School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item'Once we had bread here, you gave us stone'. Food as a technology of biopower in the stories of Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Alexis Wright( 2019)This thesis presents the first comprehensive study of food in the works of Indigenous Australian storytellers. It uses Foucault’s analyses of biopower as a grid of intelligibility through which to describe food’s various functions and effects as they are recorded, reproduced, refracted, and resisted in Jack Davis’s, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s, and Alexis Wright’s storytelling. The thesis reads food as a technology of biopower: a means by which life ‘passe[s] into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention’ (Foucault 1978, 142). Following a Foucaultian methodology, it presents close and contextualised readings of the ways that food is instrumentalised as a technology of biopower and the functions, effects, and networks of biopower that result in and through the storytellers’ works. The specific topics the thesis engages include accounts of rationing and food-centric resistance in Davis’s plays, food insecurity and obesity discourse in Langford Ginibi’s life stories, and food’s relationship with alcohol and imperilment in Wright’s stories. It traces continuities between the storytellers’ treatment of food as well as identifying the way food generates and is implicated in evolving configurations and networks of biopower. It explores various resistance strategies and their efficacy in and through their stories, as well as the new subjects, hegemonic relations, institutions, forms of government, and fields of power-knowledge that result.
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ItemWriting places: whiteness and the design of the built environment( 2018)The design of the built environment affects people. In Australia, designed spaces reflect specific ideas about nationhood that do not represent the reality of a diverse population. Instead, a white national identity pervades with unresolved issues of land often at the heart of such identity narratives. Whiteness, understood as a specific power structure, operates through landscapes and architecture in explicit and implicit ways. Indigenous cultural identities are also present within and against all of these expressions of whiteness. Such tensions arise in the first instance due to manifestations of whiteness in designed spaces being situated in Indigenous lands and Country while colonial histories and their associated violence, both symbolic and literal, remain largely unacknowledged. This thesis uses a mixed methodology to investigate a range of spaces, including demarcated national spaces, memorial sites, and places of exhibition, through the lens of critical race and whiteness studies to reveal how these identity tensions occur. Though the Australian context is the main focus of the study, an initial look to how similar issues are playing out in the US highlights the existence of transnational whiteness and the nature of the newly-formed relationship between the two nations at the time of Australia’s Federation. It is argued that the complicated relationship between these cultural identities affects the way landscapes and architecture are experienced, whether this is realised on a conscious level or not. Further, by using critical and reflexive modes of engagement, designers can gain deeper insights into place, see and feel their position in relation to these identity tensions, and understand how power is operating through them. This examination of the way cultural identities such as whiteness and Indigeneity are expressed through the design of national, memorial and exhibition spaces, allows a way into thinking about how the same tensions and power dynamics may also be taking place in more everyday spaces.
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ItemAustralia and the Pacific: the ambivalent place of Pacific peoples within contemporary Australia( 2018)My thesis examines the places (real and symbolic) accorded to Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism. It demonstrates how these places reflect and inform the ways in which Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. While acknowledging the important historical and contemporary differences between the New Zealand and Australian contexts, I deploy theoretical concepts and methods developed within the established field of New Zealand- centred Pacific Studies to identify and analyse what is occurring in the much less studied Australian-Pacific context. In contrast to official Australian discourse, the experiences of Pacific people in Australia are differentiated from those of other migrant communities because of: first, Australia’s colonial and neo-colonial histories of control over Pacific land and people; and second, Pacific peoples' important and unique kinships with Aboriginal Australians. Crucially the thesis emphasises the significant diversity (both cultural and national) of the Pacific experience in Australia. My argument is advanced first by a historicisation of Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific people, detailing intersecting narratives of their migration to Australia and Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial engagements within the Pacific region. This is followed by case studies of two celebrated sites of Australian “Pacificness”: first, a mapping of the involvement of Pacific players in the sport of rugby league in Australia; and second, an analytic record of Australia’s representation at the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts, held in the Solomon Islands in 2012. A Pacific Studies methodology is developed to provide a theoretically sound and empirically informed approach to Pacific research that distinguishes it from current studies in or of the Pacific.
