The Kangaroo Kelmscott: materiality, embellishment, and Australian identity

The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) is recognised as the crowning achievement of William Morris's Kelmscott Press. In 1921, a copy of this book housed in the State Library of New South Wales was beautifully rebound in tooled kangaroo hide. We show that in the process of attempting to transform the Kelmscott Chaucer into an Australian cultural artefact, this rebinding illuminates Australian medievalism, the philosophy of the Kelmscott Press (which tends to hybridise the medieval and the modern), Chaucer's depiction of materiality and surface in 'The Canterbury Tales', and the relationship between colonial and long-standing Indigenous Australian uses of kangaroo skin.