Abstract

This essay examines the intersection of populist nationalism and popular modernity in Aussie (1920–1931), a commercial magazine of opinion, review and entertainment that flourished in Sydney between the wars. Aussie has been overlooked in comparison to its better-known contemporaries Smiths Weekly and the Bulletin, despite occupying the same public-commercial sphere and same discursive space as those magazines. Aussie had a significant past as the main soldiers’ paper of the First World War; in its postwar format it built a sizeable circulation on both sides of the Tasman; and for more than a decade it published the major Australian writers and cartoonists of the day. The essay seeks not only to restore the magazine to its position as a significant player in the print culture of its period but also to use this case study to explore methodological questions about the historical interpretation of magazines as complex texts and the nature of Australian modernity. In particular it explores the gap between the nationalist editorial platform of the magazine and the investment in new forms of consumer and gender modernity found elsewhere in its pages. The magazine’s ambivalence towards the modern was institutional, not merely ideological, a function of its position in a modernising print marketplace. This article has been peer-reviewed.

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