School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe etched work of Jessie C.A. Traill, 1881-1967( 1982)Jessie C. A. Traill, 1881-1967, a Melbourne-born artist, was, during her heyday, well respected both in her home state and beyond, as a painter and etcher. Today her name is most readily associated with etchings, and it is generally recognised that her contribution to the etching revival in Australia is a major one and that her work in this medium warrants a thorough study in order that her relative place in this context be fully appreciated. Her prints are, moreover, of a high quality technically speaking, and show significant innovations for Australia in both this respect and in their subject matter. They are, as well, delightful and much sought after items for the collector and connoisseur of prints. This paper is the first written study of Traill's etchings, the present generation print lover having been introduced to her work in a retrospective exhibition at the "Important Women Artists" gallery in Melbourne in 1977, and in subsequent exhibitions of Australian etchings where her works have been included. As such, the study will add to a slowly growing body of information on the major Australian etchers, material which is invaluable for an adequate formulation of the history of printmaking in Australia.
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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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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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ItemThe first Australian modernists: Tempe Manning, Norah Simpson and Grace Cossington Smith: gender, myth and art criticism during the First World War( 1997)Three women artists started the shift to modernist art practice in Australia during the first world war. Norah Simpson, Grace Cossington Smith and little known artist Tempe Manning contributed to the debate and practice of new techniques and new subjects. All were students of Dattilo Rubbo's school in wartime Sydney. Unable to find a relevant level of expression in the nationalist landscape tradition, they set about painting subjects that embraced the experiences of women. Bringing together their exposure to modem art in Europe prior to the war, the politicised environment and their own personal ideas, these artists forged a new vision of Australia and a new space for Australian art. Drawing on gallery archives, newspaper articles and reviews, oral histories and a comprehensive range of secondary sources, this thesis offers a more detailed account of the emergence of modernism in Sydney, and the critical role of women artists, than has previously appeared.
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ItemAboriginal art as decor: the politics of assimilation in white Australian homes 1930-1970( 2000)This thesis will examine the White Australian home between 1930 and 1970, during the formation and implementation of policies of assimilation. The home will be considered as one of the primary sites for the display and negotiation of Aboriginal culture. The incorporation of Aboriginal-style decor within the White Australian home provided a powerful metaphor for the way Aboriginal people might relate to the Australian state under the policy of assimilation. Two main trajectories of thought have coincided in home decor: how should Australia look as it enters into a period of self-conscious modernisation, and how should Aboriginality fit into this? These trajectories were not just metaphorical stagings of nationhood but were physical projections from which, it was believed, larger social changes would result. In the 1930s after a period of interracial violence that received unprecedented international publicity, theories of assimilation were put forward as a more modern, scientific and humanitarian alternative to the existing policies of protection. Anthropologists proposed utilising art as a way to further the campaign for citizenship and assimilation. It was one matter to implement a policy that sought to internalise a marginalised group into mainstream Australian culture, but another to create an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance in which assimilation would become an everyday reality in White Australia. The adaptation of Aboriginal art to home decor represented a determined effort to recontextualise Aboriginal culture and assert its relevancy in contemporary Australian life at a time when this was far from being a given. I will examine the public campaigns, and the private correspondence of A.P. Elkin and Frederick McCarthy, to show how anthropologists influenced artists, and how the pedagogical environment of the museum met with the commercial, ideological and increasingly political sphere of the domestic. In the postwar period enormous claims were made for the role of decor in Australian homes as commerce, politics, and modernity all intersected at a domestic level. Through examining the work of artist Byram Mansell I will argue that the metaphors of Aboriginal-style decor extended beyond the home into home-like spheres elsewhere, particularly the Railways. The Railways offered a theatrical experience of modernity in which Aboriginal art would help Australia come to terms with the new world and the old at the same time. As a metaphor for assimilation, the display of Aboriginal art within Australian homes often pointed towards the instability of race relations rather than the simple containment of Aboriginal people. At a title when Black and White relations were entering a period of considerable change the domestication of Aboriginality signified the possibility of resolving persistent national insecurities and of feeling at home. However, while decor promised the possibility of resolution, hailing an optimistic new racial frontier, Aboriginal-style decor also remained an unstable, and contentious feature of domestic design, as anxious as it was assertive. These issues will be further explored in the work of several contemporary avant-garde artists who have identified the home as a key site in the politics of identity formation, both oppressive and empowering.