Memories and Promises: Australian Modernism and National Identities in Home During the 1930s

The images and texts that fill the pages of Sydney-based illustrated design magazine The Home during the interwar period tell apparently conflicting stories of Australian modernism and national identities. Visually seductive modernist forms celebrated the promises of the age in a distinctly Australian visual language, while sitting uncomfortably alongside the nation’s settler-colonial heritage and debates about the place of modern Australia in the British Empire. This chapter focuses on two issues of The Home in which these tensions manifested in major political and cultural events: the April 1932 issue celebrating the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the March 1938 issue covering Sydney’s sesquicentenary spectacles. In these issues, modernism found form in a process of looking forward and back, and efforts to integrate a sense of anticipation for the new with unresolved relations to the past. As well as examining the magazine’s content and historical contexts, this chapter argues that consideration of the disjunctions between images, articles and practices is critical for studies of modern magazines in settler-colonial contexts. Evident in the spaces between The Home’s images and texts – and between its visions of the past and present – are allusions to more complex modernisms and anti-modernisms, including white Australian appropriation of Indigeneity, conservative defences of empire, and the practices of a Japanese image-maker capturing a ‘white Australia’.