Comfort and Judgement: Nineteenth Century Advice Manuals and the Scripting of Australian Identity (Art History) - Softcover

Since the earliest days of colonisation white Australians have protectively swaddled themselves in the domestic interior. Faced with a disconcerting and entirely alien environment, the replication of English interiors provided the colony’s settler communities with the tether they sought to a guiding homeland and its comforting rules and practices. Though Australian identity is aligned, truthfully or otherwise, to the ‘masculine’ exterior: the bush, the outback and the beach, women were imperative to settler communities, and so too were the interiors they created. Comfort and Judgement provides a richer, deeper understanding of the Australian home than has been realised before.

Gene Bawden is Deputy Head of Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) design department, at Monash University,, Victoria, Australia.