Melissa Bellanta

A man of civic sentiment: The case of William Guthrie Spence

Abstract Gender historians of late nineteenth-century Australia have conventionally said a great deal about masculinity in the bush and inner-city bohemia. In both sites, we hear, a rugged ‘mateship ethos’ predominated, often identifying itself as working-class. But not all historians have restricted themselves to this mateship ethos: witness recent work by Marilyn Lake and Martin Crotty, both of which explore the ideal of manliness to be found in progressive institutions at the end of the century, or in middle-class suburbs and schools. In this paper, I contribute to this rising interest in Australian manliness, but shift the focus to the provincial town – particularly the Victorian goldfield towns. Using the labour leader William Guthrie Spence as a case-study, I show that provincial men from a middling social strata nurtured a distinctive gender ethos, perhaps best described as the manliness of civic sentiment. Highly devoted to civic service, sympathetic to the labour struggle, committed to family values and a sentimental style of address, this form of manliness played an important role in turn-of-the-twentieth century Australian politics and culture. It should thus figure more prominently in understandings of Australian manhood in this period.

Leery Sue goes to the show: Popular performance, sexuality and the disorderly girl

On a Saturday night in 1887, 13-year-old Mary Ann M., a resident of the inner-industrial Sydney district of Waterloo, paid a visit to Paddy’s Market. After winding past the sideshows and colourful stalls, the sound of bands and the calls of vendors, she ended up talking with a group of ‘larrikin’ youths in the streets outside. ‘Larrikin’ was a colloquialism used throughout colonial Australasia in this period, most often in Sydney and Melbourne. It described participants in an urban youth subculture based around loose-knit street gangs known as ‘larrikin pushes’ or ‘mobs’. Composed of young people of both sexes aged between their early teens and early 20s, the larrikin subculture was characterized by a hectic enjoyment of popular entertainments, street-smart dress, burlesque humour, a love of pugilism and clashes with police. It was also characterized by sexual activity, including group acts of male sexual violence towards women.1

His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture

Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.

Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s

Abstract Songs in which male protagonists expressed tender sentiments about mothers or sweethearts were everywhere in early twentieth-century Australia. They could be heard in vaudeville shows, home sing-songs, neighbourhood parties and amateur concerts—even those held for or by servicemen during the First World War. In this article I explore the implications of this for Australian masculinities between 1900 and the 1930s, paying particular attention to ‘rough’ and/or working-class masculinities in the First World War era. Drawing on oral histories and a case-study of the vaudevillian, Harry Clay, I challenge the idea that Australians had ‘lost their taste for the sentimental’ in the early 1900s. While men were coming under increasing pressure to be stoic or tough I argue that this made sentimental songs more important rather than less, as a forum in which men could voice feelings considered unacceptable at other times in their lives.

Rough Maria and clever Simone: some introductory remarks on the girl in Australian history

Abstract This article is intended as an introduction to a special issue of this journal entitled ‘The Girl in Australian History’. It suggests that there is a need for more historical work which focuses specifically on girls and girlhood in an Australian context and offers a number of reasons for this: (1) because relatively little of this work has been produced thus far; (2) because such work will enrich and challenge current perspectives on Australian history; and (3) because the interdisciplinary field of girl studies will benefit from more contributions by historians. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to encourage further conversations between Australian historians and other scholars interested in girlhood today.

Business Fashion: Masculinity, Class and Dress in 1870s Australia

This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

Rethinking the 1890s

In 1895 a theatrical company associated with London’s Gaiety Theatre brought musical comedy to Australia. Hailed as the latest thing in popular entertainment, musical comedy had a reputation for its emphasis on flirtation, fashion and the glamour of its female stars. Australian audiences, drawn by the publicity, gathered eagerly for the company’s first production, A Gaiety Girl. Demand was so clamorous in Sydney that an auction was held for opening-night tickets, fetching the breathtaking sum of 24 shillings for the best seats. The theatre critic for the Bulletin, the Sydney-based weekly, was rapturous in his reviews. He urged all men of discernment to buy a ticket, regardless of the gloomy economic times. The romping frivolity of theatricals such as A Gaiety Girl was one reason the 1890s were later described as ‘gay’ or ‘naughty’ in Britain, parts of Europe and the United States. Outside intellectual circles, the decade was mythologised as an era of breezy hedonism: big nights out on London’s West End, the rampant growth of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, and rouge-tinted evenings at Montmartre dance halls. In Australia, terms such as ‘Gay Nineties’ or ‘Naughty Nineties’ – like their French equivalent, Belle Epoque – never came into currency. The decade certainly attracted an extraordinary degree of myth making, some of which concerned the wine-fuelled hi-jinks of male bohemians in Sydney and Melbourne. Overwhelmingly, however, the nineties have been remembered for their intensity rather than gaiety, as a period of political and cultural experimentation rather than of racy gossip and glamorous nights on the town.

