Memories and Promises:Australian Modernism and National Identities in <i>Home</i> 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’

Playing Recognition Politics: Queer Theoretical Reflections on Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Youth Social Policy in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s

This article provides a queer theoretical reflection on the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer (LGQ) youth as subjects of policy attention in Australia in the late twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific forms of social, bureaucratic, and organizational recognition have given shape to LGQ youth as categorical policy objects. To this end, this article critically interrogates social policy related to the provision of funding for LGQ youth support during the 1980s and 1990s in two Australian states: New South Wales and Western Australia. More specifically, it focuses on some of the ways in which LGQ youth have been discursively shaped and materially supported in three different organizations, two of which continue to be strongly associated with support of LGQ youth in Australia. This study of the emergence of these organizations, resourced by three different sectors—the state, the church, and the LGQ community itself—necessarily draws on ephemeral resources, reflecting the conditions of possibility in which this work was being enacted. We conclude with an analysis of the necessity for situating policy recognitions within specific contexts to examine the implications for LGQ youth as the subjects such recognitions simultaneously seek to constitute and serve