What was the Mantua? How a 17th-century Gown Transformed Dressmaking and Ushered in Financial Freedom for Women

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, 1653, an early version of the mantua

By Sarah Bendall

If you’ve watched many period dramas, you’ve probably seen a mantua before. Originating in France in the 1670s, this women’s garment consisted of lengths of t-shaped fabric that were pleated to create an unstiffened bodice with attached overskirts.

This gown was worn over a pair of stays (corset) and an often contrasting petticoat. The draping and folding of fabric created a front-opening gown.

What many people don’t realise, however, is how fundamentally this item of clothing altered women’s involvement in the fashion industry – and represented a ticket to financial freedom for an industry of female mantua makers.

The robe à la française was a mantua style that featured loose back pleats that draped to the floor. The Met/Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Bequest, 1954

What was the mantua?

After its invention in the 1670s, the new gown became immediately popular among fashionable Parisian women.

Although strict dress codes at the Versailles court of French King Louis XIV prohibited the wearing of mantuas, women at the English court helped popularise it in England.

By the 1680s, the mantua was widely worn in Western and Central Europe, as well as in European colonies around the world. It soon became the basis for all women’s gowns in the 18th century.

Popular versions of the mantua in 18th century included:

• the loose style called a robe volante

• the iconic robe à la française (sometimes called a sack gown) with its back pleats that draped to the floor, and

• the tighter fitting robe à la anglaise  (also known as English or Italian gowns).

The robe à l’anglaise had fitted back pleats and was tighter compared to its French counterpart. The Met/Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Bequest, 2018

Tailors vs mantua makers

As well as changing the look of western fashions, the mantua radically changed women’s involvement in the fashion industry.

Before the 17th century, outer garments were usually made by male tailors. Apprenticeships and membership of guilds – the organisations that controlled most craft trades – were restricted to boys and men.

Women did participate informally in these professions. They sometimes worked alongside tailor family members (and some were fined for doing so) and widows were permitted to carry on the businesses of their deceased husbands.

Women had also historically worked as seamstresses or “silkwomen” making small linen or silk goods like underwear and accessories.

This loose 1730s style was called a robe volante. The Met/Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2010

However, this began to change in the late 17th century during what came to be known as the consumer revolution – a period, beginning in the 1600s, that saw a significant jump in the consumption of luxury goods.

Significantly, in 1675, women in Paris and Rouen acquired their own, independent couturière (dressmaking) guilds and began to take over making women’s clothing from male tailors.

In London, guilds with dwindling memberships also began to permit paying female members.

Due to the considerable influence of France on western fashions, women in London began to train under French dressmakers, giving rise to what were known in English as mantua makers.

Dressmaking and financial freedom

From the 18th to 20th centuries, dressmaking and other fashion or textile-related industries were the main source of formal employment for women in Britain, Australia and the United States (alongside teaching and domestic service).

New training opportunities in dressmaking – coupled with historical peculiarities such as London’s feme sole status, which allowed married women to run businesses and have finances independent of their husbands – meant many women began to open their own businesses.

Single women often lived in houses with other mantua makers and their apprentices, working as teams. Married women usually operated in workshops in the family home alongside their husbands, many of whom worked as tailors.

By the mid-18th century, manuals instructing parents on craft apprenticeships for their children noted mantua making was a large trade

reckoned a genteel, as well as profitable Employ [for women], many of them living well and saving Money.

But several male tailoring guilds in Europe attempted to stop women working as mantua makers, claiming they were taking away their business. Additionally, many women who worked in the garment-making industries were poorly paid and often worked in cramped conditions.

Mantuas were sometimes pinned up at the back like this 1690s example. The Met/Rogers Fund, 1933

Yet, many did rise above. French mantua makers were particularly popular, with women in London paying substantially more for gowns made by French women with access to the latest fashion knowledge in Paris.

Some became confidants of queens. The famous fashion merchant Marie-Jeanne “Rose” Bertin designed many of French queen Marie Antoinette’s gowns (her detractors labelled her the queen’s “minister of fashion”).

These networks gave these women access to vast amounts of clients and social capital. By the 19th century, senior dressmakers and milliners called modistes often ran their own luxury fashion houses in the West End of London.

Mantua making was also a significant business opportunity for women in Australia.

“M. Hayes”, Catherine Mellon and Martha Matthews were all “mantua makers and milliners” who advertised their services in the early years of the Sydney colony.

Legacies of mantua makers

During the early years of the 19th century, mantuas fell out of use as new styles appeared. The term “dressmaker” also came to slowly replace the term “mantua maker”.

However, the gendered segregation of labour remained. During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, men were more likely to be tailors and have their clothing made by tailors. Women were more likely to be dressmakers and have their clothing made by dressmakers. The skills and techniques of each profession remained quite different.

With the advent of modern fast fashion, the skills of both tailors and dressmakers are fast being lost, and with it the knowledge of this revolutionary trade for women.

