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- Collection: Medievalism on the Page
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‘Bards of the Backblocks: Knights of Chance’, The Bulletin, 26 May 1900.
To describe everyday life in colonial Australia as entirely rural-based in 1900 would be misleading, for the country’s major urban centres, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, housed much of the population and fuelled its commercial vitality…
‘Jack Cade: A Tribute to the Much-Maligned Patriot (see ‘Henry VI’ Second Part. Act IV. Scene X)’, The Bulletin, 8 December 1894.
Victor Daley was an Irishman who came to Australia as a young man. He wrote romantic verse and was referred to by Vivian Smith as, “one of the most attractive poets of the nineties in Australia” (Vivian Smith, ‘Poetry’, The…
‘Eating the Leek’ (Henry V, Act V, Scene I), The Bulletin, 4 March 1893.
This political cartoon by ‘Hop’ enacts a scene from William Shakespeare’s historical play, Henry V. In the scene, Fluellen the Welshman angrily berates the unfortunate Pistol, a crony of Sir John Falstaff, and forces him to eat a…
‘Parkes and the Templars’, The Bulletin, 3 September 1887
This poem has links with medievalism through its reference to ‘the Templars’. However, the Templars to whom it refers are not the famous medieval order of crusading knights but rather the crusading nineteenth-century temperance society,…
‘White Knight’, The Bulletin, 17 November 1894
In this cartoon from The Bulletin in 1894 a serious-faced Edmund Fitzgibbon, fully-armoured and seated astride a caparisoned Kangaroo instead of a steed, charges off to give battle to an unnamed adversary. On a handy perch (a sign pointing to India),…
‘Lays of Contemporary Chivalry’
These light-hearted verses describe the endeavours of a motley band of ‘gallants’ with dubious social origins, who jostle and vie for the hand of Lady Podophylline Musa Miggs, daughter of the Baron of Potts Point, in Sydney. These are…
‘Gratuitous Pugnacity’, The Bulletin, 3 March 1888.
Cartoonist Phil May here encapsulates the main problems of a premature pitch by NSW for Australian Federation. The doughty knight (Sir Henry) is ready to do battle with ‘all and sundry,’ for he needs to pay off (or perhaps unload the…