School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemNo gods and no master-printers: Postwar communal self-printing in Melbourne( 2023-06)Existing international print scholarship is shaped by the dominant master-printer framework. This has made it difficult to judge Melbourne’s printmakers against their international peers. Prints made by Melbourne artists looked nothing like these large, professionally crafted images. Characteristically small and handwrought, prints made in Melbourne were largely self-printed by the artists with little technical assistance. To critique Melbourne printmaking on its strengths (and not the standards of distant art-centres), this thesis posits new critical frameworks that uncover a submerged tradition of amateur and communal self-printing. With a ‘group biography’ structure (examining artists as disparate as Harry Rosengrave, Barbara Brash, Tay Kok Wee, Bea Maddock, Ian Burn, Robert Rooney and Jas H. Duke), this investigation makes an original contribution to local and transnational scholarship on the popularity and influence of printmaking after WWII.
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ItemPublic life data and placemaking: Reflections from Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market( 2022)Over the past decade, the promise of digital data to reveal new insights on the public life of the city has encouraged civic investment in data infrastructures. Sensor technologies are now embedded within the city and measures of pedestrian activity are routinely presented as indicators of city vibrancy. Yet despite this prevalence, opportunities to study the processes, relationships and motivations driving contemporary place-based data practices have eluded scholars. Practices are often evasive and hidden from view. Publicly disseminated accounts of new technologies regularly promote the benefits, remaining silent on the challenges of deploying new technologies. Consequently, empirical research is difficult for non-practitioners to undertake. The aim of this dissertation is to demystify the production of digital data and examine its implications for placemaking practice. To do so, I play dual roles; practitioner and researcher. My work as a practitioner allows me access to unique data sources, while my perspective as a researcher provides the methods and tools with which to evaluate my own experiences. This dissertation begins by situating contemporary forms of (big, digital) data collection as part of a longer history of place-based data collection, emanating from the grounded research that has characterised placemaking practice from its beginnings. Drawing on critical data studies, I review the work of early practitioners, focusing on Jacobs and Whyte to find evidence of the long entanglement of placemaking with data practices. This foregrounds my empirical contribution in this work; an auto-ethnographic case study of technology deployment at Queen Victoria Market. Through this contextualised account, I argue that recent opportunities for placemaking to apply contemporary data practices and advance the study public life have been diverted by broader trends towards urban datafication and quantification. The first and second chapters of the dissertation set out the aims, key ideas and scholarly concerns of the study. Then, to support my argument, chapters three and four trace the origins of placemaking to examine how early research methods have evolved through the introduction of digital technologies and automation. The fifth chapter shifts focus to Melbourne in the 1990s and allows me to contextualise developing place data practices and techniques as evidence of an emergent ‘indicator culture’. I then introduce Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market in the sixth chapter through an exploration of the various ways of knowing that have been construed and mobilised at the marketplace through data. The seventh chapter presents an auto-ethnographic account of people counting technologies trialled at Queen Victoria Market. My description of the four systems: their commissioning, deployment and, in some cases, their demise, is largely drawn from evidence I gathered during the period 2014-2018 when I worked for market management. This positionality is an unavoidable by-product of my research: my practitioner role afforded me access yet complicates my relationship to the subject. Through these accounts, I describe the behind-the-scenes processes involved in the production of ‘raw data’ to reveal that through its construction and presentation digital data is never neutral. I close by calling for a critically engaged placemaking practice, one that seeks to proactively explore the potential for data to advance and develop the field, rather than passively participate in processes that undermine its humanistic ambitions.
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ItemObject lessons: public history in Melbourne 1887-1935( 2000-05)The thesis studies history-making in Melbourne’s central civic sphere, from its emergence in the 1880s to its decline in the 1930s. It identifies public history’s major themes and forms, and the relationships between them, based on four main cases of history-making: the articulation of the past and history in Melbourne’s 1888 Centennial International Exhibition; the historical backgrounds, development, unveilings and partial after-lives of Sir Redmond Barry’s statue, unveiled in Swanston Street in 1887, and the Eight Hours’ Day monument, unveiled in Carpentaria Place in 1903; and history-making around Victoria’s 1934-1935 Centenary Celebrations, with special emphasis on the Shrine of Remembrance and a detailed study of Cooks’ Cottage.
