Podcasts about argus melbourne

Wherein we consider what counts as an amusement... Argus (Melbourne), 22 September 1855, p. 8 ('Amusements' column) A dance manual by one of Mr Denning's teachers, Eugene Coulon. Find the full text of the second edition (c. 1852) here. Hm...

Wherein we encounter a ‘phosphorescent charmer’ in fin de siècle Melbourne . Herald (Melbourne), 8 August 1892, p. 2, col. 8 See it on the page, here. Did you know that The day the ghost walks is slang for pay-day? Originally theatrical slang, it supposedly originated among the cast of an early production of Hamlet. Much later, it would come into more general use, though mainly in the US. And speaking of the theatre, Melbourne's suburban ghost went on to share a bill with a lady contortionist in a ‘screamingly funny farce’ – Argus (Melbourne), 5 August 1895, p. 8, col. 7 Like to know more about the legend of Spring-heeled Jack, the (not-quite) original suburban ghost? For a brief run-down, take a look at the Atlas Obscura entry – chances are you'll find plenty more at Atlas Obscura to snag your interest. Or for the (obsessively) full story (on an orange background, no less), immerse yourself in The Complete Spring Heeled Jack Page – just don't say I didn't warn you. Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London No. 1. From the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. This 'penny dreadful' series ran to at least 36 issues. See more of the covers here. Cover of Spring-Heeled Jack, a 1991 graphic novel for kids by Phillip Pullman, who would go on to write the acclaimed ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy for young adults. And speaking of daemons... Universal Spectator (London), 7 October 1732 This is the earliest mention I’ve been able to find of ‘suburban ghosts’. The suggestion here seems to be that such ghosts are ‘raised’ (i.e., invented) by ‘petty Printers and Pamphleteers’ in order to sell more papers – a suggestion echoed in a regional Australian newspaper 173 years later: Dubbo Liberal & Macquarie Advocate (NSW), 10 June 1905, p. 6, col. 4

Wherein we consider the point of hatpins. Argus (Melbourne), 9 August 1911, p. 14, col. 4 Or read the whole page here A comic postcard from 1907. I found it at http://whatsinthetrench.weebly.com/blog/archives/09-2016 Here's some hats, at the opening of the new nurses' quarter, Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne - from the Weekly Times,  15 April 1911, p. 27 Take a look here at other photos from this terrific illustrated newspaper. The World’s News (Sydney), 11 May 1907, p. 1 Read the story here. 'Here's something for you!' The hatpin in self-defence. Image: Wikimedia Commons How to Make Hatpins Useful Evening News (Sydney), 16 March 1907, p. 10 Click here to see it on the page. A head like a Sputnik Evening News (Sydney), 23 May 1912, p. 11 See it here among other ads of the day Townsville Daily Bulletin, 17 October 1912, p. 2 See all the Townsville news here

Wherein we learn who to blame for the perennial naughtiness of boys. Argus (Melbourne), 10 November 1914, p. 8, col. 2 Read it in full here Titles in the Deadwood Dick Library – ‘Issued Every Wednesday. Price 5 cents’ From the ‘Nickels and Dimes’ collection of Northern Illinois University Libraries – click here to access the whole collection. Here we see Deadwood Dick’s distinctive ‘vail’, ‘through the eye-holes of which there gleamed a pair of orbs of piercing intensity’. This cover features in Haverford College (Pennsylvania) Library’s online exhibition, The Second Generation: Boy Heroes in American Dime Novels, 1860-1910. View the whole thing here Here we have Dick from a later series, wearing a modified mask more fitting for a superhero. (From the ‘Nickels and Dimes’ collection of Northern Illinois University Libraries) Click here to view the whole book Wild Edna, the Girl Brigand (from the ‘Nickels and Dimes’ collection of Northern Illinois University Libraries) Click here to view the whole book Le vue splendide de le châlet Kosciusco tray bang! [ersatz French for tres bien] Un audience patrètique [patriotique] ‘Why should scenic pictures be picked out as specially suitable, unless dullness is presupposed as necessarily just the thing for Sunday evening? Can the Acting-Chief Secretary seriously hold that a picture of Kosciusko or Katoomba or Mullengudgerie or Stockinbingal encourages a devotional frame of mind?’ The World’s News (Sydney) on the restricting of Sunday picture shows - 10 June 1911, p. 15, col. 3 Read the whole article for yourself here What's on in Gympie - Gympie Times (Qld), 3 January 1911, p. 2 View the whole page here A typical picture-show program from 1911 - Age (Melbourne), 3 January 1911, p. 10, col. 6 Read it up close here, along with adverts for other picture shows, and for the vaudeville shows and waxworks that were on the brink of redundancy. Click here for an entire page of moving picture previews and gossip from the Sunday Times (Sydney) in 1914.

