Colonial feminism and Australian literary culture in Ethel and Lilian Turner's the Parthenon (1889–92)

The Parthenon is a unique example of a colonial Australian magazine published for girl readers by two aspirant writers, Ethel and Lilian Turner. In addition to its domestic content, typical of women's magazines, it also sought to contribute to nascent Australian literary culture. This article locates the Parthenon within the history of colonial women's publishing and literary culture, and situates its content within the context of the Woman Movement of the period. It reads the Parthenon's telling picture of young women's perceptions of colonial literary culture and of the need to balance literary aspirations with domestic responsibilities through the lens of the “expediency feminism” advocated by the Dawn, a women's magazine published by Louisa Lawson from 1888. The article argues that the Parthenon's superficially conservative opinion of women's supreme calling being in the home rather than the newspaper office or university library was in alignment with the arguments made by the Woman Movement to advocate for women's greater participation in the public sphere. The comparison of these contemporaneous monthly publications written and produced by women enables an understanding of the ways in which late nineteenth-century attempts to encourage women's careers and independence were grounded in domesticity.

Colonial museology and the Buddhist chronicles of Sri Lanka: agency and negotiation in the development of the palm-leaf manuscript collection at the Colombo Museum

The roles of colonial museums in South Asia have been understood in terms of the dissemination of museology within the British Empire. This has often underplayed the participation of local intellectuals in the formation of museum collections, and thus has not recognized their agency in the creation of knowledge and of longstanding cultural assets. This article addresses this in part through an historical case study of the development of the palm-leaf manuscript collection at the Colombo Museum in nineteenth century Ceylon. The article focuses on the relationships between Government aims, local intellectuals and the Buddhist clergy. I argue that colonial museology and collecting activity in Ceylon ought to be understood as a negotiated process and a number of reasons for this are discussed. This article contributes to an area of museological research that is exploring the roles of indigenous actors in colonial collecting and museum practice in South Asia and broader geographical contexts.

Translating the gothic tradition: St Patrick's Cathedral Melbourne

During the 1850s, England and France were the leading centres of debate over the Gothic Revival. As Barry Bergdoll argues, the issues that loomed large were at once architectural and political: stylistic eclecticism versus national purity, invention versus tradition, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, as well as the challenge of new building programmes and new materials to the historicist logic of the Gothic Revival position. William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-99), the architect of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (1858-97) found himself in the midst of this debate. ln.,1858, Wardell's client, James Alipius Goold, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Melbourne, found that local circumstances significantly influenced his aspirations for a new Catholic cathedral for Melbourne. The choices Wardell made eventually gave shape to the Gothic Revival in Australia.The New World perhaps echoing Didron, demanded of the past all it could offer the present and especially the future: a Gothic cathedral was deemed a fitting carrier of the principles, morals, beliefs and spirit of a Christian civilisation. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Britain and Europe, Wardell in Australia was to see his Gothic Cathedrals of St Patrick's and St Mary's substantially realised in his lifetime. This paper presents a building history of Wardell's St Patrick's, Melbourne, and critically examines the translations which are embedded in the design and fabric of this nineteenth-century Gothic revival cathedral.

The maintenance of Central Thai cultural identity through hybrid music genres

Thailand has experienced rapid industrialisation, modernisation and cultural changesince the mid-nineteenth century. Many Western cultural forms have been adopted intoThai life, including Western popular music. An external view of these processes andtheir results might suggest that Thailand has become quite ‘Western’. However, closeranalysis reveals that elements of foreign cultures have long been adopted and adaptedinto Thai culture, and used as social capital to build an image of modernity andcosmopolitan sophistication.One of the adaptations made has been the fusion of Western genres with Thaiones, to form new hybrid styles of music. One hybrid genre that has developed largelyover the past half century is Dontri Thai Prayuk (‘modernised Thai music’), whichfuses aspects of Western pop with elements of Central Thai classical music. As thispaper demonstrates, clear patterns emerge in the way Thai musicians have maintainedmarkers of Thai identity and fused them with Western elements that signifymodernisation.Motivations behind this deliberate fusion of Thai and Western elements areexplained by the theories of ‘musical accommodation’ and ‘acts of identity’ – thatmusicians will converge with or diverge from other music-cultures in order to gainapproval or assert a separate identity, in ways that deliberately change the underlyingrules of the source musics to form a new identity. Analysis of Dontri Thai Prayukfusion music shows that it has changed the underlying rules of Thai classical andWestern popular music to display a music-cultural identity that is Thai, yet modern.