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ItemPopcorn & politics: the queer film festival’s relationship with homonormativity and social empowerment( 2013)From grassroots screenings organised by community activists to commercially minded organisations, the queer film festival has always been an integral player in the development of queer cinema. This thesis investigates The San Francisco Frameline International LGBT Film Festival and The Melbourne Queer Film Festival using the conceptual rubric of the social enterprise to interrogate the relationship between social and economic value. I argue that the growth of the queer film festival is in historical alignment with the conceptual development of cultural policy that has enabled community arts organisations to adopt creative industry logic. One aim of this research project is to examine whether the need for fiscal sustainability results in a dominance of homonormative films in the festival program. Data will be analysed from archival research, textual and film analysis, and interviews with both audience members and film festival staff personnel. Analysis of the programs of both case studies shows that socially progressive films outnumber homonormative films. Audience members interviewed demonstrated that queer film festival attendance was socially empowering. This thesis concludes that the partially conservative programming, created out of a need for economic viability, does not outweigh the social importance of audiences’ experience of attending the queer film festival.
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ItemThe singular career of Clarice Beckett: painting and society in Melbourne, 1916-1936( 1984)Clarice Beckett has been a fugitive figure in the short history of Australian art. For more than thirty years after her death in 1935, her paintings were not seen outside a small circle of family and friends, and many were neglected. She became almost a nobody: Mrs. Beckett’s daughter, who had never travelled, never solicited success, never married, and who finally never left her parents. She had established, it seemed, only tenuous connections to the world. However between 1923 and 1933 she mounted annual exhibitions of her work in Melbourne. These exhibitions were reviewed with surprising regularity and often at some length. She also exhibited annually with the Twenty Melbourne Painters from 1923 to 1934, and the Women’s Art Club (WAC) from 1926 to 1931. These exhibitions were also widely reviewed. The discernment and attitudes revealed in this criticism constitute an illuminating depiction of culture, and of the place of women in art, in Australia between the wars. Beckett, or Miss Beckett as she was spoken of then, is now recognized as one of the finest painters Australia has produced, certainly before 1935. That this is so is due not so much to feminist art historians, and not at all to the attention paid to Australian landscape painting between the wars, but to the recovery and exhibition of hundreds of her paintings, and the recording of the recollections of friends and family, as a result of the researches of Rosalind Hollinrake. A study of Beckett’s art must account for her uniqueness and justify her promotion from the rank and file of Meldrumite painters. Such a study must also call into question the generally accepted notion that there was an absence of modernism in Melbourne till the years after her death. (From Chapter 1)
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ItemRecreating Batman's Hill: a study of urban development changes from 1835-2005( 2005)This thesis is a close study of planning developments on the Batman's Hill Precinct site, Docklands, Melbourne. It focuses on planning proposals, historical documents, descriptive texts and commemorational images to provide the first in-depth history of the Batman's Hill site from initial white settlement in 1835 to 2005. The repeated re-conceptualisation of Batman's Hill as a symbolic and historical place, and a site for urban development, was instrumental to the rapid growth of central Melbourne. The changes in land use facilitated the rapid growth of Melbourne from township to city. This detailed study of the planning and utilisation of the site of Batman's Hill enables a critique of how contemporary development on the Precinct has drawn upon colonial history to market this location. This thesis proposes that the history of Batman's Hill as the location of Melbourne's foundation, and the image of John Batman as Melbourne's founder, have been linked to the site's development at various times. This site has undergone many physical and zoning transformations that relate to the changing importance of Melbourne's cultural heritage for the public, and the need for industrial and transport facilities. Thus, public appreciation of the Batman's Hill site as a culturally significant location in Melbourne's urban history has fluctuated over time. From settlement in 1835, Batman's Hill was used for public recreation and was the first choice for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. However, the rapid boom in population, as a result of the1850s goldrushes, put pressure on industrial, transport and building infrastructure. It