Wherein we have our cockles warmed by Lord Hopetoun’s liquid largesse, as dispensed by an anarchist on the mean streets of Melbourne in 1902. Argus (Melbourne), 26 June 1902, p. 5, column 3 Read the whole of the report, plus all that day’s news (including the king’s illness) here.                   Critic (Adelaide), 5 January 1901, p. 3                                Australasian, 12 January 1901, p. 29 (Left) An official 1901 portrait of the G-G. Note the stamp, defective original, at the foot of the page. This seems to refer to the newspaper, not Lord Hopetoun – notwithstanding views expressed in the Barrier Miner. (Right) His Excellency’s safari pants and yoga pose strike an informal note, compared with Prime Minister Edmund Barton’s dress-suit, in a photo taken following the swearing-in of Australia's first federal cabinet. The crowd in Argyle Place, Carlton, on the morning of Wednesday, 25 June 1902. ‘Mr Fleming hands out the first bottle of Lord Hopetoun’s gift (25 dozen champagne)’ To qualify for a bottle, you had to have a ’tache. Note that the bottle is still packed for shipping in a protective coating of… could they be grapevine cuttings? A queue (possibly those troublesome Smiths) outside the bootshop. One of Chummy Fleming’s confederates (left) shouts the next name on the list. The above three photos come from the Australasian, 5 July 1902, p. 28 Take a closer look here – you’ll notice that, at the bottom left-hand corner of the page, a photo of the bacchanal at the beer barrels has been partly torn out of the copy of the Australasian that was digitised. Australian Women’s Weekly, 27 September 1947, p. 25 J.W. (Chummy) Fleming, still waving the flag at Melbourne’s Yarra Bank speakers’ corner in 1947, three years before his death. And here is that flag - now in the Realia Collection of the State Library of Victoria (Accession no: H89.109/2)

Wherein we plunder drapers' shops, cloakrooms, and the Lost & Found column in search of the poncho cloak and its shoddy brethren. Argus (Melbourne), 23 June 1855, p. 1, column 6 Or take a look here at what else was lost and found that day The full poncho range of Benjamin Lazarus & Co., Sydney drapers – Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June 1855, p. 8, column 6 Click here to compare Lazarus's stock with that of his competitors, or here to read what his persuasive rival, Mr Marks, had to offer Argus (Melbourne), 16 July 1855, p. 6, columns 6 & 7 Read click here to follow the fall-out of the cloakroom cock-up at the Patriotic Fund Ball Or, for a different perspective... I've searched in vain for an image of a contemporary poncho cloak (an Inverness cape just doesn't cut it), so you'll have to make do with this - Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 June 1971, 'Knits for Action' supplement, p. 14 Yeah! That's how we did things in the '70s. Well, actually... this is how we did things - (cut out of an actual newspaper - source forgotten!)  

Wherein we chart the declining fortunes of a performing elephant in goldrush-era Victoria. Further reading and links for this episode: Age (Melbourne), 7 November 1854, p. 5 - or read it in situ (look at the top of column 5), to see what else was happening in the news that day. Argus (Melbourne), 16 October 1854, p. 8 - or read it in situ (column 5), to discover what else was on in Melbourne that week. Click here to read an article looking back at the Cremorne Gardens of the 1850s & '60s, from the Melbourne Argus, 8 April 1933, p. 6

