Electrifying the Home in Interwar Brisbane - Guest Lecture by Dr Henry Reese

This paper takes up a proposed research agenda sketched out in an important 1998 article by Tony Dingle entitled ‘Electrifying the Kitchen in Interwar Victoria.’ In the generation since this paper was published, historians have produced new histories of energy that emphasise the complex entanglements of settler capitalism, colonial modernity and fossil fuel usage in Australia. This paper explores the ways in which electricity was discussed, sold to and consumed by Brisbane residents in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on research conducted as the 2021 John Oxley Research Fellow at the State Library of Queensland, I will reconstruct the social life of new electrical technologies and appliances in Southeast Queensland. The interwar period saw Queensland electricity providers and the electrical trades pursue domestic electrification as a way of stimulating growth in demand and expansion of electricity grids. Utility providers such as the Brisbane City Council Electrical Department strove to stimulate interest in electrification by connecting the new energy source with glamorous modernity, femininity and domesticity. Educating the public about the uses and potential of the new energy source was a key objective for electricity providers, and domestic electricity became a site of public performances of colonial modernity and progress in Brisbane. This paper aims to link cultures of electrification in Brisbane to wider movements around Australia, but in doing so, to simultaneously highlight the unevenness and intensely local nature of electrification in this period, as rural and regional Queensland fell behind the metropolis in access to energy.

Henry Reese is an early career historian based in Meanjin/Brisbane. His research interests include histories of sound, electricity and other energies in settler societies. Henry completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2019. His PhD thesis, ‘Colonial Soundscapes,’ was the first cultural history of early sound recording in Australia. Henry has eight years’ experience as a sessional lecturer and tutor, primarily at Australian Catholic University and the University of Melbourne. Henry has also worked as a research assistant on several ARC Projects, including most recently as a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Merchants and Museums’ Linkage project, which aims to reconstruct the global trade in zoological specimens in nineteenth-century Australian museums. He was the 2021 John Oxley Research Fellow at the State Library of Queensland and the 2022 Harry Gentle Visiting Fellow at Griffith University.