School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMedieval textual production and the politics of women's writing: case studies of two medieval women writers and their critical reception( 1991-07)Recent discussions of the state of Medieval Studies, sparked by such books as Lee Patterson’s Negotiating the Past, provide an important impetus for this thesis because they highlight the critical abyss which exists between Medieval Studies and other areas of literary studies. For one entering the field of Medieval Literary Studies this revelation is disturbing and inhibiting. However, the history of Medieval Studies cannot be ignored by those now working within the area. If Medieval Studies is to survive it must come to terms with its past and recognise the precarious position in which the discipline now stands as a result of its academic isolation. ...
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ItemThe Pinschofs: patrons of art and music in Melbourne 1883-1920( 1991)This thesis deals principally with the period following Pinschof’s arrival from Vienna in 1879, to just after the First World War. It considers the Pinschofs’ generous and timely support of the arts within the context of the amount of private and institutional patronage and the British, German and other cultural influences on Melbourne society at the time.
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ItemSymbols and power in Theatre of the Oppressed( 1999-09)Augusto Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed as a way of using the symbolic language of the dramatic arts in the examination of power relations in both the personal and social contexts. Boal understood that symbolic realities directly influence empirical reality and that drama, as an art form that employs the narrative and the event, serves as a powerful interface between symbols and actuality. In the dramatic process, the creation and the environment from which it emerges are inevitably transformed in the process of enactment. These transformations manifest in the context of power relations - in the context of the receptors ability to make decisions and to engage in actions, and the communicators ability to influence the receptors opinions and behaviour. This thesis will examine two different practices in which symbolic realities have been utilised in the context of human relations of power. Primarily, this thesis examines the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed as it has developed.
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ItemThe first Australian modernists: Tempe Manning, Norah Simpson and Grace Cossington Smith: gender, myth and art criticism during the First World War( 1997)Three women artists started the shift to modernist art practice in Australia during the first world war. Norah Simpson, Grace Cossington Smith and little known artist Tempe Manning contributed to the debate and practice of new techniques and new subjects. All were students of Dattilo Rubbo's school in wartime Sydney. Unable to find a relevant level of expression in the nationalist landscape tradition, they set about painting subjects that embraced the experiences of women. Bringing together their exposure to modem art in Europe prior to the war, the politicised environment and their own personal ideas, these artists forged a new vision of Australia and a new space for Australian art. Drawing on gallery archives, newspaper articles and reviews, oral histories and a comprehensive range of secondary sources, this thesis offers a more detailed account of the emergence of modernism in Sydney, and the critical role of women artists, than has previously appeared.
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ItemRadical inauthenticity and cultural anxiety: the Benetton advertising phenomenon( 1994)Just months before the beginning of the intifadah uprising in the occupied territories of Israel in 1987, The Benetton Group released their latest corporate advertisement (fig. 1) featuring an Arab and a Jew embracing each other with a globe between them.1 the image was one of a series from a campaign featuring historically opposed nationalities in a mutual embrace. The ‘Arab/Jew’ ad immediately sparked worldwide media controversy.2 However, the image had already been the object of a clandestine controversy resulting in the censorship of its original unreleased version, in which the two opposing ‘nationals’ were united not by a globe but by a handful of money.3 Six years later on September 13, 1993 another version of this image of desire and fear (fig. 2) made front-page news worldwide. The moment Arafat and Rabin shook hands, standing either side of the global symbolism of President Clinton of the United States, was widely acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s most significant political reconciliations. The narrative offered here by the contiguity of these three images is not structured by the operations of cause and effect. Rather, it is constructed as a challenge to that logic which would interpret advertising as having clearly negative or positive effects on reality. The impossibility of isolating the impact of the ‘original’ advertisement in this proliferation of images immediately highlights the complex relation Benetton ads maintain with reality. This complexity is fuelled by a mixture of determinism and non-determinism, figured in the ad and its various other incarnations as the contradictory embodiment of both commercially motivated product-relatedness and aesthetically ambiguous product-non-relatedness. This contradiction centralizes ambivalence in the analysis of such Benetton-related circuits of communication. Thus, just as the ‘Arab/Jew’ ad juxtaposes the logo with the dream of national transcendence, so too does the photojournalist image juxtapose the politically monumental with the memory of an ad. Neither image exists in an isolated, mono-functional realm. (From Introduction)
