School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemDaryl Lindsay : vision for Australian art(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe characterisation of oil paintings in tropical southeast Asia(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemCosmopolitanism and fictionality in eighteenth-century literature : Montesquieu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemDivide and embody : the moment of putting pen to paper in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novels(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemA fragile thing : marketing remote area Aboriginal art(University of Melbourne, 2005)This dissertation examines the marketing of Australian Aboriginal art from remote area communities with a particular focus on the new marketing practices that have evolved in response to government policies. I will argue that the pressures to achieve economic sustainability are leading art centres to put greater emphasis on business rather than artistic development. Indigenous communities do not view art centres solely as businesses, but as mechanisms for cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. I will argue that the marketing of their art is a means of communicating their culture to a broader audience as well as creating employment opportunities within their communities. Chapter 1 defines the role of art centres, examines the contribution of art centres and arts advisors in the marketing of Indigenous art, and explains the role of different tiers of government in creating the infrastructure for the Indigenous art market. Chapter 2 argues that the economic rationalist perspective disregards the cultural, social and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities. It traces the shaping of the Indigenous tine art market through government policy and funding programs, Then it examines the impact of government funding arrangements in skewing community priorities through three funding scenarios: the development of a culture centre, withdrawal of government subsidy from an art centre and the exhibition Balgo 4-04. Chapter 3 surveys approaches to the marketing of art that achieve cultural outcomes rather than business results recounting examples of innovative marketing from Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC), which were initiated with both business and cultural objectives. Chapter 4 explores the motivations of Indigenous communities in establishing art centres. It traces the history of Turkey Creek and the formation of the Warmun Art Centre and its marketing strategies. Chapter 5 addresses the economic issues faced by art centres in competing with private dealers in the marketplace. This study reveals the uniqueness and fragility of art centres operating in remote areas. I argue that the art centres' existence, and the fundamental role they play in maintaining the integrity of the market place through their marketing strategies, is threatened by the business model. In so doing, I question the current direction of government policy.
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ItemClosing the distance. Identity and self-representation in the Japanese literature of three Korean writers in Japan: Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong.( 2008)The theme of cultural identity is topical in the academy and society at large but it is especially significant for the Korean diaspora in Japan. This thesis investigates the means by which Japan-based second-generation Korean novelists Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong characterize 'zainichi Korean identity' in six semi-autobiographical novels written in Japanese between 1957 and 1972. I argue that a close reading of The Death of the Crow (1957) and The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi (1971) by Kim Sok Pom, The Cloth Fuller (1971) and For Kayako (1970) by Lee Hoe Sung1, and Frozen Mouth (1966) and Delusions (1971) by Kim Ha Gyong allows for an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Koreans born in Japan before 1945 and the effects of racial oppression on minority identity formation. Specifically, I evaluate and compare the methods by which ethnicity and images of the self are articulated by these three writers in their creative fiction. The thesis argues that, despite the diversity of the views the three writers off er on ethnicity and cultural identity, a theme which they all share is how to overcome the problem of identity fragmentation - the problem of negotiating incongruous hybrid Japanese/Korean identities. Ambivalent experiences of belonging or dislocation, vis-a-vis both Japan and Korea proper, surface as a continual source of concern for second-generation zainichi Korean writers and their protagonists. How hybridity and difference are articulated as a lived experience by Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong is at the heart of this thesis. Their protagonists are Japanese-appearing Korean men, who move between the two worlds of Japanese and (zainichi) Korean culture, and search for a unified identity, or at least contemplate what such an identity might be. In effect, they attempt to 'close the distance' between competing and conflicting images of the self while at the same time pointing to a new politics of identity and sense of belonging, where diversity no longer suggests distance but the possibilities inherent in a truly inclusive society.
