Look at the Hilzinger washing machine, costing £3 in 1880. It certainly seems rather primitive but did it get the clothes clean and how hard was it to operate? And what about Dr Allen’s belt, powered by the magic of electricity? Could it really help with rheumatism and lumbago, as its maker promised? Advertisements can reveal a great deal about an age. Gleaned from the pages of long forgotten publications, such as The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Australian Town and Country Journal and Australasian Sketcher with Pen and Pencil, together with dozens of regional newspapers, they paint an intriguing picture of the world of our great-great-grandparents. With over 450 images, this book is one to pore over and enjoy: perhaps that electric hairbrush really did cure baldness and wouldn’t it be wonderful of those strange cannabis cigarettes did relieve asthma? Advertisements for condoms? It was just a matter of knowing what to look for. In some ways it is striking how little has changed. It comes as no surprise, for example, to discover that colonial women found it hard to resist a ‘bargain’, nor that they worried a great deal about their complexions and the ‘sweetness’ of their breath. Colonial men had their own concerns, prominent among them those old bugbears of advancing baldness and retreating virility. For those seeking to revive flagging passions there were always the ‘racy’ tales advertised each week in the illustrated papers (price one shilling, posted in a sealed envelope). Equally striking are the many differences in attitude and outlook revealed by old advertisements. It is curious, for example, that for most of the nineteenth century nobody—except perhaps the very young—seem to have been much concerned about body shape. It was only in the 1880s and ’90s that advertisements began to appear offering products designed to deal with ‘unsightly’ corpulence or to plump out that ‘underdeveloped’ bosom. It cannot have taken advertisers long to realise that they were onto a good thing exploiting those particular anxieties. Emporium uses collections of advertisements as starting points in assembling a series of self-contained ‘snapshots’. Introduced by a section on shopping, a succession of double-page spreads, each with its eyewitness accounts and contemporary descriptions, work to paint a lively and entertaining picture of everyday life in the Australian colonies. Although this is a book about advertising, it is really also all about the everyday lives of nineteenth-century Australians. The focus throughout is on the lives of so-called ordinary people—the working men, women and children whose struggles all too often merit little more than a footnote or two in many of our national histories. How did they go about getting married? How did they plan their families? How did they keep clean? How did they cook their food? Advertisements can answer all these questions. Humorous – quirky – fascinating – you will find this book compulsive! Edwin Barnard is an author and designer with an enduring interest in the everyday lives of nineteenth-century Australians. His previous books include Exiled for the National Library of Australia. Edwin lives in Avalon NSW.
The Port Arthur convict photographs are a truly remarkable survival from Australias colonial past. Taken shortly before the infamous Tasmanian penal settlement closed for good, these images record the faces of men sent to Australia on convict ships between the 1820s and the 1850s. Now, for the first time, they are the subject of a fascinating new book from the National Library of Australia. Through its pages readers will come face to face with some of Australias reluctant pioneers and explore their often extraordinary lives. Using transportation records, trial documents, offi cial correspondence, prison files, local and overseas newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts, the author has pieced together biographies of some of the men and their female partners who found themselves transported to the colonies.
Spinning Tops and Gumdrops takes us back to childhood in colonial Australia. The delight of children at play is universal, but the pleasure these children experience as depicted through the book's photographs is through their 'imagination, skill and daring' rather than through possessions. Children play quoits and jacks, hide and seek, cricket with a kerosene tin for a wicket, dress ups and charades. They climb trees, run races, and build rafts to sail on the local waterhole. The photographs show children happily absorbed in the play of their own making. Being a child in colonial Australia was also tough. It was a time when school yard disagreements were sorted out with fists and 'the loss of a little claret'. A time when children could view public hangings and premature death was frequent, especially taking the very young and vulnerable though dysentery, whooping cough or diphtheria. The lasting impression left by the contemporary accounts, photographs, etchings and paintings of colonial children in Spinning Tops and Gumdrops is their possession of qualities of resilience, self-sufficiency and acceptance of their lot. Perhaps it was through lack of choice, or of knowing no other. Nevertheless, these were qualities that put them in good stead for the challenges many faced in their adulthood. Interestingly, these are qualities on which contemporary society still places a high value, but which today seem a little more elusive.
Panoramas, whether painted or photographed, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of IMAX or Google maps. These wide-angled views of landscapes and cities fascinated viewers, who had never before seen such far-reaching perspectives on the world around them. Based on the National Library of Australia¿s extensive collections, Capturing Time: Panoramas of Old Australia looks back on our nation through the magic of panoramas to the streets of Sydney when it was the convict capital, to the gold rushes of Melbourne and to Perth, struggling to establish a toehold on the continent¿s western frontier. Dating from 1810 to the 1920s, the paintings and photographs include historic views of all of Australia¿s capital cities, plus some country towns. Not only can readers imagine what it might have been like to stand on Sydney¿s Observatory Hill in 1820, for example, but also what it would have been like to stand there with a companion able to point out landmarks and tell the sorts of interesting stories that only locals know.
An explosive, eye-opening expose of the corporate forces that have for more than a century sabotaged the creation of alternative energies and vehicles in order to keep us dependent on oil. There is enough truth in this book to revolutionize our way of life. Winner of four awards for editorial excellence: American Society of Journalists and Authors Best Book, Thomas Edison Award, Green Globes, and an AJPA Rockower Award.
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