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ItemThe graphic journey: Murray Griffin linocuts( 1998)This thesis presents the first thorough examination of the prints of Vaughan Murray Griffin (1901-1992), produced in Melbourne between the 1920s and the 1980s. The thesis incorporates a catalogue raisonne of the 144 prints. Although recognised as an important contributor to early twentieth century Australian relief printing, Griffin's work has received little attention in recent years. Griffin first experimented with printing techniques in the 1920s, before settling on linocuts as a enjoyable and profitable artistic production, a sideline to his oil landscape painting. From 1932 until the 1970s, Griffin produced an opus of colourful linocuts, created by a combination of multiple block and reduction processes. This production was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served as an Official War Artist and spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Changi, Malaya. The majority of the prints are decorative images of Australian native birds which were popular items from the Depression years well into the post-war period. However, in addition to these prints produced for the market, Murray produced a number of prints over the decades through which he developed and expressed personal ideas. These culminated in the 1960s group of prints which Murray called his 'Journey' series, representing his anthroposophical beliefs (based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner). The aim of this thesis is twofold: firstly, to provide a body of empirical data for the examination of Griffin's life and production and secondly, to analyse his prints in terms of wider social and artistic contexts. This analysis reveals that for a time he was at the forefront of Australian relief printmaking. Prints produced after the Second World War remained successful in the 1950s and 1960s, but have received minimal retrospective attention. This neglect was exacerbated by Griffin's involvement in anthroposophy and the intensely personal visual depiction of his beliefs.
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ItemThe art of George James Coates, 1869-1930 and Dora Meeson Coates, 1869-1955( 1992)Edwardian England was projected in paintings by artists such as John Singer Sargent by an image of a leisured and wealthy society of aristocratic and industrialist classes. More recent scholarship has brought to the surface contradictions inherent in this image. The working classes suffered great poverty and grinding hardship which the rising forces of socialism and trade union activity were fighting to overcome. Positioned between the two extremes, the middle class, including intellectuals in the fields of art, music, academia, theatre and literature, was active and vital. After their early beginnings in Melbourne, Australia, and study in Paris, George James Coates and his wife, Dora Meeson Coates, moved progressively into this intellectual milieu, developing a wide artistic and cultural network of Anglo-Australian colleagues and acquaintances. Coates became a leader amongst the Australian expatriate artists who were seeking to take their place amongst international artists as collectively representative of the art of their new Australian nation. The emergence of this new expatriate group, and its recognition in Britain, was a first in Australia's history. Coates and Meeson were leaders in the formation of this group which sought to establish an Australian artistic identity within the broader British cultural community. By their artistic achievements at the major exhibiting venues, membership of societies, and acceptance in the wider community, the expatriates created a strong Australian presence which became a firm base for the successive generations of Australian artists in their ongoing attempts to achieve a significant place in international art. Accepted individually, but seeking recognition as representative of their nation, the Australians held group exhibitions limited to Australian artists but international in the scope of their art. Their ambitious pursuit of international acclaim, individually and as a group, was happening at the time when Australia also was making its debut in London with regard to social, cultural and commercial activities. The successes of its artists within the international community contributed to the widening acceptance of the young nation upon the world stage. Although Coates failed to achieve fame as a major artist, he was a significant and leading contributor to the overall achievements of these Australians. (From Introduction)
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ItemAustralian aboriginal art in Japan: a study of recent public exhibitions( 1994)In 1992 two large-scale exhibitions on Australian painting were held in succession at major public art museums in Tokyo and Kyoto. The first, the Two Hundred Years of Australian Painting exhibition, was basically modelled on The Great Australian Art Exhibition, a component of the 1988 Australian Bicentenary 'celebration'. It was succeeded by Crossroads: Toward a New Reality which showed over 120 Aboriginal paintings of great variety, including bark and acrylic painting. Two Hundred years of Australian Painting presented just six Aboriginal works. Australian painting itself was new to most of the Japanese audience, not to mention 'Aboriginal art'. The exhibitions provided the Japanese audience with opportunities to encounter the unique achievement of the descendants of Australia's