Bob Hodge

Since his return to Australia from the UK in 1977, Bob has seen it as important to deploy his theories and analytic tools on Australian themes and problems. In 1982 he joined forces with a group of theorists at Murdoch University (John Frow, Michael O’Toole) and Curtin University (including John Fiske, Graham Turner) to found the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, to put the then new approach to cultural studies on the map. It did this so successfully that it was quickly poached by Routledge, renamed Cultural Studies, where it continues to thrive without ‘Australian’ in its title. He also banded together with John Fiske and Graham Turner to write an exemplary text applying semiotics (social semiotics) to Australian popular culture, Myths of Oz (1987), the first book to take this approach to Australia. It proved a hit, and has been reprinted and reproduced many times. Although this book included some critical reflections, its positive tone seemed to Bob to skate over some important issues in Australian culture, especially to do with Aboriginality, so with Vijay Mishra he wrote a kind of post-colonial corrective, Dark side of the Dream (1990), in which the White denial and repression of Aborigines and Aboriginality was seen as a key to understanding the complexity of Australian culture. A respectful interest in Aboriginal culture and the diversity of strands within it, as Aboriginal people creatively come to terms with problems of modernity and dispossession, has continued up to the present.

His most recent work on Australian culture, Borderwork in multicultural Australia, 2006, with John O’Carroll, arose out of a unit they taught together at the University of Western Sydney, where they were surprised at how vigorous and vital was the interest of students in multiculturalism, even though academically and politically the topic seemed dead.  This book used some ideas from chaos theory, especially the idea of crisp and fuzzy boundaries from fuzzy logic, in a reader-friendly style which also included popular social semiotics and critical discourse analysis.