Author Archive for: ‘Jill Julius Matthews’

In the first few decades of the 20th century, many members of the Sydney elite, like civilized people throughout the world, feared the challenge posed to their old culture by the new, mechanical and American “tinned culture – cinema, gramophone, wireless”. [1]  Against its incursions they staged a reaction in which good taste, anti-commercialism, anti-modernism and anti-Americanism became synonymous. This rejection …