Sarah Bendall, Research Fellow, Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University

TRAVEL: A River Runs Through It: Echuca Dreaming on the Mighty Murray

Alfred Maslen's paddle steamer the PS Adelaide is still plowing through the waters of the Murray River today, after more than 150 years of service on Australia's greatest waterway. Cover picture of the Port of Echuca. See historic images below

Victoria's port town of Echuca on the Murray River has a rich history with its paddle steamers and riverboat men who travelled through vast inland areas of Australia. For a century, they transported wheat and wool and brought news, groceries and cloth to the people living in distant river country. Australia's Mississippi, the mighty Murray winds its way for thousands of kilometres from the soaring Mount Kosciuszko ranges down to the South Australian coast. Writer Geoffrey Maslen recalls his childhood days riding the river with his father, a steamboat engineer on the PS Adelaide

 

Morning mist rising from the Murray River
as a paddle steamer chuffs along

IN early winter the Murray River is low. Daily the mud-banks on each side appear to move together as if trying to staunch the river’s flow. The water is still fast-moving but without the broad, graceful sweep it has in spring and summer. Its colour, too, is different – a sombre grey, unlike the cheerful brown-green of the warmer months. As the morning sun drives back the shadows of the gum trees lining the banks, a white mist hovers over the waters. Seen from the top of a clay cliff bank, the mist winds away before me, slowly melting in the faint warmth. Below, at the water’s edge, a white egret perches on one leg eyeing its image – a long, pale question mark – in the water’s sheen. A flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos screeches like winged lunatics in the trees on the opposite bank. They suddenly take to the air and in an instant are gone. The brief silence is broken when a fat yellow-belly leaps out of the water and plops loudly back beneath the swirling waters – one of the many fish species that draw thousands of fishermen each year. A carolling magpie calls melodiously and a black-winged currawong sings a reply. Life is abundant around and in the river. For the creatures that rely on it, the river is life...

  

The Murray once echoed to the shrill whistles of a hundred trading paddle steamers, puffing thousands of kilometres with passengers and cargo ~ long before railways and motor cars and aeroplanes ~ through country Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The men on the steamers opened up a vast area of inland Australia, feeding and clothing the people living in the river country and carrying away their produce. They were also the floating mailmen and newsboys, spreading friendly gossip and even at times the word of the Lord. The overlanders who travelled by horse and dray, the steamboat men and the pioneer settlers regarded the river in different ways: for some the water was for crops and stock; for others, it was a great transport highway. The gums they saw as fence posts, firewood, boats or railway sleepers, the cliffs as quarries.

 

The steamboat men opened up vast areas of inland Australia, bringing food and clothing to the people living in the river country and carrying away their produce

 

Built in 1866, the PS Adelaide is still plying
 the river today, carrying passengers

In my childhood, my father Alfred Maslen was the engineer on the oldest paddle steamer then left on the Murray, the PS Adelaide whose age has now passed the century and a half mark. She is a sturdy old tub, no beauty to be sure with her squat lines and snub nose. But she has a certain rakish grace, sailing the river like some outsize, mechanical duck. As with most of the riverboats, the Adelaide was built to last in 1866. She was originally fitted out to accommodate passengers on the run from Echuca to Albury but in 1873 she was refitted as logging steamer and for nearly 100 years she pulled barges of cargo – red gum logs in her later years – up and down the river to Echuca. I can see her now, chuffing her way upstream towing a string of barges behind to collect logs from the Barmah forest. The barges were outriggers with a number of logs lashed crosswise and from these the red gum logs, too heavy to float, were suspended by chains on the surface of the water, parallel to the barge.

 

 Curled up in the paddle steamer's bunk house I could look up into the sky, stars glittering like tiny crystals while meteoric sparks from the boat's belching tunnel flamed momentarily beneath them

 

A small boy with the Riverboat Captain,
 at the big wheel of his paddle steamer

On special occasions I was allowed to go too ~ a week on the high road! Bliss for a small boy was the marvel of the two great thrusting pistons, the hiss of steam, the steady, hypnotic chunka-plunk-chunk of the paddles. During the day there was ever-changing scenery ~ red gum forests, high cliffs, sand bars ~ with occasional stops at the wood piles to load up with firewood. And there was wildlife galore: ducks of every kind, huge flocks of swans, innumerable species of other birds and sometimes a long tiger snake, its head up like a periscope, swimming like mad to escape the whack of the paddles. At night the great eyes of the headlamps would sweep the bends and stare along the reaches into the weird and silent darkness of the bush. Yellow water curled at the bow and the trees grew out of the darkness, flashed greenly for a moment, then sank back into the shadow. Curled up in the bunk house with the door open I could look out and up into the infinite depths of sky, stars glittering like tiny crystals while meteoric sparks from the belching tunnel flamed momentarily beneath them. As I was lulled to sleep by the steady throb of the engine I could hear the sound of the firebox doors being clanged open, the rattle of the long poker as it was wielded to rearrange the burning logs. As a new log was thrust in, the glow from the furnace would light up the trees along the bank. Then the firebox doors would clang shut and I would hear the sound of laughter and soft talk from some of the crew keeping the captain company in the wheelhouse.

From the barge behind a song would sometimes drift across the water. One was sung to the tune of The Dying Stockman: Wrap me up in my tow-line and check-line And scuttle me deep down below, Where the cod and the snags won’t molest me, Where the Murray’s clear waters do flow... But usually it was yarns that were spun; oft-repeated tales of the great days on the river and the mighty mud pirates who sailed her. There was Captain Tommy Freeman who, as a young man was inspired by the feats of Blondin and walked across the Murray high on a tightrope stretched between trees on opposite banks. When he reached the middle of the river, the Echuca Riverine Herald reported, he lay down on his back and `kicked his legs about in the most astonishing manner’.

