AustLit

'When an Australian Cinesound newsreel from 1946 o!ers to take viewers behind the Tivoli curtains for a glimpse backstage at the life of a show girl, erotic fantasies are doused and moral qualms are soothed. As it turns out, Joyce Smith is just a girl-nextdoor, living an ordinary, respectable, work-a-day life. For 7 pounds and 2 shillings a week, she arrives at the theatre for morning rehearsal, performs two shows a day, matinee and evening, six days a week. She is met by her steady boyfriend a"er the evening show, but, too tired to socialise a"er a day's work, she heads straight home to bed. The glamour of the film's chorus line montage is grounded by the mundane narrative of a working girl's routine. A photo-essay on a 'Nightclub Dancer' in a 1950 issue of Pix magazine operates on similar terms. The visual eroticism of the nightclub, depicted in photographs of the floor show and dressing rooms, is stabilised in the story by a domestic frame: 'At night she frolics with other lovelies among crowded cabaret tables. By day she's a home girl, mad on pets. She doesn't drink or smoke.' The discourse on show girls' work is sustained when Pix profiles a Tivoli 'ballet girl' three months later: 'She thinks people have wrong ideas about the glamour of it. "There's not much glamour in sheer hard work," she says. "We're on the stage because we love it."' (Publication abstract)