School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBeing in Place: Reimagining Relationships with History, Place and People( 2021)This creative writing project explores questions of belonging and place in settler-colonial Australia, through an historical and writerly lens. It first explores the interrelationship between writing and colonisation, and the construction of settler identity in relation to the control of landscapes, narratives and representations of Aboriginal people. Through an interweaving of critical and autocritical writing, I draw upon personal experiences-in-place from a settler Australian perspective and use Deborah Bird Rose’s philosophy of ‘writing place’ in an attempt to methodologically unsettle colonising narratives and discourses. The thesis documents an emergent, experiential and immersive writing process, which is focused around the following questions: If the act of writing has been crucial to the construction of settler identity, and Aboriginal misrepresentation, can writing—and more specifically the practice of ‘writing place’— respond to place and our presence here through invasion, rather than our anxiety over the absence of belonging? How might we write as settlers in ways that do not distance us further from our identities as colonisers, from our history and from our potential to take responsibility for our legacies of colonisation? These are questions that drive the work, rather than questions that are answered by the work. Part One traces the development of this thesis through an unsettling of questions of settler belonging to a focus on writing place. It locates the thesis in two places: an Aboriginal community in northern Australia and Melbourne in southern Australia. Part Two is a series of meditations on place that document my explorations of ways to read and write place. I draw on both published texts, place as text, and texts encountered in place, in an effort to consider place as an important academic and literary source. Throughout the thesis, I keep a sense of irresolution to the fore, in an effort towards unsettling, rather than settling (or re-settling) the meaning of experience. Through writing place, I look to place as a text that can reveal our own colonising identities to us, to encourage us to move away from an attempt to ‘indigenise’ to belong but instead to come into relationship with ourselves and to understand how colonisation informs our relationships with place, history and Aboriginal people.
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ItemRational fictions: Hollis Frampton's Magellan and the atlas of film( 2019)This thesis analyses three films by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984): Magellan (1964–1984), Palindrome, (1969), and Zorns Lemma (1970). I argue that Frampton sought to organise knowledge on film by recuperating the atlas—a highly selective tableau of images arranged spatially—as a model to promote film as a form of cultural memory in contrast to history. It begins with an examination of these themes in Frampton’s writing, following his conceptualisation of what he called ‘the infinite film’ and ‘the infinite cinema’ in his 1971 essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” and the subsequent essay “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” from 1972. After an analysis of how his unfinished, 36-hour-long film-cycle titled Magellan developed from this model, I argue that Zorns Lemma (1970) can be re-framed as an experiment in “filmnemonics”. This latter film left Frampton unsatisfied, however, due to the way in which it emphasised photography’s subordination to traditional systems of inscription, both alphabetical and numerical, in the highly determined matrix of the film frame. Finally, I argue that Frampton recognised that his earlier film, Palindrome (1969), was the experiment most appropriate for realising the model of the atlas of film. Frampton’s decision to include Palindrome within the Magellan cycle is proof not only of the importance of that film and its significance for understanding the complexity of the long, calendrical film cycle as a whole, but also of his shift to a topological model of film. Central to the thesis is the idea of conflation as a means to link memory with formal attempts at thinking in images, as demonstrated by Frampton’s work, addressing how he strove to accommodate film in its complexity while also providing a path through its infinity.
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ItemContesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930( 2015)Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.
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ItemLost property: the marginalisation of the artefact in contemporary museum theatre( 2015)The use of performance as an interpretive tool in museums has a long, although largely under-researched, history. Central to this thesis is the paradoxical observation that performance in museums, or ‘museum theatre’, regularly fails to engage with collection items. The title of the thesis, ‘lost property’, refers to both the apparent displacement of collection objects as the subject of museum theatre and the complexities of performing historical artefacts in a museum without reducing their significance to the status of a theatrical prop. Traditionally, the object has been central to the concept of ‘museum’. With the advent of a new museological approach to the running of museums, the exhibition object seems to have taken a subordinate role to the presentation of ideas and concepts through exhibition design and interpretation. This thesis draws on disciplinary literature, case studies, site visits and interviews with museum theatre practitioners to identify and examine the factors that have contributed to the shifting focus of performance based on objects to performance based on ideas.