‘Living Advertisements’: The Poster Ball in Australia

Abstract

In August 1900, a new type of charity event – the advertising poster ball – was introduced to Australia. The event brought together a range of pre-existing cultural forms to promote mass market brands, facilitated by a new, visual advertising culture. Over the next forty years, the poster ball was adopted by community groups, becoming a regular feature on the social and fundraising calendar. By harnessing people’s innate longing for creative expression and shared social activity to the promotion of commercial brands, the poster ball linked these brands to pleasurable social events, helping embed them in Australian cultural memory.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Kate Darian-Smith for commenting on an earlier draft, and the two reviewers and the editors for their helpful suggestions and guidance.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘The Poster Carnival: Some More Characters’, Table Talk, 13 September 1900, 12; Advertisement Poster Ball Programme (APBP), H. Byron Moore Papers (hereafter Moore Papers), MS 9725, Box 3393/1, State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV). White had appeared earlier in the proceedings dressed as a bottle of Kola Nut Tonic, APBP, 17.

2 APBP.

3 The event was alternatively called the ‘Advertisement Poster Ball’ and the ‘Poster Advertisement Ball’. See APBP and Figure 1.

4 APBP, front cover; Royal Children’s Hospital, Minutes of the Committee of Management (1870–1992), VPRS 16796/P/001/000020, 211, Public Records Office Victoria (hereafter PROV); ‘Posters as Living Pictures: A Charity Ball in Melbourne’, The Sphere, 3 November 1900, 146; ‘The Poster Ball. For the Children: Philanthropy and Business’, Table Talk, 6 September 1900, 10.

5 ‘Representing Tattersall’s Sweeps at the Sydney Poster Ball, 6 September 1900’, Punch, 13 September 1900, 24; ‘Proposed Poster Ball: Compliment to Lady Lamington’, Telegraph, 10 September 1900, 2; https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/dressing-brisbane-1900s-style (accessed 7 August 2021).

6 Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 120–1.

7 Natalie Smith, ‘Ephemera Dress: New Zealand Poster Dresses and Poster Competitions in the 1900s’, Context 19 (2009): 34–41.

8 Claire Regnault, ‘Poster Costumes at the Rink’, Context 31 (2015): 6–13; and ‘Poster Balls, a New Species of Fancy Dress’, https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2015/10/27/poster-balls-a-new-species-of-fancy-dress/ (accessed 8 March 2021). Lucy Chesser notes that cross-dressed, disguised characters were a common device in nineteenth-century popular theatre: Parting with My Sex: Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008), 58.

9 Carolyn Fraser, ‘The Poster Ball Craze’, Etsy Journal, 27 August 2012. Copy of the Etsy Journal post in which this article first appears in the author’s possession.

10 Christopher Tilley et al., eds, Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2005), 350; Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’, Journal of British Studies 48, no. 287 (2009): 283–307; Bronwyn Labrum, ‘Material Histories in Australia and New Zealand: Interweaving Distinct Material and Social Domains’, History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 805–16. See also Hannah Forsyth and Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 169–88.

11 Frank Trentmann, ‘Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption’, Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 373–401, 376, 400; Frank Trentmann, ed., Introduction to The Making of Consumer Society: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (London: Berg, 2005), 18; Frank Trentmann, The Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Penguin, 2016), 10–11.

12 Human billboards remain a marketing tool in the twenty-first century: see ‘Streetfighter Media’, https://www.streetfightermedia.com.au/backpack_human_billboards/ (accessed 14 December 2020).

13 ‘Living Posters for Advertisers’, Hay Standard and Advertiser, 26 May 1897, 1.

14 Melanie Dawson, Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 5; Karen Halttunnen, ‘Disguises, Masks and Parlor Theatricals: The Decline of Sentimental Culture in the 1850s’, in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale, 1982), 153–90; Kirsten Holmstrom, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1967), 209–42. For the history of the tableau vivant as a form of artistic expression in Australia, see Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), ch. 4, ‘Posing as Painting’, 59–84.

