No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy
Abstract
By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in the mouths of criminals, and by situating them in the suburbs, Underbelly suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the Australian Dream. Exposing a generation's denial of the criminal elements behind ecstasy's fetishized status, it problematizes celebratory accounts of club culture, and suggests dark externalities for the ‘night-time economy’ of our inner cities. As well as connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality, by virtue of its casting choices at the very least, the series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia's present that countervails the official pieties of the ordinary that characterized the Howard years.
... True crime writing retains some of the qualities of fiction in setting out the crimes they are treating as "heightened, narrativized versions of historical criminal events," with a strong focus on making those involved into character types. 7 True crime writing fills gaps in stories with a level of speculation not permissible for historians and offers moralistic or darkly humorous asides. It is also often based on painstaking research into primary sources and so can be useful for historians as they piece together accounts of crime. ...
... As Seltzer (2007) has noted, true crime may be based on fact, but it often it resembles fiction. This is evident in the way that both types of text often make use of scene-setting, descriptive detail, character development, as well as the construction of a coherent narrative (Gregg and Wilson, 2010). Moreover, true crime stories may also "invent" characters to serve the story (Paget, 2004). ...
The true crime genre has become synonymous with the serial killer. As such, other narratives dealing with different types of violent criminal subjects have been overlooked in academic and media analyses. The following article explores a subgenre of true crime which has been overlooked—the life story of the violent criminal or “hardman biography.” However, in acknowledging the hardman, the discussion also reveals his presence across fact/fiction boundaries and a range of cultural terrain. Following a discussion of the cultural space this figure occupies, I turn my attention to hardman stories which exist predominantly in the local imaginary and focus on one such text which tells the story of a violent protagonist and cultures of crime and violence in the North of England in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In so doing, I focus on how this text animates cultures of violence and marginality left in the wake of deindustrialization and economic decline, combining this with relevant theoretical and ethnographic work. I conclude by arguing that the text is a further example of the way in which popular criminology can complement and advance academic criminological understandings of crime and violence.
... Melbourne's so called 'gangland wars' of the 1980s and 1990s have generated enormous interest in Australian organised crime, especially through the associated series of 'true crime' books and the TV series Underbelly (Gregg and Wilson 2010). In a sign of perennial tensions around the Victoria Market racket, Melbourne boss Liborio Benvenuto was targeted unsuccessfully by a car bomb in 1988, while Vincenzo Muratore's son Alfonso was shot dead in 1992 after attempting to break away from the Honoured Society's market produce monopoly, which even extended to national supermarket chain Coles (Herald Sun, 25 March 2013). ...
Although Italian mafia scholars have recently been turning their attention to the Calabrian mafia (known as the ’Ndrangheta) diaspora in Australia, their efforts have been limited by conducting research remotely from Italy without the benefit of local knowledge. Australian journalists and crime writers have long played an important role in documenting ’Ndrangheta activities, but have in turn been limited by a lack of expertise in Italian language and culture, and knowledge of the Italian scholarly literature. As previously in the US, Australian scholarly discussion of the phenomenon has been inhibited, especially since the 1970s, by a ‘liberal progressive’ ‘negationist’ discourse, which has led to a virtual silence within the local scholarly literature. This paper seeks to break this silence by bringing the Italian scholarly and Australian journalistic and archival sources into dialogue, and summarising the clear evidence for the presence in Australia since the early 1920s of criminal actors associated with a well-organised criminal secret society structured along lines familiar from the literature on the ’Ndrangheta.
... The popular fascination with serial killers, gangsters and their related memorabilia now constitutes a global market. This is conceptualized by Penfold-Mounce (2009, 82) as 'celebrated criminality', that is: the 'celebration of transgression, deviance and rebellion' by the culture industry; or what Gregg and Wilson (2010) refer to as 'the cultural economy of infamy' underpinning 'true crime'. This is manifested in the wide appeal of 'crime as entertainment' (Turnbull 2010) and the 'spectacle' of (especially violent) crime (see , Gever 2005;O'Brien, Tzanelli, Yar, and Penna 2005). ...