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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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ItemLife and more life: the strategic hierarchies of Australian literary vitalism( 2008)This thesis argues that Australian literary historiography has largely overlooked the significant impact of literary vitalism on twentieth-century Australian writing, and attempts to redress this with a study of the ways in which principles of vitalist philosophy were used by Australian writers to gain certain strategic advantages in four key twentieth-century literary debates and conflicts. This strategic and functional approach to literary vitalism diverges from the genealogical approach taken by Vincent Buckley in his 1959 essay, `Utopianism and Vitalism in Australian Literature,' which traces various strands of vitalism across generations of writers. Buckley's essay nevertheless remains significant to this thesis because the three strands of literary vitalism Buckley identifies are linked to corresponding literary debates. The vitalist sexuality championed by Norman Lindsay is associated with the censorship debates of the 1930s; William Baylebridge's vitalist nationalism applied vitalist notions of evolution to a nationalist agenda that attempted to resist British cultural dominance; a version of heroic vitalism, which appeared first in the work of Christopher Brennan, provided Buckley with a critical framework for supplanting the nationalist literary canon with a metaphysical canon during the Cold War years. A fourth strand of industrial vitalism, which Buckley omits from his study because of his distaste for the politicisation of literature by the social realist writers with whom it was linked, controversially used literature as agitprop in the promotion of left-wing industrial reform agendas. Instead of following Buckley in making a study of literary influence, the focus of this thesis is on writers' strategic use of vitalism as both a rationale for, and an instrument of, change. These strategic opportunities arise out of vitalism's discursive shift from biology into literature. In biology, vitalism hypothesised an answer to the question, What is life? With the entry of vitalism into literary discourse an entirely different question is addressed: What is a more vital life? This new question introduces into literature an hierarchical and biopolitical notion of life- the possibility of a more vital life or intense life. Since literary vitalism ceases to value all life equally, it becomes a means of discriminating between lives. This meant that writers were able to prioritise certain literary and social formations over others on the grounds that these were somehow more life affirming or more attuned to life. The various strategic priorities asserted by different literary vitalists were based on two main claims: that vital norms have a natural or normative priority over social norms, and that the vital force, while connecting each person with the whole of life, endows upon a chosen few some particular advantage over the rest of humankind. The literary vitalists were interested in change at both the individual and collective levels. Vitalism was linked to social evolution and progressivism and to ideas about self-improvement and self-fulfilment. For those literary vitalists who recognised that life has its own momentum, the emphasis on change meant cooperating with the push of life, a collective force in which all humanity participates in the general evolutionary movement of the whole of life. For other writers the push of life gives way to a teleological pull towards a predefined goal, thereby introducing a finality inimical to the vitalist dynamic. Here the literary vitalists became involved in life management strategies that were biopolitical in the Foucaultian sense, where human life itself becomes the political target and stake, and the lives of individuals are taken charge of and regulated in the name of the well-being of the population, with individuals encouraged to align their personal aspirations and conduct with the cultural imperative to act upon themselves in the interests of the social whole. Central to vitalism's appeal to Australian writers was its promise to liberate life from repressive forces. For the true vitalist, this liberation must inevitably follow from the movement or force of life itself. But more often the literary vitalists thought to accelerate the movement of life by driving it towards particular progressivist or individualist goals. Rather than opposites, these two versions of the movement of life in the work of the Australian literary vitalists tend to dovetail into one another. This is the double aspect or `double horizon' of life which Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality, where life is not only the force which is resistant to power but also the object of power. This thesis is also a study of the literary vitalist tendency to conflate the movement of life with the drive towards progressivist goals. This commitment to progressivism proceeds through the regulation and management of life and works to block the dynamic of change and to constrain the very forces that the vitalists had set out to liberate.
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ItemRe-landscaping the historical novel : imagining the colonial archives as postcolonial heteroglossic fiction( 2009)This thesis comprises a critical dissertation (Part A) and an extract from my novel, Eugene's Falls (Part B). Eugene's Falls was published by Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Press) in 2007. Eugene's Falls is a Bildungsroman retracing the Australian journeys of colonial landscapist Eugene von Guerard. It deploys narrative techniques of historiographic metafiction, polyphony and parody to deconstruct the heroic colonial quest tale. The critical dissertation situates the novel against recent theories of intercultural subjectivity, postcolonialism, and the advent of the so-called `history wars'. This thesis argues that Bakhtin's theories of novelistic polyphony, theories of focalisation building on Gerard Genette's work, and postmodern narrative techniques have a renewed importance for postcolonial historical novels created in a context of the `history' and `culture wars'. These frameworks and techniques not only enable the writer to render ethical portrayals of Indigenous-speaking subjects; most importantly, they enable postcolonial novelists to expose the archive imaginatively. At the heart of the (Australian) section of the novel is the issue of imaginatively interrogating all forms of archival evidence—rethinking `what counts, what doesn't, where it is housed, who possesses it, and who lays claim to it as a political resource' (Burton 139). As Antoinette Burton suggests, `this is not theory, but the very power of historical explanation itself (139).
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ItemSeeing in unordinary ways: magical realism in Australian theatre( 2008)This thesis introduces three emerging Australian playwrights, Lally Katz, Ben Ellis and Kit Lazaroo, who are interrogating the politics of culture, identity and gender through the application of magic realism to theatre. This thesis contends that magic realist theatre offers a public site for the cultural mediation of binaries: self and other, margin and centre, life and death, western and non-western, pragmatic and spiritual. Australia, because of its history, geographical location and cultural positioning provides a fascinating case study.
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