15 Robert Crawford, But Wait There’s More … A History of Australian Advertising, 1900–2000 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004), 9–10.

16 Robert Crawford, ‘The Quest for Legitimacy: The Growth and Development of the Australian Advertising Industry, 1900–1969’, Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 124 (2004): 355–74; Stephanie Rains, ‘Modernity and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2007): 285–300; Jackie Dickenson, ‘The First World War, Artists, and the Profession of the New Era’, in The First World War, the Universities and the Professions 1914–1939, eds Kate Darian-Smith and James Waghorne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2019).

17 Letter from The Sphere to Moore, 29 August 1900, Moore Papers, MS 9725/II/238.

18 Annette Shiell, ‘Fundraising through Fancy Work: Grand Bazaars in Melbourne at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, eds Kate Darian-Smith et al. (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2008), https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/monograph/Seize_The_Day_Exhibitions_Australia_and_the_World/12821393 (accessed 19 April 2022).

19 ‘Grand Police Carnival’, Sportsman, 14 August 1900, 6; ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Australasian, 29 September 1900, 43.

20 Annette Shiell, Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth Century Australia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 281; ‘United Ancient Order of Druids, Half Yearly Meeting’, Argus, 7 November 1900, 7; ‘A Letter from Aunt Connie: The Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Weekly Times, 29 September 1900, 13; the gross proceeds from all sources are given as £16,251, with expenses of around £1,990, leaving a profit of £14,253, a result which exceeded expectations.

21 Shiell, Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork, 2.

22 Ibid., 2, 281.

23 Ibid., 7.

24 Moore Papers, MS 9725/II/44, November 1881; MS 9725/II/142, 25 March 1882.

25 Annette Lewis, ‘Janet Lady Clarke (1851–1909) “Leader in the Good Work”’ (PhD thesis, Deakin University, 2010), 86.

26 Lewis, 98; Shurlee Swain, ‘Women and Philanthropy in Colonial and Post-Colonial Australia’, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations 7, no. 4 (1996): 428–43, 433.

27 Rains, 295–6.

28 ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Age, 31 May 1900, 3; ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Argus, 18 July 1900, 4.

29 Janet Lady Clarke to Dr Snowball, 19 November 1899, The Royal Children’s Hospital, VPRS 1679/P/0001/00001, Letters 1885–1900, PROV.

30 ‘Home’, Leicester Chronicle, 11 December 1897, 8.

31 Lady Clarke had previously staged amateur tableaux vivants at her East Melbourne home, Cliveden, in the early 1890s: Callaway, 73.

32 Margaret Williams, ‘MacMahon, Charles (1861–1917)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macmahon-charles-7773/text12911 (accessed 7 March 2021).

33 Letter from The Sphere to Moore, Moore Papers, 29 August 1900, MS 9725/II/238.

34 Marginally more men (145) participated than women (140). These numbers are approximate, however, as the APB program went to print before the list of participants was finalised.

35 ‘The Poster Ball’, Table Talk, 13 September 1900, 12.

36 ‘Social’, Table Talk, 30 August 1900, 22; APBP, 19; ‘Echoes of the Week’, Prahran Telegraph, 24 March 1900, 2; ‘Grand Concert and Dramatic Entertainment’, North Melbourne Courier and West Melbourne Advertiser, 29 May 1903, 3.

37 ‘The Poster Pageant: A Tremendous Crush, Many Women Faint’, Age, 5 September 1900, 7; ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar: Poster Ball, Extraordinary Scene’, Argus, 5 September 1900, 8.

38 Hindson, 120–1; ‘The Poster Pageant’, Age, 5 September 1900, 7.

39 ‘For the Children’s Sake: Philanthropy and Business’, Table Talk, 6 September 1900, 10.

40 ‘Some of the Costumes’, Australasian, 1 September 1900, 24; ‘The Poster Ball’, Table Talk, 6 September 1900, 10.

41 Jonathan E. Schroeder and Detlev Zwick, ‘Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images’, Consumption, Markets, and Culture 7, no. 1 (2004): 21–52. See also Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), especially ch. 3, ‘The Stylization of Culture’.