This article explores the construction and dissemination of media representations of violent crime in popular culture through a case study of Cass (2008), a film adaptation of the autobiography of Cass Pennant, a former football hooligan. Personal biographical research interviews with the film's scriptwriter/director and Pennant himself provided a rare insight into the culture of production underpinning the (re)production of the violent football hooligan culture. The interviews explored the film-makers' preferred meanings, their target audience and distribution strategy, their understanding of the consumption of ‘true crime’ and their responses to reviewers and regulators. While caution is needed when using ‘true crime’ autobiographical accounts and cinematic representations as an academic resource due to their potentially self-serving nature, their analysis can nevertheless inform the study of violent or criminal subcultures – such as football hooliganism – as well as our understanding of the culture of production and production of culture underpinning the mediated celebration of crime and deviance more broadly. As such, the findings usefully contribute to academic and populist debates concerned with the aesthetics and effects of violent media content in popular culture and whether ‘underworld exhibitionists’ should financially benefit from their criminal pasts.
Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ppIZr2XdnQJJtqNvhTGw/full
This chapter considers the portrayal of the life of Melbourne 'standover' man Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read, in his memoir, the film Chopper and with brief reference to subsequent documentaries and true crime exposés. It focuses on writer/director Andrew Dominik's film as an adaptation of Read's bestselling memoir, Chopper: From the Inside (1991). The chapter explores this biopic as a complex form of adaptation of life story, 'yarn', 'true crime' genre text and popular mythology of gangland Melbourne. In common with many biopics, the chief focus is on the portrayal of Chopper himself, and Eric Bana's method‐style approach to Read's character involves a highly physical performance, where display of the body and the injuries inflicted on it are central to one's understanding of the character. Eric Bana's performance as Chopper is extraordinary and career defining.
This chapter will consider the Australian television series Rake (2010, 2012, 2014, 2016) as an example of ‘HBO-style television’. Like the television series produced by HBO—from The Sopranos (1999−2007) to Game of Thrones (2011−)—Rake is an example of a new form of television with its own distinctive mode of narration. This chapter uses Rake as a case study through which to explore the ways in which the mode of narration employed in HBO series has influenced television made in Australia in the 2000s.
This chapter examines the intersections between crime, celebrity culture, and the changing mediascape in relation to the constructions of guilt and innocence associated with Amanda Knox (‘Foxy Knoxy’) in the Meredith Kercher murder case. Clifford situates these practices in the context of Knox’s online declaration of innocence—the SIAMO INNOCENTI tweet—published by Knox on Twitter in the fortnight after the Italian appeals court had reinstated guilty verdicts against her and former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Clifford concludes that, whilst its aesthetic appeal and the conventions of the medium imply access to a more authentic or ‘real’ Amanda Knox, the persona constructed in the tweet was no less performative, stage-managed, or contestable than the identities constructed for Knox within legal, media, and publicity discourses before it.
With the release of The Football Factory(Dir. Nick Love, 2004) in May 2004 coinciding with news that filming had wrapped on Green Street (Dir. Lexi Alexander, 2005), The Timesran the exaggerated headline: ‘Film Now in Firm Grip of the Hooligans’ (Edgar, 2004). Criticism of this apparent ‘grip’ on the film industry was twofold. It focused, first, on the timing of the film and press releases (on the eve of the FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Millwall and also the Euro 2004 tournament in Portugal) and, second, on accusations that these films glamorised football-related violence, so running an alleged risk of pre- cipitating it in real life (Poulton, 2006). A decade later, the number of hooligan-themed films has tripled (see Table 7.1), providing the self-appointed moral guardians with more ‘evidence’ to support their complaints. For example, Tookey (2007) heralded the release of Rise of the Footsolâier(Dir. Julian Gibley, 2007) with the indignant lament: ‘Just what we need! Another British glorification of gang warfare, full of macho posturing, non-stop swearing (with a record number of c-words) and sadistic shots of gruesome beatings and killings.’
