Australian History/Art History
Book Details

Canvas Documentaries

Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand

Mimi Colligan

Long before cinema was invented, people went to picture shows. Canvas Documentaries captures the artistic, civic and social preoccupations of popular culture in nineteenth-century Australia.

Opinion

‘This is not just a story of picture men on the move from the old world to the new but a well-documented study in art history and popular culture, one in which the images go back and forth.’ (JAS Review of Books, May 2003)

Mimi Colligan 'describes, aided by wonderful and numerous illustrations in a handsome A4 landscape format, the various kinds of giant visual displays with appeared in Melbourne and elsewhere between the 1840s and the early twentieth century'. (Theatre Research International, vol 28/2, 2003)

About this Title

Long before cinema was invented, people went to picture shows. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, Europe and America they were treated to dramatic pictorial spectacles.

Audiences might be encircled by vast 360-degree canvases, or seated before continuous images drawn across a proscenium, or gathered in amusement parks to watch painted 3-D structures come ‘alive’ with the explosion of fireworks overhead. The sense of realism was enhanced by back-lighting, running commentaries and props such as real sand and trees.

These spectacular representations of scenery, current events or recent battles abroad were indeed documentaries on canvas—the first travelogues.

The phenomenon of complex circular panoramas and dioramas took root in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s. They drew enthusiastic crowds, brought good work for local artists, and propagated the glories of empire in all the capital cities they toured.

Canvas Documentaries captures the artistic, civic and social preoccupations of the times. Generously illustrated with paintings, etchings, engravings, mechanical drawings, architectural plans, photographs and advertising material, this beautiful book is a window on the vibrant popular culture of the Victorian era.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Picture Show Terminology
Preface
Introduction

1 Grand Tours for a Shilling: The English background
2 Moving Panoramas: Presenting the world and local exploits
3 Panorama Business: Far-off battles and armchair travel
4 Across the Stage: Moving panoramas in Australian theatre
5 Vesuvius in Melbourne: Outdoor modelled panoramas and fireworks
6 Pompeii in Australia: Pain’s pyrotechnics and modelled panoramas
7 At the Battles: Cycloramas in Australia
8 Exhibiting Old Melbourne: The cyclorama of early Melbourne
9 Around the Country: The intercolonial cyclorama circuit
10 On the Move: The decline of panoramic picture shows

List of Illustrations
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Dr Mimi Colligan is an honorary research associate in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, National Centre for Australian Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University. She writes on nineteenth-century popular culture, and is the only historian to have made a detailed study of Australasian panoramas.

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978-0-522-85019-2