Tracey Avery, University of Melbourne
t.avery@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Critical consumption: Australians unpacking Britain’s global domestic design in the late nineteenth-century

A series of reports on the furniture trade between Britain and Australia from the late 1880s highlight Britain’s ‘universal’ approach to the practical and ideological furnishing of the Greater British home (not dissimilar to the international diffusion of Scandinavian furnishings by Ikea, today). These reports suggest that British ideas of the colonial home were at odds with the ‘exigencies’ of colonial life: climate, higher costs and frequent house-moving. For example, veneered furniture (associated in Britain with high class furniture) was undesirable due to its failure to withstand temperature change and transportation. Yet, without this discourse, the absence of veneered goods might have been viewed as an aesthetic choice.

Using supporting evidence - drawn from Brisbane household auctions and their owners (1880-1900) - this paper will challenge the use of style as an indicator of the class and tastes of Australians in relation to Britain in the late 19th century. Although historical investigations into consumption have begun to consider multiple viewpoints in the dialogue between production and consumption in a European context (Auslander, 1996; Roche, 2000) a possible lesson from contemporary ethnographic studies in the home (e.g. Miller, 2001) is to ‘unpack’ the canons of taste and design before going abroad.