Towering over all : the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape

The Picturesque aesthetic emerged in the later 18th century, uniting the Sublime and the Beautiful and had its roots in the paintings of Claude Lorrain. In Britain, and in Australia, it came to link art, literature and landscape with architecture. The Picturesque aesthetic informed much of colonial culture which was achieved, in part, through the production and dissemination of architectural pattern books catering for the aspirations of the rising middle classes. This was against a background of political change including democratic reform. The Italianate villa, codified and promoted in such pattern books, was a particularly successful synthesis of style, form and function. The first Italianate villa in England, Cronkhill (1803) by John Nash contains all the ingredients which were essential to the model and had a deeper meaning. Deepdene (from 1807) by Thomas Hope gave the model further impetus. The works of Charles Barry and others in a second generation confirmed the model's acceptability. In Britain, its public status peaked with Osborne House (from 1845), Queen Victoria's Italianate villa on the Isle of Wight, Robert Kerr used a vignette of Osborne House on the title page of his sophisticated and influential pattern book, The Gentleman's House (1864,1871). It was one of many books, including those of J.C, Loudon and AJ. Downing, current in colonial Victoria. The latter authors and horticulturists were themselves villa dwellers with libraries and orchards, two criteria for the true villa lifestyle. Situation and a sense of retreat were the two further criteria for the villa lifestyle. As the new colony of Victoria blossomed between 1851 and 1891, the Italianate villa, its garden setting and its landscape siting captured the tenor of the times. Melbourne, the capital was a rich manufacturing metropolis with a productive hinterland and international markets. The people enjoyed a prosperity and lifestyle which they wished to display. Those who had a position in society were keen to demonstrate and protect it. Those with aspirations attempted to provide the evidence necessary for such acceptance, The model matured and became ubiquitous. Its evolution can be traced through a series of increasingly complicated rural and suburban examples, a process which modernist historians have dismissed as a decadent decline. These villas, in fact, demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated retreat by merchants from ‘the Town’ and by graziers from ‘the Country’. In both town and country, the towers of villas mark territory newly acquired. The same claim was often made in humbler situations. Government House, Melbourne (from 1871), a splendid Italianate villa and arguably finer than Osborne House, was set in a cultivated landscape and towered above all It incorporated the four criteria and, in addition, claimed its domain, focused authority and established the colony's social status. It symbolised ancient notions of democracy and idealism but with a modem appreciation for the informal and domestic. Government House in Melbourne is the epitome of the Italianate villa in the colonial landscape and is the climax of the Picturesque aesthetic in Victoria.

Holocaust literature : an exploration of second-generation publication in Australia

Normally we expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust and the flow is reversed (Clendinnen 1998, p. 185). This dissertation explores the relationships between the second-generation Holocaust writer, the Australian publishing industry and the reading public. It contends that a confluence of elements has made the 'genre' of second-generation Holocaust writing publishable in the late 20th century in a way that would not seem obvious from its major themes and the risk-averse publishing strategies increasingly adopted by the multinational conglomerates controlling the Australian industry. The research explores the nature of connections between writing, publishing and reading Holocaust literature, seeking to answer the following questions: What are the driving forces that compel children of Holocaust survivors to write about their parents' lives and their own experiences of growing up in a 'survivor' family? By what mechanisms are such stories published in an Australian industry dominated by international conglomerates focused on mass-market publishing? How do readers receive and make sense of this material?

Vision and rationalisation : a study of the school psychology profession within the Victorian Government school system

Since its origins in the 19th century, modern schooling has been a continuously contested domain within nation states. Underlying this contestation dynamic lie competing value systems about the social purpose of education; competing values around which are generated different discourses, and which in turn generate inherently contradictory social and organisational structures. As reflected in other areas of society, the 20th century expansion of state-provided schooling has essentially developed around variations of a bureaucratic model Thus, organisational cultures based around bureaucratic values have come to permeate the enterprise of schooling on a world wide scale. Concomitantly, the value for education to be fundamentally associated with human emancipation from psychological, social, political, or economic states of being, persists as a recurring theme in modern schooling. Premised on these understandings, the thesis argues that the development of the practices of school psychology as a profession, like education in general, and special education in particular, has similarly been influenced by tensions between different and competing constellations of values. It is argued that throughout the 20th century, the pervasiveness of formal schooling systems suggest that schooling may be understood as a modernist cultural archetype. As a socially constructed reality, the phenomenon of schooling has become unproblematic the apparent cultural inevitability of formal schooling in the modern era can also be understood as a premise of a systemised way of looking at the world; that of bureaucratic consciousness. Dialectically, bureaucratic consciousness persists in influencing every manifestation of schooling; structurally through its organisational forms, and epistemologically through the institutionalization of teaching and learning. A particular illustration of the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and the social forms and social practices of schooling is the school psychology profession which has developed as a part of school systems. The thesis argues that the epistemic archeology of psychology as a knowledge discipline can be traced through an earlier European intellectual and cultural tradition, but in the 20th century, has come to develop a symbiotic yet contradictory relationship with compulsory schooling in the modern nation state. The research study employs historical and fieldwork methods in a study of the development of the school psychology services within the Victorian Education Department, particularly between 1947 and 1987. The thesis also draws upon several usually distinct literatures; the philosophical and theoretical discourse of modernity and post modernity, the history and development of modern schooling, the ethnography of schooling, the international comparative literature on the school psychology profession, and the literature on action research in education practice and curriculum development, As a case study of Victorian school psychology, the research eschews a quantitative statistical approach in favour of qualitative investigatory genres, which have in turn been guided by the values of action research in education, as well as those of critical theory. The important focus of the thesis is its investigation of some aspects of the development and transformations within the Victorian state education bureaucracy, and the dialectical relationship that has persisted between the evolution of change processes and the shifting conceptions of school psychology practices in the 20th century. A history of the organisational development of school psychology services in Victoria constitutes an important part of the thesis. This is complemented by specific illustrations of how some school psychologists have been influenced by and have contributed towards paradigm shifts within the profession, shifts relating to how the changing nature of their work practices have come to be understood and valued by teachers and by school administrators. The work of J. R. MacLeod from the 1950s is noted in this regard. Particular attention is also drawn to the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and school psychology's professional orientation in the 1980s. As a means of providing field data to explore this relationship, ethnographic case studies with two school communities are included as part of the fieldwork of the thesis, and are based upon the author's own work in the mid 1980s. These case studies provide a basis for conceptually refraining the school psychologist's professional experience within schooling systems, and an opportunity to examine how competing value systems impact upon the work of the school psychologist. The thesis concludes with some observations about bureaucratic transformations within educational organisations, and about the future relationship of the school psychology profession with schooling systems, as framed by the theoretical parameters of the modernist /post modernist debate. The issue of competing value systems within the administration of public education is re-examined as is the value of promoting human empowerment in the ongoing work of the school psychologist. Finally, some scenario building with reference to the future of school psychology in Victoria in is undertaken.