When fathers murder sons: male melancholy in Dostoyevsky, Mailer and Murakami

 This thesis identifies what is unique about male melancholia as represented in literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that male melancholia is written into western civilisation and sustained as a necessity for social order and that it involves male violence towards its male offspring by the father.

Popular imperialism, Scottish identity, and William Wallace in an Australian colonial city

The narrative of William Wallace holds a prominent position in the current conception of England as a negative referent for Scotland’s national identity—its binary “Other”, against which Wallace valiantly fought. This article considers a contrasting understanding of Scottish national identity from the late-nineteenth century, and explores the events surrounding the unveiling of a statue of William Wallace in Australia during the year of 1889. It illuminates how settlers interpreted this national hero in such a way that demonstrated loyalty to the Union and Empire, and accommodated a convergence of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants in a British colonial city. The article highlights how statues, the ceremonies surrounding them, and their public reception help us to investigate the symbolic, ritualistic, and performative dimensions of identity formulation. It considers how public monuments, providing a sense of authority to particular groups, can marginalise others by acting to settle cultural competition, and will reflect on competing interpretations of the statue at its unveiling.

Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi christmas

A trend in studies about National Socialism and religion in recent years argues for a deliberate distinction between the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the antisemitic völkisch movement of nineteenth-century Germany. This article challenges that contention. Several researchers have published comprehensive studies on the heterogeneous nature of Christian responses to the Nazis, but a comparable approach looking at how the Nazis viewed religion has not yet been undertaken. A study of the latter type is certainly necessary, given that one of the consistent features of the völkisch movement was its diversity. As Roger Griffin has argued, a “striking feature of the sub-culture . . . was just how prolific and variegated it was . . . [T]he only denominator common to all was the myth of national rebirth.” In short, the völkisch movement contained a colorful, varied, and often bewildering range of religious beliefs.

The silent screen (1895-1928)

In chapter 1, Victoria Duckett introduces the silent screen years (1895–1927) by investigating the American poet Vachel Lindsay’s claim in 1915 that European stage acting was unsuited to film. This critique held sway for decades, during which commentators celebrated American, as opposed to European, contributions to the new craft of motion picture acting. European acting became associated with mannered staginess in contrast to a more subtle American style. Building on recent scholarship that questions this dichotomy, Duckett skillfully analyzes the screen performances of two women actors: the French Sarah Bernhardt, arguably the most famous late nineteenth-century actor, who electrified theater audiences but made relatively few film appearances, and the American Lillian Gish, who began her career as a child in stage melodramas but whose fame derived from her appearances in films. Duckett’s nuanced reading of Bernhardt’s performance in the film Camille (Film D’Art, 1911) and Lillian Gish’s in Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) reveals that despite their differences, they both used their bodies expressively to convey meanings and emotions.

Feminine freakishness: Carnivalesque bodies in Angela Carter’s nights at the circus

Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologisingbusiness” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the CircusCarter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The wingedaerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom shejourneys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin cites as apowerful challenge to the spatial, temporal, and linguistic fixities of themedieval world. The transformative and regenerative potential ofRabelais’ grotesque is evident in Nights' temporal setting, whichforegrounds the possibilities of birth through death. Set at the “fagend” of the nineteenth century (19), the characters are witness tohistory on the cusp as “[t]he old dying world gives birth to the newone” (Bakhtin, 435). Here Carter has shifted the point of historicalregeneration from Rabelais’ subversion of the Neo-Platonic medievalcosmology to, rather hopefully, symbolize the demise or at least thederailment of the Age of Reason, industrial progress, Imperialism, andtheir respective ideologies of misogyny. For Fevvers and Walser theexcess of the carnivalesque prompts a crisis of subjectivity thatsignals both the redundancy of restrictive ideologies of demarcationand hierarchy, but also the playful possibilities of corporeal fluidity andreferential relativism.

Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film

The most famous stage actress of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed a surprising renaissance when the 1912 multi-reel film Queen Elizabeth brought her international acclaim. The triumph capped her already lengthy involvement with cinema while enabling the indefatigable actress to reinvent herself in an era of technological and generational change. Placing Bernhardt at the center of the industry's first two decades, Victoria Duckett challenges the perception of her as an anachronism unable to appreciate film's qualities. Instead, cinema's substitution of translated title cards for her melodic French deciphered Bernhardt for Anglo-American audiences. It also allowed the aging actress to appear in the kinds of longer dramas she could no longer physically sustain onstage. As Duckett shows, Bernhardt contributed far more than star quality. Her theatrical practice on film influenced how the young medium changed the visual and performing arts. Her promoting of experimentation, meanwhile, shaped the ways audiences looked at and understood early cinema.

Establishing insurance markets in settler economies. a comparison of Australian and South Africa insurance markets, 1820-1910

How did insurance markets in the settler economies of Australia and South Africa develop? This paper investigates the establishment of the local insurance industries in two settler economies in the wake of the absence of comparative studies in the emergence of insurance markets in the periphery. The paper compares conditions in these settler economies and notes the innovative role of local entrepreneurs. British insurance companies extended operations into the British colonies, but local interests emerged to challenge their dominance. Innovations in organisational form, product offerings and distribution channels afforded local entrepreneurs a competitive advantage in the life market. Collusion in the fire market restricted innovative practices and retained foreign control. This article explains the agency of local entrepreneurs in the emergence of insurance markets in two settler societies at the end of the nineteenth century. This historical development path has notable implications for the current development of insurance markets in Africa.

Transforming narratives of colonial danger: imagining the environments of New Zealand and Australia in children's literature, 1862–1899

Nineteenth-century British children’s literature set in Australia and New Zealand fixates on the dangers of colonial environments. This chapter examines four British novels of the period, observing the ways in which they manifest elements of ecological imperialism and environmental racism in order to depict successful settlement. It compares these novels with fantasy fictions by Australian and New Zealand children’s authors that constitute more complicated attempts both to understand and co-exist with the natural environment. The chapter proposes that by the 1890s earlier British anxieties had dissipated in popular Australian and New Zealand fiction, in which child protagonists were newly charged with the ability to interpret and control nature.

Marketing the message: the making of the Market for Life Insurance in Australia, 1850–1940

During the late nineteenth century, sales of life insurance products in Australia increased at a rapid rate. An investigation of the way in which life insurance products were targeted to the consumers provides insights not only into the marketing approaches, but also the changing nature of the mutual organization. This article uses a “stages” approach to analyze the evolution of the marketing message. The experience of Australian mutual insurers suggests that marketing strategies, as with other types of organizational skills, evolve in response to both the prevailing business environment and the ability of the firm to acquire and implement new knowledge and ways of conducting business.

Business strateBusiness strategies under conditions of uncertainty: The rise of mutual life insurers in colonial Australiagies under conditions of uncertainty

The early development of Australian life insurance was marked by the failure of stock companies to successfully establish a market presence. Mutual insurers emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in response to this gap in supply. The underlying rationale behind their establishment differed but the business model adopted proved remarkably successful. Mutual life insurers dominated the market for life insurance for nearly a century. This chapter investigates mutualism as a business strategy that addressed particular problems associated with doing business in a small and underdeveloped economy. Business and social networks were important facilitators of new business. In addition, most mutual life insurers had a social/philanthropic charter and they were able to utilize this to build business. An outcome of this mix was the emergence of a particular type of entrepreneurship that fostered innovative product development and cemented the role of mutual insurers as market leaders.. The Variety, Choice, Governance, and Regulation of Organizational Forms 2.

Her Majesty moves: Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Elizabeth and the development of motion pictures

Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest theatrical star of the late nineteenth century, enabled and even promoted the association of early film with the British monarchy. She did this literally, by playing the role of Queen Elizabeth in Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth, Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, 1912). Bernhardt also promoted the association of the cinema with monarchy symbolically, making the medium a new empathetic vehicle for the development of celebrity mystique and global power.