or less static displays. People's Day at the Brisbane Exhibition is a surviving manifestation of this belief in the domesticating powers of the reform popular leisure. Events like People's Day at the Ekka, however, also permitted the (partial and temporary) reconstitution of what John Hartley has called 'a physical space in which the public could congregate, gaze upon, and so govern, its collective self'. They turned into opportunities for the people to supplement, rather than replace, traditional, boisterous, popular recreation with a more 'civilised' interest in fashion. Nevertheless, from the outset such were the novelty of the experience, and the nervousness with which 'polite society' viewed it, that the people were also the object of the middle-class gaze mediated through the press. Direct experiences and specific formal mediations of those experiences, at the point of the emergence of popular journalism, interconnected to (re)construct popular fashion. This paper will examine part of this process in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the coverage of People's Day at the Ekka by the Brisbane newspaper press.
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