It’s Sydney – and Saturday night. The Great Jazz Orgy has begun … a million people are moving, turning, swaying, shuffling to the accompaniment of pianola, gramophone, or jazz band, and are beating out the barbaric time of syncopated melody. (Home magazine, 1923)

Historian Jill Julius Matthews takes us back to Sydney between the 1890s and the late 1920s, when cinema and the phonograph were exciting new imports, their impact on the local culture at once exhilarating and threatening. Matthews examines the way modernity – in the form of popular music, dance and film – was brought to and embraced by Sydneysiders. Her focus is on the ‘mediators’ of the new: entrepreneurs who imported the products and the technique of making them indispensable to people’s lives; the traditionalists who hoped to protect audiences from ‘corruption’ by seductive popular culture; and the government officials who negotiated these voices, seeking to regulate content.