Abstract
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Melbourne was a city undergoing enormous political, social, and cultural transformation. Within this volatile melting pot, three women pursed their respective arts in close collaboration to produce a remarkable series of children’s songs and drawings on themes of the Australian bush. The renowned illustrator Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (1888–1960), her sister, writer Annie Rattray Rentoul (1882–1978), and composer Georgette Peterson (1863–1947) published a series of popular and influential children’s books that were re-published at least 52 times over a period of approximately 30 years beginning with a launch at the historic Women’s Work Exhibition in Melbourne in 1907. The unique and artful combination of images, text, and music provides a rich example of multimodal discourse, literary theory, and semiotics. This chapter draws upon the work of authors including Bruno Bettelheim, Perry Nodelman, and Daniel Chandler. Through this analysis, it is argued that the work of these women can be considered as a form of ‘high art’ rather than devalued merely on the basis that it was created for children.
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Notes
- 1.
The Exhibition of Women’s Work was held at the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne from 23 October to 30 November 1907. Attracting 250,000 visitors from Australia and overseas, it showcased women’s achievements in the arts, crafts, health, child care, homemaking, and horticulture. A women’s choir and orchestra gave concerts and a competition was run to compose an ‘ode’ for choir and orchestra to text by Annie Rentoul. Georgette Peterson gained second place behind first-prize winner Florence Donaldson Ewart.
- 2.
Georgette Peterson, Annie Rentoul, and Ida Rentoul (Outhwaite), Australian Songs for Young and Old (Melbourne: Allans, 1907); Bush Songs of Australia for Young and Old (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1910); More Australian Songs for Young and Old (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1913); Australian Bush Songs (Melbourne: Allans, 1936).
- 3.
H.M. Saxby, Offered to Children: A History of Australian Children’s Literature, 1841–1941 (Sydney: Scholastic Australia, 1998), 432.
- 4.
Hereafter, the multiple editions will be referred to collectively as the ‘Bush Songs’.
- 5.
John Rentoul (1846–1926) was Professor of New Testament Greek Literature and Christian Philosophy at the Theological Hall of Ormond College between 1884 and 1926.
- 6.
Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Annie Rentoul, Elves and Fairies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, ed. Grenbry Outhwaite (Melbourne: Lothian, 1916).
- 7.
James Cockington, ‘British Buyers Under the Spell of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s Australian Bush Magic’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 17, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/money/investing/british-buyers-under-spell-of-ida-rentoul-outhwaites-australian-bush-magic-20160616-gpl1n5.html.
- 8.
Marcie Muir and Robert Holden, The Fairy World of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1985), 16.
- 9.
Letter from John Rentoul to Miss Vines (dated 22 September 1921, Ormond College, Parkville), 1. A copy of the letter was accessed by the author in a private collection in Ringwood, Victoria (Australia). See collector’s site: https://www.thecollectingbug.com/idarentoulouthwaite/.
- 10.
Muir, The Fairy World, 20.
- 11.
Royal Society of Victoria, Official Souvenir Catalogue of the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work, (Melbourne, 1907). Catalogue no. 024775, X607.34951Aus. For Franklin and Georgette Peterson, see Faye Patton, ‘Peterson, Georgette Augusta Christina (1863–1947)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, National Centre of Biography, accessed January 18, 2021, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/peterson-georgette-augusta-christina-8543/text13995.
- 12.
Stella Lees and Pam MacIntyre, The Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77, 152.
- 13.
Saxby, Offered to Children, 319.
- 14.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin, 1991), 6–7.
- 15.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 8.
- 16.
Perry Nodelman, Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
- 17.
National Centre for Research Methods, Glossary of Multimodal Terms, accessed June 24, 2018, https://multimodalityglossary.wordpress.com/mode-2/.
- 18.
The word ‘play’ is used here in the sense of the way a child enjoys recreational activity joyfully and spontaneously. The notion of informal ‘play’ is arguably intrinsic to the creative act.
- 19.
Georgette Peterson, Annie Rentoul, and Ida Rentoul (Outhwaite), ‘Autumn Wind’, Australian Songs for Young and Old, 27–28. Copyright V&S Martin. Used with permission.
- 20.
Nodelman, Words About Pictures, Chapter 9: 14.
- 21.
Nodelman, Words About Pictures, Chapter 2: 6.
- 22.
