Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity

By Jill Julius Matthews, Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2005, 342 pages, paperback, $32.95. Reviewed by Jane E Hunt in the June 2005 issue.

Help more readers find out about this article
Slashdot   Digg   StumbleUpon   Del.icio.us

Surprisingly little has been written about modernity in Australia. Art historians have focused on 'modernism', though the term is often used in a limited and misleading way. A number of historians have also considered women or gender in relation to modernity. But modernity itself is rarely the subject of scrutiny. Jill Julius Matthews' Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity thus offers a refreshing new direction in Australian cultural history.

Matthews professes that 'This is a tale of modern romance'. (p 1) But the book consists of more than one story, and the 'stories do not fit neatly within the boundaries of the nation continent'. (p 2) There is an unavoidable international dimension to this account of how modernity emerged in the everyday experience of the people of Sydney.

Dance Hall & Picture Palace begins with the physical city itself, followed by the iconic modern woman. It is here that we briefly encounter the dance hall, but the cinema is the real business of the book. Matthews turns to Sydney's romance with modern mechanical marvels. In this story, the sheer novelty of moving pictures proved insufficient to entertain audiences and secure ongoing profits. To entrench the presence of moving pictures in the recreational life of modern cities, the film industry developed advertising strategies, addressed its critics by trying to appear as respectable, and created a self-sustaining aura of glamour through the star system. Of course the business methods as well as the iconography emanated primarily from America. Local reactions on the part of what Matthews terms the 'heroes of civilisation' thus combined nostalgia and anti-modernism with anti-Americanism. The romance of civilization constitutes the last theme in this book.

What emerges from Matthews' analysis is an impression of the pendulum of opinion swinging wildly at first between the extremes of fierce rejection of modernity and rampant celebration of the modern to a more general consensus, or at least compromise, through which modernity became safe, tame and unadventurous. In the end, Matthews concludes, 'The modern was no longer a glorious, giddy future to be embraced enthusiastically, nor was it the feared sign of the end of civilization. It simply was'. (p 249)

This is a sensible conclusion. Though there are many nuances to the story of 'Sydney's romance with modernity', the truism that everything new at first meets resistance and finally finds acceptance (when it finds an acceptable form) clearly applies. Thankfully, Matthews allows neither this inevitable progression, nor the multitude of dichotomies raised by participants in the process, to project onto her account of the romance. Modernity was at once a personal experience as well as the product of the actions of a plethora of entrepreneurs and contemporary commentators. Public opinion struggled with it, but public opinion was not some static entity. There is a subtle equation of cause and effect in this book that is stated most clearly in the conclusion, but the excitement, the fear, and the desire that accompanied the romance with modernity live in Matthews' account.

There is an appropriate energy in the telling of this story. I once came across an advertisement for the Commonwealth Bank, published in September 1929, which described modern times as kaleidoscopic, and of course portrayed the bank as safe and secure. This very modern sense of a fragmented, rapidly changing world is captured in the way Matthews presents the story, particularly in the first chapter, 'Modernising Sydney'. It is also apparent, though not necessarily deliberately, in the many romances presented in this book. The story itself could easily dissolve into fragments. Through judicious use of sections, chapters and subheadings Matthews offers stepping stones to follow through the chaos, and carefully avoids indulging other angles that could sidetrack from her central thesis.

One of those other possible stories ends up being more of a prelude to the real substance of this book: the dance hall. The taming of modern dance, through which the fears of moral corruption and decadence were quelled, commands very few pages here while the story of the transformation of the 'tango' into a safe practice is offered in the introduction.

Another possible story which initially promises to be a central one is the personal experience of modernity. But Dance Hall & Picture Palace is not about the individual romance with modernity. It is about how 'new possibilities and opportunities were brought into people's daily lives' .(p 2) '[M]odern Australians' were encouraged to become 'modern citizens of the world' through the accumulated efforts of 'show-business entrepreneurs' and the 'heroes of civilisation'. Matthews does acknowledge that 'young women created the modern world by their work and through their leisure ... They conjured its presence by immersing themselves in its collective dream at the picture show and in fan magazines' (p 67-8). There is another story here about young predominantly working-class women as active creators of modern taste, whom opportunistic entrepreneurs began to recognize as a specific market, and social commentators were driven through fear and horror to denounce. In addition, although this book is about Sydney's romance with modernity, Sydney, like the modern girl, seems to retreat into the background. Admittedly Matthews uses examples of Sydney individuals (a working girl, magnates, and critics) to ground her observation of the processes through which modernity came to Sydney. Quite clearly, however, Dance Hall & Picture Palace is not about how the city and its people experienced modernity, but rather how that experience came to them. Sensibly the individual experience of modernity is not explored here. That is not Matthews' point, and the story is textured enough. She has done well to hold it together. This is not, therefore, the last word on Australian experiences of modernity, but a vibrant, well-crafted and instructive starting point.

Citation

• Jane E Hunt. 'Review: Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity by Jill Julius Matthews' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'In the early years of the twentieth century, moving pictures blazed like a comet in the night-life sky with other entertainments streaming away in brilliant tails, scattering the sparks of modernity into everyday life. Together they reshaped the possibilities of the modern world for the people of Sydney.'
  
  Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity paints Sydney between the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s as a prosperous city riding an international wave of modernism. In the pub, parlour and pulpit, people clashed over the significance of moving pictures, jazz, new dance crazes, the radio, gramophone records and cheap magazines.
  
  Conventional accounts of the Australian film industry at the beginning of the twentieth century focus on the impact of Hollywood on local production. But in this vibrant history, the author shows how moving pictures captured the imagination of Sydney's people and transformed how they thought about the world.
  
  Jill Julius Matthews describes how in Sydney, as elsewhere, young flappers came to embody both glamour and decadence in modern city life. She uncovers entrepreneurs bribing politicians as they aggressively pursued profits for their American patrons and reveals the innovative marketing techniques that provoked cultural elites to deplore commercialisation.

Have You Also Read?

• The Convict Theatres of Early Australia 1788-1840
  
  Robert Jordan, Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2002, 366 Pages, Hardcover, $49.95
  Reviewed by Marion Spies in the May 2003 issue.
  
  Due to the absence of a substantial body of primary material, the origins of European theatre in Australia have never been the subject of sustained and systematic analysis. Even Philip Parsons's seminal Companion to Theatre in Australia (1995) includes only one - although informative and well-researched - entry by Elizabeth Webby on 'Convicts and Theatre' plus some cross- references, and almost everything else the average reader or theatre-goer knows about the staging of plays in Australia from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1840s comes from much later works of fiction, such as Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker (1987/8) and Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Contry's Good ... read more.