Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity

Robert Dixon is Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a past-President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and has published widely on Australian literature, postcolonialism, Australian cultural studies, and aspects of Australian art history, photography and early cinema.

• Illustrations; Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Australia’s Embrace of Colonial Modernity; 1. ‘The Home of the Blizzard’: Douglas Mawson’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainment; 2. Guided Spectatorship: Exhibiting the Great War; 3. Touring the Nation: Shackleton’s ‘Marvellous Moving Pictures’ and the Australian Season of ‘In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice’; 4. Entr’acte: ‘Sir Ross Smith’s Flight’, Aerial Vision and Colonial Modernity; 5. Colonial Modernity and Its Others: ‘Pearls and Savages’ as a Multi-media Project; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index

‘[O]ffers a new way of looking at aspects of Australia’s national culture history and its place in a broader Empire history [and] offers enormous insights into the work of one of the world’s most idiosyncratic figures in what was already a constantly evolving international entertainment industry. […] Dixon’s book is rich in detail and is beautifully assembled, with many telling images.’ —Andrew Pike, ‘Visual Anthropology’