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Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s Goldfields

Through their engagement with the varied content of Home (1920–42), The BP Magazine (1928–42) and MAN (1936–72), the authors argue that representations of travel functioned as a means for these magazines to both construct and negotiate what it meant to be modern in interwar Australia, particularly at a time where, they argue, ‘the Pacific was at the fore of the nation’s consciousness and imagination’ (18). Organised across three parts – Geography, Cultural Value, and Temporality – the book endeavours to show that it was not just physical travel that was so crucial to interwar ideas of modernity but imagined travel as well. Indeed, the authors engage with the concept of ‘geographical imaginary’ and the ‘outward gaze’ to contend that, as cultural texts, magazines enabled readers to forge a connection to a world beyond Australian shores and understand themselves as on the cutting edge of global fashion, cinematic, literary, and artistic trends – even if they never left their armchairs. There is much to commend in the book. The authors’ commitment to taking seriously the ways in which consumers of knowledge, through the act of reading, actively understood and negotiated complex ideas demonstrates the continued need to engage with cultural texts, especially Australian print culture. The Transported Imagination is indeed noteworthy precisely because it brings attention to magazines, which remain a desperately overlooked source of cultural activity. The focus on glamour, fashion, excitement, and pleasure – which follows Jill Julius Matthews’ work on international modernity in interwar Australia – helps to challenge enduring understandings of the 1930s in particular as inescapably miserable and Depression-riddled (although this point should perhaps have been made earlier than in the conclusion). Additionally, the recognition that the act of imagining travel (as well as actually travelling) was an important means through which Australian readers understood their position in the modern world allows space to acknowledge the hopes, desires, and fantasies of those readers who could not afford trips to the Pacific, Europe, or North America. Readers’ fantasies and desires were invoked and catered to in the three magazines not just through explicit coverage of travel, but also through representations of the modern world in book and film reviews, fiction, fashion coverage, and advertisements. The authors thus employ the category of the ‘middlebrow’ to reconcile not only the intersection of high and popular culture, but also of art and consumerism, which in turn approaches readers as intelligent consumers of cultural meaning. This is especially important given that the magazines each explicitly targeted quite different audiences. The authors place a lot of emphasis on the Pacific in the introduction to the book, not only as a place where interwar travellers were visiting, but also as an imagined concept which helped shape Australian ideas of modernity in the period. However, while they claim to ‘[discover] a number of simultaneous “Pacifics”’ in the three magazines, I found treatment of these multiple Pacifics to be uneven and at times underwhelming (20). This is a small but important critique, given the space provided in the introduction to discussions of the complex, contentious Pacific that the authors claim was represented in these interwar magazines. Overall, The Transported Imagination is a welcome addition to the small field of the study of Australian magazines and would also be of interest to scholars of travel, modernity, and interwar Australia.