As I was lulled to sleep by the steady throb of the engine I could hear the sound of the firebox doors being clanged open, the rattle of the long poker as it was wielded to rearrange the burning logs
 

Paddle steamers leaving the wharves
at the Port of Echuca

Tommy was one of the best swimmers among the river men. One of his favourite pastimes was to dive in ahead of one of the paddle wheels of his steamer, let the thrashing blades pass over his head and then surface and swim to the rudder where he would climb on board again. His enemies called him `Tear-arse Tommy’ because he was always trying to get the maximum speed out of boats. Once, when sailing full-steam up the Darling, Tommy pointed to a camp high on the bank to his son Buck, who was the mate.

The camper was sitting outside his tent eating breakfast. `Watch this,” Tommy said and steered the steamer straight at the bank. At the last moment, he veered away but a great wave swept up the bank and over the unsuspecting breakfaster. The furious victim, however, was waiting at the next bend with a shotgun and peppered the wheelhouse with buck-shot. The captain and mate lay on the floor arguing about who should take the wheel while the steamer rounded the bend with no-one in command until she was out of range.

The firebox doors would clang shut and I would hear the sound of laughter and soft talk from the crew keeping the captain company in the wheelhouse

Then there was Wildman Bailey, another river captain from Echuca who acted for years as if the river was his private domain. Once, sailing in the Success with a barge called Croupier, Bailey met another steamer and was supposed to but refused to give way. The two boats steamed straight at each other and missed narrowly. Bailey managed to swing away from the other boat but a collision between it and the Croupier seemed inevitable. Bailey watched helplessly as the other steamer and his barge rushed head-on at each other. `Goodbye Croupier old girl,’ he called sadly.



The PS Adelaide docked in the rising sun at Echuca

But instead, the steamer crawled up on the Croupier on one paddle wheel, waddled the full length of her deck and then slid into the river again, leaving the barge barely damaged. On another occasion, Bailey was caught up the Darling on a falling river. Flying downstream on the last of the water, he passed a sheep station just before dawn and was hailed by an anxious squatter in his pyjamas. `Hey Bailey!’ the squatter yelled, `will you take my wool? It might be another year before the river rises again.’ Bailey leaned out of the wheelhouse and stared up at the squatter. `She’s so damn near sliding on the bottom,’ he yelled back, `that I wouldn’t even take a loaf of bread – and by hell am I hungry!’

 

Today, a dozen large and small home-built boats still chuff along the river, including the Alexander Arbuthnot ~ one of the last steamers built on the Murray River during the riverboat trade. She was constructed at Koondrook in 1923 to tow barges carrying logs from the forest to the Arbuthnot Sawmills for some years until the 1940s. Then she was sold to charcoal producers in the Barmah Forest and, during World War II, she lay idle. In 1947, however, she sank at her mooring and it was not until 1972, that the boat was raised by a group of Shepparton volunteers and was then bought by the City of Echuca in 1989 for restoration at the Port. The Alexander Arbuthnot is one of the 10 or more steamers that can still be seen on the river around Echuca.

 

Today, a dozen boats still chuff along the river, including the Alexander Arbuthnot ~ one of the last steamers built on the Murray River during the riverboat trade

 

The great sweep of the Murray River runs
through four Australian states

As it snakes its way across the countryside, the Murray drains an enormous area of land. The Murray-Darling Basin occupies more than a million square kilometres ~ about a seventh of the total area of Australia. With tributaries like the Darling, the Murrumbidgee, the Goulburn and the Campaspe, the Murray River takes in half of Victoria, three-quarters of New South Wales and part of South Australia, and an area of Queensland greater than the whole of Victoria. Maybe the Murray isn't as famous as other great rivers such as the Mississippi or the Amazon but, from its watershed in the Mount Kosciusko ranges more than 2000 metres above sea level, the Murray has wound its way for 20 million years ~ far longer than any other river on Earth ~ down to the South Australian coast 3000 kilometres away.

Humans have known and lived by the Murray for more than 40,000 years: the first people had it to themselves for almost all that time, up until 1830 when Captain Charles Sturt rowed down to its mouth: “At 3 pm, Hopkinson called out that we were approaching a junction and in less than a minute afterwards we were hurried into a broad and noble river,” was how the soldier-navigator-explorer described his discovery. “We had got on the high road and it was either to the south coast or to some important outlet but I will call it the Murray River.”

River trade endured for a century along the Murray River. By 1863, Echuca had been built to take the loads of wool, wheat and meat from the steam boats because it was the closest river port to Melbourne.

 The wharves at Echuca where wool and wheat
were unloaded for Melbourne

Some 20 years later, William Randall steamed from Mannum in South Australia nearly 1600 kilometres past Swan Hill ~ downstream from Echuca ~ in a home-made boat with a home-made steam engine whose boiler `swelled in defiance of bolts changes and wedges’, breathing, say the old-timers, like a concertina. Sturt’s `high road’ soon became a reality. River trade endured for a century and stretched across three colonies and 6000 kilometres of waterway. In 1860, 17 steam boats were trading and operating along the Murray River and by1863 the new town of Echuca had been built to take the loads of wool and wheat and meat from the steam boats because it was the closest river port to Melbourne. By then, it had a population of 300 but, in less than 10 years, there were 1,600 inhabitants and Echuca was Victoria's second largest port with 240 boats annually trading in all types of goods, particularly wool.

