School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemObject lessons: public history in Melbourne 1887-1935( 2000-05)The thesis studies history-making in Melbourne’s central civic sphere, from its emergence in the 1880s to its decline in the 1930s. It identifies public history’s major themes and forms, and the relationships between them, based on four main cases of history-making: the articulation of the past and history in Melbourne’s 1888 Centennial International Exhibition; the historical backgrounds, development, unveilings and partial after-lives of Sir Redmond Barry’s statue, unveiled in Swanston Street in 1887, and the Eight Hours’ Day monument, unveiled in Carpentaria Place in 1903; and history-making around Victoria’s 1934-1935 Centenary Celebrations, with special emphasis on the Shrine of Remembrance and a detailed study of Cooks’ Cottage.
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Item"Scattered cedars in a western town": interviews with Lebanese Muslims on the family, ethnicity, gender and racism( 2003-02)This study examines the views of twenty Sunni Muslim Lebanese families about issues of family, ethnicity, gender and racism. It provides insights into some of the complex ways these participants tend to define and experience ethnicity in Australia. This thesis also considers some of the ways Sunni Muslims narrate the ethnic self in regard to their social and cultural practices in contemporary Australia. It highlights the similarities and differences between the views of Sunni Muslim families from a community perspective. This study also made important connections between the notion of ethnicity and issues of class, gender and generation. This thesis provides a seven part analysis. The first part of this study provides an outline of contemporary issues relating to the social network of the Islamic Lebanese community in Victoria. The next part is about applying the methodology of this thesis. The methodological themes of interview-narratives were explored in this chapter. In so doing, it outlines the advantages of family group interviews in ethnic community-based studies. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemChanging the landscape: the life and art of Moya Dyring( 2002)This thesis brings back into focus the life and art of Moya Oyring 1909-1967, who for a time played an important role in Australian art history. From 1937 she lived mainly in France and during her lifetime produced a substantial body of work, most of which was sold at exhibitions throughout Australia. Dyring's early work was figurative, her style strongly defined by the George Bell School and an early foray into Cubism. After settling in France the figures gave way to the constantly changing landscape as she travelled throughout the countryside of France, Spain and Italy. She recorded the life of the country villages the seaside towns and the vistas of Paris. But as her life slowed down in the late 1950s and early 1960s and she travelled less, the figures of children, playing in the parks and gardens blending with the cityscape of Paris, took over from the predominate landscape of earlier years. This thesis is presented in two parts. The first part takes the form of a biography, reconstructing the life of the artist from letters and interviews. Fifty six letters were sent to John and Sunday Reed by Dyring, over a period of thirty years and are now held in the archives of the State Library of Victoria. These letters and other relevant archival material have been used to reconstruct the life of the artist in consultation with family members and friends. Secondary sources, including catalogues and relevant art historical texts have provided additional knowledge of significant people and events that have had an impact on the artist's life, such as John and Sunday Reed, Sam Atyeo and Herbert and Mary Alice Evatt. The second section studies her work and the critical reception it received. It places the artist in the context of her own history, her art practice and art history as it relates to Dyring's gendered experience, politically and personally. Lack of knowledge of the artist's life and work has contributed to her being almost completely disregarded in exhibitions of women artists working in the thirties, forties and fifties. Her contribution to the emerging modernist scene in Melbourne and the part she played in the circle surrounding John and Sunday Reed at Heide, has been reduced to a few lines in art historical texts, yet a studio in Paris bears her name in homage to a great supporter of fellow artists. She had a rare gift for friendship and extended generous hospitality to a large circle friends and young artist visiting Paris from Australia. Like so many women artists of her generation her place in history has been ignored and her art forgotten. This thesis tells her story and places Moya Dyring and her art and life, back into the landscape.