The history of communication research in Australia reveals that, like the history Australian television, it has involved a process of adaptation and innovation to suit a particular national context. In this article, I pursue the analogy between the two in order to illustrate how the peculiar history of Australian communication research (and Australian television) have created a pedagogical environment in which those who teach in the field of media, communication and cultural studies are already well equipped to deal with the invitation posed by Cunningham (2010) to 'refine critical stances', to rethink 'core pedagogical ethics' and to take account of 'vocational aspirations, workplace trends and the broader structure of the economy'.
As a genre, the television crime drama has long been a constant of the television landscape since it first migrated from film and radio onto the small screen in the 1950s. Since then, from Dixon of Dock Green to The Wire, from Minder to The Sopranos or Cracker to Dexter and The Killing, it has continued to attract large audiences even as the depiction of the crime, the perpetrators and the investigators may have changed. In order to track these changes, this book provides an historical analysis of the TV crime series as a genre by paying close attention not only to the nature of TV dramas themselves, but also to the context of production and reception. Rather than simply providing an overview, this book offers a series of case studies to illuminate key issues in the trajectory of the genre. Particular attention will be paid to the transnational career of the television crime drama, including the British and American product, as well as attention to crime drama series produced in other national contexts such as Europe and Australia. In terms of reception, this book includes original research on how the TV crime drama is perceived by audiences within the particular national context of Australia where American, British and European crime dramas vie for attention in the TV schedule alongside the local product. Finally, the future of the TV crime series is canvassed in a discussion of the changing television landscape and the shift to other forms of TV consumption enabled by new digital technologies.
Underbelly (2008), Screentime's $10.4 million, thirteen-part dramatization of the so-called 'Gangland Wars' from 1995 to 2004, tracing the rise and fall of career criminal Carl Williams, showcases a Melbourne largely unseen on the screen. That so much of Underbelly is shot on
location means that its sets are the real spaces and places of Melbourne, overlaid with the scripted drama of what may have occurred there. This provides a new way of mapping the city, crime by crime, over time, a new way of understanding the Melbourne that the Kennett Government remade throughout
the 1990s as an 'entrepreneurial city'. It is our argument that it is this 'entrepreneurial' Melbourne that is being re-presented in Underbelly. Kennett's entrepreneurial city is the context in which Williams operates and the philosophy to which he ascribes during his takeover of Melbourne's
drug trade. Drawing on examples from the 2008 Underbelly series, newspaper reports, Silvester and Rule's 2008 repackaging of their underworld reports and a mixture of neo-liberal and entrepreneurial theory, this article explores Melbourne's construction as an entrepreneurial city and how this
has been represented, repackaged and experienced in a way Kennett himself could never have foreseen, through the Underbelly television series and the new markets this has opened.
This essay suggests that hip‐hop music may reasonably be thought of as a form of urban and regional research. The essay draws upon a recently published book by hip‐hop artist Jay‐Z, which provides biographical information alongside translations of the lyrical content of his works, to show that hip‐hop is full of insider ethnographic insights into urban life. This, it is argued, can be thought of as an answer to Daryl Martin's call for a more ‘poetic urbanism’, an urbanism that captures the material, sensory and emotional aspects of the city. The essay uses Jay‐Z's text to illustrate the type of insights and ideas that we might obtain from hip‐hop, giving some specific examples of these insights and concluding with some reflections upon this alternative insider account of city life — and how it might provide us with opportunities for expanding our repertoire.
