The hero of this poem, as the name Sir Anopheles hints, is a mosquito. The author here humorously stages an encounter between man and mosquito as a drawn-out battle between a recumbent Ogre and an intrepid and undaunted medieval knight. It is clear…
‘Rivals’ is an interesting attempt by medievalist writer Victor Daley to transform what must have been a fairly commonplace incident at that time into something more than it seems. The poem describes a young man, Sir Valour, taking leave…
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…
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 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 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 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 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…