School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    The singular career of Clarice Beckett: painting and society in Melbourne, 1916-1936
    McGuire, Margaret E. ( 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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    The legend of the Goodfella Missus: white women, black society, 1840-1940
    McGuire, Margaret E. ( 1991)
    The legend of the Goodfella Missus is a gendered myth dear to white Australian history. The most constant motif of the Goodfella Missus is her acclimatization to and affection for all that is different in the antipodes. Concepts of aboriginality are inextricably mixed with her vision of the strange landscape and its flora and fauna. She has had a hallowed place in the Australian annals. The power and persistence of the legend, with its repressive ideology of charity and chastity, is the subject of this thesis. It is a study of race, class and gender in the context of colonization. The stereotypes of aboriginality remain remarkably constant over the century, though place, time and Aboriginal society may be radically different. The gender boundary is the most troubling and revealing because of its ambiguity in the interstice between black and white, servant and mistress, matriarch and monster. Much of the evidence has had to be recuperated, reinstating a selection of verbal and visual images of what white women could come to know of Aboriginal life. My argument works as much through repetition and resonance as it does through explication and exegesis. The historical patterning of three generations of women’s images forms a kind of unhappy hearth history, from Emigrant Gentlewoman of the 1840s, to Australia’s Daughter of the 1870s, and Modern Woman of the early twentieth century.