was therefore rezoned to allow for railway and port expansion. Chapter One is a history of the effects of colonial governance on Batman's Hill. It details the change of Batman's Hill from a public space to an industrial zone. The industrialisation of Batman's Hill resulted in the removal of the elevated 'hill' in the late nineteenth century for the expansion of the Spencer Street railway lines. The name 'Batman's Hill' was still used although it was not consciously commemorating Melbourne's foundation or a hill. By the early twentieth century with Melbourne's centenary approaching, there was a renewed interest in reclaiming the identity of John Batman as the founder of Melbourne. Chapter Two discusses this period of industrial land use, and the reinvigoration of the image of Batman through the popular press and historical societies. Batman's Hill remained as an industrial area until the late twentieth century. The City of Melbourne's urban design agenda in the 1980s was to refocus the city's development toward the Yarra River and Port Phillip Bay. Such regeneration of docklands followed global urban design and planning trends. The history of Melbourne's foundation and John Batman, partially achieved in the early part of the twentieth century, was appropriated in the planning for residential development at Batman's Hill Precinct at the Melbourne Docklands. The use of this specific history within urban planning and marketing documents is discussed in Chapter Three. As the developers endeavour to reinstate Batman's Hill as Melbourne's 'Plymouth Rock', the place of 'first' white settlement by John Batman, the history of the site that is repackaged for the public is a fragmented one.
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ItemChamber music audiences: access, participation and pleasure at Melbourne concerts( 2003)This thesis examines the social role of chamber music. It argues that in contemporary Australian society the chamber music audience is largely unobserved and under-theorised, and redresses this with a study of Melbourne concert audiences. An analysis of the chamber music 'scene(s)' in Melbourne finds that audience-ship is a socially constructed practice accessed through a particular habitus that facilitates participation and pleasure at concerts. In this way access and participation is acquired through social vehicles that exist outside the concert hall. The thesis also finds that chamber music is not simply one unified cultural form, but a diverse set of music genres and cross-fertilised forms with some striking differences in the audiences of ‘new music' concerts compared with other forms of chamber music. Through an analysis of survey data and self-narrated audience biographies the thesis demonstrates that, for those with the necessary habitus, chamber music constitutes an important source of cultural capital: it is a worthwhile object of desire, an indispensable and irreplaceable means of pleasure and happiness and plays a worthwhile role in the public and private lives of individuals. The habitus that facilitates an appreciation for chamber music is not available to everyone and in an era of confused egalitarianism this finding challenges the claim that access to the arts and high culture has been democratised. Particular cultural precursors arc necessary in order to derive access, participation and pleasure in high cultural events such as chamber music concerts. In this way access, participation and pleasure of chamber music remain off limits to most Australians.
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ItemEarly modernist landscape painting in Melbourne( 1995)In the years leading up to Federation at the turn of the century and in the ensuing decades up to about 1940, popular and respected landscape artists in Australia were preoccupied with distinctively 'Australian' images of the countryside. These nationalist landscapes tended to promote a conservative and masculinist imagery. Subsequently historians have constructed a narrative of landscape painting in Australia which follows the work of these popular artists and generally dismisses the early challenges to the art establishment posed by artists who produced modernist landscapes from 1925 to 1939. Historians have constructed a narrative of early modernism in Australia which focuses on Sydney artists and on painting genres and art practices apart from landscape art (design art, flower studies, prints). Furthermore, some historians have dismissed this period as unimportant or as a period producing unsuccessful works because a number of women painters were prominent and influential. Historians have not considered the impact of early modernism on landscape painting. This thesis recovers the work of a number of early Melbourne modernist landscape artists and discusses them in their historical context in order to re-evaluate the success of their modernist experiments and the importance of their challenges to Melbourne's art establishment. The work of early Melbourne modernists in educating a new audience for art, inspiring a new generation of art students, and in challenging the authority of critics and established artists was significant for the development of modernism in Melbourne.