Interview with Ruth Collerson and Joanne Kerr
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| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Interview with Ruth Collerson and Joanne Kerr |
| Interviewer: | Susan P. Batho |
| Interviewee: | Joanne Kerr and Ruth Collerson |
| Date(s): | July 20, 2005 |
| Medium: | online as PDF |
| Fandom(s): | Star Trek |
| External Links: | effect of commercialisation and direct intervention by the owners of intellectual copyright : a case study : the Australian Star Trek fan community by Susan Batho (2009) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Ruth Collerson and Joanne Kerr were interviewed by Susan P. Batho in Newtown, NSW.
The interview was included in an academic paper by Susan P. Batho which addresses the effect of the Viacom Crackdown, TPTB, and Australian fandom.
Part of a Series
- Interview with Susan Batho
- Interview with Geoff Allshorn
- Interview with Julie Gormly
- Interview with Ruth Collerson and Joanne Kerr
- Interview with Shayne C. McCormack
- Interview with Ian McLean
- Interview with Tricia McKinlay
- Interview with Rose Mitchell
- Interview with Regina
- Interview with Jim Rondeau
- Interview with Derek and Sharon Screen
- Interview with Rachel Shave
- Interview with Nikki White
- Interview with Donna Hanson
- Interview with Bob Miller
- Interview with William Hupe
- Interview with Dr. Ann Hupe
- Interview with Fern Clarke and Jodi Williams
Excerpts
Joanne: My introduction to Fandom, I found Star Trek on TV in 1976 or early 77 and started buying the books immediately. It was while I was reading one of the books at school, when another girl came up to me and said are you a Star Trek fan, I said yes we started chatting, she invited me over to her house one weekend to show me her collection of Star Trek, and she introduced me to ASTREX. I went to my first meeting by myself, which was a brave thing for me because I was shy back then, and I never looked back. Because suddenly I found I wasn’t the only strange person. There were all these strange people who loved the same thing and it went from there.
Ruth: Yes,[fandom has changed over the years]. We used to be very active going to conventions, getting involved with things, helping with all sorts of things, not to mention all the work parties we had getting ready for the conventions. I loved that side of things, the social side of it. It was great. The way it’s done today, I went to one celebrity convention (you’ll remember, Joanne, you were doing a book stand there) and that put me off going to any more conventions, even though they’re thought to be more professional today. But I’m old fashioned, I like it the do it yourself source where we did it all ourselves: it was sharing around and it wasn’t copyrighted for profit. You didn’t join a long line and pay a fortune for a photo and then pay a fortune for an autograph but only the first 200 hundred would get it, and things like that, and that’s what puts me off. I’m happy to be a fan but not an active one.
Ruth: You see, my main memory of the early 90’s was going to the George and Maria meetings where they used to show the latest videos they would have flown in from America. But they couldn’t anymore because they had spies. When they first started having strange people coming to the meetings and then going and dobbing them in and that’s what I remember. And from there we couldn’t view anything we couldn’t have anything. We couldn’t do anything that Paramount didn’t say we could do. And that stifles creativity, and that’s when I opted out of Star Trek fandom then. I was still involved with other fandoms, but then they never really had clubs. They were just groups of friends who got together and chatted about things.
Joanne: Well, [ The Viacom Crackdown ] cut it dead basically because you couldn’t go to normal conventions any more. You couldn’t go to normal club meetings. Everything was basically cut off at the knees. Having spent about well at least 10 or 15 years in a fairly free fannish environment, I wasn’t going to be homogenized. And I’d spent that long in it. It was time to move on. So it came at the right time. I probably would have been winding down anyway but I would of kept the social side (sic) but even that got just screwed, because every one we liked was dropping out as well. It was before e-mail and the internet and therefore you couldn’t keep in contact with people through that medium so we lost contact with a lot of people. Because if you didn’t see people from meetings or that it broke the contact, it broke the social ties we had that we had taken for granted because we weren’t the only ones dropping out of meeting and events and everything and I lost contact with a lot of people.
Ruth: Well yes, but [fans now are] of a generation that has everything spoon-fed to them. So they sit there and take whatever Paramount spoon-feeds them and they accept that because it’s all they know. They don’t know the other side of things. Which is a pity because I think they’re missing out on a lot, particularly the creative side. Because the old style fandom was extremely creative. There was some wonderful artwork and a lot of people went on to make their mark on the art world commercially. The same with the writing people who wrote fannish stories have gone on to be professional writers, many of them people like Jacqueline Lithchenburg and Jean Lorrah. People like that who have gone on to be professional writers published. Well dozens of the Star Trek writers, they started out in fandom; even Marion Zimmer-Bradley started out in fandom. I’ve got a copy of one of her early Star Trek stories, from one of the really old zines. You now look at the number of books she went on to turn out.