original inhabitants. The presentation of Aboriginal paintings at the art museums was complemented by the 50,000 Years of Hunters and Spirits exhibition mounted at the Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, a presentation of Aboriginal culture in the light of ethnographic interest. What is Aboriginal art for the Japanese audience? While in Australia Aboriginal art is a political and cultural issue concerning the rights and identity of the nation's indigenous people, which are predicated on their ancestral, tribal relationship to the land, in Japan it is an unfamiliar art brought from abroad, which agrees with the current trend of Japanese taste for the 'ethnic'. In other words, while no Australian audience can be detached from the historical and moral questions the art conveys directly to them, the Japanese audience is an outsider to the art. Conceptually, the art loses part of its raison d'etre as it travels outside Australia. For example the political function of the art as an Aboriginal statement of protest against white invasion and a claim to Aboriginal land rights becomes a mere background narrative to the art when it is presented to the Japanese audience. In a strict sense, however, the Japanese audience cannot remain entirely detached from the Aboriginal land rights issue because Japanese enterprises are largely involved in mining and land 'development' in Australia. Considering that most of the currently developed mining sites are located in the arid interior of the continent, where Aboriginal communities have been increasingly regaining their autonomy during recent years, Japanese entrepreneurs are involving themselves in the intractable conflict between indigenous rights and the national economy of Australia. Theoretically Japanese nationals residing in Japan, as well as the Japanese entrepreneurs who are engaged in the mining industries, are all implicated in this conflict of interests, whether or not they are aware of their involvement. A substantial proportion of the energy resources extracted from Australia is exported to Japan and the exported resources, such as petroleum and various minerals are utilized in Japan daily by Japanese people. (From Introduction)
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ItemEarly modernist landscape painting in Melbourne( 1995)In the years leading up to Federation at the turn of the century and in the ensuing decades up to about 1940, popular and respected landscape artists in Australia were preoccupied with distinctively 'Australian' images of the countryside. These nationalist landscapes tended to promote a conservative and masculinist imagery. Subsequently historians have constructed a narrative of landscape painting in Australia which follows the work of these popular artists and generally dismisses the early challenges to the art establishment posed by artists who produced modernist landscapes from 1925 to 1939. Historians have constructed a narrative of early modernism in Australia which focuses on Sydney artists and on painting genres and art practices apart from landscape art (design art, flower studies, prints). Furthermore, some historians have dismissed this period as unimportant or as a period producing unsuccessful works because a number of women painters were prominent and influential. Historians have not considered the impact of early modernism on landscape painting. This thesis recovers the work of a number of early Melbourne modernist landscape artists and discusses them in their historical context in order to re-evaluate the success of their modernist experiments and the importance of their challenges to Melbourne's art establishment. The work of early Melbourne modernists in educating a new audience for art, inspiring a new generation of art students, and in challenging the authority of critics and established artists was significant for the development of modernism in Melbourne.
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ItemThe Moravian-run Ebenezer mission station in north-western Victoria: a German perspective( 1999)This thesis analyses the German perspective of the Ebenezer mission station in north-western Victoria. The German-speaking Moravian missionaries were sent out from Germany in 1859 to civilise and Christianise the Aborigines of this area. Until now the German perspective of the Ebenezer mission station has been neglected, partly because much information is locked up in the German language. Through an analytical descriptive history the missionaries are contextualised in a European and also an Australian setting. This background clearly defines the cultural baggage that the missionaries carried with them to Australia, and how this affected their work at Ebenezer. With this background in mind an analysis of the German language writings in three mediums is conducted, these being: Missionsblatt aus der Brudergemeine (the Moravian mission's global publication), Der australische Christenbote (the journal of the Lutheran Church in Victoria) and also the missionaries diaries and letters that were sent back to Germany. It is shown that the missionaries were aware of the different perceptions that their audiences had and wrote accordingly. Through the missionaries' depiction of other groups an understanding of how the missionaries perceived themselves is formed. Although these depiction of the ‘other’ were different in all three mediums, they always advanced the interests of the missionaries (usually by reinforcing the contemporary cultural hierarchy) and not the ‘other’. The analysis of German language sources leads to a more detailed understanding of the perceptions of the German-speaking missionaries at the Ebenezer mission, and also to the history of the mission itself.