This interest piece from the Western Mail in 1954 introduces readers to Saltbush Bill, a travelling Australian folk band created and led by Queenslander William Rawle. The article likens the band to the troubadours of the medieval period, because…
This article from The West Australian in 1937 reports on a number of new knighthoods awarded as part of the King’s Coronation Honours. For the first time, the article informs readers, the recipients were ‘dubbed’ by the…
This article from The Argus in 1930 reports on the return to Melbourne of famed Australian mosaic and stained glass artist Mervyn Napier Wallace and his wife. Napier, whose mosaics in the Melbourne Town Hall and the National Gallery were already well…
This light-hearted poem by Charles Crawford is packed with poetic allusion, and with classical, medieval, and medievalist references. We find mention of several beautiful women from classical antiquity: Queen Semiramis, Eurydice, Judith, Cytheris,…
This intensely nostalgic medieval poem by E. J. Brady “is most distinctive for its unapologetic insertion of the chivalric into the local”, which becomes the source of unintended humour (Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless…
This engaging “McCrae-like medieval narrative ballad” (John B. Webb, “A Critical Biography of Edwin James Brady 1869-1952” PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1972, p.95) concerns the fortunes of a triad of ill-starred…
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,…
This 1903 Bulletin cover by Hop, which lampoons NSW politicians Sir George Reid (the Freetrade advocate) and Sir Joseph Carruthers (illustrated here holding a copy of his reform policy), draws on medievalism by depicting them as saints in stylised…