Being Modern on a Slender Income: "Picture Show" and "Photoplayer" in early 1920s Sydney

This article examines how Sydney movie magazines connected provincial audiences to a globalized culture centered on Hollywood. Such publications recognized that they had to mediate both the economic and the geographic gap that existed between images of film-inspired modernity and their readers' lives. By promising an insider's view, movie magazines brought the distant world of Hollywood celebrity to Australian readers with a powerful immediacy, and urged them to incorporate this information into their daily lives. Movie magazines offered a seductive image of society in which a woman's fate was determined not by her wealth, but by the transformative potential of personal style and self promotion learnt from movies. These sources allow for a case study exploring the nexus between the global and the local in the construction of particular models of femininity, consumption, and modernity.