Finding hy-Brazil : eugenics and modernism in the Pacific

In the 1930s a number of Australian women writers took issue with material and symbolic aspects of public health discourse and in particular challenged institutional endorsement of eugenicist movements. This paper discusses the response of inter-war women writers to the national discussion of science and medicine and, in particular, eugenics.

Modern Times : The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia

Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Modern Times - The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia reveals how modernism transformed all aspects of Australian culture across five tumultuous decades from 1917 to 1967. The influence of modernism was far-reaching. "Modern Times" looks at all things modern and as diverse as art, advertising, photography, film, fashion, the body, architecture, interiors, recreational sites such as the new swimming pools and fountains, milk bars and auto culture.Modernism embodied the utopian possibilities of the twentieth century. It transformed Australian cities into complex metropolises and offered access to new cosmopolitan cultures. This is the first time that such diverse material has been brought together in one volume.

Exploring sustainability in literature for the Australian curriculum : an annotated guide

The Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E) is being implemented in Queensland and asks teachers and curriculum designers to incorporate the cross curriculum priority of Sustainability. This paper examines some texts suitable for inclusion in classroom study and suggests some companion texts that may be studied alongside them, including online resources by the ABC and those developed online for the Australian Curriculum. We also suggest some formative and summative assessment possibilities for responding to the selected works in this guide. We have endeavoured to investigate literature that enable students to explore and produce text types across the three AC:E categories: persuasive, imaginative and informative. The selected texts cover traditional novels, novellas, Sci-fi and speculative fiction, non-fiction, documentary, feature film and animation. Some of the texts reviewed here also cover the other cross curriculum priorities including texts by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and some which also include Asian representations. We have also indicated which of the AC:E the general capabilities are addressed in each text.

From Sydney and Shanghai : Australian and Chinese women writing modernism

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their position in the Pacific, they entered into a dialogue with a European modernism that they reworked to invigorate their own writing and to make cross-continental connections. My interest in the work of Australian women prose writers of this period stems from an appreciation of the extent of their engagement with interwar modernism (an engagement that is generally under-acknowledged) and the realization that there are commonalities of approach with the ways in which contemporaneous Chinese authors negotiated this transnational cultural traffic. China and Australia, it has been argued, share an imaginative and literal association of many centuries, and this psychic history produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone.’1 Equally, Chinese exploration of the great southern land began in the fifteenth century, prior to European contact. In recent times, the intensity of Australia’s cultural and commercial connections with Asia has led to a repositioning of the Australian sense of regionalism in general and, in particular, has activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. In this context, the association of Australian and Chinese writing is instructive because the commonalities of approach and areas of interest between certain authors indicate that Australian writers were not alone in either the content or style of their response to European modernism. This recognition, in turn, advances discussions of modernism in Australia and reveals an alternative way of looking at the world from the Pacific Rim through literature. The intent is to examine selective Australian and Chinese authors who are part of this continuous history and whose writing demonstrates common thematic and stylistic features via the vector of modernism. I focus on the 1930s and 1940s because these are the decades in which Australia and China experienced wideranging conflict in the Pacific, and it is significant that war, both forthcoming and actual, features as an ominous soundtrack in the writing of Chinese and Australian women. I argue that, given the immensity of cultural difference between Australia and China, there is an especially interesting juncture in the ways in which the authors interrogate modernist practices and the challenge of modernism. The process in which writing from the Pacific Rim jointly negotiates the twin desires of engaging with European literary form and representing one’s own culture may be seen as what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 My discussion centres on the work of the Australian women, to which the Chinese material serves as a point of reference, albeit a critical one. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation.

Printmaking as an expanding field in contemporary art practice : a case study of Japan, Australia and Thailand

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments. The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary. I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.

Indig-curious : what are the challenges for non Aboriginal theatre practitioners in accessing and interpreting Aboriginal themes?

How do non-Indigenous theatre practitioners, especially actors, access and incorporate Aboriginal themes in the plays they create or perform in? Will it ever be acceptable for a non-Aboriginal actor to play an Aboriginal role? In literature there are clear protocols for writing Aboriginal characters and themes. In the visual arts and in dance, non-Indigenous practitioners might 'reference' Aboriginal themes, but what about in theatre performance? This research embodies one cultural dilemma in a creative project and exegesis: exploring the complex issues which emerge when an Aboriginal playwright is commissioned to write an 'Aboriginal themed' play for two non-Aboriginal actors.

Portrayal of librarians in Australian creative writing

An exploration is made of the ways in which librarians have been depicted in Australian creative writing. Reference is made to characters in novels, short stories, drama and poetry. With respect to novels, there is some consideration of characterisation and its relationship to plot.

Within and without family in the Icelandic sagas

The Icelandic sagas reflect a deep social interest in the nature of family obligations. Narrative tension and drama often result from carefully plotted increases in competition between families,while considerable space is given over to family biographies and genealogical information. As a result, the saga authors’ conception of the historical seems closely bound to a desire to represent family life. In Gísla saga Súrssonar and Íslendinga saga, the representation of family life extends to the situation of internal family conflicts, when the strict ethical codes underpinning the centrality of family obligations seem to be complicated and perhaps even threatened by characters’ formation of stronger bonds outside the family. The portrayal of internal family conflicts in these two sagas enabled the authors to express complex and often conflicting ethical issues.