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 The reconstruction of von Guerard's early life in Europe is based on the artist's sketchbooks and unpublished oil sketches.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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.