When Adelaide Was Australia's Cultural Capital: The Forgotten Rebels of the 1930s

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-mins + Q&A with Dr Samuel J. Cox Adelaide Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: When Adelaide Was Australia's Cultural Capital: The Forgotten Rebels of the 1930s Overshadowed by the major east-coast metropolises, Adelaide is often seen as peripheral to Australian cultural development. Yet in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was briefly ‘the literary capital of Australia’, (Harris 18), emerging as a key centre for the development of Australian modernism before moving to the Eastern Coast. Given that this was an anomalous position the city never held again, why has this chapter of Australian cultural history remained largely untold? The rediscovery of the radical little magazine Phoenix (1935–39) allows us to recover the full story of Adelaide’s radical Bohemia. This talk begins with the ferment around Phoenix and the network of institutions that fostered modernism in the city. It then follows the two literary movements that grew out of the magazine, the Angry Penguins and the Jindyworobaks, through to their demise in the Ern Malley hoax and the high farce of Max Harris’s obscenity trial. Throughout, the talk seeks to restore the lost Adelaide-centricity of this history of Australian modernism and to consider what it would take to foster such an arts scene again. Your Speaker: Dr Samuel J. Cox Dr Samuel J. Cox is a researcher of Australian literature at the University of Adelaide, whose work explores Australian modernism, literary and cultural history and the relationship between literature and the environment. His essay uncovering the overlooked story of Phoenix journal and its importance to Australian modernism won the History Council of South Australia’s Wakefield Essay Prize in 2026. Samuel’s forthcoming monograph, Dust Country: Australian Literature in the Age of the Anthropocene, will be published by Routledge. His scholarly writing and criticism has been widely published locally and internationally. Samuel held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tübingen in 2025–2026 and will take up a two-year Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Potsdam in 2027.