‘Making Night Hideous with their Noise’: New Year's Eve in 1897 more

New Year’s Eve in Sydney is an iconic festival. It emerged with the modern city at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper uses newspaper reports to examine Sydney’s first truly urban celebration of New Year’s Eve in 1897. This one night brought together the elements of the city that the urban crowd considered worth celebrating: artificial lights, carefully measured time, commodity consumption and even the crowd itself, all things that at other times were considered oppressive. This reveals New Year’s Eve as a new type of urban carnival, a night where the city was turned upside down.