The PS Emmylou, one of the fine 19th Century
paddle steamers travelling the river

Just before the turn of the 20th century, however, railway lines began linking river towns with the larger cities and the steamboat era was already nearing its end. Eventually, boats were tied up all along the Murray River waiting for work that never came. Some sank or were broken up, a few ran halfway into the new century as fishing boats, logging steamers and passenger craft but they, too, eventually disappeared. But then interest spread among locals and historians and some of the old steamboats were restored and began operating trips up and down the river for tourists.

The Aborigines had looked at the river and saw fish and game; at the gums and saw canoes and shields; at the cliffs and saw caves for shelter, clay and ochre for dancing bodies. But there was a difference. To the Aboriginal tribes ~ the Baraba Baraba, Wemba Wemba, Yorta Yorta and Ngurraiilam ~ the river was sacred. It was not theirs; it did not belong to them. They belonged to it for the river was the source of their legends; for them the Murray valley had been carved out in the Dreamtime when a giant Murray cod went swimming down the piccaninny Murray, his waving tail so huge it created the great broad sweeps seen today.

To the Aboriginal tribes ~ the Baraba Baraba, Wemba Wemba, Yorta Yorta and Ngurraiilam ~ the river was sacred. It was not theirs; it did not belong to them. They belonged to it, for the Murray was the source of their legends

A white Egret on the Murray, one of the many native
Australian birds that make the river home

In their 40,000 or more years as custodians, the Aborigines left few scars around the river: sacred burial grounds, gum trees with bark cut out for canoes, smoke stains on the yellow cliffs where they camped; glittering kitchen middens of cockles and mussel shells. The marks of the European invaders, though, are more easily seen. Locks and dams have drowned the swamplands and the red gum forests, arresting the rhythm of the river which replenished the swamps and mud-flats and generated the breeding cycles for fish, and for crops and cattle, the river polluted with runoffs and drains. There are other changes: When I first learned to swim in the Murray’s warm brown water, paddle-wheelers still swished back and forth. Swimming like fish, we could easily dodge them and we chased their wash to catch the waves, bobbing like corks.

Today, though, swimming in the river is like playing hop-scotch on a busy freeway. High-powered speedboats roar down the river, trailing skiers for tails, scattering swimmers daring enough to try to compete or just to cross the river from one bank to the other. A screaming fibreglass rocket with a 60 horsepower outboard at the stern and a nut at the wheel has none of the charm, the serenity or even the style of the old river boats.

The memories flood back as I stand on the cliff looking down on the river, the white mist almost gone. Life along the river has experienced a vast change in the past 150 or more years. The indigenous people who roamed its banks for millennia have almost all disappeared. The inland sailors, too, have gone ~ Alf Maslen among them ~ and little of what they brought to the river remains. They have stepped out of the great river of history.

Geoffrey Maslen’s new books are An Uncertain Future: Australian birdlife in danger and Too late: How we lost the battle with climate change, are published by HardieGrant and available at all good bookshops.

An early picture of the Adelaide steaming up the Murray River, towing a barge carrying red-gum logs. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society



In 1869, wool being unloaded at the Punt in Echuca. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society.

Bullock trains in Leslie Street in Echuca, carrying the wool brought by the paddles steamers to be taken to Melbourne. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society 

 

 An 1876 etching of Echuca's Main Street and the Bridge Hotel at left, both still key features of the town. Image: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society

To Understand the History of European Culture Start with the Minoans, Not the Ancient Greeks

Ruins of the ancient Minoan settlement in Gournia, Crete.  Photograph: Georgios Tschilis/Shutterstock

By Ellen Adams, King's College London

The Minoan culture was the first highly complex society on modern European soil, with palaces, writing, stunning art – and even flushing toilets. The Minoans lived in the bronze age (circa 3000-1200BC) on the Mediterranean island of Crete, which served as a stepping stone between Europe, Africa and Asia.

My new book, The Minoans, presents key features of their archaeology, including architecture, art, religion, writing, bureaucracy and the economy. It explores how this pioneering European civilisation has influenced western culture – and how Minoan culture has been reconstructed, re-imagined and represented in museum displays.

Traditionally, the ancient Greeks have been viewed as the fountainhead of European civilisation, but Minoan culture was flourishing many hundreds of years earlier. Despite this expanse of time, there was a loose dialogue between them: the Minoans influenced the Mycenaeans, who themselves were early Greeks, and the later classical Greeks indicate some “memory” of the Minoans, as filtered down through their myths.

For example, in the later Greek stories (from the first millennium BC), Crete is closely associated with bulls. Zeus took the form of a bull when he seized the Phoenician princess Europa and forced her to the island to initiate the Minoan bloodline. She bore Minos whose wife, Pasiphae, submitted to her passion for Poseidon’s bull, producing the minotaur.

In Minoan art, bulls are everywhere. Archaeologists have found bronze age ritual libation vessels – used for pouring liquid sacrifices to the gods – crafted into the shape of a bull’s head, and large gold rings depicting people leaping over bulls. The echoes of history, myth and ritual seem to have rippled through the generations, to later be reproduced and re-imagined by the ancient Greeks.

A bull fresco from Knossos Palace in Crete. Pecold/Shutterstock

It is therefore essential for people who want to understand the history of Europe to study the influence the Minoans have had on the ancient Greeks and modern Europeans – in particular, the evidence coming from the great digs conducted on the island in the early 20th century. These include the excavations by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans at Knossos, Crete, a vast site with complexity that may lend itself to the Greek labyrinth myth.

