Local government is admired for being ‘close to the people’. Respect from communities extends naturally to those institutions that claim to represent or serve them, as many local governments do. The centralised mass media blitz means citizens are better informed about issues and actors on the national stage than those local and so it is that the third tier of government in this country is unregarded. It may be that the public’s expectations of local governments have not been high, as well as not being particularly well informed. In which case this wide-ranging study coming as it does from an experienced practitioner, Frank Hornby, promises much, especially as he claims to offer us an historical and a national account.

Guided as he is by the pioneer historian of local government in New South Wales, Frank Larcombe, Hornby identifies the failure of early initiatives. In rudimentary urban and rural settings landholders were reluctant to accept responsibility for local amenities in the absence of support from the central government. Modern local government as the Australian colonies received it derived from reform initiatives undertaken to serve the pressing needs of sanitation, energy and transport in the new industrial cities of Britain. The taxed ratepayer, municipal borrowings, the town clerk and the salaried expert were the new faces and features of Britain’s reformed corporations in places like Manchester and Birmingham. So they might have been in Australia and truly influential had colonial corporations been allowed to keep pace with the growth of cities and towns and not savaged by colonial central governments who, paradoxically and, in turn, were themselves captured by localism – by ‘local members’. Colonial and State governments in Australia controlled municipalities and kept them down by fiat of legislative control, leaving them numerous and relatively powerless. On occasion they have denied their democracy. It remains no accident that the most recent attempt to have local government recognised in the Constitution failed dismally.

Hornby brings us quickly to the twentieth century. Too quickly in this reviewers view and notwithstanding a rich store of archival and research material in all the colonies and states, which he ignores in favour of but a few often ancient secondary sources and numerous reports. He misses much that is relevant in the colonial and State settings. The debates over the franchise, the growth of municipal assets and services, crises of infrastructure, of transport and public health, the splendour of ceremonies, town halls and cultural entertainments, the complex character of councillors and aldermen and mayors, reform initiatives like the town planning and the greater city movements, social evils, old and new world exchanges, women and charity work – these hold little interest for him. Overview accounts of local government history in major colonies such as Queensland and Victoria are simply inadequate. Before we know it the book is less than a quarter gone and we are in contemporary times and the author’s comfort territory. He is interested in the peer association of local governments as an interest group, even as a player in Australian national politics. This perhaps explains his ready inclination to read putative national figures (Sir Henry Parkes, but only Parkes) and national events (Federation) into his story. By and large though individuals do not much trouble this narrative, not even major administrators or long serving councillors or for that matter innovative ministers of local government who might have had some vision for the sector. This is local government seen from above through a crude national and peer prism of national politics.

We do get some signposts. The Whitlam government’s far-sighted Australian Assistance Plan (AAP), for example, that sought to establish direct links (and funding for) local communities. It was resisted, predictably by State governments and more surprisingly by many municipal bodies. The author gives an account of events and institutional bodies he himself participated in, like the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), a body writ large in this story. His account of local government’s involvement with Indigenous people, ‘new settlers’ (migrants) and themed issues, ‘affordable housing’ and arts and culture, are seen through the prism of conference deliberations and submitted reports rather than any deeper or systematic research. The final section four promisingly subtitled ‘Local Government and National Politics’ is similarly constrained. All of which encourages the reader to wonder whether a memoir rather than a supposedly objective and researched ‘history’ would have been a better vehicle for the contents of this book. This is a pity, as there is a need for a wide-ranging and historically well-informed study of this unregarded third tier of government in Australia.

This book review was originally published in Australian Historical Studies

The post Review: “Australian Local Government and Community Development” appeared first on David Dunstan.

So much in thrall are we with imaging technology’s spectacular and converging internet, television and the cinema applications that we are sometimes forgetful of its history. Media history, let alone media pre-history, gets scant attention these days. This is a pity because Mimi Colligan’s Canvas Documentaries is fascinating on pre-cinematic forms and popular culture in Australia and New Zealand.

