This full-page illustration by the Bulletin’s American-born cartoonist Livingston Hopkins (aka ‘Hop’), pokes fun at some of Australia’s prominent political figures. The 25 June 1887 issue of the Bulletin reviewed Queen…
This amusing temperance ‘ditty’ describes the adventures of “a burly Templar chief†whose carefree night of drinking turns out to be more than he expected or bargained for. The I.O.G.T. was a temperance society (The…
This is another cheeky comment from Bulletin cartoonist Tom Durkin, directed at the reputedly self-important chairman of the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works, E. G. Fitzgibbon. In the cartoon Fitzgibbon is throwing a temper tantrum over…
This poem provides a vigorous denunciation of “the English caste system†and “celebrates the decay of feudalism,†at least in the Australian rural locale (Louise D'Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in…
‘Dam(n)pier as Mephistopheles,’ is The Bulletin cartoonist Phil May’s humorous pun on actor and theatrical entrepreneur Alfred Dampier’s name (See Louise D'Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian…
This online newspaper article by Henrietta Cook appeared in The Age on March 15, 2012. It reports on an incident during the weekly Swordcraft event in Melbourne, Victoria, in which a woman was hit in the head by a rubber sword and required medical…
This poem is an example of the satirical verses published by The Bulletin to ridicule the perceived “opportunistic and self-serving†collaborative association between former political opponents (aka ‘rivals’), Sir Henry…
The long-vanished past is briefly reconfigured in this sad and poignant poem. It allows us a fleeting glimpse of what has (or may have) been, even though we find ourselves standing in the waking world “Under blue skies in a fair land.