Cirrus@Austlit

'Esme Bruce, who in the first place was married in England to the aged and wealthy Hon. Cecil Bruce, but was never quite happy with her husband, decides against the counsels of her friend Helen Lady Gordon to elope with Fedor Barenski, by repute a great violinist but whose playing, Esme says, lacks the passion which love is calculated to put into it. After a brief period of life in Europe with Esme, Barenski makes his mark in the musical world, and then he grows tired of the runaway. Bruce and the violinist meet in Paris, Barenski receives a fatal wound in the duel that follows (but which combat was not enacted on Monday night), and the curtain falls on the closing of the ignoble life of Esme, who poisons herself.'

Source:

'Barenski: A Farcical Melodrama', The Mount Barker Courier and Southern Advertiser, 26 May 1905, p.2.

'Scottish actress Thistle Anderson's firecracker of a polemic against her adopted hometown of Adelaide, published to roars of outrage and laughter in 1905, proves beyond doubt that people of the past were - just like us - fond of a good piss-take.

'This barbed satirical spray reveals the City of Churches as 'less holy than might be supposed', with more opium dens and prostitutes per capita than Melbourne, wines that are 'the worst ever made' (!), the local men 'caricatures' with inferior facial hair, the local women 'cats'. Thistle’s fondness is reserved for the fruit, the flour, the cabmen ... and the return ticket to Melbourne.

'This hilarious little volume, intended by its author as 'a playful skit', is to be taken with a pinch of salt ... or perhaps savoured, stubbornly, with a glass of excellent Adelaide wine.'

Source : (publisher's blurb)