Roberts’s return to Melbourne in 1885, after four years’ study in Europe, marked the end of his long artistic apprenticeship. By the age of twenty-nine he had developed a sophisticated eye and an exceptional technical facility that enabled him to capture the appearance of things. He was also a proselytiser and, back home, looked up his old friend Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) and enthused him about the European style of plein-air painting. Together they established a weekend painting camp on Houston’s Farm at Box Hill, some sixteen kilometres from the city. It was a primitive approximation to the artists’ colonies of Europe and America, but quickly became a hub of the new painting in Melbourne. Many of the first great works of the Australian Impressionist movement were painted there, in or near the patch of remnant bushland on Gardiners Creek where the camp was located. Paintings such as McCubbin’s Lost1and Roberts’s own A summer morning tiff2 and Wood splitters3captured the intimacy and patchy sunlight of the site. Roberts’s ’Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ was painted on the hillside above the camp and is more panoramic in format than the other early Box Hill views. It is also a nocturne – a type of twilight or evening subject that was still something of a novelty in late 1880s Melbourne. Streeton, who joined the group in 1887, recalled: We tried painting the sunset with somewhat conventional and melodramatic results. Roberts pointed to the evening sky in the east, and showed us the beauty of its subtle greys, and the delicate flush of the afterglow, when the shadow of the earth upon its atmosphere, resembling a curved band of cool grey, rises up, and succeeds the rosy warmth as the sun descends further below the western horizon. He was the first artist in Australia to notice it, and to point it out to the native-born.4 Roberts’s painting skills enabled him to capture rapidly the topography of the valley of Gardiners Creek and the view to the Dandenongs. The facture is suggestive rather than descriptive, with a definite drift towards abstraction, particularly in the adjustments made in the studio to the foreground and other areas. Atmosphere was also important, and Roberts succeeded brilliantly in capturing le moment crepusculaire, the stillness of dusk. The only movement is a bird wheeling in from the left, and a waft of smoke rising from a field. ’Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ is a national picture, in that its subtext is the claiming and clearing of the land, one of the great themes of nineteenth-century Australian life. As such, it demands a place on Roberts’s list of national pictures, alongside such works as Coming South, Allegro con brio: Bourke Street West, The sunny South and Shearing the rams.5It is also his most poetic and elegiac landscape, Symbolist in its evocation of the slumbering land. Terence Lane 1 Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 2 Collection of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria. 3 Collection of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. 4 Argus (Melbourne), 21 June 1932, p. 8. 5 All collection of National Gallery of Victoria, except Allegro con brio: Bourke Street West.

Von Guérard sailed into Milford Sound on the SS Otago on the evening of Monday 24 January 1876. The passengers on the eagerly anticipated four-and-a-half day voyage from Melbourne were not disappointed. Myriad waterfalls dashed down the steep sides of the granite peaks, following recent rain, and the clouds lifted to reveal Mitre Peak and Mt Pembroke – their towering forms reflected in the mirror-like surface of the fiord. The Otago dropped anchor by Bowen Falls at 7 pm. Von Guérard ‘at once had himself conveyed to an island’ where he executed sketches, and three drawings documented with notes on colour and vegetation, before the midsummer sun finally set.1From his chosen viewpoint he developed a panoramic composition of a series of pyramidal forms that stretch across the canvas, rising above the line of the water and reflected in it. Through the power and austerity of the composition, von Guérard communicates the monumental scale and geological age of the dark, angular rocky peaks, the depths of the fiord and the haunting silence of the Sound. His own personal experience is registered in the vignette of tiny figures seen disembarking from their rowboat. Their exhilaration at finding themselves in a place described by a journalist on the Otago as ‘unsurpassed, if equalled, by any cynosure of beauty on the earth’s surface’, is palpable.2 The intensity of von Guérard’s response to Milford Sound was informed by his scientific interest in its geology and vegetation.3 Contemporary reviewers, such as the writer for the Argus, who referred to ‘the steamer, floating like a child’s toy at the foot of one of the “awful cliffs”’, responded to Milford Sound in terms of the British Sublime.4 The Sublime played a part in von Guérard’s vision, but a more revealing context for understanding his portrayal of the subject is the scientific and specifically geological direction taken by German landscape painting in the early nineteenth century. Carus, in his Nine letters on landscape painting, argued for a new type of landscape art, one that revealed the history of the Earth’s formation through a scientifically accurate portrayal of its geology. In Milford Sound von Guérard observed and portrayed the hard, erosion-resistant character of the granite, gneiss and diorite rock formations and the vertical ridges of their foliated geological structure. The glacier at the top of Mt Pembroke – a flash of white in a predominantly dark composition – is a reminder of the glacial activity that shaped this landscape over six million years ago. Von Guérard’s New Zealand journey was the last of his many expeditions in the southern hemisphere. The two major works from this trip, Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu with Mount Earnslaw, Middle Island, New Zealand 1877–79, were immediately acclaimed by contemporary reviewers.5Milford Sound was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1878, and won a ‘First degree of Merit Special for Landscape Painting’ at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879. Ruth Pullin 1 ‘The Otago’s Trip to Milford Sound’, Otago Witness, Issue 1262, 5 February 1876, p. 7. 2 Otago Witness, p. 7. 3 Von Guérard’s scientific accuracy is also evident in his portrayal of the plants found at Milford Sound. It is probable that the feathery flowered grasses in the foreground are the species richardii, a member of the Cortaderia genus. It is known by the Maori as toe toe. My thanks to Richard Neville, Conservation Botanist, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, for identifying this plant species. 4 Argus (Melbourne), 2 January 1877, p. 4. 5 Collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.