PSR 3: Primary Source Report on The Home Magazine Vol 18 No. 1 January 1937 

 Advertisement for Burns Philp Shipping line (The Home, 1937, p.2)

Circulation

What can you find out about the circulation of the magazine? How would you characterise the circulation--was it limited, or popular?  Can you find out if that was considered expensive?

At 1/3p, The Home compares favourably with other magazines of the period. When the quality of content is taken into consideration, it appears to give good value for money, possibly made achievable at the price by the large volume of adverting, it contain, which may represent the periodical’s main source of revenue.

 Editor

Does the magazine have the same editor for a range of time? Can you find out anything about this person?  What is her or her background, education, training? If the editor writes for the magazine, what kind of things does he/she write?

 This edition of Home Magazine was co-edited by Sydney Ure Smith and Leon Gellert. Smith had founded the magazine in 1920, and Gellert joined him as co-editor and a director in 1922 after the death of Smith’s original partner, Bertram Stevens.

Smith was born in Stoke Newington, London, on January 9 1887. After his family emigrated to Australia in 1889, he studied at Queen’s College, St. Kilda, and then Sydney Grammar School after his father, John Smith, was made Manager of the Hotel Australia in Sydney. While at Sydney Grammar he produced ‘the Kat’ and ‘Australia Kat”, gossip broadsheets aimed at the hotel’s clients. In 1902 he attended the Sydney Art School, specialising in pen and pencil drawing.

 Smith pioneered the incorporation of quality art and design into print culture as the founding principle of an advertising agency he started with cartoonist Harry Julius, ‘Smith and Julius’. As editor and publisher, he brought this technology to the pages of The Home, which prided itself on ‘good taste in contemporary architecture, interior design, photography and graphic design.’

 Smith resigned from magazines in 1938, leaving Gellert as sole editor until the magazine closed in 1942. He died in Potts Point, Sydney in 1949.

Gellert was born in Walkerville, South Australia on 17 May 1892. Described as a ‘soldier, poet and journalist’, he trained as a teacher before studying modern European History and English literature at the University of Adelaide. He then taught physical Education at Hindmarsh Public School, until enlisting in the Army at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. He was wounded by shrapnel during the Gallipoli landing, and while convalescing he was diagnosed with epilepsy and discharged medically unfit on 30 June 1916.

While on embarkation, he started writing poetry, publishing The Isle of San containing 120 of his poems in 1919, with the Theme ‘Youth’s eternal awakening to the failure of ideals’.

Gellert did contribute literary to other magazines after his tenure with The Home, but his contribution to The Home appears to have been purely as an editor.

Gellert passed away in Toorak Gardens, Adelaide in 1977 (Souter n.d.)

 

Implied Reader

After studying thoroughly a single issue of the magazine--ads, articles, stories, everything--consider its target reader implied by the magazine’s contents: age, sex, economic class, intellectual class, race, political position, and anything else that seems important

 The implied reader of The Home appears to be female, comfortably white middle and upper class, with the middle-class reader aspiring for upward social mobility (Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly, 2020, pp. 4-5). The literary tone and topics would appeal to someone reasonably well read, probably with conservative views and political opinions. Women of all ages would find value in this magazine.

 Contents

a.      In a single issue, what kind of content gets the most pages (creative: fiction, poetry, drama, visual art, music/ critical: cultural, aesthetic, social, political/ informative: travel, biography, history, news)

Second only to advertising, Social articles and photographs dominate the content of this issue, with seven pages devoted to ‘Social notes’, and ten for photographs. There are twelve stories and articles, a fashion article and five dealing with house and garden. There does not appear to be any content of a political nature.

 b. Advertising: Ratio of advertising to other aspects of the text. What kind of advertising gets the most space? Anything else significant about advertising?

 Approximately 30 pages (37.5%) are devoted to advertising, supporting the premise that advertising was a major source of revenue for the publication. There are 17 full page ads, with six advertising travel.

 If the magazine attends to social, political, or cultural issues, is there anything that helps you describe its position? 

 High brow culture, and socialites and celebrities grace the pages of this issue. Cultural themes include Ballet, some light-hearted poetry, fiction by notable contemporary authors such as Katherine Susannah Prichard, and exclusive sporting clubs. Articles such as ‘Air Mail Notes from London’, by ‘Princess Troubetsky’, exemplify the high brow tone of the social pages, while the ‘Social and personal’ pages deal mainly with the activities of upper class figures, which supports the premise that this magazine would appeal to those seeking social elevation, and those who are ‘already there’.

 Format

How many average pages per issue? Did it use colour?  How much?  Photography? How much?  How are images used?  Do they illustrate stories or article?  If there are illustrations, how do they make the magazine feel?The Home comprises an average of 80 pages. In this issue, there are some colour illustrations, mainly adorning advertisements, of which there are six full page and one quarter page plates, and a full-page colour painting of a socialite. Articles are illustrated with two or three tone colours. The illustrations invoke a feeling that this is a quality publication.

References

Gavin Souter, 'Gellert, Leon Maxwell (1892–1977)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gellert-leon-maxwell-10288/text18201, published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 24 October 2020.

Kuttainen, Liebich, and Galletly,. "Transported Imagination-Introduction" James Cook University 2020. Web. 21 August 2020.