Table of Contents

Contributors
List of figures
Australian vernacular modernities: people, sites and practices
Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly

Section 1: erotic, exotic and primitive
1. Erotic modernities
Jill Julius Matthews
2. Art dance, burlesque and body culture: negotiating interwar modernities
Amanda Card
3. Letters from Tangiers: the creative partnership between Elsie and Hilda Rix in Morocco
Jeanette Hoorn
4. Modernity denied: the case of Harold Blair’s 1956 EP, Australian Aboriginal Songs
Bill Casey
5. Jedda, Négritude and the modernist impulse in Australian film
Barbara Creed

Section 2: impresarios, artists and celebrities
6. Vulgar art: issues of genre and modernity in the reception of the flower paintings of Ellis Rowan
Kerry Heckenberg
7. ‘Written to tickle the ears of the groundings in garden cities’: the aesthetic of modernity – Vance and Nettie Palmer and the New Age
Deborah Jordan
8. Ambitious angel: Jean Batten and the performance of gender in a man’s country
Anne Collett
9. Making it accessible: Mary Alice Evatt and Australian modernist art
Melissa Boyde
10. Pioneering cultural exchange: two international exhibitions 1931–1933, initiated by Mary Cecil Allen and Alleyne ‘Clarice’ Zander
Eileen Chanin
11. Bryan Robertson, abstract expressionism and late Modernism in ‘Recent Australian Painting’ (1961)
Simon Pierse

Section 3: cosmopolitanism and international performer networks
12. The Davenport brothers down under: theatre, belief and modernity in 1870s Australia
Melissa Bellanta
13. London, New York and Hollywood: three ‘Australians’ on the world stage
Angela Woollacott
14. Cosmopolitans at home: Judith Anderson and the American aspirations of J.C. Williamson Stock Company members, 1897–1918
Desley Deacon
15. Chasing modernity: an expatriate star’s return ‘home’
Fiona Gregory

Section 4: sites of leisure, pleasure and consumption
16. Exhibiting ourselves: myth-making and modernity at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition
Ailsa McPherson
17. The Turkish bath in Australia: an exotic eastern delight or a home-grown utility
Susan Aykut
18. The circus and the amusement park: a site of contestation near Princes Bridge, Melbourne
Gillian Arrighi
19. Pools and the modernising of the landscape
Hannah Lewi

Index

Promotional Information

Impact of the Modern brings together examples of interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars.

About the Author

Robert Dixon is professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney. He is a general editor in Sydney University Press' Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.
Veronica Kelly is professor emerita in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

Reviews

' ... this is a volume which any Australianist scholar interested in cultural history, and its popular manifestations, can dip into. Much new knowledge is demonstrated here as well as new discoveries about old traditions and the place of Australia within the climate of international modernist debate in the period 1870 to
1960.'
*Australasian Drama Studies*