Mark Hearn is Senior Lecturer of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Australia. The author of several books and scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and National Identities, his research focuses on the history of ideas and governance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Ends and Beginnings: Life and Mind at the Australian Fin de Siècle1. The Bush Undertaker: Henry Lawson and the Stragglers of the Second Industrial Revolution2. Rose Summerfield Imagines a New Woman3. The Wanderer: Christopher Brennan’s Two Lives in Fin de Siècle Sydney4. ‘A Modern Eve’: Vida Goldstein Stands for Parliament5. ‘Some Disquieting Symptoms’: Alfred Deakin’s Nervous Breakdown6. David Unaipon, ‘The Super-Aborigine’7. John Dwyer’s Family StoriesConclusion: Fin de Siècle AfterlifeEndnotesBibliographyIndex

At last, the Australian experience of the extraordinarily volatile period known as the fin de siècle has found its historian. Carl Schorske first explained the significance of the era, and offered a brilliant model for understanding it, in his Fin-De-Siècle Vienna of 1979. Mark Hearn picks up where Schorske left off, amplifying his biographic structure and building on his profound insights. Hearn, though, has a theatre that adds the missing piece to the fin de siècle puzzle: a settler colonial site that shows how imperial forces drove many of the political and cultural crises of these crucial decades. Hearn’s study includes women and Indigenous characters in with the more usual mix of male artists and European intellectuals. The result is an exemplary account for the twenty-first century.

Mark Hearn is Senior Lecturer of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Australia. The author of several books and scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and National Identities, his research focuses on the history of ideas and governance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Ends and Beginnings: Life and Mind at the Australian Fin de Siècle1. The Bush Undertaker: Henry Lawson and the Stragglers of the Second Industrial Revolution2. Rose Summerfield Imagines a New Woman3. The Wanderer: Christopher Brennan’s Two Lives in Fin de Siècle Sydney4. ‘A Modern Eve’: Vida Goldstein Stands for Parliament5. ‘Some Disquieting Symptoms’: Alfred Deakin’s Nervous Breakdown6. David Unaipon, ‘The Super-Aborigine’7. John Dwyer’s Family StoriesConclusion: Fin de Siècle AfterlifeEndnotesBibliographyIndex

At last, the Australian experience of the extraordinarily volatile period known as the fin de siècle has found its historian. Carl Schorske first explained the significance of the era, and offered a brilliant model for understanding it, in his Fin-De-Siècle Vienna of 1979. Mark Hearn picks up where Schorske left off, amplifying his biographic structure and building on his profound insights. Hearn, though, has a theatre that adds the missing piece to the fin de siècle puzzle: a settler colonial site that shows how imperial forces drove many of the political and cultural crises of these crucial decades. Hearn’s study includes women and Indigenous characters in with the more usual mix of male artists and European intellectuals. The result is an exemplary account for the twenty-first century.

Mark Hearn is Senior Lecturer of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Australia. The author of several books and scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and National Identities, his research focuses on the history of ideas and governance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Ends and Beginnings: Life and Mind at the Australian Fin de Siècle1. The Bush Undertaker: Henry Lawson and the Stragglers of the Second Industrial Revolution2. Rose Summerfield Imagines a New Woman3. The Wanderer: Christopher Brennan’s Two Lives in Fin de Siècle Sydney4. ‘A Modern Eve’: Vida Goldstein Stands for Parliament5. ‘Some Disquieting Symptoms’: Alfred Deakin’s Nervous Breakdown6. David Unaipon, ‘The Super-Aborigine’7. John Dwyer’s Family StoriesConclusion: Fin de Siècle AfterlifeEndnotesBibliographyIndex

At last, the Australian experience of the extraordinarily volatile period known as the fin de siècle has found its historian. Carl Schorske first explained the significance of the era, and offered a brilliant model for understanding it, in his Fin-De-Siècle Vienna of 1979. Mark Hearn picks up where Schorske left off, amplifying his biographic structure and building on his profound insights. Hearn, though, has a theatre that adds the missing piece to the fin de siècle puzzle: a settler colonial site that shows how imperial forces drove many of the political and cultural crises of these crucial decades. Hearn’s study includes women and Indigenous characters in with the more usual mix of male artists and European intellectuals. The result is an exemplary account for the twenty-first century.