Quite understandably, we prefer a history of ‘firsts’, great beginnings and successes. We think of the birth of photography and the cinema as defining moments (and so they were) but many teachers of media, film and communications would do well to explore this book that explores the world of commercial image making and presentation in the nineteenth century through the diorama and the panorama (moving, still and modelled) and that interesting but almost forgotten construction, the cyclorama. Colligan takes her cue from pioneering studies such as Richard Altick’s The Shows of London tracing these entertainments (and their people) to the antipodes, where, not surprisingly, wealth was to be had and they plied a busy trade, although the record of bankruptcies and downfalls suggests a hazardous livelihood as well. The terrain is not so little known amongst historians, which is where Dr Colligan began. Many will be aware of her 1987 Monash university doctoral thesis ‘Canvas and Wax’ for its ground-breaking explorations of nineteenth century popular culture. Canvas Documentaries is a long awaited embracing in book form of this terrain with much gleaned in the interim in Australia and overseas libraries by one of the best researchers in the business.

This is not just a story of picture men on the move from the old world to the new but a well-documented study in art history and popular culture, one in which the images go backwards and forth. Many early representations of Australia were, after all, intended for these forms. Canvas Documentaries offers contextualisation for many of the images of Australian history. A panoramic view of Sydney was on show at Barker’s Panorama in the Strand, London, as early as 1824. Sketches by August Earle provided the basis for a similar display on Hobart in 1831. London was then the world’s market for such entertainments but colonial centres soon boasted populations and potential audiences for the same and in the forty year period of moving panorama popularity in Australia (which ranged from the mid 1840s to the late 1880s) Colligan observes three main categories of subject: scenes of the colonies themselves, scenes of England and the Continent, and scenes of historical and contemporary battles, with religious scenes included as a minor category.

‘Static pictures’ represented on stage in the form of theatre ‘scenes’ quite early provided bread and butter work for artists. Successful practitioners were always striving after effects that would enthral and enliven. Colligan tells us about these scene painters and gives us important insights into practical, and then highly commercial, applications of artistic technique. Her journeymen scene painters, some trained and some self-taught, some famous some less so, moved with illusionism’s appeal through panoramas, dioramas, and cycloramas – a useful ‘picture show terminology’ is offered to the definitionally-challenged reader in the early pages. The terms may be unfamiliar to some but they shouldn’t be, for their legacy in visual technique is significant and call to mind the latest attempts at virtual reality and video games involving applications of lasers and holography – there is, after all, nothing new under the sun. The panorama, too, as Colligan notes, had its origins way back in the quest for realism in art in techniques deriving from the Renaissance, but which, as visual attractions, offered spectacles to the masses. And so Victorian ideologues told, just possibly, a form of rational amusement – commercial entrepreneurs of such entertainments could always justify their enterprise in such terms.

The fun fairs, pleasure gardens and theatres led the way but most impressive and dedicated at the end of the period was the Cyclorama (from the Greek cycl, round; and rama, view: round view). The term was used in the United States and Australia to distinguish 360-degree panoramas from moving panoramas. These were purpose-build constructions into which the public entered (for a fee, of course) to marvel in promenading comfort at scenes of the Eureka Stockade or the Battle of Waterloo. For some reason battles seem to have offered the cyclorama’s main fare, its forte perhaps being the realistic presentation of landscapes. The story is balanced across the Tasman and Bass Strait, even if Melbourne gets the lion’s share of attention. It was, after all, the get rich quick metropolis. It had the well-to-do and the masses; also, entrepreneurs like George Coppin whose gold rush period Cremorne Gardens in Richmond were elaborate pleasure gardens on the London model. Among its illusionistic extravaganzas was an erupting Vesuvius. Like Cremorne, Melbourne’s cycloramas have not survived. But the State Library of Victoria still has John Hennings 360 degree backdrop painting of pre-gold rush Melbourne from the Cyclorama display of Early Melbourne shown at the Exhibition Building in 1892. The cyclorama buildings, alas, have not survived, although the remnant and altered structures managed to prick the interest of the heritage-minded, Colligan among them. A rebuilt cyclorama ought to be a viable project for heritage media enthusiasts. After all, steam buffs keep their technology alive.

These displays and the peregrinatons of their authors, meticulously recorded and documented by Colligan, tell us much about cultural transmission and production in Australia in the nineteenth century and Canvas Documentaries should encourage further studies. Arcana as the topic may seem to some, we are not dealing with marginal experience. As Colligan reminds us, in those times of ‘simple technology and daunting geographical distances such images attracted mass audiences’, or at least they were mass audiences by the standards of the day. Possibly also, these images and entertainments were as forging of contemporary identity and cultural understandings as any period novel or collection of gallery paintings so ardently worshipped by scholars today, and probably a good deal more so.

This review originally appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies issue 78 (2003), pp. 163-165.

The post Panoramic Entertainments in the Nineteenth Century appeared first on David Dunstan.