There's a black boy dead and a migloo holding a gun : death, Aboriginality and history in Australian adolescent literature

This essay is concerned with the extent to which the attitudes and ideologies of colonial discourse continue to influence contemporary signifying practices in Australian adolescent historical fiction. Under scrutiny are three novels which take issue with the violent aspects of colonisation when so many members of the Indigenous population either died or were forcibly displaced: Melissa Lucashenko’s Killing Darcy, Gary Crew’s No Such Country and Mark Svendsen’s Poison Under Their Lips. Although these texts share a desire to interrogate monolithic versions of Australia’s history, it is argued that such motivations offer no guarantee that the implied audience is positioned to come to an understanding of perspectives belonging to ex-centric Others.

Who stole the cheese? or : How postmodernism can grow your business

In this paper, I examine some of the key management literature of the neoliberal 1990s to make a series of wider observations about contemporary ideology. Post-structuralist or post-modernist theory is often presented as the arch-enemy of neoliberal capitalism, as the orthodoxy of late capitalism. However, adding to work by Frederic Jameson, Thomas Frank and others, this paper examines uncanny proximity between neoliberal ideas about disaggregating, outsourcing, networking, etc. and the learning motifs of postmodernist theory. Its guiding hypothesis is that postmodernism in the academy, despite its own self-misrecognition as "racial", is a further ideological expression of the samr neoliberal drive to overcome "Fordist", "authoritarian" ways of organising producation and social regulation.

Matilda's last dance: death, gender, sexuality and Australian adolescent literature

This thesis examines representations of death in a selection of contemporary texts for Australian adolescent audiences. It demonstrates that, although death is a complex subject, a characteristically Australian 'way of death' is identifiable in these fictions and it is invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender and power.

Feminist perspectives on gender ideology in recent young adult literature

This study of gender in young adult literature examined a range of recently published texts in both the fantasy and realist genres and determined that narrative discourse contests the dominant patriarchal paradigm most sucessfully when female protagonists enact a trickster role.

Renegade judgement : a study of madness in medicine and literature

Explores socio-historical understandings and treatments of madness, examining literary works alongside contemporary medical texts. Incorporating notions of scientific objectivity, individual subjectivity and social totality, the thesis shows conceptual overlaps between art and science, identifying continuities and conflicts between fictional, clinical and cultural investigations into madness.

Literature and environmental ethics

This thesis contends that literature which reflects, and is informed by (whether consciously or not), reconstructive postmodern ecology is not a static literature but by representing and confronting the underpinning causes that have led humanity to violence, literature generates new engagements and the potential to reconstruct - ethically, cognitively, perceptually- alternative ways of being-in-the-world for political ends.

After-life of modernist abstraction

An investigation of the consequences of pluralism for abstract painting. A central theme examines the possibilities for contemporary abstraction to question its own condition and history. The theoretical model of after-life forms facillitates an understanding of modes of abstraction which recombine unresolved, syncretic forms and address domains excluded by modernism.

Multicentric carpal-tarsal osteolysis with nephropathy treated successfully with cyclosporine A : a case report and literature review

Multicentric carpal-tarsal osteolysis is a rare skeletal disorder characterized by osteolysis of the metacarpal, carpal, and tarsal bones and leading to crippling joint deformities. Progressive nephropathy occurs in more than half the cases. All previously reported series with renal biopsies showed only end-stage renal disease on histological examination because of the late presentation to nephrologists. Accurate diagnosis of the underlying renal pathological state therefore has not been possible. We report the first case in which early and sequential renal biopsies were performed. These show the renal lesion to be focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis, which was treated successfully with cyclosporine A.

Parents' knowledge, attitudes and practices about preventing child sexual abuse: a literature review

Increased concern about high rates of child sexual abuse has led to the demand for more prevention programmes, particularly those aimed at parents. Research on how parents manage and reduce the risk of child sexual abuse can help plan programmes. This literature review explores published research on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of parents on the risk and prevention of child sexual abuse and identifies gaps and needs for further research. The majority of studies reviewed originated in North America and Asia, were quantitative, surveyed mainly mothers and were more than ten years old. Recommendations are made for more current and country specific research, further research to gain a deeper understanding of how parents manage the risk of child sexual abuse, more comprehensive research covering a range of knowledge, attitude and practice variables, and greater inclusion of fathers in research.