Art

White Australia and the Empty North (1909)
1900s, 1910s, Art, Australia, Ephemera, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Plays

Australia and the airship — IV

The previous post in this series was supposed to be the last. But in the course of taking two months to write it, I managed to forget about another, earlier association between a White Australia and an Australian airship. This one wasn’t a real airship; it was a fictional one which appeared in Randolph Bedford’s […]

Shori Arai, Maintenance Work aboard Aircraft Carrier II (c. 1943)
1940s, Art, Ephemera, Pictures

Preparing for take-off

Apropos of nothing, here’s a (somewhat cropped) c. 1943 painting by a Japanese artist named Shori Arai. (Sometimes called Maintenance Work aboard Aircraft Carrier II, though clearly it’s not maintenance that’s going on there.) The original is held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. It was also issued as a postcard by the

A ham-bone
1910s, Archives, Art, Pictures, Reprisals

A ham-bone for Sir Edwart

An early contribution to the list of strange things dropped from the air in wartime was made by the crew of L13, a German naval Zeppelin under the command of Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy. During a raid on London on the night of 8 September 1915, they dropped bombs from Bloomsbury to the City which killed

1910s, 1920s, Art, Before 1900, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Ephemera, Music, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Tools and methods

Half full and half empty

Getty Images has just announced an embed function, which makes it possible to very easily use images from their collections in blogs and other social media, while simultaneously maintaining Getty Images’ rights and — this is the really nice bit — avoiding the use of unsightly watermarks. This is rightly being greeted with enthusiasm (though

IWM PST12249
1910s, Art, Australia, Ephemera, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures

Zeppelins over your town

[Cross-posted at Society for Military History.] Above is a poster printed in Australia during the First World War. It very strikingly shows a Zeppelin caught in searchlights (with an aeroplane just visible at the top) over what looks like a town nestled in a valley beside a river. The text reads: ZEPPELINS OVER YOUR TOWN

Cyril Power, Air Raid (1935)
1910s, 1930s, Archives, Art, Pictures

Air Raid

Cyril Power, Air Raid (1935): British biplanes tangling with an unidentified enemy against a smoke-filled sky. It is tempting, given the date, to see this as an air raid of the next war, especially given Power’s marked interest in machines and speed and influence by Futurism and Vorticism. But it could just as well be

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