This thesis examines art critical writing on contemporary Australian art published between 1960 and 1988 through the lens of its engagement with its location, looking at how it directly or indirectly engaged with the issues arising from Australia's so-called peripheral position in relation to the would-be hegemonic centre. I propose that Australian art criticism is marked by writers' acceptances of the apparent explanatory necessity of constructing appropriate nationalist discourses, evident in different and succeeding types of nationalist agendas, each with links to external, non-artistic agendas of nation and politics. I will argue that the nationalist parameters and trajectory of Australian art writing were set by Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his book Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (1962) and that the history of Australian art writing from the 1960s onwards was marked by a succession of nationalist rather than artistic agendas formed, in turn, by changing experiences of the Cold War. Through this, I will begin to provide a critical framework that has not effectively existed so far, due to the binary terror of regionalism versus internationalism. / Chapter One focuses on Bernard Smith and the late 1950s and early 1960s Australian intellectual context in which Australian Painting 1788-1960 was published. I will argue that, although it can be claimed that Australia was a postcolonial society, the most powerful political and social influence during the 1950s and 1960s was the Cold War and that this can be identified in Australian art criticism and Australian art. Chapter Two discusses art theorist, Donald Brook. Brook is of particular interest because he kept his art writing separate from his theories of social and political issues, focussing on contemporary art and artists. I argue that Brook's failure to engage with questions of nation and Australian identity directly ensured that he remained a respected but marginal figure in the history of Australian art writing. Chapter Three returns to the centre/periphery issue and examines the art writing of Patrick McCaughey and Terry Smith. Each of these writers dealt with the issue of the marginality of Australian art but neither writer questioned the validity of the centre/periphery model. / Chapter Four examines six Australian art magazines that came into existence in the 1970s, a decade of high hopes and deep disillusionment. The chapter maps two shifts of emphasis in Australian art writing. First, the change from the previous preoccupation with provincialism to pluralist social issues such as feminism, and second, the resulting gravitation of individual writers into ideological alliances and/or administrative collectives that founded, ran and supported magazines that printed material that focused on (usually Australian) art in relation to specific social, cultural or political issues. Chapter Five concentrates on the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and Paul Taylor, its founder and editor. Taylor and his magazine were at the centre of a new Australian attempt to solve the provincialism problem and thus break free of the centre/periphery model.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 484-511)

What would Australia be like if it had been recognised as terra alterius, ???land of another???, by the British, rather than claimed and treated as terra nullius, ???land of no-one???? This question was posed by the exhibition Terra Alterius: Land of Another, which comprised works by Gordon Bennett, Barbara Campbell-Allen, Julie Dowling, Shaun Gladwell + Michael Schiavello, Jonathan Jones, Joanne Searle, Esme Timbery, Freddie Timms, Lynette Wallworth, Guan Wei and Lena Yarinkura, created or nominated in response to the theme. This thesis describes the concept of terra alterius and the exhibition Terra Alterius: Land of Another. It considers the utility of the concept terra alterius, whether the exhibition achieved its ambition to explore the political and social terrain of a reconciled Australia, and, briefly, whether the concept of terra alterius might be useful to other ???terra nullius??? countries. It argues that the curatorial strategies ??? the ???What if???? re-imagination of Australia???s past, multiplicity of vision and active creation, grounding of the exhibition in affect (in response to Aboriginal painting), and working within Indigenous protocols ??? were effective, and that the exhibition was a useful means of exploring the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Comparisons with the exhibition Turn the Soil curated by Kevin Murray and the ???retrospective utopia??? W.H. Oliver argues has been created for New Zealand by the Waitangi Tribunal provide insight into the nature of the reconciled Australia presented in the exhibition and what might be achieved by a counterfactual exhibition. From these comparisons, it is argued, first, that the exhibition points to a disjuncture between Australia???s ongoing official, psychological and legal terra nullius and the approaches and relationships present in Australian society (characterised as a performance of Bloch???s utopian function); and secondly, that a counterfactual exhibition, because it is not bound to the factual, causal or narrative qualities traditionally attributed to history, is able to explore the future in a way that contains rather than denies the past. Although the concept of terra alterius is seen as having played a crucial role in the realisation of the exhibition, it is questioned whether the concept???s utility extends beyond Australia.

