School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemLarrikins, Listeners and Lifeline: inside Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club( 2022)Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club (2010 – present) is a loosely structured weekly podcast hosted by two stand-up comedians and good mates Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler. Each episode usually features one to three guests, often also stand-up comedians, who casually chat with Chandler and Dassalo and joke about their lives and the world around them. In this thesis I establish how hosts, guests and listeners of comedy chatcasts co-create their performance conventions by collaboratively and often unwittingly combining a range of social norms, stand-up comedy techniques and conversational skills. Understanding how these conventions are created and shared shows how comedy chatcasts influence host and listener behaviour in podcast-related spaces and in their broader lives. As I demonstrate, comedy chatcasts have influence even when the intention of the hosts and guests is only to be funny. The comedians in The Little Dum Dum Club are always looking for the joke, and the humour is often insult-based and puerile. These are contemporary larrikin performances, involving taking the piss out of one another, themselves and authority in an egalitarian way, a shared self-deprecation that also encompasses a sense of mateship. Rather than uncritically reiterating these dominant conventions of white Australian masculinity, however, the comedic performances in the podcast both represent and critique them. The performance conventions of comedy chatcasts create a “safe space” in which comedians can humorously explore ideas and respond to changing cultural norms in a way that does not radically reshape them but does suggest opportunities for intervention and evolution. The impact of this is clear, for instance, in the meaningful but humorous discussions of suicidality on the podcast and how joking about lived experience reframes flippant suicide jokes to lessen shame and promote help-seeking behaviour among listeners and comedians. Listeners likewise have a set of conventions which enable them to perform their fandom of the comedy chatcast. Building on podcast scholarship about intimacy and parasocial relationships, I show how listeners attempt to replicate the mateship form of friendship performed on the podcast using its jokingly abusive comedy style. For listeners of The Little Dum Dum Club, successfully performing their listenership requires navigating a series of at times conflicting conventions which are often at odds with broader norms of appropriateness and do not necessarily find a willing audience. Podcasts have niche global audiences and conventions need to be interpreted and performed to receptive audiences in order to be successful. The Little Dum Dum Club is unique in its content, but not in its construction. This thesis shows how comedy chatcasts as new media enable analysis of the shifts in and discussions of our cultural norms that happen in non-radical, flexible and playful ways. Through such analysis, we can see how comedy chatcasts can be influential in minor and major ways for those involved.
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ItemOswald Brierly and the art of patronage: a colonial journey( 2016)This thesis seeks to evaluate the nature and significance of artistic patronage in colonial Australia by an examination of the patronage received by Oswald Walters Brierly [later Sir Oswald] (1817-1894) associated with his time in Australia and the extent to which this patronage informed his art. The thesis explores Brierly’s role as a professionally trained artist in the emerging artistic environment of the Australian colonies in the 1840s and seeks to show how his colonial experiences influenced the subject matter of his later art; particularly the impact of his direct engagement with the whaling industry at Twofold Bay in New South Wales between 1843 and 1848, under the patronage of his first Australian mentor, the flamboyant entrepreneur, Benjamin Boyd (1801– 1851). It also examines his role as a shipboard artist on voyages of discovery aboard H.M.S Rattlesnake and to a lesser extent H.M.S. Maeander. It will be shown that following Brierly’s second visit to Australia with H.R.H. Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh (1844-1900), on the first Royal visit to Australia in 1867-1868, the artist attracted new Australian patronage: patrons who sought to enhance their own prestige and status by acquiring works by an artist who enjoyed strong royal connections. It proposes that the examination of Brierly’s work associated with Australia sheds new light on the changing nature of artistic patronage in Australia between the largely convict dependent society of the 1840s and the confident and prosperous world of the Boom Period following the discovery of gold, especially in Victoria. The thesis will demonstrate that Brierly’s art reflects these changed circumstances and the expanding aspirations of his Australian patrons.
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ItemCircuits, computers, cassettes, correspondence: the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976 - 1984( 2016)This thesis examines the production and presentation of experimental music, art, performance and installation by a group of musicians, visual artists, writers, performers and film makers who were involved in the activities taking place at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Melbourne from 1976 until 1984. This thesis will investigate the musical influence of the generation of practitioners who founded the Clifton Hill and taught at the La Trobe University Music Department. It will examine their influence upon the younger generation, with focus on the close relationships both generations had with the broader music and visual art scenes of Melbourne and Australia. This thesis traces a transitional moment in artistic production between the older and younger generations, which was an illustration of the broader shift in Australian artistic culture from modernism to postmodernism. I will document the artistic work of a younger generation at the Music Centre as a symptom of a new postmodern mode of engagement in order to determine what place the Clifton Hill occupies within a history of emergent postmodern theories in Australian art.
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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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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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ItemUnsettling Australia: modernity and mobility in some recent Australian fiction( 2011)This thesis explores motifs of modernity and mobility in recent Australian fictions by Joan London, Rodney Hall, Gail Jones, and Michelle de Kretser, demonstrating how these interrelated themes “unsettle” the notion of national identity. Recent Australian criticism advocates methods of reading beyond the strictly local category of the national, instead reflecting the ways in which influences from across the modern world inform literary and national identity. Since part of this critical project has been to assert that transnational mobility has underpinned Australia’s modernity since colonial settlement, analysing instances of mobility in these contemporary novels unsettles modernity as perpetual present and advancement, for the project necessarily involves referring back to the past. Drawing on critical articulations of transnationalism, postcoloniality, and an Australian uncanny, in conjunction with arguments for a multi-temporal notion of modernity, I use the notion of “unsettlement” to articulate the terms and framework for the spatial and historical anxieties that this multi-temporal and multi-spatial modernity presents, considering it as a postcolonial predicament. Not only is Australia as a literary setting unsettled through the depiction of journeys to and from the nation but, since modernity must always be defined in relation to the past that precedes it, these authors’ depictions of modernity in effect reanimate Australia’s history. “Unsettlement,” in the novels examined, reveals the space of the modern nation to be destabilised by the dislocations of global mobility and striated by the continuing effects of its colonial past. The first chapter pursues the figure of the travelling colonial woman, whose mobility destabilises the boundaries between home and away, and enables an alternative, gendered and fluid narrative of modernity. As a historical fiction, London’s Gilgamesh (2001) also animates the unsettling of Australia’s past, invoking an ancient epic in order to unsettle the boundaries between the “Old” world and “New.” The second chapter focuses on Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home (2000), in which travel mobilises the proximity of two distinct historical locations (National Socialist Germany and colonial Australia) to unsettle each nation’s mythological origins. The third chapter argues that Jones’s Black Mirror (2002) and Dreams of Speaking (2006) develop an underlying poetics of the unmodern through their concern with subjectivity, memory, and both personal and national traumas. These novels disrupt a coherent narrative of modernity as progress and renewal, presenting it instead as an unsettling condition, but one that is also empathetically engaged with the past and with others. The final chapter, on de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (2007), examines unsettlement as a condition of modernity within the national space and argues that the diasporic, double consciousness performs an unsettled, lived tension between the past home and the present inhabitation.
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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.