Presbyterian ethos and environment in the novels of John Buchan : a religious and historical study

The aim of this thesis is to establish, from a historical and religious perspective, that the Presbyterian ethos and environment in which John Buchan was reared was the predominating influence in the writing of his novels. Presbyterianism was not the only influence on Buchan that determined the character of his stories. Buchan was by temperament a romantic, and this had considerable influence on his literature. His novels are romances, peopled by romantic figures who pursue romantic adventures. There are the signs of Buchan's romantic nature in the contents of the novels: creative imagination, sensitivity to nature, and expectations of the intrusion of other worlds, with destiny-determining events to follow. But Buchan had also an acquired classicism. His studies at Glasgow and Oxford Universities brought him in touch with a whole range of the master-pieces of classical literature, especially the works of Plato and Virgil. This discipline gave him clarity and conciseness in style, and balanced the romantic element in him, keeping his work within the bounds of reason. At the heart of Buchan's life and work, however, was his deeply religious nature and this, while influenced by romanticism and classicism, was the dominant force behind his work. Buchan did not accept in its entirety the Presbyterian doctrine conveyed to him by his father and his Church. He was moderate by temperament and shrank from excesses in religious matters, and, being a romantic, he shied away from any fixed creeds. He did embrace the fundamentals of Christianity, however, which he learned from his father and his Church, even if he did put aside the Rev. John's orthodox Calvinism. The basic Christianity which underlies all Buchan's novels has the stamp of Presbyterianism upon it, and that stamp is evident in his characters and their adventures. The expression of Christianity which Buchan embraced was the Christian Platonism of seventeenth century theologians, who taught and preached at Cambridge University, They gave prominence to the place of reason and conscience in man's search for God, They believed that reason and conscience were the ‘candle of the Lord’ which was existed every one. It was their conviction that, if that light was followed, it would lead men and women to God. They were against superstition and fanaticism in religion, against all forms of persecution for religious beliefs, and insisted that God could only be known by renouncing evil and setting oneself to live according to God’s will. This teaching Buchan received, but the stamp of his Presbyterianism was not obliterated. The basic doctrines which arose from his father's Presbyterianism and are to be found in Buchan's novels are as follows: a. the fear (or awe) of God, as life's basic religious attitude; b. the Providence of God as the ultimate determinative force in the outcome of events; c. the reality, malignity and universality of evil which must be forcefully and constantly resisted; d. the dignity of human beings in bearing God's image; e. the conviction that life has meaning and that its ultimate goal, therefore, is a spiritual one - as opposed to the accumulation of wealth, the achieving of recognition from society, and the gaining access to power; f. the necessity of challenge in life for growth and fulfilment, and the importance of fortitude in successfully meeting such challenge; g. the belief that, in the purpose of God, the weak confound the strong. These emphases of Presbyterianism are to be found in all Buchan's novels, to a greater or lesser degree. All his characters are serious people, with a moral purpose in life. Like the pilgrims of the Bible, they seek a country: true fulfilment. This quest becomes more spiritual and more dearly defined as Buchan grows in age and maturity. The progress is to be traced from his early novels, where fulfilment is sought in honour and self-approving competence, as advocated by classicism; to the novels of his middle years, where fulfilment is sought in adventures suggested by romanticism. In his final novel Sick Heart River. Buchan appears to have moved somewhat from his earlier classicism and his romanticism as the road to fulfilment. In this novel, Buchan expresses what, for him, is ultimate fulfilment: a conversion to God that produces self-sacrificing love for others. The terminally-ill Edward Leithen sets out on a romantic adventure that will enable him to die with dignity, and so, in classic style, justify his existence. He has a belief in God, but in a God who is almighty, distant and largely irrelevant to Leithen's life. In the frozen North of Canada, where he expects to find his meagre beliefs in God's absolute power confirmed by the icy majesty of mountain and plain, he finds instead God's mercy and it melts his heart. In a Christ-like way, he brings life to others through his death, believing that, through death, he will find life. There is sufficient evidence to give plausibility to the view that Buchan is describing in Leithen his own pilgrimage. If so, it means that Buchan found his way back to the fundamental experience of the Christian life, conversion, so strongly emphasised in his orthodox Presbyterianism home and Church. However, Buchan reaches this conclusion in a Christian Platonist way, through the natural world, rather than through the more orthodox pathway of Scripture.

From crystals to pixels: new technology in the documentary work of John Hughes

Film technology, in the broadest sense, embraces a vast array of knowledge, skills, tools, and systems. These include the codes and conventions of screen representation at the centre of much screen scholarship. The electro-mechanical tools of filmmaking are less often the focus of academic study than these codes and conventions, but they are central to them and to the daily work of artists and educators in the field of screen production. This paper traces the scope and significance of technical change, for independent film making, over the past four decades. Melbourne documentary filmmaker John Hughes provides a varied and expansive oeuvre through which to arrange an historical equipment list.