The Master of Fine Art document examines the inception of Matter Painting as it occurred in Europe and it's following in Australia. This document recalls the history and process of this late assimilation through examining the development of abstraction in Australia and the local receptiveness of influence from abroad. Within a climate of increased immigration and international awareness, Matter Painting was encountered by an initiated few. This history firstly begins with practitioners that were not in locale but rather overseas who were in close proximity to the centre of such avant-garde. It is not until the artist and critic Elwyn Lynn returns from his seminal overseas travels in 1959 and his first showing of "Matter" painting's in 1960 that Matter Painting in Australia gathered momentum. Discussed within this document is the history of this movement, the impact that it had on local practitioners and the relevance that it has played within my practice.

This thesis is inspired by the historical principles of RG Collingwood, an historiographer whose precepts are recurrently cited herein. It is the life and times style biography of Francesco Giovanni Fantin, born San Vito de Leguzzano in the Schio district of the Province of Vicenza in the Veneto region of Italy 20 January 1901, died Loveday Internment Camp Compound 14A, South Australia 16 November 1942. SA police at the time found that Fantin was assassinated by fascist conspirators who contrived to intimidate witnesses and interfere with material evidence, (findings here confirmed) frustrating the laying of a charge of murder and leading in March 1943 to the sentencing of Giovanni Casotti to two years hard labour for manslaughter in the Supreme Court of South Australia. (Casotti was subsequently deported.) This thesis begins with the reconstruction of Fantin’s origins in one of the rural crucibles of Italian capitalism and industrialism. The presence of anarchist traditions in the Province and in Fantin’s immediate circle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is documented. The history of the Great War, the Red Biennium and the Rise of Fascism in the Schio district is then reconstructed in connection with Fantin’s formative years, with particular reference to the role of the textile strike of 1921 as the precursor to the political and mass emigration from the district to Australia of which Fantin was a humble protagonist. Fantin’s years as an antifascist activist in exile in Australia are then rehearsed as an essential prerequisite for understanding why he was selected for assassination. The thesis closes with a detailed reconstruction of how his death was encompassed and its political implications managed by Dr HV Evatt. An Iconographic Appendix and Bibliography follow. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1331596 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Economics, 2008

No description available.

Errata is pasted inside front end paper. / Bibliography: leaves 309-329. / vii, 329 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Education, 1996?

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Master of Arts / N/A

Widowhood and remarriage affected a majority of people in colonial Australia, yet historians have given them scant attention. Today, widowhood primarily concerns the elderly, but in the mid-nineteenth century a considerable proportion of deaths were amongst young adults. Thus many widows and widowers had children to care for, who were also affected by the loss of a parent and the possible remarriage of their surviving parent. Extended families might be called on for support, while communities, at the local and government level, were confronted with the need to provide welfare for the widowed and orphaned, including the older widowed. This thesis considers how widowhood impacted on men and women at all levels of society in the nineteenth-century Australian colonies, especially Western Australia and Victoria, taking into account the effects of age, class and numbers of children of the widowed. When men were the chief family earners and women were dependent child bearers the effects of widowhood could be disastrous, and widows had to employ a range of strategies to support themselves and their families. Men too were affected by widowhood, for the loss of a wife’s housekeeping skills could cause serious financial consequences. One response to widowhood was remarriage, and the thesis discusses the advantages and disadvantages of remarriage for men and women. Historians have regarded remarriage as the best option for the widowed, especially for women. Research into remarriage, especially in Britain and Europe, has focussed on demography. Assuming that all widowed wished to remarry, demographers have compared remarriage rates for men and women, within the context of the relative numbers of marriageable men and women in a given community.