Susann Liebich and Victoria Kuttainen
Currents of international travel: Australian magazines and travel writing about the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s
The period between the world wars was both 'the golden age' of magazine publishing and of sea travel, giving shape to the popular imagination of a globally connected world. This talk situates two Australian quality magazines of the 1920s and 1930s in the context of international currents of modernity, more…
Louise Edensor
The Native Companion: E. J Brady's 'home-grown' literature and modernist aesthetics
The Native Companion was an early twentieth century little magazine of 'Australian Life, Literature and Art' that would 'give a voice to Australian genius'. It ran for only two volumes, featuring 12 issues from January to December 1907, and is largely remembered as the magazine in which Katherine Mansfield published her first short stories. more…
The city, race and labour in Australian design magazines of the 1930s
The photographs that fill the pages of Sydney-based illustrated design magazines The Home and Glass and Decoration tell two apparently conflicting stories of race and labour in 1930s Sydney. As key sites for the development and popularization of Australian modernism, these magazines featured the work of Australia's leading artists, designers, more…
Panel 4, Q&A
Native Companion
First post and replies | Last post by Louise Edensor, 9 months ago
I enjoyed your talk, Louise. You cite Kimber's observation that Mansfield's vignettes are informed by Wilde, which supports your larger point that the literature Brady promoted was at once fervidly nationalistic and in dialogue with European and American models. But I wonder if you would say the vignette form changes in the hands of the three female writers you mention: does it get inflected differently in this Australian context? Is there something distinctive in the way these three writers use the vignette?
By Carey Sny...
Carey hello. Thanks for your question. Apologies for my late response! This is a very interesting question and I have to confess that my research so far doesn't allow me to answer it! I have only had the opportunity so far to examine a small number of the stories and I think to answer your question I need to look at the whole run under Brady's editorial eye. The magazine format changed significantly when he took over and as Carol Mills highlights it went from being a magazine of the 19th century to one of the 20th century under Brady's guidance. It might have been that, as a result of his guid...
By Louise Ed...
Native Companion's idea of a national literature
Louise: thank you for this fascinating presentation. I'm interested in this idea of a "national literature" nurtured by protectionist policies, that would simultaneously be in dialogue with international modernism - it seems like an impossible contradiction: how would this literature avoid falling into a narrow provincialism? I'm guessing part of the answer must lie in the unique qualities of the "Australian genius". Does Brady manage to define this? What sets Australian literature apart, in Brady's view?
Tim, hello. My apologies - only just saw this post! Your question is really interesting thank you. Brady is noticeably vague on the issue - as is his literary policy in the magazine. This in itself is both interesting and problematic. He champions 'Australian writers' but he doesn't define what he means by that - does he mean people born in Australia? People who were born outside but have adopted Australia as their home? What about those who were born in Australia but who left and write from overseas? He seems concerned with nationality but as for the content he is oblique. The research that I...
Distance & Time
First post and replies | Last post by Susann Liebich, 10 months ago
Thank you for the wonderful talk, with stunning images, Susann & Victoria! I found myself thinking about the differences in the way Australian ads and features have to frame the voyage to Europe, compared to the ways American periodicals talk about it, when it's temporally such a different experience... (correct me if I'm wrong, but it was still taking about 4 weeks to complete the journey from Australia by the early '30s, right? Compared to the 6ish days on the US-UK route...). I'm curious to hear more about anything in these magazines about how passengers should pass their time on board...
By Nissa Can...
Hi Nissa. Thank you for your great comment and question; I am glad you enjoyed our talk. (and sorry for this slow response.) You are right: it still took at least 3 weeks, often longer, to travel by steamer from Australia to Europe, regardless of whether one travelled via the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and Atlantic, or eastwards across the Indian Ocean and trough the Suez Canal, or even around the Cape of Good Hope (with a stopover in South Africa, for instance). Interestingly, as you say, much of the travel-related content as well as the ads really do focus on the destinations, and on s...
By Susann Li...
@sliebich Thanks for the comprehensive reply, Susann! The American and European advertising I'm familiar with presents very much the same images of shipboard time/space. I look forward to learning more about your work on the transitional & transformative ocean experience at some point, as I'm writing about this, too (specifically focused on interwar American expats)!
@nissaren. Thank you Nissa. It's interesting that the travel ads are so similar in American periodicals, when, as you noted, the journeys were quite different in terms of time spent at sea, and the actual experience of travel differed significantly depending on whether one 'just' crossed the Atlantic, or whether one travelled between the hemispheres and crossed the tropics. It suggests a global, or at least anglo-phone or Western (though I think global), imagination of steamship travel and its associated values, somewhat removed from the realities of travel. Your project sounds fascinating a...
