Modelled on the American Esquire magazine, Man began publication in 1936. An unapologetic magazine for men, it tested the borders of acceptable taste with suggestive cartoons, portraying the sexual exploits of men with a variety of female character-types. This feature endured throughout the magazine's history, but competition from more explicit magazines such as Penthouse and Playboy contributed to the demise of Man in the early 1970s.
While not aiming for literary quality, Man published many short stories and some poetry. A 1938 editorial reported that between four and five hundred manuscripts were received each month. The magazine expected stories to be 'slanted for masculine interests', but would provide some editorial enhancement if necessary. In addition to the many amateur writers who contributed to Man, writers such as Vance Palmer, E. V. Timms, Will Lawson, R. Carson Gold, J. M. H. Abbott, Ruth Park and Dal Stivens also appeared, largely adhering to the magazine's prescribed formulas.
Another literary feature of Man was the 'magazine within a magazine' called 'Australianasia'. Edited by Ion Idriess, this section published essays and adventure fiction set in places like the Australian Outback or in the South Seas. Idriess contributed many of these, but contributions were also received from Frank Clune, Francis Birtles, Jack Hides, George Farwell, Will Lawson, Robert Kaleski and a wide variety of amateur writers.
While Man asserted an Australian attitude in early issues, its later contents often reflected the adoption of language and commercial attitudes of the United States. In his study of Man, Richard White demonstrates how Man 'exhibits an image of the Australian Male which struggled to reconcile an Australian identity with modern demands'.
The 'Man' Storyteller : A Selection of the Best Australian Fiction by Modern Writers
Sydney
:
K. G. Murray
,
1945
Z1096305
1945
anthology
short story
A collection of short stories from Man magazine.
The Man Gift Book : A Presentation of the Best Australian Writers of To-Day
Sydney
:
K. G. Murray
,
1946
Z126810
1946
anthology
short story
Man Magazine : The Australian Publishing Icon
Z1783834
website
Site contains brief history of the magazine, its writers and its editors together with images of covers.
The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity
Amherst
:
Cambria Press
,
2018
15395169
2018
multi chapter work
criticism
'In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity.
'Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world.
'This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia’s cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'This article examines the representation of masculinity in Man, a men’s magazine, in post-war Australia. While the notion of the “sleepy 1950s” has implied a period of social conservatism and gender stability, the representation of (and commentary on) men’s social, cultural and familial worlds in Man tells a rather different story. In a period in which Menzies’s breadwinner masculinity idealised work and familial life as the source of men’s satisfaction (and civilised society more broadly), Man positioned its imagined reader as desperately unhappy and frustrated by the confines of suburban life and marriage. There were limits, however, to the generosity of this critique. While trying to provide Australian men with an escape from the rigid confines of hegemonic masculinity, Man remained attached to a near-misogynist attitude to women. The distress and anguish of men, in this case, became another way to restrict the lives and choices of women.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Man Magazine : The Australian Publishing Icon
Z1783834
website
Site contains brief history of the magazine, its writers and its editors together with images of covers.
'Fair Dinkum Personal Grooming' : Male Beauty Culture and Men's Magazines in the Twentieth Century
Brisbane
:
2008
Z1828834
2008
single work
thesis
Burton analyses the representation of grooming in Australian men's lifestyle magazines to explore the emergence of new masculine subjectivities constructed around narcissism and the adoption of previously feminine-coded products and practices which may indicate important shifts in the cultural meanings of Australian masculinity. However, in order to talk about 'new' subjectivities and 'shifts' in masculine behaviours and cultural ideals, then it is imperative to demonstrate 'old' practices and ideologies, and so while the thesis is concerned with discourses of grooming and models of masculinity presented in the new genre of men's lifestyle titles which appeared on the Australian market in the late 1990s, it frames this discussion with detailed analyses of previously unexplored Australian men's general interest magazines from the 1930s ... This thesis is centrally concerned with the role of men's lifestyle magazines and magazine representations of masculinity in the 'cultural economy' of mediated male grooming cultures.
