School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEugene von Guerard and the science of landscape painting( 2007)Eugene von Guerard (1811-1901) is regarded as one of Australia's most important nineteenth century landscape painters. He was forty one when he arrived in Australia in 1852. His training, his contact with artists in Rome, Naples and Dusseldorf and his engagement with contemporary scientific thought in Europe shaped his response to the Australian landscape. In this thesis von Guerard's origins in Vienna and the role played by his artist-father in his early art practice are explored. The reconstruction of von Guerard's early life in Europe is based on the artist's sketchbooks and unpublished oil sketches. His training under Bassi in Rome (1830-32), his immersion in the German community of artists there, the significance of the Nazarene painters and the influence of Joseph Anton Koch for his career are examined. In Naples, where von Guerard lived and worked for six years, he painted with Pitloo and the School of Posillipo, he was introduced to Hackert's work and ideas and he undertook an extensive Sicilian expedition recorded in the sketchbooks of both father and son. In Naples von Guerard's interest in volcanic geology was ignited. Following the death of his father in 1836 von Guerard arrived in Dusseldorf 1838 where he studied landscape painting under Schirmer and Lessing, participating in their open air painting expeditions to the Neander Valley and the Eifel. He made studies volcanic phenomena in the Eifel, an important site for the emerging science of geognosy. In Dusseldorf he was exposed to the ideas of Humboldt and Carus, took sketching expeditions along the Rhine, met his future wife Louise Arnz and was a founding member of the Kunstlerverein Malkasten. An examination of the landscape paintings and lithographs that he produced during the almost thirty years he spent in Australia (1852-1882) indicates that Humboldt's ideas were the enduring imperative for von Guerard's journey to Australia. In a series of case studies von Guerard's career as a Humboldtian Reisekunstler is explored. Von Guerard's scientific interests were nurtured in mid-century Melbourne by the community of eminent German scientists resident there. His expedition to Kosciuszko with the eminent geophysicist, Georg von Neumayer, epitomized Carus's ideal of the complementary relationship between art and science. His interpretation of the volcanic Western District, prior to government geological surveys, was informed by his studies of parallel phenomena in Germany's Eifel region. In Victoria's fern gullies and the sub tropical rain forest of New South Wales von Guerard portrayed plant species from Humboldt's sixteen Urpflanzen in their natural groupings and environmental context. His album, Eugene von Guerard's Australian Landscapes, was recognized by the geologist of Novara expedition fame, Ferdinand von Hochstetter in Vienna in 1870 for its geological and botanical content. Carus and Humboldt looked for a poetic response to nature, one that would communicate a sense of the inner life of the subject and this von Guerard achieved through the sensitivity of his touch, the honesty of his response to nature and the compositional geometry of his works, works that brought Humboldt's vision of unity and interconnectedness to the Australian landscape.
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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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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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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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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemArt at auction: price formation and the creation of superstars in the Australian art auction market( 2008)This thesis shows that prices generated by the art auction system can be anything but mysterious despite the common perception that art, as a commodity, somehow falls outside the norm compared with other economic systems. Far from being the by-product of an enigmatic process, auction prices evolve directly from the mechanisms that shape the market and the human agents and institutions that dominate the system. Using the non-Indigenous Australian art market as a case study, this thesis offers a new, cross-disciplinary model that draws on economic and art-historical methodologies as a means of examining and explaining price formation within the art auction market. The research presented shows that the Australian auction market is dominated by a very small number of artists who are responsible for generating the lion’s share of revenue. Referencing cultural economic theory, I describe these artists as ‘superstars’. I discuss the superstar effect as it is defined in economic terms and show how it manifests in the art auction record. I map the existence of a superstar class of artists at the high-end of the Australian art auction market and consider the implications of this for art’s investment potential. Most market commentaries focus on the top-end of the market. This study uses as its starting-point a dataset of over 2,500 artists active at all levels of the secondary-market compiled from auction records covering the period 1972-2004, including artists who registered just a single auction appearance. This presents a broad overview of the market that offers new insights into the relationship between levels of professional accomplishment and auction price. Artists’ auction records and biographies are examined in detail in addition to agglomerate data for the market as a whole. This examination presents a picture of the key events, agents and institutions that shaped the auction market in Australia during the ‘boom’ period that commenced in the late 1990s. The premise of the ‘superstar’ artist is perpetuated and enshrined by the way these factors interact with the art auction system and place upward pressure on prices. The model of the art auction market presented in this thesis suggests that the prices it generates can be formed by activities that have little if anything to do with genuine competitive forces. As I will show, this can have implications for the efficiency and sustainability of the market.
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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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ItemWho is behind the camera? The cinema of Giorgio Mangiamele( 2009)The cinema of independent film director Giorgio Mangiamele has remained in the shadows of Australian film history since the 1960s when he produced a remarkable body of films, including the feature film Clay, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1965. This thesis explores the silence that surrounds Mangiamele’s films. His oeuvre is characterised by a specific poetic vision that worked to make tangible a social reality arising out of the impact with foreignness — a foreign society, a foreign country. This thesis analyses the concept of the foreigner as a dominant feature in the development of a cinematic language, and the extent to which the foreigner as outsider intersects with the cinematic process. Each of Giorgio Mangiamele’s films depicts a sharp and sensitive picture of the dislocated figure, the foreigner apprehending the oppressive and silencing forces that surround his being whilst dealing with a new environment; at the same time the urban landscape of inner suburban Melbourne and the natural Australian landscape are recreated in the films. As well as the international recognition given to Clay, Mangiamele’s short films The Spag and Ninety-Nine Percent won Australian Film Institute awards. Giorgio Mangiamele’s films are particularly noted for their style. This thesis explores the cinematic aesthetic, visual style and language of the films. It also explores the influence of the cultural context in which the films were made and from which the film director originated. It looks at wartime Sicily, and specifically the film director’s natal city Catania; the neorealist period in post-war Rome; and the city of Melbourne to which the film director relocated in 1952. Finally, the research looks at the filmmaking experience whilst working for the Film Unit of the Papua New Guinea Government in Port Moresby.