While the image of the bull is particularly widespread here, there is little association between this creature and women, as later appears in the myths. Women are linked with other animals, though, such as serpents, as shown by the snake goddess figurines that Evans found in the Palace of Knossos in 1903.

Snakes in Minoan art

These snake goddesses were found hidden in large stone-lined pits, in a very fragmentary state. Numerous riches were in this deposit: hundreds of shells, clay and stone vessels, clay seal impressions (used for documentation), Linear A inscriptions (a writing script) and animal bones.

The remains of five or six female figurines were found, but only two have been reconstructed. They have become icons of Minoan culture and poster girls for Crete, standing out due to their eye-catching costumes. These are tight, corseted jackets that leave the breasts bare, with floor-length full skirts – their heaviness serving to emphasise the exposed breasts even more.

The remains of the figurines found in the Palace of Knossos in 1903. Wiki Commons

The slightly larger one is a matronly figure with a tall, conical hat. Her snake-entwined arms are held at around 45 degrees, palms up and set approximately in line with her navel. Snakes drape over her as she stares straight ahead.

The second figure raises her bright white arms, bent at the elbow, up and out to her sides, flexed slightly forward. She clutches snakes, and a feline creature balances on her hat.

These figurines offer food for thought about the reconstruction processes that archaeologists undertake. First, Evans gave the title “goddess” to the larger figurine, and “votary” (meaning a worshipper who has taken vows) to the smaller one. This is arbitrary: we cannot know who these figurines represented, whether they were human, as a dignitary or priestess, or divine – we just sense they were VIPs.

Furthermore, when viewing these extraordinary objects in the Heraklion Museum in Crete today, the visitor may be unaware of the extent to which they have been reconstructed, and how much is an early 20th-century creation.

For example, the votary’s head, with its distinctive, wide-eyed stare, is entirely modern, as is her left arm, added soon after she was excavated. The object held in her right hand was broken off – only a very small piece of the original remained in her clenched fist. The reconstruction of snakes as the objects she holds is not so absurd – her sister has them running all over her as a comparison – but recent research has cast some doubt on what she originally held.

In addition to reconstructing the originals, people have also re-imagined these striking figurines in numerous ways – in replicas as souvenirs, as Barbie dolls, in graffiti (particularly in Heraklion) and in advertisements. They have appeared as book covers and inspired modern literature as well as visual and performative art.

Adaptations of them have come to life in poetry, opera, dance and music. A performer led the historical procession as the snake goddess in the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess project, which I am part of, seeks to understand the cultural biographies of these objects. It shows their legacy has been great partly because we have recreated them in such varied ways.

Minoan Crete is important not only because of any claims made for its place as the fountainhead of European civilisation, but also because its art and archaeology have done so much to shape modern culture.

Ellen Adams, Professor in Classical Archaeology and Museum Access, King's College London

The Margaret Preston Retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria is a Revelation

Self-portrait of Margaret Preston from 1930. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. © Margaret Preston/Licensed by Copyright Agency Australia. Image © Art Gallery of New South Wales. Cover picture of Issey Miyake SS27 in Paris. 

By Sasha Grishin

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Margaret Preston is a breathtaking exhibition. It is Preston as we have never seen her before, and challenges many earlier preconceptions.We see her work in the context of her students/lovers, Bessie Gibson and Gladys Reynell, and her obsession with First Nations art – her adaptations, her collections, and, now, commentaries on her adaptations by Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennett, among others.

A much more complex and nuanced image of Preston emerges than in previous exhibitions.

The show is a mixture of a chronological survey with her early still life paintings from the opening decade of the 20th century, then her decorative flower pieces moving to the magnificence of her hand-coloured woodcuts.

There is a desire to bring her art to life: we see her iconic Wheelflower print of 1929, next to the actual woodblock from which it was printed. Her First Nations pieces are shown together with their actual sources of inspiration.

The exhibition is full of these little detective pieces that save the exhibition from being just another Margaret Preston show to make it into the Margaret Preston show for our generation.

The vivid 'Coastal Gums' 

by Matgaret Preston, 1929. 

Private Collection

© Margaret Preston

Licensed by Copyright 

Agency, Australia

A spectacular makeover

Born Margaret Rose McPherson in Adelaide in 1875, she initially trained in Sydney, then at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She spent many years travelling in Europe, mainly in Germany, France and England.

She first travelled with Betty Davidson and then Gladys Reynell, with both of whom, the NGV catalogue asserts, she had a romantic bond.

She exhibited to limited acclaim, first under the name of Rose McPherson and by 1912 as Margaret McPherson.

Her personal and artistic makeover was as spectacular as it was sudden.

On the last day of 1919, the 44-year-old McPherson falsified her age by eight years and married Lieutenant William George Preston, subsequently a successful businessman. This made her, at least on the marriage certificate, a socially respectable two years younger than her husband, rather than the embarrassing six years older.

She changed her exhibiting name to Margaret Preston and, armed with her husband’s wealth, launched her new career with a massive publicity blitz that was to last until her death in 1963.

Following her marriage, she settled with her husband in the bayside Sydney suburb of Mosman and moved rapidly up the social ladder to become a friend of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith.

Preston was the most articulate and outspoken female artist of her generation, writing frequent articles and giving lectures and interviews.

While always a committed traveller, after her marriage Preston embarked on numerous journeys throughout Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

At the height of the Depression, the Prestons moved from Mosman to a 14-acre block in rural Berowra, before returning to the Mosman neighbourhood in 1939, where they remained until her death.

