| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Jill Julius Matthews. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. Sydney, Australia: Currency Press. 2005. Pp. x, 342.

Jill Julius Matthews has hitherto been known in general historical debate for her trail-blazing book Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (1984). She will be henceforth known for this book as well, which transmutes culture change in one city into the broader flows of popular culture production in an increasingly networked and American-dominated world. Matthews's focus is the thirty-year period of relative prosperity between the ending of one economic depression in the 1890s and the onset of another in 1929. This time period corresponds with the consolidation of complex and globally connected urban forms. In Sydney, it is delineated as well by the screening of the city's first motion picture in 1896, and by the first viewing of a full-length talking movie (The Jazz Singer) late in 1928. Matthews sees synergies between these developments. Her purpose is in part to describe how modernity was tangibly expressed in everyday city life: through department stores and dance halls, gramophone records, radio, and cinema. In so doing Matthews also identifies the friction points—for example, competition locally and internationally for commercial advantage, to influence the regulatory environment, and to arbitrate the cannons of public taste—that conditioned the emerging popular culture industry. These investigations enable Matthews to engage powerfully with her core purpose: to unravel the multilayered mediations that fashioned the kaleidoscopic essence of early twentieth-century urban culture.

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