Savage or civilised? Manners in colonial Australia

Angela Woollacott’s latest contribution to Australian history covers the fraught terrain of national identity in the first half of the twentieth century, a period politically defined by ‘White Australia’ and culturally afflicted by ‘White paranoia’. Woollacott explores the ways in which ‘Australianness’ contributed to the international success of female stage and screen performers Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong and Merle Oberon. The fame of these women fascinated Australians and enabled a sense of Australian presence in global modernity. Thus Woollacott’s premise that the ‘Australianness’ of each performer is a transnational construct where negotiations of racial identity play out on a global level. The complexity of Kellerman, Quong and Oberon’s celebrity is teased out in terms of their negotiations of cultural difference, their strategic deployment of exoticism, and their positions amongst changing feminine ideals in post-suffrage Australia. What emerges is a compelling argument for ‘Australianness’, or more specifically Australian femininity, as a negotiable construct even in the entrenched era of White Australia. Woollacott’s text further enriches important work by Aileen Moreton-Robinson and others, who have established that constructions of whiteness were central to the racial formation of Australian society. What Woollacott makes clear is that even during the seven decades of White Australia, constructions of whiteness were anything but fixed and simple. The point is quickly established in Woollacott’s first case study of Annette Kellerman*here a white Australian woman played with the category of South Sea Islander to sell her image internationally, and on a global stage the mythologies and meanings surrounding South Seas Islanders extended to include Australians. Quong and Oberon also packaged their racial identities loosely. Tracing Quong’s incarnation from Australian-born actress to Chinese cultural ‘authority’, Woollacott aptly demonstrates the malleability of ethnic identities and their capacity to travel, teasing out her deployment of ‘Orientalist’ symbols across the contexts of Australia, London and New York. The ‘Australiannesss’ of Oberon’s global image was a wonder, given the ‘magnificent product of the Apple Isle’ hadn’t set foot in Tasmania until very late in her life. What Woollacott finds in Oberon’s story are the deep anxieties surrounding ‘exoticism’ for Australians, anxieties related to racial miscegenation, promiscuity and morality. Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2012, 253 265

Naughty and gay? revisiting the nineties in the Australian colonies

In this article I show that aspects of what was called the ‘Gay’ or ‘Naughty Nineties’ in other parts of the world were experienced in Australia, in spite of the depression and industrial upheaval taking place in most Australian colonies during the 1890s. My focus is two tours by companies from London’s Gaiety Theatre — one in 1893, the other in 1895 — but might just as easily have been the development of vaudeville, the arrival of cinema, or the expansion of spectator sport in the decade. By drawing attention to these modernising influences on leisure and popular culture, my aim is to expand the way the decade is imagined in Australian historiography. It is also, more ambitiously, to grapple with some of the disparities between social and cultural approaches to history. Mindful of the fact that social historians have focused on the material hardships caused by the depression, while cultural scholars have paid them less heed, I suggest ways in which we might bring together these different perspectives in accounts of Australia’s 1890s. This article has been peer-reviewed.

A swindler's progress: Nobles and convicts in the age of liberty

Within the popular field of trans-national history is an expanding focus on panPacific networks, as evidenced by the transoceanic bias in a new series by University of Hawai’i Press, ‘Perspectives on the Global Past’. A most recent addition to the UHP list is Fiona Paisley’s Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific, an illustrated account of the first three decades of the pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) since its inception in 1928. Fiona Paisley is a Cultural Historian at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and the author of Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919 1939 (2000) and her expertise in gender studies brings critical focus to the place of women in pan-Pacific cultural networks. Glamour in the Pacific highlights how early suffragettes sought to create a role for themselves in a globalising world, where inter-racial friendships and cross-cultural awareness would provide a praxis for a new world order and peace. Driven by an unwavering belief in the importance of interpersonal relationships in global affairs, the PPWA’s methodwas to stage conferences at various Pacific and Pacific-rim countries and include as many representatives from the region as possible. Paisley points out that the diverse destinations for the conferences aimed to heighten the sense of cultural difference within modernity, and underlined the glamour of the conference experience. The conferences attracted delegates from countries such as Hawai’i, the US Mainland, Japan, China, the Philippines, Latin America (Chile and Mexico), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the trusteeships of (British) Fiji and (American) Samoa. By 1958 these delegates were joined at the eighth conference, held in Tokyo, by delegates from Ceylon, Pakistan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Western Samoa and Thailand. Paisley has chosen a roughly chronological format to discuss the conferences, which also manages to fit neatly into thematic categories which include decolonising movements, peace-building, culture and identity. Glamour in the Pacific traces the development of the PPWA from early logistical challenges to the struggle to maintain international relationships in the context of the Cold War. Paisley has brought a keen critical eye to PPWA, noting the predominance of a middle-class clientele, the inconsistencies in gender politics and nationalism, and its deeply ambivalent approach to Indigenous women, despite the drive to include Pacific women in a world community. But these criticisms are balanced by respectful acknowledgments of the motivation and intention of these women who committed themselves to the promotion of social reform and a new world order through a cultural internationalist project. Paisley draws mainly on diaries and letters produced by women attending the conferences to tell the story of the PPWA, and locates these first-hand accounts in