For pleasure’s sake: Dance Hall & Picture Palace 20 years on

From the late 1980s, Jill Julius Matthews embarked on a quest to uncover the neglected histories of women’s pleasure. This research agenda reached its apotheosis in Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (2005), a book that told ‘the story of modern Sydney as a romance’ and painted the harbour city as ‘a cosmopolitan centre of modern pleasure’. Twenty years on, Dance Hall & Picture Palace has become a classic of Australian historiography, an agenda-setting book that anticipated numerous scholarly preoccupations of the 2010s and beyond–from modernity studies and transnational history to sensory history and the new histories of capitalism. Yet the book’s underlying impetus has found few disciples. For all its myriad fans and historiographical influence, Dance Hall & Picture Palace’s methodological concern with pleasure has been little emulated within Australian history, where we continue to give scant attention to the things that made life worth living.<p></p>