Thea Proctor's Tea Party, 1924 by Margaret

Preston. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

Purchased in 1942.© Margaret Preston 

A revelation

For me, a revelation of this exhibition is her late stencil pieces, including Christ turning the water into wine (1951) and White gum (1953) where Preston in her mature years is grappling with a host of conceptual problems and exhibits a brilliant technical inventiveness.

While many of the pieces have been seen before, here they gain a new poignancy through their new context.

With over 200 works on display, there is enough to present a comprehensive overview to gain a good understanding of her work and her contribution to Australian art and not an overkill requiring a packed lunch for viewing every print she ever made.

On ‘primative’ art

Although a strong advocate for First Nations art, I feel that Preston’s attitude still sat within the framework of cultural imperialism.

That is, it came from one who had not the slightest doubt in the superiority of her own culture that could absorb “primitive” elements from Indigenous cultures.

She illustrated how a sacred Kimberley dancing board could give you a suggestion for a curtain. In 1924 she boasted,

I have barely altered the design […] The Australian aboriginal has followed the usual abstract designs that are characteristic of the savage […] I have suggested a cushion cover that could be adapted from the design.

Aboriginal Still Life 1940, by Margaret Preston.

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Gift of the

Godfrey Rivers Trust through Miss Daphne 

Mayo, 1940. © Margaret Preston

In 1925 Preston wrote,

In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own, I have gone to the art of a people who have never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed to always use the same symbols to express themselves.

[…]

It is on the primitive natural forms that we must depend. In returning to primitive art it should be remembered that it is to be used as a starting point only for a renewal of growth, and a gradual selection must take place to arrive at the culmination.

Over the decades, Preston’s attitude to First Nations art matured as she travelled thousands of kilometres to view rock art and art in various communities. But the art remained a quarry from which a “civilized” artist could plunder elements from which to create an “authentic” Australian national art.

Preston’s ideas on a national art were naïve, but, as shown by this exhibition, she did create a powerful and memorable oeuvre.

Margaret Preston is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until January 31 2027.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

The Mediterranean Diet is all the Rage Because it Represents a Way of Life We’ve Lost

The Mediterranean diet has been included on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2010. Cover picture of Issey Miyake SS27 in Paris.

By Marco Romagnoli, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) 

The promise of a long, healthy, happy existence living an active, community-based lifestyle under warm, sunny skies may be within reach. In fact, it could be on your table.

The Mediterranean diet has been included on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2010. Not only does the diet have guaranteed cultural value, it is also a powerful strategic tool for promoting food products such as olive oil.

Often cited for its health benefits, the Mediterranean diet was first described in a 1953 book about Crete. At the time, people were amazed at the low incidence of cardiovascular disease among the inhabitants of this Greek island, compared with northern Europeans.

Among other things, this olive oil-based diet encourages the consumption of fresh foods, seasonal fruit and vegetables and whole grains. It embodies the essence of the Mediterranean lifestyle, according to the UNESCO definition:

The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean Basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. 

Olive oil is at the heart of the Mediterranean diet. (Shutterstock)

But beyond its impact on our health, what does the Mediterranean diet say about us as a society? Could it be the symptom of something?

As a postdoctoral researcher at UQAM’s École des sciences de la gestion, my research lies at the intersection of heritage and tourism studies, food and mental health.

In 2021, I carried out field research in Cilento (Italy), Soria (Spain) and Marseille (France), where I looked at the inhabitants’ attachment to the Mediterranean diet. I listened to their stories and tried to understand the local and social dynamics at play in the Mediterranean diet concept.

Mirroring a deep societal crisis

The concept of the Mediterranean diet refers to a lifestyle that strengthens social relationships and is good for your health. It sounds simple and coherent.

However, the society in which we live turns the work of meeting these basic needs into something more complex. The health and social dimensions of the Mediterranean diet are seen as extremely desirable because they represent a balance that is lacking in globalized societies.

Claude Fischler, a sociologist of human nutrition, describes the multidimensional crisis of the food system in modern societies.

In his view, there is a psychopathology of daily eating underway. This is characterized by “appetite disturbances, bulimic attacks, anxious or compulsive snacking, etc.” Just think of the consumption of ultra-processed foods or ready-made and frozen meals, eaten on their own in front of the TV in the evening or in front of the computer during lunch break.

A meal at the O Vicolo ‘E L'Alleria, in Battipaglia, Italy. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities in the Mediterranean basin. (Author provided)

In this psychopathological perspective on food, which also mirrors a societal crisis, mechanisms for cultural (and in this case, food) reactivation are appearing. The rush to the Mediterranean diet is a reflection of this societal crisis, because it is the opposite of our way of life.

With its inclusion on the UNESCO list, the Mediterranean diet has thus become a prestigious “monument” of Mediterranean culinary art.

This food culture has been mythologized and made a part of our heritage after undergoing an irreversible process of erosion of food production and consumption systems in the Mediterranean area.

‘Gastronativism’: Politics on the plate

The food arena is one of the best places to express the anxieties and fears of contemporary life.

Fabio Parasecoli, a researcher in food studies, describes the anxieties caused by globalization as gastronativism, “the ideological use of food in politics to advance ideas about who belongs to a community (however defined) and who doesn’t.”

So gastronativism represents a political tool that provides “a sense of rootedness, comfort and security” in the face of perceived collapse (climate change, wars, pandemics, globalization).

