Transfers 7(1), Spring 2017: 52–69 © Transfers doi: 10.3167/TRANS.2017.070105 ISSN: 2045-4813 (print) 2045-4821 (online) Worldly Tastes Mobility and the Geographical Imaginaries of Interwar Australian Magazines Victoria Kuttainen and Susann Liebich Abstract In the interwar period, increasingly mobile Australians began to contemplate travel across the Paciic, both toward Asia as well as to America. Contempo- rary writing relected this highly mobile culture and Paciic gaze, yet literary histories have overlooked this aspect of cultural history. Instead of looking to Australian novels as indexes of culture, as literary studies often do, this article explores the range of writing and print culture in magazines, concentrating on notions of mobility through the Paciic. Its focus is on the quality magazines MAN and he Home, which addressed two distinct, gendered readerships, but operated within similar cultural segments. his article suggests that the dis- tinct geographical imaginaries of these magazines, which linked travel and geographical mobility with aspiration and social mobility, played a role in consolidating and nourishing the class standing of their readers, and revealed some of their attitudes toward gender and race. Keywords: Australia, celebrity, interwar print culture, magazines, Paciic, sea travel By the mid-1930s, Australians were enamored with travel and mobility, and took part in a bourgeoning culture of tourism and organized travel. 1 While the development of rail networks and the democratization of car travel stimulated new forms of domestic mobility, travel by sea remained the dominant aspect of Australians’ interstate and overseas trips. 2 Popular sea journeys and desti- nations continued along established cultural ties of empire, through the Suez and the Cape routes, and were oriented toward Britain and Europe, but many of these trips took in areas of the Paciic that hugged Australia’s shores and extended into Southeast Asia. Australians also increasingly looked and trav- eled across the Paciic to America and beyond, particularly as travel through the Panama Canal boosted Paciic traic on routes to Europe. Contemporary writing in magazines relected this outward gaze, yet literary histories of the interwar period have elided this narrative, preferring instead a history of liter- ature and, by implication, a history of culture slanted toward radical cultural nationalism, based largely on a focus on high literary culture in book form. 3