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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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ItemAustralian media representations of sea-level rise in the Pacific: an assessment of coverage around COP21( 2016)This study examines Australian mainstream media coverage of those in the Pacific most at risk of suffering due to climate change-related issues. It develops a multidimensional framework to assess the performance of news texts published by four key online outlets around the time of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. The study finds, through measuring performance against journalistic ideals, that there are many areas where the potential to improve coverage exists. This includes: better representation of Pacific Islanders, conveying the global and regional significance of the issue, the use of visioned cosmopolitan discourse, mentioning the potential for adaptation, critiquing climate policy and engaging in debate, including a vast range of diverse voices, and using environmental narrative to inspire action.
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Item‘Something we can only desire’: writing the past in recent Australian literature & an extract from the novel 'To name those lost'( 2014)In the last decade, the novel in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny from historians, academics, and the wider public as novelists offer a vision of our past that often sits uneasily beside more formal historiographic investigations. There is a general expectation that fiction should be truthful with the past. Fiction, however, often undermines the empiricist view of referentiality that history promotes, instead exploiting the paradoxical break from the referent that the imagined topography of fiction allows. This leads to what Ellison has called ‘referential anxiety’, or an uncomfortable awarness of the loss of reciprocity with the world. Given this range of responses and the paradox of which they are indicative, to claim that the novel is a form of historiography misunderstands the nature of truth in fiction. This dissertation focuses on three Australian novels that exemplify the problematics of reference, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. The dissertation is paired with an extract from the novel To Name Those Lost, the story of an itinerant labourer and Black War veteran named Thomas Toosey. His journey takes him along the Launceston-Deloraine railway line during the early years of its operation as he searches for his son, William. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey finds the town in chaos. Riots break out in protest at a tax levied on citizens to pay for the rescue of shareholders in the bankrupt Launceston and Western Railway Company. Toosey is desperate to find his son who is somewhere in town amid the looting and general destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
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ItemThe aesthetics of counter-memory: contemporary art and Australian refugee histories after Tampa( 2013)This thesis provides the first in-depth examination of experimental methods for memorialising Australian refugee experiences in works by the contemporary artists Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. As this thesis argues, each of these artists’ methods for memorialising refugee experiences is distinguished by the use of montage (the conjoining of disparate materials and references). By bringing together—or montaging—cultural documents from a variety of sources at both a historical and geographic level, these artists create deeply fragmented images of refugee histories. Representations of refugee experiences such as those involving the Tampa, the “children overboard” affair and SIEV-X are juxtaposed and sutured with a range of other seemingly incongruous histories from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In engaging strategies of montage and juxtaposition, this thesis finds that the artists examined therein develop a distinct paradigm of experimental memorialisation—termed here the aesthetics of counter-memory. Developed through a critical engagement with discourses on contemporaneity, globalisation, migration and memory, this thesis’ development of the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory offers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the import of Laing, Schmidt and Brown and Green’s experimental methods of memorialisation. In contrast to the notion of the “counter-monument”, which focuses on analysing official and state-sanctioned memorials, the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory addresses the possibility of art directly intervening in the politics of memory of that which escapes collective consciousness: that is, the politics of who and what is remembered and why. As this thesis shows, in grappling with the politics of memory, the aesthetics of counter-memory refuses didactic or agitprop modes of communication and is instead structured by affective and poetic forms of address. The aesthetics of counter-memory determines our experience of migratory flows, place and inter-subjectivity through a series of analogies, resonances, ligatures, networks and border-crossings. It places montage and juxtaposition—the conjunction of heterogenous and at times seemingly incongruous things—as central to a critical understanding of experiences of place, migration and exile in the twenty-first century. In mapping the emergence of the aesthetics of counter-memory this thesis theorises and analyses a new paradigm of contemporary art and its impact on remembrances of recent refugee histories.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.
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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.