The Mediterranean diet is part of this gastronativist approach, standing for a lifestyle that can be adopted.

Different meanings of the Mediterranean diet

We often hear about the Mediterranean diet from institutions and academics. What we don’t hear much about are the views of the communities that practise this way of life.

My field research in 2021 aimed to understand the different ways in which the Mediterranean diet is defined, described, understood and lived, depending on the community.

The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge and rituals that relate in particular to cultivation, harvesting and picking. (Shutterstock)

In Cilento, the Mediterranean diet is synonymous with “lifestyle.” It’s part of local identity and a reference to the wider socio-cultural sphere (“our lifestyle,” the locals say).

In Soria, it embodies a “nutritional model” and in the domain of health: the adjectives most commonly used to describe it are “healthy,” “beneficial,” and “health-conscious.”

In Marseille, the term “diet” conjures up images of fasting, deprivation and abstinence, while the term “Mediterranean” refers to organic, seasonal and healthy food. The reference here is more to the food industry.

A sociocultural seismograph

Whether understood as a nutritional model, a way of life or an example of intangible heritage, the Mediterranean diet represents a way out of a system (societal, food, economic, environmental) in crisis and in constant search of reference points.

Seismographs are instruments that record and measure earthquakes. Like a “sociocultural seismograph,” the Mediterranean diet enables us to capture the vibrations, i.e. the changes taking place in contemporary society with which cultural (and dietary) practices must contend.

Marco Romagnoli, Postdoctoral research fellow, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Calabria: The revamped Hiking Trail Regenerating an Italian Region Blighted by Mafia Stereotypes

The mountain village called Pentedattilo at the start of the trail. Photograph: Polonio Shutterstock.

By Aurora Moxon 

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese – the Trail of the Englishman – is bringing new hope to Calabria’s Aspromonte mountains in southern Italy, one of the EU’s most marginal and economically depressed areas.The six-day trail is named after the English poet Edward Lear who walked these mountains in the 19th century. The route encourages hikers to challenge preconceptions of the Aspromonte and experience local hospitality, while boosting the economy of an area at risk of abandonment.

The Aspromonte has long been associated with the ’Ndrangheta – Italy’s most powerful mafia. In the 1970-1980s, organised criminals held high-profile kidnapping victims in these mountains, consolidating this association. The most famous of these was Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty Sr, whose kidnapping inspired the 2017 film All the Money in the World.

As well as researching food, farming and ecotourism in the Aspromonte mountains, my work investigates the negative effects of stereotypes of this area.

Although the ’Ndrangheta is still active in Calabria today, much of its primary activity now takes place in Italy’s north and overseas. Despite this shift, a negative image of the Aspromonte and its inhabitants still prevails among Italians.

It was not the ’Ndrangheta, but mountain brigands (robbers) that Lear feared when he set off on foot through the Aspromonte in 1847.

Best known for his poem The Owl and the Pussycat (1871), among Lear’s other works is Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria. Published in 1852, he wrote about the people of the Aspromonte who shared their houses and food with him, from members of the landowning class to the poorest peasants.

Although he often interpreted his surroundings through a northern European lens, exaggerating the presumed backwardness of the area and its inhabitants, Lear was evidently impressed by this hospitality and Aspromonte’s physical  

Boosting the trail

In 2019, a hiking organisation called La Cooperativa San Leo, based in the village of Bova, opened Il Sentiero dell’Inglese. The trail follows the first 80km of Lear’s journey on old mule tracks with views of the Ionian Sea, Mount Etna and the dramatic valleys and peaks of the Aspromonte.

The cooperative runs a network of local B&B hosts across the seven villages along the route. They offer hikers local cuisine in private homes and no-frills eateries, with accommodation for around €60 a night. Now numbers of tourists from Italy’s north and other parts of Europe are on the rise.

Andrea Laurenzano, president of the cooperative and coordinator of the trail, told me that 2024 saw around 600 hikers walk the sentiero while approximately 1000 hikers completed it in 2025. This year has seen approximately 700 people walk it so far. However, despite Lear’s fundamental role in the trail’s story, hikers from the UK are rare.

The trail is becoming a vital economic artery. Locals with B&Bs can join the hosting network and earn a small income during the low-season (hiking is best avoided in the summer heat). It also provides employment for local guides and brings business to bars, restaurants, shops, museums, artisans and farmers.

Antonio Frangipani, local guide and vice-president of the association that runs the trail, explained that the cooperative’s restaurant in Bova uses organic ingredients such as cheeses from local herders and fruit and vegetables from local farmers.

Finding ways to protect and promote the unique agropastoral culture of this part of the Aspromonte, called the Area Grecanica, is important. Ancient rural know-how and the Greco-Calabro language, which includes words and phrases from ancient Greek, are at risk of dying out as inhabitants move away from the local villages. This movement is part of a wider pattern in Italy of human abandonment of inland regions.

The repercussions of the trail go well beyond the purely economic. Human geographers like Tim Edensor argue that walking has historically forged stereotypes, contributing to the marginalisation of cultures considered “other” from a western viewpoint. The bourgeois Lear and his travels across southern Europe arguably fall into this category.

Local guides, however, believe that hiking is helping to challenge negative associations of the Aspromonte. They say that hikers often arrive with varying degrees of prejudice regarding locals and their way of life, and leave with a new appreciation of the region.

