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
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