School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemRevealing the light: stained glass and the art of John Trinick( 2008)Australia has an important legacy of stained glass, but there has been limited scholarship undertaken on the artists who have chosen to specialise in the medium. One artist to whom this applies is John Trinick (1890-1974). Educated at Melbourne's National Gallery School, Trinick immigrated to England in 1920 and went on to execute over fifty stained glass window schemes in that country. He regularly exhibited his work at the Royal Academy of Arts and had a collection of his stained glass drawings acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Despite these achievements, he has not received recognition for his work in either England or in his place of birth, Australia. The significance of Trinick's contribution to stained glass design will be demonstrated in this thesis through an examination of the John Trinick Study Collection held at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. This Collection consists of seventy-five works, the majority of which are large-scale stained glass cartoons for the windows Trinick produced. This thesis represents the first time the Collection has been examined in depth. The thesis assesses how Trinick can be positioned within Australian stained glass history. It will be argued that as part of the wider University of Melbourne Art Collection, the John Trinick Study Collection has been given a renewed meaning, providing researchers with a different insight into the development of the medium in Australia. The important links that the Collection reveals between Trinick and fellow stained glass artists, Napier Waller (1894-1972) and Christian Waller (nee Yandell) (1894-1954) are also assessed. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Two chapters focus on the biographical details of the artist's life. These chapters argue that Trinick's introduction to the Arts and Crafts Movement while he was a student in Melbourne and his initial employment in some of England's leading Arts and Crafts stained glass studios had a lasting impact on the type of stained glass artist he was to become. The other two chapters focus on the John Trinick Study Collection as a case study to assess the collection management and curatorial challenges that these types of collections pose. A series of recommendations is then put forward as to how these problems can be addressed in relation to the management and care of the John Trinick Study Collection. Trinick is one of the forgotten practitioners of Arts and Crafts stained glass. The many years he spent as an Anglo-Australian artist working in England have contributed to his neglect within Australian art circles. It is hoped that this study will reveal his skills as a stained glass artist and introduce his work to a new audience.
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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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ItemUncollected verse: an analysis of the decline of the national poetry anthology( 2007)In this thesis I show that there has been a decline in the production of "national poetry anthologies" in Australia since the end of the 1990s and seek to understand the reasons behind this decline. The first chapter examines changes in the economics of publishing and asks how these impact on literary texts, including the poetry anthology. I argue that with the increasing influence of a neo-liberal, deregulated industry context, production is concentrated within a smaller number of firms and that these firms concentrate on titles that might become blockbusters and are reluctant to produce texts — like anthologies — which will never be bestsellers. This is in spite of the fact that, I argue, there remains demand for them. I consider other factors including the introduction of a GST in 2000; the arrival of Nielsen BookScan, also in 2000; changes at Oxford University Press in the late 1990s; and adjustments in Australia Council funding since 1996, which I argue have aided the decline. The second chapter looks at cultural changes that have threatened the legitimacy of the national poetry anthology, including the "new" reality of social fragmentation in Australia and moves within the intellectual environment to express a more complex, diverse image of national culture. The challenge posed to national poetry anthologies by thematic anthologies produced in the 1970s and 1980s is also considered. In Chapter Two, I go on to provide a close textual reading of the eight major national poetry anthologies produced between 1986 and 1998 by focusing on their "paratextual" apparatus, including the Introduction, the cover, the publisher's and anthologist's reputations and the critical reception of these works. In the past, commentaries have tended to look at the selection of poems or poets in an anthology but these paratextual elements shape our reading of the poems in powerful ways and so deserve careful examination. In considering these anthologies, I argue that national poetry anthologists in the 1980s and 1990s were, for the most part, unable to make the anthology reflect social diversity and this made the anthology appear out-dated and irrelevant to contemporary reality. In the conclusion I argue that there is a need for the form of the national poetry anthology to change in order to try to accommodate current social and intellectual conditions.
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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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ItemDrawing a line: the colonial genesis of the Hume highway( 2006)The colonial archives of the Hume Highway return to an inception narrative containing tropes of intrusion and conflict. In Chapter One a survey of the maps and literature relating to the 1824/5 expedition leads to a discussion of these tropes. The first of these, 'intrusion', concerns the process through which Aboriginal place was first reconfigured as colonial space. Beginning with Hamilton Hume's act of 'drawing a line' through the blank space of a government supplied skeleton chart, this act of intrusion was rapidly followed by the expedition party's penetration into the Aboriginal countries of south-eastern Australia. The second trope, 'tug of war', concerns the rivalry between Hovell, a British free settler, and Hume, a first-generation Australian. Throughout the 1824/5 expedition differences between the two men smouldered, before erupting in controversy in 1855 when Hume published his vitriolic pamphlet Facts. By placing the expedition and these men in their colonial context, Chapter One draws parallels between this conflict and class tensions within the Australian colonies during the same period. Such information enables the reader to appreciate the inception narrative of Chapter Two. How the expedition party made the road during their three and a half month expedition is recreated by drawing from associated exploration texts. By contrasting the explorers' distinct attitudes to the land and the Aborigines, the relationship between the two tropes also becomes evident. As the two men walked the road, so they would write it. Chapter Three examines the key moments and motivations of their controversy. With the publication of Facts 1 in 1855 Hume reasserted his authority over a road since inscribed with the regular traversings of settlement and gold traffic. In doing so, Hume also drew a line through the name of Hovell and ensured that the line in the skeleton chart eventually became known as the Hume Highway.
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ItemSydney Dance Company: a study of a connecting thread with the Ballets Russes( 2009)This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This study sketches the origins of the Ballets Russes, the impact its launch made on dance in the West, and how it progressed through three distinguishable phases of influence. It summarises the important features of the visits to Australia of Russian ballet companies from Adeline Genee in 1913 to the culturally altering impact of the revived Ballets Russes companies over three extended tours between 1936 and 1940. It charts the formation of viable ballet companies in Australia, commencing with Kirsova in 1939 and Borovansky in 1940, to the Australian Ballet in 1962 and the Sydney Dance Company led by Murphy between 1976 and 2008. Drawing on distinctions between classical and contemporary dance, it attempts to demonstrate the groundwork of example established by the Russian ballet, and, particularly, the revived Ballets Russes visits up to 1940. Data for this thesis was drawn from a personal interview with Graeme Murphy, original documentary research in public collections in Australia, government and Sydney Dance Company archives, newspapers and secondary literature.
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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.