Ugo Sergi, trail host, organic bergamot producer and well-known figure on the local ecotourism scene, described his experience to me: “Many people have come here … believing they would find a dangerous and backward underclass. I have taken great pleasure in helping them understand how they were mistaken.”

Similarly, local guide Stefania Praticò explained: “The Sentiero dell’Inglese has started to remove the stigma as people walk these paths [which] help to show these places in a new way. [The trail] creates this connection, they can understand with their own eyes that the [stories] are different from reality.”

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese is demonstrating that a form of slow tourism adapted to the particular culture and problems faced by locals in the Aspromonte is working to regenerate and rehabilitate a once notorious region of southern Italy. 

The Shards Transforms Bret Easton Ellis’s 1980s LA Nightmare into a Warning for the Present

Igby Rigby as Bret and Kaia Gerber as Susan in a scene from the series thriller The Shards, set in 1981 Los Angeles following an elite group of prep school students. 

By Bran Nicol

Ryan Murphy, director of the controversial Netflix true-crime Monster Anthology (2022-), and Bret Easton Ellis, literary provocateur and author of American Psycho (1991), seem the perfect match. Sure enough, Murphy’s new TV adaptation of Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards, for Disney+ is an exhilarating mix of teen drama, serial killer nail-biter and homoerotic cat-and-mouse thriller.

The Shards features a fictionalised version of Ellis himself (a standout performance by Igby Rigney). The show details the unravelling of a close-knit group of friends during their senior year at a private LA high school in 1981. It’s triggered by the simultaneous arrival of a charismatic and mysterious newcomer, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere), and the terror and destruction wrought by a serial killer at large in the community dubbed “the Trawler”. Are these events coincidental? Or connected in some way?

Ellis has said that the appeal of his precocious first novel, Less Than Zero (1985) (which he was indeed working on in his senior year, as the series shows) was that it allowed viewers to imagine what it would be like to be a privileged youngster in cool, affluent Beverley Hills.

The trailer for The Shards.

This TV incarnation of The Shards presents a particularly vivid version of this fantasy. The affluent teenagers pad around beautiful, empty houses, throw endless pool parties, drive through LA in their shiny cars and indulge in as much drugs and sex as they want.

Yet the flip-side of such extraordinary freedom is excessive vulnerability. The story of the Trawler recalls the dark history of late 1970s and 1980s LA. It was a time when over 20 serial killers – each given similarly foreboding monikers like the Night Stalker or the Hillside Strangler – were also traversing the city.

Watching the lives of such a privileged group become shattered might be considered just deserts: a secret satisfaction for viewers enamoured by that Beverley Hills fantasy life. This is, after all, the kind of dark morality which propels the slasher movie (a genre which has influenced both Ellis and Murphy) where characters, usually girls, die in seemingly direct proportion to how sexually active they are.

But The Shards wants to do more than glamorise and invite critique of the lives of affluent youth in the US. Outwardly its sumptuous rendering of Westside interiors and exteriors tempt viewers to regard it as another example of TV’s current fascination with displaying the indulgent existences of the super-wealthy, such as Big Little Lies (2017) or White Lotus (2021-).

The Shards aims at something more profound. At its heart is a comparison between 21st-century existence and the world of the early 1980s. The series reminds us that then there were no helicopter parents, no social media nor smartphones. Factors which explain how these teenagers can do what they wish without adult scrutiny.

Despite the permissive atmosphere – as Bret’s comparison of Mallory’s arrival to “a virus” signals subtly – all this sexual decadence was, in only a few years, about to be extinguished by the advent of Aids.

Lessons for today

Yet The Shards also insists this era is the gateway to understanding the world we exist in now. This is a core message of the novel, conveyed powerfully through references to songs from the period.

Ellis’s fiction has always used music as a way of summing up character or anchoring its narrative in a particular cultural moment. In The Shards, his observations about emblematic music tracks of the time – such as Ultravox’s Vienna or Kim Wilde’s video for Kids in America – focus on what he calls a pervasive social “numbness”.

The novel’s virtual soundtrack is one reason it feels so deeply personal. In literary terms, The Shards is what is known as an autofiction. It’s a mode of writing which differs from straight autobiography. Autofiction conveys personal truth in a way which keeps it unverifiable or obscure, perhaps even to the authors themselves.

Like Ellis’s Lunar Park (2006), another magnificent autofiction, The Shards seems an effort to understand which dark parts of his psyche could have summoned up a creation like Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic anti-hero of American Psycho.

Kids in America by Kim Wilde.

Murphy’s adaptation of The Shards – as expected given Ellis’s close involvement as executive producer and co-writer – preserves much of this personal significance. This helps to elevate it above racy, entertaining but essentially empty, bonkbuster thrillers such as Hunting Wives (2025). It is hard, for example, not to see the casting of newcomer Gere, who plays Robert Mallory with a perfect combination of beauty and menace, in the light of Ellis’s notes about the elemental impression the work of his father, Richard Gere, left on his own formative years.

Ellis’s novel is remarkable for how it creates such a deeply immersive blend of image, narrative and soundtrack in prose. The tools available to screen directors ensure they can do this much more easily, as Murphy’s version of The Shards demonstrates. But the pairing of director and writer ensures the series also, just about, avoids the superficial trap TV can fall into – the lingering on surfaces, the indulgence in sex scenes or gruesome murders. It preserves the powerful elements of autofiction and cultural analysis that drive the original work.

Bran Nicol, Professor of English, University of Surrey