The first series of the Channel Nine crime drama series, Underbelly, is the starting point for a reflection on the relationship between women, work, crime and feminism. Following a brief description of the episode ‘Wise Monkeys’ written by Felicity \Packard which features three of the ‘real’ women involved in Melbourne's gangland murders, the essay considers the significant role women have played in the depiction of crime on television as creators, writers and actors. In the end, it all comes down to power and control, who wins and who loses in what Gregg and Wilson (2010) have identified as the ‘cultural economy of infamy’ where the playing field is still far from level, either in the television industry or on the ‘mean streets’ of crime.
The current interest of policy makers in contemporary popular music should be seen as connected to the growing worldwide interest in development of the creative industries and creative cities. In contrast to the move away from the inner cities that characterised the post-WWII ‘Fordist’ era of capitalism, and its separation of the city into zones of urban production and suburban consumption, the period since the 1980s has seen a growing worldwide interest in the development of cities as sites for creativity and consumption. While this has been driven in part by urban regeneration projects, termed gentrification or ‘yuppification’ by their critics, it has also reflected a growing realisation that, in a creative economy, the wealth of a city or region resides not only in its physical and human capital, but also in the less tangible networks of knowledge capital and social capital that lead to the clustering of creativity and innovation in particular geographical locations.
A central element of the cultural ‘competitive advantage’ of cities and regions in a global creative or knowledge-based economy is the significance, diversity and vibrancy of activities in the night-time economy. The night-time economy is a term that is used to describe the diverse range of service-related and creative industries associated with leisure, entertainment, hospitality and tourism, which cater to the ‘liminal zone’ between work and home for the local population, and activities related to travel and tourism for those visiting a city. This paper explores such claims in relation to the popular music industry in Brisbane, and considers the implications of such developments for cultural policy more broadly.
The field of biogerontology has made great strides towards understanding the biological processes underlying aging, and the time is ripe to look towards applying this knowledge to the pursuit of aging interventions. Identification of safe, inexpensive, and non-invasive interventions that slow the aging process and promote healthy aging could have a significant impact on quality of life and health care expenditures for the aged. While there is a plethora of supplements and interventions on the market that purport to slow aging, the evidence to validate such claims is generally lacking. Here we describe the development of an aging interventions testing program funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to test candidate interventions in a model system. The development of this program highlights the challenges of long-term intervention studies and provides approaches to cope with the stringent requirements of a multi-site testing program.
During the 1950s and 1960s True Detective magazine developed a new way of narrating and understanding murder. It was more sensitive to context, gave more psychologically sophisticated accounts, and was more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers than others had been before. This turned out to be the start of a revolution, and, after a century of escalating accounts, we have now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers. The Rise of True Crime examines the various genres of true crime using the most popular and well-known examples. And despite its examination of some of the potentially negative effects of the genre, it is written for people who read and enjoy true crime, and wish to learn more about it.
With skyrocketing crime rates and the appearance of a frightening trend toward social chaos in the 1970s, books, documentaries, and fiction films in the true crime genre tried to make sense of the Charles Manson crimes and the Gary Gilmore execution events. And in the 1980s and 1990s, true crime taught pop culture consumers about forensics, profiling, and highly technical aspects of criminology. We have thus now become a nation of experts, with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood-spatter patterns and organized vs. disorganized serial killers.
Through the suggestion that certain kinds of killers are monstrous or outside the realm of human morality, and through the perpetuation of the stranger-danger idea, the true crime aesthetic has both responded to and fostered our culture's fears. True crime is also the site of a dramatic confrontation with the concept of evil, and one of the few places in American public discourse where moral terms are used without any irony, and notions and definitions of evil are presented without ambiguity. When seen within its historical context, true crime emerges as a vibrant and meaningful strand of popular culture, one that is unfortunately devalued as lurid and meaningless pulp.