Ichiro Kagiyama and Harold Cazneaux
First post and replies | Last post by Josie Johnson, 10 months ago
Dear Melissa, Thank you so much for a wonderful and thought-provoking talk. I was especially excited to learn about Ichiro Kagiyama and Harold Cazneaux--both of them are new to me, and produced some really striking photographs for the magazines in your talk. Would you have any additional reading to suggest on either one? A quick internet search of Cazneaux shows that he is best known for his work as pictorialist photographer in the 1910s. I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between pictorialism and modernist photography, and he seems like an excellent example of a photographe...
Hi Josie, Thank you for your questions and kind words. I can suggest quite a bit of additional reading to keep you busy! Cazneaux is perhaps Australia's most well known Pictorialist photographer, and there has been quite a bit published about his work. For example: Ennis, Helen. Cazneaux: The Quiet Observer. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1994. Bullock, Natasha, ed. Harold Cazneaux: Artist in Photography. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008. Dupain, Max. Cazneaux: Photographs by Harold Cazneaux 1878-1953 Selected and with an Appreciation by Max Dupain. Canberra: Na...
By Melissa M...
Dear Melissa, Thank you so much for all this additional information and all the reading suggestions. I'm excited to dig in! And I completely agree--"transition" was the wrong word to use, not only because it elides the temporal overlaps you mentioned, but also because it hints at a sense of progression from "bad" pictorialism to "good" modernisim that photo history is still struggling to reassess. Thanks again, Josie
Travel Writing in Home and Man
First post and replies | Last post by Carey Snyder, 10 months ago
Thank you, Victoria and Susann, for an engaging and informative talk. I was struck by the asymmetry between the gendered kinds of pleasure and wish-fulfillment that these two publications offered. On the one hand, for women writers like Preston, travel seems to offer self-development and worldly knowledge, as she views Asia and the Pacific as a "museum of colonial curiosities"; on the other hand, former service men and other male readers are offered these regions as a "zone of wish fulfillment", one that presumably entailed romantic/sexual conquests, as suggested by the images of scantily cla...
The Home, Decoration and Glass, and education
First post and replies | Last post by Victoria Kuttainen, 10 months ago
Hi Melissa. I loved your presentation: thank you so much for a rich and thought-provoking talk. I have a couple of questions about these magazines' pedagogical aims. You argued that The Home aimed to raise the tastes of its readers using the best production values, and that Decoration and Glass aimed to educate its readers about architecture (among other things). I wonder if you could say a little more about how each magazine sought to improve or educate its readers. Was this intention implicit or explicit in these magazines? In some of the magazines I've looked at, there are articles wh...
By Emma West
I just wanted to echo what Emma said about the richness of your talk, Melissa. Emma's question about the education of taste also resonated for me (I was thinking of a potential comparison with the American 'House Beautiful' which as you'll know likewise ranges beyond the house/home to talk about towns, architecture, modernity, national visual identity). Also I think your emphasis on "the work through which the magazines were made" is very valuable. I agree we could do more to look at who contributed to magazines. Would you include in this category all those uncredited contributors - designe...
Hi Emma and Faye. Thanks for your kind words. I'll respond to you both in one post if that's ok. Yes, the magazines did explicitly articulate their aims to improve readers in different ways. The editor of Decoration and Glass, Walter Glover, described in the first issue how the magazine's plan was about 'educating people to present-day influences in home-building and particularly the progress made in this field by Australians.' (1 May 1935, p. 5) I don't know that I would use the words pedagogical mission to describe their approach, in that it wasn't formalised or systematised. It was more a...
Thanks for a really thought-provoking presentation, Melissa. I love the way in which your discussion of race and labour "behind the scenes" in these magazines brings out a different and complimentary dimension to the work Susann and I have been doing on The Home and its relationship with portraying the Asia-Pacific. Very rich work.
By Victoria ...
reading about travel
Victoria/Susann - fabulous talk: I loved it. I am struck by so many of your points: one that jumped out was that "Reading about travel was presented as a form of geo-political engagement." That is an insight that many of us could use I think. I was asked a question re my own talk about single women travellers, and was expecting to find an answer in yours. The example of Margaret Preston's "There and Back in Three Months" is perfect. That is a very ambitious trip for a woman in 1926, isn't it? Did I understand right that she travelled by herself? I love that the piece picks up on 'Gentlemen P...
Thanks for your insightful comments, Faye. Margaret Preston's contributions to The Home are remarkable, and well worth looking at now that The Home has been digitised by Trove and is searchable on the catalogue of The National Library of Australia: Preston is THE impresario of Australian modernist art, and having her semi-regular essays and other contributions in the magazine certainly lent the magazine status, and gestured toward her as a modern Australian taste-maker for readers of such middlebrow magazines who were well-to-do, in-the-know, or aspired to be. Preston was indeed well-...
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