Harmonising the City
Music, Multiculturalism and The Muses' Magazine in Brisbane
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1375/qr.18.1.26Keywords:
Brisbane, 1920s, political and social conflicts, community cohesion, multiculturalism, The Muses' MagazineAbstract
Brisbane in the 1920s certainly had its tense moments, but what struck me most forcibly in browsing the local newspapers from the period was how successfully political and social conflicts were absorbed into the peaceful, civil and law-abiding fabric of Brisbane life. World-altering events like the Russian Revolution, the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, the Irish Troubles and the rise of Mussolini were reported and discussed in the press and elsewhere, but matters seldom went further than that despite the real potential — given the presence of significant Russian, German, Irish and Italian minorities in the city’s population — for ‘imported’ tensions. Even the momentous political developments that occurred in Brisbane in the early 1920s, when the state government’s efforts to secure foreign loans were sabotaged by an opposition-funded delegation to London, and the Premier, EG (‘Red Ted’) Theodore, forced the parliamentary upper house to terminate its own existence, failed to polarise or fracture the community to any significant degree.
References
Accounts of this period in Queensland history can be found in Ross Fitzgerald, From 1915 to the Early 1980s: A History of Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984), pp. 14–41, and Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 159ff. Despite their own differences of approach and emphasis, neither Fitzgerald nor Evans accords the same social, political and cultural distinctiveness to the 1920s that the present article proposes.
ABC of Queensland and Australian Statistics 1927 (Brisbane: Registrar-General, Queensland, 1927), p. 96; ABC of Queensland and Australian Statistics 1934 (Brisbane: Registrar-General, Queensland, 1934), p. 144.
Not to be confused with the Società Dante Alighieri (Dante Alighieri Society), the international organisation founded in Rome in 1889. Official branches of the DAS were established in Melbourne in 1896 and Sydney in 1925, but not in Brisbane until 1937. Based on the information contained in several issues of The Muses’ Magazine, it seems clear that the ‘Dante Society’ that was formed in 1926 (with Archbishop Duhig as patron, HG Tommerup as president, and JJ Stable as vice-president) was quite separate from the later Dante Alighieri Society branch. I do not know whether it still existed in 1937.
The list is compiled from several sources, including HA Tardent, ‘Linguistic Study in Brisbane’, The Muses’ Magazine, 11 (September 1928): 1, and Multicultural Queensland: 100 Years, 100 Communities: A Century of Contributions, ed. Maximilien Brändle (Brisbane: Multicultural Affairs Queensland, 2001).
Leanne M Day, ‘Civilising the City: Literary Societies and Clubs in Brisbane During the 1880s and 1890s’, unpublished PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2005.
Raymond Evans, ‘Conscription Riot’, ‘Government Printing Office, 1917’, ‘Red Flag Riots, 1919’, in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History, eds Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier, with Jeff Rickertt (Melbourne: Vulgar Press, 2004), pp. 156–74. See also Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988).
See, for example, Stable’s urgent cable to Prime Minister Hughes on the eve of the Government Printing Office raid: ‘Is there any way of preventing this other than by armed force?’ In response, Hughes arrived in Brisbane the next day and personally directed the first of the raids by the army. There seems no doubt that Hughes, unlike Stable, was eager for violence: three days later, he responded to eggs being thrown at him during a speech in Warwick by leaping into the crowd, ‘reaching inside his overcoat for a revolver — fortunately left behind in another coat in the railway carriage — astonishing those watching with his “wildly infuriated manner”’. Evans, Radical Brisbane, pp. 164, 162.
Evans, Red Flag Riots, p. 83.
Patrick Buckridge, ‘Roles for Writers: Brisbane and Literature, 1859–1975’, in By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, eds Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2007), p. 61.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 6.
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 70.
JC Mahoney, ‘Stable, Jeremiah Joseph (1883?1953)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 12 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), p. 42; ‘Queensland Authors and Artists Association’, The Muses’ Magazine, 11 (September 1928): 19.
E Clarke, ‘Roe, Reginald Heber (1850?1926)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 11 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), pp. 437–9; Day, Civilising the City, pp. 26–69.
M French, ‘Tardent, Henry Alexis (1853?1929)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), pp. 167–8.
Craig Munro, Inky Stephenson: Wild Man of Letters (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992), pp. 4–5.
French, ‘Tardent’, p. 168.
Luis Amadeo Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away (Brisbane: Author, 1943), p. 34.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 61.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 79.
Brisbane Courier, 15 November 1923: 13; 6 November 1924: 12; 22 May 1924: 16; 4 July 1925: 12; 10 July 1924: 12; 19 June 1924: 13.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 106.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 110.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. pp. 83–6. See also Brisbane Courier, 13 March 1929, p. 16.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 80.
Reports on some of these events can be found in the Brisbane Courier, 7 February 1925: 5; 2 May 1925: 17; 6 May 1925: 12; 19 September 1925: 11.
The score of the lullaby, La Cuna [Cradle Song], composed by LA Parés, with words by CA Neville, can be viewed online in the State Library of Queensland collection.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 93.
Both comments are quoted in the first issue of The Muses’ Magazine, 1 (November 1927): 32.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 95. The poem was also published in The Muses’ Magazine, 4 (February 1928): 16.
It was not totally original. A similar attempt had been made in England in 1911, resulting in a performance by over 1000 schoolchildren at the Crystal Palace, London. (On that occasion, as the Courier pointed out, the children were all ‘pupils of teachers who were paid for their services’, which served to highlight Parés’s generosity and vision. Brisbane Courier, 5 March 1927: 26.
Brisbane Courier, 4 May 1948: 4.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 90.
HG Tommerup, ‘In Aid of Culture’, The Muses’ Magazine, 1 (November 1927): 26.
The Muses’ Magazine, 1 (November 1927): 3ff., 6ff.
The Muses’ Magazine, 2 (December 1927): 1.
The phrase (often misquoted with ‘beast’ instead of ‘breast’) comes from William Congreve’s tragedy, The Mourning Bride, Act I, Scene 1.
Both Tardent and Parés evince a keen interest in the psychology of musical experience. In addition to the ‘morceaux’ from Frank Howes’ book, there is a similar number of quotations on the same subject by the aesthetician Vernon Lee [Violet Paget]. Lee’s chief work on the psychology of music, however, first appeared in 1932, and the source for the many quotations from her work in 1928 is something of a mystery.
Frank Howes, The Borderland of Music and Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, 1926). For Howes’ career, see Diana McVeagh, ‘Howes, Frank Stewart (1891–1974)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
The Muses’ Magazine, 12 (November–December 1928): n.p.
The Muses’ Magazine, 12 (November–December 1928): n.p.
The Muses’ Magazine, 2 (December 1928): 17.
For example, Tommerup, ‘In Aid of Culture’: 26.
Parés, I Fiddled the Years Away, p. 96.
Brisbane Courier, 13 March 1929: 16.
