Sex, Money, Art and Death: A Biography of my Grandparents, Edith Birks and Basil Burdett with a Family History of the Birks - Napier - McDougall Dynasty

Abstract

The thesis is in the form of a creative non-fiction book with exegesis. The main work is a combined biography and social and intellectual history. I trace the lives and family backgrounds of my grandparents Edith Birks and Basil Burdett who were both avantgarde writers, artists and cultural activists for Modernism in Australia in the 1920s and 30s. Using hybrid methodologies of Social History, the History of Emotions and Genealogy, I trace their family backgrounds in order to understand the provenance of the Modernist, liberal, feminist ideology they both championed. I describe Basil Burdett’s relationship with the Modernists and intellectuals gathered around the journal Art in Australia and I examine in detail Edith Birks’ family, a network of intensely engaged religious and political activists including Northern English landed gentry, Manchester industrialists, London Methodist intellectuals, Women’s suffragists and Utopian Christian Communists. The work contributes to knowledge of the intimate cultures of the politically and culturally activist groups and classes in the British imperial dominions in the period immediately preceding and after the First world war, and to an understanding of how the processes of economic transformation, class formation, migration, and imperial expansion operated at the local level of emotions, intimacy and filial relations. The Exegesis describes the motivation, sources, methodologies and scholarly literature used in the research programme and a summary of its contribution to scholarship.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History, 202