TV is being reshaped, reimagined and reinvented in unpredictable ways. Broadcasting has become only one of a set of options for the distribution of TV content, alongside cable, DVDs, internet downloads, and online video streams. Simultaneously, audiences have embraced new modes of engagement with audio-visual products, with many seamlessly shifting from the role of consumer to that of producer. Broadcasting still reigns, but its place as the normative television form is under greater threat than ever. The articles in this issue of MIA suggest that, while it may no longer be the cultural norm, broadcasting may still have a role to play in whatever television becomes. The current phase of television suggests contested continuities rather than radical seismic shifts, as the new technologies open up possibilities beyond broadcasting. Of most interest is the emerging tension between what newly empowered users want television to be, and the institutional desire to dictate the direction and pace of change.
True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers-and tests out-work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori-work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.
This paper identifies the significance of 'the ordinary' in Richard Hoggart's 'The Uses of Literacy' and notes its distinction from philosophies of 'the everyday' that have been ascendant in recent cultural studies theory. It does this in order to oppose the rhetorical use of ordinariness promoted by conservative politicians such as Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Such etymological specificity is argued to be necessary so that cultural studies and other scholars can continue to promote the relationships of empathy in class-segregated societies that Howard's use of ordinariness strategically lacks.
Police seize Underbelly DVDs. The Age
- J Holroyd
Holroyd, J. 2008. Police seize Underbelly DVDs. The Age, 11 March.
Mission incredible. The Age
- M Idato
Idato, M. 2007. Mission incredible. The Age, 29 November.
Roberta Williams: My life
- R Williams
- Williams R.
Williams, R. 2009. Roberta Williams: My life. Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins.
We're watching you, Roberta Williams
- Houlihan L.
Houlihan, L. 2008. We're watching you, Roberta Williams. Sunday Herald-Sun, 1 June.
Buyers swamp Underbelly for 15 seconds of fame
- P Mcintyre
- McIntyre P.
McIntyre, P. 2008. Buyers swamp Underbelly for 15 seconds of fame. Sydney Morning Herald Business Day, 19 February.
Television after TV: Essays on a medium in transition Making a killing. The Weekend Australian Magazine Who killed Channel Nine? The death of Kerry Packer's mighty TV dream machine
- L Spigel
- J Olsson
Spigel, L., and J. Olsson, eds. 2004. Television after TV: Essays on a medium in transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, C. 2008. Making a killing. The Weekend Australian Magazine, 19 – 20 July. Stone, G. [2007] 2008. Who killed Channel Nine? The death of Kerry Packer's mighty TV dream machine. Sydney: Pan Macmillan.
So, what episode are you up to? The Age
- A Jackson
Jackson, A. 2008. So, what episode are you up to? The Age, 13 March.
Television studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era
- G Turner
- J Tay
Turner, G., and J. Tay, eds. 2009. Television studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era. Milton Park: Routledge.
The truth behind Underbelly – or why a bit of fiction goes a long way
- A Rule
- Rule A.
Rule, A. 2008. The truth behind Underbelly – or why a bit of fiction goes a long way. The Age, 10 February.
Strong local content. The Age
- J Elder
- T Reilly
Elder, J., and T. Reilly. 2008. Strong local content. The Age, 5 October.
Ramsay and Underbelly spark new obscenity regime. Daily Telegraph, 4 February. ———. 2009b. Underbelly's bare breasts and sex scenes called soft porn
- E Mcwhirter
McWhirter, E. 2009a. Ramsay and Underbelly spark new obscenity regime. Daily Telegraph, 4 February. ———. 2009b. Underbelly's bare breasts and sex scenes called soft porn. Daily Telegraph, 19 February.
The public's right to know versus a person's right to a fair trial. The Age, 13 February. Battersby, L. 2008a. Gangster's ex to lecture on public safety. The Age
- Rev Bartlett
Rev. ed. Sydney: Bantam Books. Bartlett, P. 2008. The public's right to know versus a person's right to a fair trial. The Age, 13 February. Battersby, L. 2008a. Gangster's ex to lecture on public safety. The Age, 4 July. ———. 2008b. Convicted killer rallies support on Facebook. The Age, Tech, 15 May.
