'Home' in a country with a notorious history of division becomes both a material and symbolic handle for belonging. The thesis looks at the nature of home making and home building as it is subjected to conflicts of tradition and domestic design organisation. The material objects together with the physical as well as the psychological spaces of home in South Africa exemplify the struggle with the ironies of a nascent modern era. / The thesis addresses the combination of home and modernity in a place and at a time when the one seemed to cancel the other. The role of authorities and missionaries in determining what home was to particularly categorised people and also what modernity should represent contributes to the subtle formulations of meaning in the narrative of this thesis. South African design and material culture precedes a discussion of land as home and visual culture's expression of this. This expression is seen in the monumentalising of struggles for a home country and more specifically a homeland. Some of these visual expressions are in the form of architecture and some as sculpture, painting or drawing. The visual art of the time informs and comments upon the notion of home as a place of belonging, longing or a place that is lost. A subtle reading of this ostensibly modern art is that it is strangely disengaged from its subject matter. Notions of white supremacy in line with a romantic nationalism based on theocratic beliefs in the 'promised land' are addressed in relation to these and other visual documents of the time. / Domestic design advice and advertising for the home provides insight into the home as an ideal as well as the home as an example of ostensible modernity. Issues such as fashion, taste, relevant theories of consumption together with the constant denial of African consumption form the background to the chapter's arguments on white South African middle class consumer reticence. The printed face of South Africa's supposed domestic modernity in the advertisements and decorating columns is balanced by a discussion of deeper psychological and emotional interiorities, these are evidenced in biographies, letters, oral family histories and historical novels. The possible meaning of home is also viewed through the lens of historical documentation, which shows the role of authorities and missionaries as partial players in the construction of modern domesticities. The notion of domesticity and its association with western progress or civilisation is shown to be filled with anxieties relating to hygiene and order. / Thesis (PhDArchitectureandDesign)--University of South Australia, 2005.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267390 |
| Creators | Connellan, Kathleen Anne. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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