School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemShakespeare in Australia: the making of a colonial literary institution from 1788 to 1901( 1997)In the 1980s and 1990s Shakespeare scholarship in Britain and North America has produced powerful analyses of the ways in which Shakespeare operates as a cultural institution. In analysing Shakespeare as a cultural institution it is less the meanings of his plays or poems that are examined than the role that Shakespeare plays in securing important social and institutional relationships, both inside and outside the academy. This thesis adds to that body of scholarship an analysis of Shakespeare as a cultural institution in colonial Australia during the period from 1788 to 1901. Its aim is to examine the historical conditions for the development of Shakespeare's preeminent signifying power with a focus on the ways in which the "transportation" of Shakespeare from Britain to the Australian colonies occurred. The thesis develops the argument that the transportation of Shakespeare to the Australian colonies and his reproduction within the colonies were important enabling conditions for the formation of a colonial public domain. In the early years of colonial settlement the presence of Shakespeare in the colonies enabled them to exhibit evidence of the development of colonial culture both to imperial eyes and to the colonists themselves, while later in the century a number of literary and cultural organisations were established with the affirmation of Shakespeare as one of their central goals. Colonial reproduction of Shakespeare therefore helped to secure channels of communication between the colonies and the metropolitan centres of the British Empire and influenced the formation of central colonial cultural institutions - the theatre, criticism, and literature, for example - through which this communication occurred. At the same time, colonial Australia's Shakespeare helped the colonies to negotiate tensions and contradictions in their relationships with the metropolitan culture, in part because the colonies' constructions of Shakespeare registered complex interactions between discourses of colonialism, nationalism and imperialism. This thesis draws upon recent work in Shakespeare studies, postcolonial studies and Australian studies, and on original archival research into nineteenth-century Australia. Its analysis of Shakespeare as a colonial cultural institution aims to contribute to our understandings of Shakespeare's continuing influence in Australian culture and to revitalise discussion of established topics in Australian literary studies.
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ItemPerformance studies as a discipline?: a Foucauldian approach to theory and practice( 1993)This thesis has three major purposes: firstly, to describe and analyse the institutional power/knowledge relations operating in the constitution of the academic ‘discipline’ of performance/theatre studies. I deploy Michel Foucault’s conceptions of ‘discursive formation’, ‘discursive practice’, and ‘power/knowledge’; in an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which the academy distinctively articulates the discipline. The second purpose of the thesis is to map and critique specific conceptions of the ‘discipline’s’ epistemological profile, through an examination of the discursive practice of theatre at the University of Melbourne from the mid-fifties to the present. Third, I go on to prioritize a specific performance oriented articulation of the field’s epistemological profile, based on an interdisciplinary pedagogy. I describe the techniques, methods and theoretical justifications for such an articulation of the discipline by offering a critical account of The Killing Eye project - a multi-media performance which deals with the topic of serial murder - which was initiated in the context of a third year performance studies course. I conclude with an analysis of the academy’s institutional enablements and constraints in the areas of theatre practice and pedagogy.
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ItemThe legend of the Goodfella Missus: white women, black society, 1840-1940( 1991)The legend of the Goodfella Missus is a gendered myth dear to white Australian history. The most constant motif of the Goodfella Missus is her acclimatization to and affection for all that is different in the antipodes. Concepts of aboriginality are inextricably mixed with her vision of the strange landscape and its flora and fauna. She has had a hallowed place in the Australian annals. The power and persistence of the legend, with its repressive ideology of charity and chastity, is the subject of this thesis. It is a study of race, class and gender in the context of colonization. The stereotypes of aboriginality remain remarkably constant over the century, though place, time and Aboriginal society may be radically different. The gender boundary is the most troubling and revealing because of its ambiguity in the interstice between black and white, servant and mistress, matriarch and monster. Much of the evidence has had to be recuperated, reinstating a selection of verbal and visual images of what white women could come to know of Aboriginal life. My argument works as much through repetition and resonance as it does through explication and exegesis. The historical patterning of three generations of women’s images forms a kind of unhappy hearth history, from Emigrant Gentlewoman of the 1840s, to Australia’s Daughter of the 1870s, and Modern Woman of the early twentieth century.
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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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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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Item'Pilgrims of the picturesque': the amateur woman artist and British colonialism, circa 1750-1860( 1996)Until recent feminist revisions of art history, British and British colonial amateur women artists have been almost totally ignored. Although biographical information is available about them, there is no general study which analyses their collective position and role in British and colonial societies. This is the broad aim of the thesis. It examines the construction of the subject of the British, middle-class, amateur, woman artist from the late eighteenth-century, her art training and employment opportunities, and her role in establishing amateur artistic culture in the colonies of Australia and India. It is an interdisciplinary study because amateur women artists typically produced hybrid, non-canonical, visual works that cross over into the fields of science and literature. The thesis explores the way amateur women’s various leisure and work practices were linked, discursively and practically, using an interdisciplinary approach which draws on feminism, postcolonialism and Foucault’s analysis of discursive practices. These approaches to historical study have in common an analysis of power in relation to the subject. Here, the power dynamics of class, race and gender are analysed in relation to the subject of the amateur woman artist. The thesis traces a key development in the ideological construction of the amateur woman artist to the 1790s in Britain, using the evidence of female conduct and other manuals. These promoted a rational, religious, domestic and maternal model of femininity, influenced by Evangelical religious ideas and gendered concepts of nature. ‘Feminine’ leisure pursuits, such as drawing, were redefined as self-disciplinary practices which would help achieve a desirable type of modern, middle-class, female subjectivity. This discourse extended into the construction of ‘feminine’ artistic genres in commercially available drawing-manuals and was practically reinforced by the conventions of amateur women’s private art training. The thesis revises definitions of the amateur woman artist, particularly the conventional split made between the amateur of the ‘female’ private sphere and the professional of the ‘male’ public sphere. These categories overlapped in middle-class women’s artistic employment. Moreover, their status was different in the nineteenth-century. While amateurs are now devalued relative to their professional counterparts, amateurism was then a mark of class superiority. The stigma attached to professional status for women, and the structural obstacles put in the way of their achieving it, meant that amateur and professional women artists trained, worked and presented themselves in similar ways. In the so-called ‘private’ sphere, it can be seen that women’s domestic, amateur, art production served the community rather than the self and therefore belonged as much to the public as to the private sphere. The thesis examines questions of white, middle-class women’s agency in raced, classed and gendered systems of colonial power. In Australia and India, male and female amateurs were central in founding artistic cultures, which were an instrument of class hegemony. Gendered hierarchies are evident within these class-based amateur cultures. In reading women’s representations of colonial lands and other races, the thesis argues that their conventional adoption of the picturesque mode of description, ostensibly a protest against ‘male’ violence and ‘progress’, was ambivalent and, ultimately, compliant with it.
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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.