Lawrence Sipe, ‘How Picture Books Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationship’, Children’s Literature in Education, 29, no.2 (1998): 98.
- 23.
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 39. By the term ‘fix’, Barthes implies that a certain meaning is being ‘fixed’ in the mind of the viewer, such that a particular interpretation of the text becomes more likely.
- 24.
A ‘sign’ is defined by Daniel Chandler as ‘a meaningful unit’, which is interpreted as ‘standing for’ something other than itself. Quoting Ferdinand Saussure, Chandler describes it as ‘the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified’. See Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, Chapter 1: 1 and Glossary, accessed June 23, 2018, http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/.
- 25.
A ‘syntagm’ is defined by Chandler as ‘an orderly combination of interacting signifiers, which forms a meaningful whole’. See Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, Glossary.
- 26.
Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 41.
- 27.
Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, Glossary.
- 28.
Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 32–51.
- 29.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies: Selected and Translated from the French by Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 115.
- 30.
Chandler defines codes as ‘procedural systems of related conventions for correlating signifiers and signifieds…. [They] provide a framework within in which signs make sense: they are interpretative devices which are used by interpretative communities.’ (See Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, Glossary.) More broadly, ‘codes’ refer to the systems of representation of the hidden meanings.
- 31.
The similarity to, for example, the James Bond signature theme suggests an ‘archetype’. The fact that the Bond theme and the ‘Gobble Wobbles’ motive are totally unrelated is consistent with the notion of an archetype.
- 32.
Peterson, Rentoul, and Rentoul (Outhwaite), ‘Gobble Wobbles’, 4–5. Copyright V&S Martin. Used with permission.
- 33.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 8.
- 34.
Annie Rentoul and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, The Little Green Road to Fairyland (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1925); ‘War’, by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, in Elves and Fairies, 21; ‘And Wept Bitterly’, by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, in Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Annie Rentoul, and Grenbry Outhwaite, Fairyland (Melbourne: Ramsay Publishing, 1926), 53.
- 35.
Rentoul and Rentoul Outhwaite, Fairyland, 133.
- 36.
Barbara Bader, quoted in Nodelman, Words About Pictures, 8.
- 37.
Nodelman, Words About Pictures, 8.
- 38.
Nodelman, Words About Pictures, Chapter 4: 8.
- 39.
Edith Honig quoted in Caitlin Campbell, ‘Heroes and Heroines: A Feminist Analysis of Female Child Protagonists in the Epic Fantasies of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Pullman’ (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 2009), 11.
- 40.
Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Discussions about how music ‘signifies’ arguably date back at least as far as the eighteenth century but were construed within entirely different contexts to modern conceptions of semiotics.
- 41.
Óscar Hernández Salgar, ‘Musical Semiotics as a Tool for the Social Study of Music’, trans. Brenda M. Romero, Ethnomusicology Translations IUScholarWorks Journals 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.14434/emt.v0i2.22335; Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007).
- 42.
Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, Chapter 5: 1.
- 43.
National Centre for Research Methods (‘Mode’).
- 44.
Lyndon C.S. Way and Simon McKerrell, eds., Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), xvi.
- 45.
Way and McKerrell, Music as Multimodal Discourse, xvi.
- 46.
As an example of vocal glissando, see ‘Coo-ee’ from Peterson, Rentoul, and Rentoul (Outhwaite), More Australian Songs for Young and Old, 10–11.
- 47.
Nodelman, Semiotics for Beginners, 1.
- 48.
Nodelman, Semiotics for Beginners, Preface.
- 49.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 12.
- 50.
Saxby, Offered to Children, 319.
- 51.
Michael Michalko, ‘Scratch a Genius and You Surprise a Child’, The Creativity Post, June 28, 2012, https://www.creativitypost.com/article/scratch_a_genius_and_you_surprise_a_child.
- 52.
State Library Victoria, ‘Dr Johanna Selleck’, accessed January 24, 2021, https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/about-us/fellowships/creative-fellowships/current-creative-fellows/johanna-selleck.
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Acknowledgement
This article is based upon research conducted at the State Library Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) as part of the author’s 2016 Creative Fellowship at the library.Footnote 52
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Selleck, J. (2022). Australian Bush Songs as Multimodal Discourse: The Remarkable Collaboration of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Annie Rentoul, and Georgette Peterson. In: Kouvaras, L., Grenfell, M., Williams, N. (eds) A Century of Composition by Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95557-1_3
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