When Adelaide Was Australia's Cultural Capital: The Forgotten Rebels of the 1930s

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Adelaide

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

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When Adelaide Was Australia's Cultural Capital: The Forgotten Rebels of the 1930s

Overshadowed by the major east-coast metropolises, Adelaide is often seen as peripheral to Australian cultural development. Yet in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was briefly ‘the literary capital of Australia’, (Harris 18), emerging as a key centre for the development of Australian modernism before moving to the Eastern Coast. Given that this was an anomalous position the city never held again, why has this chapter of Australian cultural history remained largely untold? The rediscovery of the radical little magazine Phoenix (1935–39) allows us to recover the full story of Adelaide’s radical Bohemia. This talk begins with the ferment around Phoenix and the network of institutions that fostered modernism in the city. It then follows the two literary movements that grew out of the magazine, the Angry Penguins and the…