The media geographies of Tom O’Regan

Abstract

This essay reflects on the many contributions of Tom O’Regan to media scholarship in Australia. While O’Regan may be best known as a scholar of Australian film and television, we suggest that O’Regan was also – and always – a scholar of the global. His work was premised on the idea that national and global industries are co-constitutive, shaped by flows of content, technology, ideas and attention. These are, fundamentally, matters of media geography – an issue to which O’Regan returned continuously throughout his long career. O’Regan was fascinated by spatial aspects of media: questions of flow and exchange across, between and within nations; problems of scale and scalar relations; and interactions between local, national, subnational, regional and global formations. We suggest O’Regan’s research oriented national and subnational media studies along that expansive geographical plane, and we consider how this perspective informed his prolific work on film, television, video, and digital platforms.