42 Lury, 77–8.

43 APBP, 8.

44 APBP, 10.

45 ‘Some of the Costumes’, Australasian, 1 September 1900, 24; Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

46 ‘Society and Fashion: By “Rita”. A Craze’, Weekly Times, 6 September 1902, 25; ‘Kitchen’s Velvet Soap’, Punch, 6 September 1900, 25; ‘Who Was Nydia?’, Telegraph, 18 January 1930, 8. See also APBP, 15.

47 Schroeder and Zwick, 21–52.

48 Christina Kotchemidova, ‘Why We Say “Cheese”: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (March 2005): 2–25, 4; Suzanne L. Flynt, ‘Don’t Smile for the Camera: Expression in Early Photography’, Historical Journal of Massachusetts 37, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 3–11.

49 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 114.

50 ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Age, 20 September 1900, 4; ‘The Poster Ball’, Punch, 30 August 1900, 26; ‘The Poster Pageant’, Leader, 8 September 1900, 37; ‘The Poster Pageant’, Age, 5 September 1900, 5.

51 Beverley Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 3, 1860–1900: Glad Confident Morning (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988, 1993), 284–6; Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 61–2.

52 Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, 1901–1942: The Succeeding Age (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 45; Melissa Bellanta, ‘Naughty and Gay? Revisiting the Nineties in the Australian Colonies’, History Australia 9, no. 1 (2012): 136–54, 152; Amanda G. Taylor, ‘A Fashionable Production: Advertising and Consumer Culture on the Australian Stage’, Journal of Australian Studies 63 (2000): 119–28.

53 This straddling of high and low culture was evident elsewhere at the Hospital Bazaar, particularly at the Café Chantant: Shiell, Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork, 277–80; ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Age, 20 September 1900, 4.

54 ‘Poster Ball at the Pump Room’, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette 165, no. 8337, 2 April 1921, 27; ‘The Living Poster Ball’, The Tatler, 9 July 1930; ‘National Poster Ball’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 70, no. 26686, 2 January 1932, 4. For more on popular leisure activities in this period, see Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788 (Melbourne: Longman Australia, 1995), especially 67–74.

55 The public relations theorist Edward Bernays may have used the term from 1919.

56 Sianne Ngai, The Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 3.

57 ‘Poster Ball’, Evening Mail, 18 October 1906, 2; ‘Fancy Dress and Poster Ball at Menzies’, Table Talk, 28 September 1911, 7; ‘Poster Ball’, North West Post, 8 June 1911, 2; Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005), 273.

58 ‘Better Late Than Never: Britain Discovers Australian Confectionery Industry’, The Australasian Confectioner and Soda Foundation Journal, 25 February 1924, 25. See Robert Crawford, More Than a Glass and a Half: A History of Cadbury in Australia (Canberra: Halstead, 2022), ch. 3.

59 ‘Poster Ball’, Bruce Rock Post and Corrigin and Narembeen Guardian, 26 October 1934, 3; ‘Children’s Poster Ball at Winton’, Morning Bulletin, 8 October 1938, 9.

60 ‘Poster Ball at Flinders a Great Success’, Mornington Standard, 19 August 1911, 4; ‘Living Posters at Melton’, Bacchus Marsh Express, 3 August 1918, 3: a fundraiser ‘for the comfort and happiness of our brave soldiers’.

61 John H. Antil, ‘New Product or Service Adoption: When Does It Happen?’, Journal of Consumer Marketing 5, no. 2 (1988): 5–16, 7.

62 ‘Poster Ball’, Morning Bulletin, 1 October 1936, 4.

63 Individual poster entrants were identified separately at fancy dress events: ‘Miss Ethel Roy, Cadbury’s Cocoa (poster)’, in ‘Fancy Dress Ball: A Great Success’, Healesville and Yarra Glen Guardian, 5 July 1912, 2.

