The Red Center: The Quest for “Authenticity” in Australian Dress

A severity of plainness: the culture of female riding dress in America during the 1920s and 1930s

“…The riding habit was, then, caught up in an Anglo-American exchange underpinned by both economics and culture: of commodities, people, skills, traditions and mythologies. This entangled web of exchange across geographical space had a further permutation, one pertaining to 'place' and the consumer experience Á what Maynard (1999) views as a touristic and sartorial pilgrimage after authenticity. Society women, viewing both riding and shopping as legitimate leisure activities, indulged in vacations that combined holidaying with hunting trips and shopping sprees to European centres.…”

An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman

“…As an example, along the coast of Queensland and in northern New South Wales cane farmers, many of whom have family biographies tied to Italy or Malta, would typically wear a cap or straw hat in the paddock not an Akubra (Pini, 2003). Of course, the meanings attached to clothing such as hats are not static but can shift and be redefined, as Indigenous activists have demonstrated in appropriating the Akubra (Maynard, 1999). For example, Indigenous Labor Party Senator Patrick Dobson, is well known for wearing a distinctively black Akubra with added threads of the Indigenous colours of yellow, brown, red and white around the brim (Lewis, 2016).…”

“…The narrative of Australian farm women’s invisibility, now beginning to be rectified by the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project, (as encapsulated by Mitchell’s hat), is tied to the deep socio-cultural resonance of the Akubra as a symbol of rural masculinity and, in turn, the nation, as mythologised in poems, films, novels, plays, advertisements, and the product’s association with national sporting teams and the military (Kennedy and Coulter, 2018; Maynard, 1994, 1999). Writing about the Sydney Olympics, Hogan (2003: 106) has observed that the spectacle of 120 men and women riding horses around the stadium carrying Australian flags and wearing Driza-Bone coats and Akubra hats, ‘made explicit’ the link between these items of clothing and national identity, and moreover, that the national identity communicated was not just rural, but primarily masculine and white.…”

Relational craft and Australian fashionability in the 1970s–80s: Friends, pathways, ideas and aesthetics

“…Jackson and Kee, have been fairly widely written about (McPhee, 1985;Jackson, 1987;Maynard, 1999Maynard, , 2001Gray, 1999Gray, , 2010Gray, , 2011Jocic, 2012;Kee, 2006;Leong and Somerville, 2010) and the others, most notably Chai, less so. The inter-connected ideas, people and creative output in this group has not, however, previously been discussed.…”