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ItemBogan: exploring images of Australian cultural marginalisation( 2004)This thesis engages with a pressing contemporary concern: the negotiation of Australian national identity. Specifically, it argues that Australian media practitioners reconcile some of the complexity and ambivalence of Australian identity by deploying a discourse called 'bogan'. The bogan discourse creates a mediatised figure of the bogan, which is innately 'Australian' yet is also a social outcast for Australians to laugh at and loathe. By personifying traits and practices that do not accord with pre-existing ideologies of Australianness, the figure of the bogan helps reconcile contested and ambivalent ideas of national identity. Despite its assumed contemporary roots and actual existence, the bogan is purely discursive; and many of the rhetorical techniques used to produce bogans today were developed as long ago as the 1860s. This thesis assembles journalistic, literary, filmic and televisual conceptions of bogans through discussions of case studies including nineteenth-century larrikinism, the murder of Jaidyn Leskie, and the pilloried Paxton family. The bogan discourse operates in and through very different cultural contexts, without being limited to a particular era or location, because it is articulated through ideologies of national identity that are the subject of cultural anxiety and contest. These nationalist ideologies include the 'bush hero', the 'battler', 'community parenthood' and the 'do-it-yourself' ethos. While it has come to seem ‘true’ that the figure of the bogan is innately deviant and monstrous, and while the bogan discourse certainly requires and refers to empirical social realities, the figure of the bogan does not reflect the material conditions of a socioeconomic class, nor the self-articulated formations of a subculture. Rather, the bogan discourse produces understandings of reality through representations in journalism and popular culture. The social processes this thesis analyses, while anecdotally well-known, have never been studied academically as a social phenomenon. Thus this thesis proves its originality and importance by identifying a central figure in the Australian national imagination.
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ItemAboriginal art as decor: the politics of assimilation in white Australian homes 1930-1970( 2000)This thesis will examine the White Australian home between 1930 and 1970, during the formation and implementation of policies of assimilation. The home will be considered as one of the primary sites for the display and negotiation of Aboriginal culture. The incorporation of Aboriginal-style decor within the White Australian home provided a powerful metaphor for the way Aboriginal people might relate to the Australian state under the policy of assimilation. Two main trajectories of thought have coincided in home decor: how should Australia look as it enters into a period of self-conscious modernisation, and how should Aboriginality fit into this? These trajectories were not just metaphorical stagings of nationhood but were physical projections from which, it was believed, larger social changes would result. In the 1930s after a period of interracial violence that received unprecedented international publicity, theories of assimilation were put forward as a more modern, scientific and humanitarian alternative to the existing policies of protection. Anthropologists proposed utilising art as a way to further the campaign for citizenship and assimilation. It was one matter to implement a policy that sought to internalise a marginalised group into mainstream Australian culture, but another to create an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance in which assimilation would become an everyday reality in White Australia. The adaptation of Aboriginal art to home decor represented a determined effort to recontextualise Aboriginal culture and assert its relevancy in contemporary Australian life at a time when this was far from being a given. I will examine the public campaigns, and the private correspondence of A.P. Elkin and Frederick McCarthy, to show how anthropologists influenced artists, and how the pedagogical environment of the museum met with the commercial, ideological and increasingly political sphere of the domestic. In the postwar period enormous claims were made for the role of decor in Australian homes as commerce, politics, and modernity all intersected at a domestic level. Through examining the work of artist Byram Mansell I will argue that the metaphors of Aboriginal-style decor extended beyond the home into home-like spheres elsewhere, particularly the Railways. The Railways offered a theatrical experience of modernity in which Aboriginal art would help Australia come to terms with the new world and the old at the same time. As a metaphor for assimilation, the display of Aboriginal art within Australian homes often pointed towards the instability of race relations rather than the simple containment of Aboriginal people. At a title when Black and White relations were entering a period of considerable change the domestication of Aboriginality signified the possibility of resolving persistent national insecurities and of feeling at home. However, while decor promised the possibility of resolution, hailing an optimistic new racial frontier, Aboriginal-style decor also remained an unstable, and contentious feature of domestic design, as anxious as it was assertive. These issues will be further explored in the work of several contemporary avant-garde artists who have identified the home as a key site in the politics of identity formation, both oppressive and empowering.