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, ‘that everlasting entity’. 19 His journey would prove that ‘the air and the four corners of the earth are ours to command’. 20 A fairy tale was about to come true. The shimmering symbolism was memorable sixty years later: the moment was remembered as ‘the culmination of six years of pioneering endeavour and the brink of realisation for an Imperial dream’. Empire and mother country would be joined as
‘Airborne to Africa’ was more than alliteration; it was still extraordinary news. A Times leading article intoned paternally that Africa was like a fairy-tale sleeping beauty, waiting to be awakened by some outside agency before the full extent of its resources could be utilised ‘for its material advancement and more complete civilization’. Cobham, the editorial continued, was setting out so that British
to be practised on the island), and days were spent sunbathing on the island’s white beaches and jumping into the fairy-tale ocean. 17 ‘We go naked’, the famous musician went on to explain, ‘so the heat does not disturb us. The hustle of culture we do not know, our venture is communistic, every colonist becomes part-owner.’ 18 Lützow’s panegyric descriptions of
children’s afterlives was a fairy tale in which the darkness of the past was erased by a rosy future. Transplantation returned the child to the garden of innocence. Yet underneath such idealised imagery lay a harsher reality, a regime of training designed to produce a subservient workforce, tolerating strict discipline which had the potential to veer into abuse. Such abuse was not an aberration but intrinsic to a system
enlivening and lengthening New Zealand’s history and adding to it a dash of myth and romance. Edward Tregear had taken a similar line in his Fairy Tales and Folk-lore of New Zealand and the South Seas (1891), which – motivated by what he saw as colonial children’s lamentable ignorance of Maori lore – presented Maori mythology as quintessentially New Zealand as opposed to Maori stories. 17 Others
and the availability of new technologies, especially electric lighting, enabled designers to create spectacular effects. The Paris show of 1900 was the most developed example of the exhibition as an unreal paradise. It was the first in Europe to extensively use electric lighting to evoke a fairy-tale environment, invariably in conjunction with water cascades, glass and mirrors. A large number of the
1864 and adopted a policy of including ballet in his programmes. The ballets drew for their themes on familiar elements: the exotic (Spain, Russia, Scotland, the Orient); fairy tales and legends; love stories; with a fondness at the Alhambra for large-scale water-cascades, fountains and ice effects. The music was generally supplied by one or other of the successive music directors and was usually arranged from
, were popular because they hymned the beauties of nature, contentment with one’s lot, rural bliss and a settled society. Sacred songs like The Holy City and The Lost Chord provided the spiritual uplift, and the exotic ballads ( The Arab’s Farewell To His Steed; I’ll Sing Thee Songs of Araby ) reflected the growing interest in travel, exploration and Empire and the construction of a fairy-tale