School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemFrom "Homelands" to "Wastelands": landscapes of memory in poetry, place and photography( 2012)This thesis explores the gaps within the familial narrative, including those found in the photographic archive. The ideological framework of the family, and the ways in which we create and imagine domestic landscapes, is examined through a “reading” of family photographs, a key feature of this thesis. Family photographs frame and trigger individual and familial memory and instigate forgetting. Additionally, landscapes of memory and identity are strongly linked to, and inform a dis/connection to place. Our “sense of place” is also informed by trajectories of migration both forced and desired. The meaning of “home” and the ways in which we imagine “home” is, in turn, informed by the construction of myths, shared through generations. Utilising notions of memory, place and landscape in my photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” as a point of departure, the thesis also examines how cultural memory is mediated through place and photography. The thesis traverses various terrains and cultural geographies, investigating how cultural identity is both informed and challenged by myths of the nation, “home” and “homelands”, childhood and the family. Within my own family, narratives of migration and settlement both anchor familial bonds while simultaneously disputing and supporting nationalist narratives. The confluence of migrations from Jamaica, Wales and England to Australia offers a new perspective on colonisation, nationalism, belonging, and “home” in an examination of myths of the family, place, and cultural identity in Australia and my family’s countries of “origin”. An analysis of both place and the photographic image, as repositories of memory, create what Michel Foucault terms counter-memories and reveal histories “hidden” or erased in visual and written discourses of the nation-state and the dominant narrative of the family, which is often patriarchal or monolithic. The thesis also adopts an interdisciplinary approach within visual and cultural studies with a strong emphasis on feminist theories and those located within the fields of memory studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies. The thesis is divided into two sections: the photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” and the critical component entitled “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. “A Time in Place” responds to places (both in the natural and built environment) of familial and personal significance in my family’s patterns of migrations. Three parts constitute the critical component of the thesis “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. The first of these explores place and memory (including forgetting) in family photographs taken in Jamaica, England and Wales. The second examines the work of three contemporary photographers: Ingrid Pollard, Simryn Gill, and Sandy Edwards, and the ways in which they negotiate identity, place, space, diaspora and the family. The third investigates “sense of place” and the notion of home through a psychogeographic exploration of my “hometown”, Newcastle, Australia.