The Home

The Home: An Australian Quarterly was first published in February 1920. Published by Art in Australia Ltd, The Home’s target market was Australian middle-class women readers. It was established in an effort to help underwrite the publication of Art in Australia and other publishing projects. Initially produced by a team of editors, including Sydney Ure Smith (art editor), Bertram Stevens (literary editor) and Julia Lister (fashion editor), The Home suffered early losses, but finally provided the financial stability needed by Art in Australia Ltd.

The Home is known for its promotion of graphic art and advertising in Australian magazines, particularly the influence of its magazine covers. It proclaimed to be ‘modern’, which it was to an extent, but ignored movements such as cubism, futurism and surrealism. It did promote women in a more modern context. The magazine continued into the 1940s, but found strong competition from new magazines like Vogue and Fashion and Society. It finally ceased publication  in 1942.

Although it was not a literary magazine, The Home published the work of many of Australia’s leading writers. Contributors included Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice, Nettie Palmer, Norman Lindsay, Lionel Lindsay, Joan Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor, Mary Gilmore, Arthur Adams and David Unaipon. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel The Wild Oats of Han was serialised in The Home during 1926 and 1927.

The cover image of this issue, vol. 2, no. 4, December 1, 1921, is by Bertha Sloane, an artist and cartoonist. She trained in commercial art in Sydney with Albert Collins and worked under him at Smith and Julius art studio, part of the Ure Smith companies.

MUM

Melbourne University Magazine, or MUM, was a student magazine, produced annually and sometimes several times a year. It was published from 1907 until 1979 and included prose, poetry, art and general musings. Often witty and irreverent, MUM also sometimes contained more serious topics, such as the war memorial edition of 20 July 1920. Some famous names pop up: Barry Humphries, Bruce Dawe and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, for example. The magazine gives a sense of the student experience, often including rants about happenings at the University, but it sometimes also laments the lack of contribution to MUM by the students. Pictured here are issues from 1950, 1952, 1957,1958, 1959 and 1962. All are from the Special Collections, University of Melbourne.

Early Image of Sydney

Augustus Earle (c.1790-c.1839) was the son of James Earle (1761-1796), an American artist. Following his father’s profession, the younger Earle exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1806. He travelled around the world in the first half of the 19th century, visiting almost every continent. On one trip, his ship was marooned on the island of Tristan D’Acunha. He was taken off by another ship on its way to Tasmania, and arrived at Hobart on 18 January 1825. He stayed there for about nine months, then went to Sydney where he lived for about two years.

Earle did much painting in watercolours and obtained commissions for portraits from several of the leading colonists. In 1827 he sent a set of eight paintings of Sydney to London to be used for Robert Burford’s panorama of Sydney. In 1830 he published Views in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Australian Scrap Book. The eight views were all of New South Wales subjects and are important early views of the growing colony of New South Wales. Earle died between 1838 and 1840.

Pictured is ‘Government House, and part of the town of Sydney’, from Augustus Earle, Views in New South Wales and Van Diemens Land: Australian Scrap Book, London: J. Cross, 1830, lithograph, printed in black ink, from one stone, 19.8 x 28.8 cm (printed image (trimmed)). Special Collections, University of Melbourne.