This article explores the possibility of renewing the comparative study of Canadian and Australian literatures through an alertness to parallel developments in mid-range magazines and middlebrow print cultures in Canada and Australia in the early- to mid-twentieth century. While scoping the possibilities of full-fledged comparative studies, its focus is a case study of the Australian magazine BP: a well-capitalized, plush upmarket publication published by the Australian steamship company Burns Philp. The BP Magazine promoted travel between 1928 and 1942 as the nation underwent a transition from settler colonialism to vernacular modernity. The magazine lays bare tensions between literary aspiration and commodity culture, sophistication and escapism, edification and entertainment, and modernity and primitiveness. The aim of this case study is to raise questions that might be asked of both national literary cultures about the role of travel, modern consumer culture, magazines, and nationhood as the scales of literary values changed during the development of local middlebrow values and tastes.

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As travel began to massify in the aftermath of the Great War when passenger ships still regularly stopped at ports of call, and as Australia developed a sub-imperial relationship to its near Melanesian neighbors in Papua and New Guinea, the Pacific and its islands loomed large in Australian consciousness and print culture. This article employs Christina Klein's concept of "middlebrow orientalism" to examine how Australia's quality magazines, MAN and The BP Magazine, reflected an "expansive material and symbolic investment in Asia and the Pacific" (2003: 11) between the two world wars. While development of a consumerist, leisure relationship with the region is in evidence in these magazines that undoubtedly assume the superiority of White Australia, we argue they also promote diversity, inclusiveness, and an emerging maturity in outlook that conveyed the way in which Australians began to understand themselves as Pacific citizens wishing to "make friends of the nations.

In the interwar period, increasingly mobile Australians began to contemplate travel across the Pacific, both toward Asia as well as to America. Contemporary writing reflected this highly mobile culture and Pacific gaze, yet literary histories have overlooked this aspect of cultural history. Instead of looking to Australian novels as indexes of culture, as literary studies often do, this article explores the range of writing and print culture in magazines, concentrating on notions of mobility through the Pacific. Its focus is on the quality magazines MAN and The Home, which addressed two distinct, gendered readerships, but operated within similar cultural segments. This article suggests that the distinct geographical imaginaries of these magazines, which linked travel and geographical mobility with aspiration and social mobility, played a role in consolidating and nourishing the class standing of their readers, and revealed some of their attitudes toward gender and race.