64 Stephen Knott, ‘Fancy Dress as an Amateur Craft’, Performance Research 25, no. 1 (2020): 10–17, 11, 16.

65 ‘Ravenshoe Notes: Poster Ball’, Northern Herald, 25 September 1937, 48.

66 Knott, 10–17, 11. See also Rebecca Mitchell, ‘The Victorian Fancy Dress Ball, 1870–1900’, Fashion Theory 21, no. 3 (2017): 291–315.

67 ‘Biggest Ball of Season: Repatriation Funds Benefit’, Table Talk, 31 August 1916, 26.

68 ‘Label Costumes’, Kyabram Free News, 10 December 2014, 23.

69 ‘Poster and Paper Dance’, Sunday Times, 13 April 1924, 15. The ‘Paper’ in the title referred to the representation of newspaper brands.

70 ‘Coopernook’, Northern Champion, 12 August 1931, 3: ‘Coopernook Ball’, Manning River Times, 9 August 2011, 6; ‘Fancy, Fun Costumes Were a Hit at Early Events, Contests’, Sunshine Coast Daily, 18 May 2019.

71 ‘Advertisement Ball at Railton’, Advocate, 15 October 1931, 7. It is not clear whether this was in aid of a good cause, but it may have been a fundraiser for the hall itself.

72 Diane Hutchinson, ‘Manufacturing’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Australia, eds S. Ville and G. Withers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 296–300.

73 ‘Poster Ball’, Bruce Rock Post, 26 October 1934, 3.

74 Ibid.

75 ‘Children’s Hospital Bazaar’, Leader, 8 September 1900, 37.

76 ‘Topical Echoes’, Tocsin, 30 August 1900, 1.

77 ‘Extraordinary Theft: Parliament House Robbed’, Argus, 10 October 1891, 9.

78 John Rickard, ‘The Anti-Sweating Movement in Britain and Victoria: The Politics of Empire and Social Reform’, Australian Historical Studies 18, no. 73 (1979): 582–97; Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1874–1914 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1996); Marilyn Lake, ‘Challenging the “Slave-Driving Employers”: Understanding Victoria’s 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach’, Australian Historical Studies 45 (2014): 87–102.

79 ‘Topical Echoes’, Tocsin, 6 September 1900, 1.

80 ‘Carlyle on the Poster Ball’, Tocsin, 6 September 1900, 9.

81 ‘The Poster Ball’, Table Talk, 30 August 1900, 19.

82 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 124–51.

83 Gail Reekie, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 42. I am conducting a comprehensive study of Australian labour’s struggle with the implications of expanding consumption and have recently completed an article entitled ‘Luxury and the Labour Press, 1890–1918’, which deals with this topic more fully. This article is currently under review with Labour History.

84 ‘Topical Echoes’, Tocsin, 20 November 1902, 1.

85 The Australian labour movement showed limited enthusiasm for the collectivist consumption represented by the co-operative movement: Nikola Balnave and Greg Patmore, ‘The Politics of Consumption and Co-Operation: An Overview’, Labour History 91 (November 2006): 1–12.

86 Crawford, ‘The Quest for Legitimacy’, 355–74.

87 Labor Call, 28 May 1914, 10.

88 ‘Carlton School Board of Advice’, Labor Call, 30 September 1909, 7; ‘Poster Ball’, Bowen Independent, 28 January 1938, 3. No doubt scores of similar events did not make it into a newspaper.

89 Even though items 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 15 do not have ‘poster’ in the event’s name, the text of the advertisement for the event mentioned a poster section. Most newspaper coverage advertised a coming event, so it is uncertain how many people turned up as advertising posters. A number were post-event reports that mentioned people wearing brands.

90 ‘Stawell’, Labor Call, 25 September 1913, 10.

91 ‘At Juvenile Ball’, Labor Daily, 21 May 1937, 8; Labor Call, 18 August 1910, 10.

92 ‘Round and About’, Socialist, 28 September 1907, 3. ‘Direct Action’ was represented at the Socialist Fancy Dress Ball in 1917: ‘Our Fancy Dress Ball’, Socialist, 3 August 1917, 3.