y separately published work icon The Home periodical  
Date: 1939-1942
Date: 1922-1938
Date: 1920-1921
Issue Details: First known date: 1920... 1920 The Home
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

The first issue of the Home appeared in February 1920. Published by Art in Australia Ltd, the Home was aimed at the Australian market of middle-class women readers to help underwrite the publication of Art in Australia and other publishing projects. Initially produced by a team of editors, including Sydney Ure Smith (art editor), Bertram Stevens (literary editor) and Julia Lister (fashion editor), the Home suffered early losses, but strengthened to provide the financial stability required by Art in Australia Ltd.

The Home is widely admired for its role in the development of graphic art and advertising in Australian magazines, particularly the influence of its magazine covers. Often proclaiming to be 'modern', the magazine did not, however, embrace all contemporary developments in modern art, rejecting techniques such as cubism, futurism and surrealism. Nevertheless, discussion of modern technology and architecture, and the magazine's role in advertising and cover art gave the magazine a very modern appearance for its time.

Combined with Sydney Ure Smith's advertising connections, the Home and Art in Australia developed a significant network of associates in graphic arts, advertising, printing and publishing. Seizing on this potential, the magazine was bought (with Art in Australia) by the Fairfax press in 1934 to challenge magazines such as Vogue and Fashion and Society. Ure Smith and Leon Gellert were retained as editors, but after the magazines failed to live up to Fairfax's expectations, Ure Smith retired to pursue other projects. Gellert remained as editor until the Home ceased publication in 1942.

While not often recognised for its literary content, the Home published the work of many of Australia's leading writers. Contributors included Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice, Nettie Palmer, Norman Lindsay, Lionel Lindsay, Joan Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor, Mary Gilmore, Arthur Adams and David Unaipon. Katharine Susannah Prichard's novel The Wild Oats of Han was serialised in Home during 1926 and 1927. The magazine also printed articles on a number of Australian writers and artists, including Norman Lindsay, Barbara Baynton, Will Dyson, George Lambert, Margaret Preston and Hans Heysen.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

First known date: 1920

Works about this Work

Constructing Citizenship : Labour, Urban Development and Citizenship in Australian Design Magazines of the 1930s Melissa Miles , Geraldine Fela , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 47 no. 1 2023; (p. 27-48)

'The photographs that fill the pages of the Australian illustrated magazines The Home and Decoration and Glass offer new insights into the connections between urban development and citizenship in 1930s Sydney. This article focuses on two sites in which urban citizenship was represented and contested in these magazines: symbolic images of white Australian construction workers as builders of the nation, and debates about the lived experience of urban citizenship associated with the rise in flat construction. The multivocal quality of these illustrated magazines provides a means of addressing the complex interconnections between the built environment and cultural conceptions of citizenship. Examining work in and for these illustrated magazines shows that citizenship was neither understood nor lived as a fixed status defined and conferred by the state, but a contested series of values, obligations and modes of social participation.' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Victoria Kuttainen , Susann Liebich , Sarah Galletly , 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.

Illustrating Mobility : Networks of Visual Print Culture and the Periodical Contexts of Modern Australian Writing Victoria Kuttainen , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;

'This article reviews the illustration history of Australian periodicals to place modern illustrated short stories in this context.  It argues that illustrated periodicals drew on networks of etchers, engravers, printers, promoters, advertisers, authors, and artists that were globally distributed as well as locally contentrated.  As Victorian Studies have experienced a visual turn in the last decade, and as modern periodical studies have also gained momentum, this paper argues that the time is past due to consider Australian Literature in terms of its connections to visual print culture, especially in the peridocial scene. Of the several reasons this article offers to account for persistent oversights of this material in the Australian context, it explores the ways that modern magazines challenge existing paradigms of national literature because of their intensive investments in travel, mobility, and commercial culture. Yet, in their original contexts, illustrated short stories in modern Australian magazines that celebrated these values existed side-by-side with nationalist literature and national brands.' (Publication abstract)

Style, Modernity and Popular Magazines : Writing Pacific Travel Victoria Kuttainen , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Telling Stories : Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012 2013; (p. 51-56)
The Home Blake Singley , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Found in Fryer : Stories from the Fryer Library Collection 2010; (p. 96-97)
Focuses patricularly on the special food number of the Home.
y separately published work icon Making Australian Art 1916-49 : Sydney Ure Smith, Patron and Publisher Nancy Underhill , South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1991 Z1041402 1991 single work bibliography
Editorial Notes 1920 single work criticism
— Appears in: Birth : A Little Journal of Australian Poetry , March vol. 4 no. 40 1920; (p. 31-32)
The Home : An Australian Bi-Monthly : Editorial i "Good editors are very few -", 1924 single work poetry humour
— Appears in: The Home , 1 November vol. 5 no. 4 1924; (p. 11)
Always at 'Home' i "Behold my lady fair!", Hugh McCrae , 1924 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Home , 1 December vol. 5 no. 5 1924; (p. 114)
A Talk to Our Advertisers George Patterson , 1925 single work column
— Appears in: The Home , 1 August vol. 6 no. 4 1925; (p. 9)

Recounting how the The Home was founded as a quality publication, G. H. Patterson notes that the journal has established 'a circulation of readers comprising mostly the well-to-do people throughout the Commonwealth'. He subsequently discusses 'the value of The Home as an advertising medium', particularly for 'an advertiser who has luxuries to sell'.

PeriodicalNewspaper Details

Subtitle:
The Australian Journal of Quality
Subtitle:
An Australian Quarterly
Frequency:
Quarterly (1920-1924); bi-monthly (1924-1925); monthly (1926-1942)
Range:
1920-1942 (Vol. 1, no. 1, Feb. 1920 - v. 23, no. 9, Sept. 1942)
Mergers:
From 1940 incorporates the Sydney Mail.
Size:
30cm; 80-90 pages
Price:
2 shillings and sixpence

Has serialised

The Epistles of Pamela, Barbara Macdonald , series - author prose humour
Written in the form of personal correspondence, Pamela's humorous letters recount details of country life from the sheep farming property, 'Kukooburrabong'. The first instalment establishes that Pamela has recently arrived from England and that she (and husband Peter) had a 'ripping time' in Sydney. Depicting the chic Pamela in the midst of various rural pursuits, each instalment includes illustrations with accompanying captions.
The Careerist : An Aspect of Sydney Life, John Dalley , single work novel
'Unlike most Australian fiction, this story is almost entirely concerned with city life. Richard Rowley Baynes is a typical ambitious Australian who starts on the ground floor and works to the top. His view of Australian Society is that of a keen witted climber, with some experience of London for comparison, and his career makes piquant reading for those who know anything about Australian life. Its strong human interest, however, is sufficient to command the interest of readers anywhere. The characters are lifelike, but no one in the story is intended to represent a real person.' (Source: The Home, 1 December 1921)
The Wild Oats of Han, Katharine Susannah Prichard , single work novel
The People with No Clothes, Bartlett Adamson , single work novel adventure romance
'An amateur airman, Huntingdon ("Don") Garde, discovers a sheer-walled canyon in Central Australia. He makes a forced landing on the bank of a river which traverses the vast cavity, and while exploring the region the aeroplane disappears. Within the canyon he finds a strange community, speaking old Spanish, practising ancient torture-rites and ruled by an old despot. Garde and a girl named Liria form an attachment. After various terrifying happenings the two get separated, Liria being with the people of the canyon, and in great peril, while Garde is shut off from her by a line of sentinels and watch fires.' (Source: The Home, June 1927)
Last amended 6 Mar 2018 14:10:22
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