School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
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.
-
ItemChamber music audiences: access, participation and pleasure at Melbourne concerts( 2003)This thesis examines the social role of chamber music. It argues that in contemporary Australian society the chamber music audience is largely unobserved and under-theorised, and redresses this with a study of Melbourne concert audiences. An analysis of the chamber music 'scene(s)' in Melbourne finds that audience-ship is a socially constructed practice accessed through a particular habitus that facilitates participation and pleasure at concerts. In this way access and participation is acquired through social vehicles that exist outside the concert hall. The thesis also finds that chamber music is not simply one unified cultural form, but a diverse set of music genres and cross-fertilised forms with some striking differences in the audiences of ‘new music' concerts compared with other forms of chamber music. Through an analysis of survey data and self-narrated audience biographies the thesis demonstrates that, for those with the necessary habitus, chamber music constitutes an important source of cultural capital: it is a worthwhile object of desire, an indispensable and irreplaceable means of pleasure and happiness and plays a worthwhile role in the public and private lives of individuals. The habitus that facilitates an appreciation for chamber music is not available to everyone and in an era of confused egalitarianism this finding challenges the claim that access to the arts and high culture has been democratised. Particular cultural precursors arc necessary in order to derive access, participation and pleasure in high cultural events such as chamber music concerts. In this way access, participation and pleasure of chamber music remain off limits to most Australians.
-
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.