Fringe to Famous: Indie and Mainstream Cultural Production in Australia

Fringe to Famous examines exchange between small scenes of cultural production and mainstream institutions and markets.

Drawing on Australian examples in music, streetwear, comedy, screen and digital games, it argues that there has been much greater crossover between the two than is generally recognized.

The book resists a tendency to represent fringe and mainstream as abstract opposites, bringing a focus instead to concrete historical formations. It offers an alternative both to romantic celebrations of a ’pure’ fringe - discredited now by half a century of critical responses to the counterculture - and to an increasingly hardened anti-romantic reaction.

Drawing on extensive original interviews, Fringe to Famous offers an overview of transformations in Australian culture since the 1980s, concluding with suggestions for cultural policy ’after the creative industries’. It proposes an idea of ’generative hybridity’ between fringe and mainstream that allows us to imagine new possibilities for arts and culture in the 2020s and beyond.

Tony Moore is Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians since 1860 (2012), The Barry McKenzie Movies (2005) and Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788 - 1868 (2010). Moore has a background as a documentary maker and current affairs producer at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearing as a cultural historian on the BBC/ABC series Brilliant Creatures (2014).

Mark Gibson is Associate Professor and Head of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (Berg, 2007) and Editor of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. His research interests include cultural industries and cultural policy, everyday life and theories of power in communications and cultural studies.

Chris McAuliffe is Professor of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Australia. Previously, he was Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. McAuliffe has curated extensively and written widely on Australian art and culture. He is the author of Art and Suburbia (1996) Linda Marrinon: Let Her Try (2007) and Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories (2008).

Maura Edmond is Research Fellow in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. She has written about arts and culture for a range of Australian publications and cultural organizations. Her research has been published in New Media and Society, TV and New Media, Screening the Past, Media International Australia, Senses of Cinema, and elsewhere.