UQ Library podcasts

Australia Doesn’t Have to Rhyme With Failure: Carter Brown as Cultural Export
Lecture by Dr Toni Johnson Woods on Australian Detective Fiction Writer Carter Brown, 3 April 2008

Listen or download Dr Toni Johnson-Woods lecture on Carter Brown

View the slides from Dr Toni Johnson-Woods PowerPoint presentation

Dr Toni Johnson-Woods has been teaching media and communication in the Bachelor of Arts program at the UQ Ipswich Campus, where she has designed groundbreaking and popular courses such as Changing Channels where students explore developments of mass media (print, film, TV & radio) through the examination of a popular icon – Tarzan – and Media Sensations which examines media stories, TV programs & radio personalities that shock, amuse and intrigue audiences.

Toni was the winner of the Fryer Award for 2007 and her talk derives to a significant degree from the work she did in the Fryer Library on the Carter Brown collection. She has a book forthcoming on Carter Brown which will be published later this year. In 2007 Toni received an ARC grant to examine Australian pulp fiction. For the next three years she will be working in the pulp fiction archives around the world.

Toni conducts creative writing workshops and has edited short stories and writing from these workshops. She was the literary editor of the Brisbane Independent Review and has worked on the management committee of the Brisbane Writers Festival.

 
The Carter Brown Collection at the Fryer Library
The Fryer Library holds nearly 400 individual titles written by best-selling Australian author, Carter Brown, whose real name was Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985).

Yates penned a series of detective pulp fiction books between the early 1950s to the early 1980s. Much of Yates work was produced in a period when the home-grown popular fiction industry blossomed under an Australian Government tariff system that effectively banned US imports. Carter Brown titles were translated into 14 languages. The books were written initially for the Sydney based Horwitz Publications, which sold the overseas rights to the US based multinational, Signet. In 1977 Yates was awarded a posthumous Crime Writers Association of Australia Ned Kelly Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Carter Brown books are estimated to have sold more than eighty million copies worldwide.

All of the titles in the Fryer Library collection are individually listed on the UQ Library catalogue and the lively cover art is available online through UQ eSpace.