An epistemically distant God? a critique of John Hick's response to the problem of divine hiddenness

God is thought of as hidden in at least two ways. Firstly, God's reasons for permitting evil, particularly instances of horrendous evil, are often thought to be inscrutable or beyond our ken. Secondly, and perhaps more problematically, God's very existence and love or concern for us is often thought to be hidden from us (or, at least, from many of us on many occasions). But if we assume, as seems most plausible, that God's reasons for permitting evil will (in many, if not most, instances) be impossible for us to comprehend, would we not expect a loving God to at least make his existence or love sufficiently clear to us so that we would know that there is some good, albeit inscrutable, reason why we (or others) are permitted to suffer? In this paper I examine John Hick's influential response to this question, a response predicated on the notion of 'epistemic distance': God must remain epistemically distant and hence hidden from us so as to preserve our free will. Commentators of Hick's work, however, disagree as to whether the kind of free will that is thought to be made possible by epistemic distance is the freedom to believe that God exists, or the freedom to choose between good and evil, or the freedom to enter into a personal relationship with God. I argue that it is only the last of these three varieties of free will that Hick has in mind. But this kind of freedom, I go on to argue, does not necessitate an epistemically distant God, and so the problem of divine hiddenness remains unsolved.

Building a national image : the architecture of John Smith Murdoch, Australia's first Commonwealth Government architect

Presents John Smith Murdoch and examines his significant contribution as an architect and public servant in Australia between 1885 and 1929. Murdoch's greatest achievement was the development of his modern Renaissance idiom of which Provisional Parliament House, Canberra is the finest example.

Being the right kind of male teacher : the disciplining of John

In a context where the lack of male teachers is constructed as a worrying concern for many Western education systems, men who make the decision to become teachers, particularly in early childhood and primary education, are often adulated. However, alongside this adulation sits an expectation to be a ‘real man’. This paper tells the story of John, a male primary school teacher who left the teaching profession after one year as a result of incommensurable differences between the expectations held of him as a male teacher and his identity as a primary school teacher. While not an attempt to position John as a victim, this paper suggests that expectations of male teachers, such as to be effective disciplinarians, have normalising effects on men within the teaching profession that, in this case, led to a rejection of teaching as a career path. We contend that the image of the ‘imagined male teacher’ that underpins both current calls for more male teachers and John’s departure from schooling is likely to have a negative impact upon all students (boys and girls) and also denigrates the work of female teachers.

The third space: The poetry of Sudesh Mishra & the paintings of John Forrest

This book consists of two chapters that document and analyse the context and development of a collaboration between two writers, a poet and a painter, 33 poems and 33 paintings. The poems and paintings are placed in a dialogical relationship with each other. The book attempts to do more than present poetry and paintings serving merely as an illustration of each other. Instead the authors/artists have experimented with how each art-form can bring further significance to another and make new meaning. The two chapters and introduction set up for the viewer a means of exploring a novel form of making meaning. Furthermore these chapters discuss aesthetic, philosophical, historical and political questions endemic not only to the selected art and poetry but to questions governing creative art processes. In this sense it deals with what we have termed 'a third space'.

The films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia

ABSTRACTIn The Films of John Hughes: A history of independent screen production in Australia filmmaker and academic John Cumming tells the ongoing story of Hughes’ work illustrating the delicate balance of individual, collective and corporate agendas that many contemporary artists need to negotiate. This story begins in the 1960s with a generation of intelligent, socially engaged young people who challenge established power structures, conventions and stereotypes in art, politics and the media. Experiments were being made with grassroots democracy, with new social formations and new ways of seeing and communicating. The book also pays attention to earlier periods of cultural and political activism that captured Hughes’ imagination in the 1970s and became the subject of a number of his films over a period of nearly forty years. Through these films Cumming traces the outline of post-war film culture and production in Melbourne from the 1940s and sets this history within the context of international trends in independent filmmaking throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st.The work of an independent filmmaker has always included a great deal more than directing films. Working in an artisanal mode, he or she often performs, or has a hand in, every aspect of craft at the same time as engaging in discussion and organisation around the wider sphere of screen culture and industry. In addition to having proficiency as a producer, photographer, sound recordist, editor, distributor and exhibitor of films, there is research, organisation, lobbying, entrepreneurship and mentoring to be done. As an independent producer-director, John Hughes has engaged in all of these activities – often simultaneously. He is also a scholar, writer, organiser, activist and teacher. As a television bureaucrat he was both eminent and innovative, and through his filmmaking he has become a leading historian of Australian documentary cinema. ‘… that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings.’ Sylvia Lawson, ‘Such a Bloody Wonderful Place’, Inside Story, 28 April 2013.

Book review: Review of 'John Connor, Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence' (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press), 2011. ISBN10 1107009502 (Hb) pp. 248. $59.95, cloth.

Anzac and Empire is the remarkable story of George Foster Pearce – a carpenter who became one Australia's most influential politicians, and the man central to how Australia planned for, and fought in, World War I. The nation's longest-serving defence minister – holding the portfolio before, during and after the Great War – Pearce saw no contradiction in being both a fierce Australian nationalist, and also a loyal subject of the British Empire.Anzac and Empire is the first full-length biography of this extraordinary Australian. Written by one of Australia's leading military historians, this book shows that to understand Australia in the Great War, you must understand the man behind it.