Crime series pays for lawyers, pirates. The Age Business Day
- P Weekes
Weekes, P. 2008. Crime series pays for lawyers, pirates. The Age Business Day, 16 March.
Nine reels from Underbelly ban. The Daily Telegraph
- M Casey
Casey, M. 2008. Nine reels from Underbelly ban. The Daily Telegraph, 13 February.
The times will suit them: Postmodern conservatism in Australia
- M Sharpe
- G Boucher
Sharpe, M., and G. Boucher. 2008. The times will suit them: Postmodern conservatism in Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Nine cancels Underbelly cinema show. The Age, 9 February. ———. 2008b. Network's vaulting ambition skewered. The Age, 13 February. ———. 2008c. Underbelly goes under the counter in Victoria. The Age
- D Ziffer
Ziffer, D. 2008a. Nine cancels Underbelly cinema show. The Age, 9 February. ———. 2008b. Network's vaulting ambition skewered. The Age, 13 February. ———. 2008c. Underbelly goes under the counter in Victoria. The Age, 22 February.
Tough: 101 Australian gangsters: A crime companion Leadbelly: Inside Australia's underworld war Gotcha: How Australia's baddest crooks copped their right whack Rats: Crooks who got away with it: Tales of true crime and mystery from the Underbelly archives
- J Silvester
- A Rule
Silvester, J., and A. Rule. 2002. Tough: 101 Australian gangsters: A crime companion. Camberwell, Vic.: Floradale Press and Sly Ink. ———. 2004. Leadbelly: Inside Australia's underworld war. Camberwell, Vic.: Floradale Press and Sly Ink. ———. 2005. Gotcha: How Australia's baddest crooks copped their right whack. Camberwell, Vic.: Floradale Press and Sly Ink. ———. 2006. Rats: Crooks who got away with it: Tales of true crime and mystery from the Underbelly archives. Camberwell, Vic.: Floradale Press and Sly Ink.
Fury on gangland tour. Herald-Sun
- I Royall
Royall, I. 2008. Fury on gangland tour. Herald-Sun, 16 May.
Pirates promise Underbelly downloads
- N Miller
- Miller N.
Miller, N. 2008. Pirates promise Underbelly downloads. The Age, 12 February.
Directed by Andrew Dominik
- Chopper
Christian lobby scratches Underbelly
- P Akerman
- J Roberts
- Akerman P.
The rise and rise of Kerry Packer - Uncut , Sydney : Bantam Books
- P Barry
- Barry P.
The public's right to know versus a person's right to a fair trial
- P Bartlett
- Bartlett P.
Glorifying gangsters a crime, say critics
- M Benns
- Benns M.
Ordinary people's politics: Australians talk about life, politics and the future of their country
- J Brett
- A Moran
- Brett J.
Underbelly leaves Roberta Williams in tears
- AAP
Eels star Hayne shot at in Kings Cross 3 March
- Abc Online
Relaxed and comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia
- J Brett
- Brett J.
Supreme Court to decide if gangland drama gets chop
- S Butcher
- Butcher S.
Ban threatened on gangland TV series
- S Butcher
- Butcher S.
Fury on gangland tour
- Royall I.
Leadbelly: Inside Australia's underworld war
- A Rule
- Rule A.
Gotcha: How Australia's baddest crooks copped their right whack
- A Rule
- Rule A.
Network's vaulting ambition skewered
- D Ziffer
- Ziffer D.
Grave doubts over ‘Underbelly’: Court
- AAP
Gangster's ex to lecture on public safety
- L Battersby
- Battersby L.
Convicted killer rallies support on Facebook
- Battersby L.
Carl Williams ‘popular’ on Facebook
- K Bradford
- Bradford K.
Green light likely for Nine's Underbelly
- S Bradley
- Bradley S.