School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEveryday Traces: Diasporic Hauntings and the Affectivity of Historical Trauma Among Cambodian-Australian Women( 2020)This thesis explores how traces of the Cambodian genocide affectively haunts Cambodian-Australian women. I draw upon postcolonial theory, affect theory and feminist studies, to analyse the ways in which Cambodian-Australian women mediate memories and experiences in relation to broader cultural, social and historical structures. I contend that intergenerational trauma, gendered norms, and the politics of racism and belonging shape women’s connections to their Cambodian heritage and Cambodian identities in diverse and significant ways. My methodology, which includes qualitative in-depth interviews with Cambodian-Australian women is informed by a feminist approach that foregrounds women’s lived experiences. Yet, this thesis is not only about haunted diasporic subjects; it is also written from the perspective of a haunted diasporic subject. Given my positionality as an ‘insider’ researcher, I use a reflexive, autoethnographic approach, to writing, in order to challenge conventional modes of storytelling in academia and to interrogate what counts as ‘evidence’ in social science research. To this end, I situate my autoethnographic pieces alongside my participants’ narratives in an attempt to disrupt the subject-researcher distinction. My thesis adopts Grace Cho’s (2008) creative and reflexive approach and Avery Gordon’s (2008) method of ‘linking imagination and critique’, to not only explore the hauntings legacies of the Cambodian genocide, but to perform the very thing that my research tries to capture: ‘affective hauntings’. Using Avery Gordon’s (2008) theory of ‘haunting’ as an overarching framework, I argue that for many of my participants, all of whom were raised in Australia by one or both parents who survived the Cambodian genocide, the collective traumas of Cambodia’s devastating history have affected and continue to affect their lives, in subtle and not so subtle ways. Intergenerational hauntings, while sometimes difficult to locate, can provoke affective states that are embodied, and reflect emotions such as confusion, guilt, unease, melancholy, sadness, sorrow, pain, pride, and gratitude. These affective states are relational, contextually driven, cultural, discursive and continually negotiated. Certainly, embodied hauntings speak to histories of grief and loss, and yet from this loss, something else, something beyond psychopathology emerges. Drawing on feminist theories that highlight the generative possibilities of affect (Dragojlovic and Broom 2018; Ahmed 2010), I explore how intergenerational hauntings are sites of possibility that can open up new ways of thinking about identity and agency. As illustrated by my participants’ narratives, hauntings can be expressed by desires to actively engage with the past, recover histories, and ‘return’ to Cambodia.
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ItemA Gothic vision: the architectural patronage of Bishop James Goold in colonial Victoria( 2020)During his almost 40 years long episcopacy, James Alipius Goold (1812-1886), the first Roman Catholic bishop of Melbourne, laid strong foundations for the Catholic church in Victoria. The diocese of Melbourne counted only two churches and two chapels when he arrived in 1848, but, during his lifetime, clergymen claimed he laid as many foundations stones as Saint Patrick himself. After ten years spent as a missionary in New South Wales, Goold dedicated himself to the diocese of Melbourne. He established a firm administration, and was involved in several aspects of church building. He selected prominent locations and provided parish priests with suitable designs, he decided how to allocate Government funds and visited the building site whenever possible. His architectural patronage exemplifies the evolution of Gothic taste in Victoria. While earlier commissions encompassed Gothick churches, in the wake of the gold rush Goold had the resources to commission archaeologically correct Gothic Revival churches from the English architects Joseph and Charles Hansom. Over the years Goold developed a network including leading manufacturers in Europe and Australia to provide glass, furnishings and metalwork of the finest quality for the Gothic churches he was building. He gifted items to the parishes to dignify also the humble temporary buildings used for Sunday mass. In 1858, the English Catholic-convert architect William Wardell relocated to Melbourne. He had worked on about 30 church commissions in England, almost all of them in the Gothic Revival style faithful to AWN Pugin’s principles. Wardell was the man Goold needed to pursue his Gothic vision in Victoria. In the following decade, the bishop commissioned him to provide plans for at least a dozen parish churches ranging in size and refinement for city parishes and rural districts alike. His ambitious patronage culminated with the realisation of St Patrick’s Cathedral to Wardell’s grand design, a building rooted in French and English mediaeval tradition matching the size of European cathedrals. Bishop Goold played a remarkable role in shaping the built environment of the colony. His championing of the Gothic Revival style ascribes his name among the group of patrons who translated European culture to colonial Australia.
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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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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.