Anne Maxwell

Postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism and climate change: A tale of Melbourne under water in 2035

The difficulty that postcolonial critics have found in opposing the recent, aggressive phase of capitalism known as “globalization” has led to a crisis of relevancy in the discipline. Engaging with ecocritical discourses is one way to overcome this crisis. Some postcolonial poets and writers are already working in this way, and although historically ecocriticism has posed problems for postcolonial critics, the changes that ecocriticism has recently undergone mean that such concerns are fading. An area of study that is especially promising for postcolonial critics is analysing apocalyptic dystopias that speculate on the dire social and physical consequences of global warming. Taking a text by a leading Australian author as an example, this article argues that criticism that combines postcolonial and ecocritical concepts is able not only to expose late capitalism’s crucial role in global warming but also to show readers that the political choices they make now will have lasting consequences for the lifestyles of coming generations.

The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography

ion from the steely industrial shapes associated with the straight style to the images aimed at capturing movement and the organic and unruly images derived from nature. Cotton may be the only woman photographer Miles selected for this chapter, but, as the author observes, the photograms she produced are among the most impressive from this period not just because they ‘hover excitingly between abstract geometrical tracery and the echo of objects’ but also because of the intense ‘dreaminess’ of their effects. The final chapter sees Miles examining the works of Bill Henson, David Stephenson, Mark Kimber, Jane Burton and Aboriginal photographer Michael Riley in terms of their mutual fascination with the stars and sky. Under a series of evocative subtitles, Miles describes respectively Stephenson’s interest in photography’s ability to suggest the threat to the environment caused by humans’ inability to fully control the sublime and terrifying energy of light, Kimber’s Turneresque and Friedrich-like use of light in colour photographs that are a ‘dreamy fusion of lurid neon glare and fading twilight’, Henson’s portraits in which highly lit facial forms evoke landscapes, and industrial structures are bathed in an ‘atmosphere of quiet beauty and anticipation’, Burton’s use of light and dark to communicate intense emotional states, and Aboriginal photographer and filmmaker Riley’s subtle use of lighting to portray the four elements in a way that suggests the history of dispossession. Despite enormous differences in each photographer’s style and subject matter, all according to Miles use light to portray the night sky and its constellations as the markers of Australia’s specific position on the planet and as a site of wonder. A major strength of Miles’s book, in my view, is that it shows that ideas about light and its role in Australian identity have changed over time because of new technologies, including experiments with radiology and lasers, but also greater awareness of and sensitivity to the nation’s indigenous cultures and climate change. The importance of technology is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the chapter where Miles refers to those camera experiments which involved ‘writing with light’ since these revealed among other things the ‘camera’s ability to record [the body’s] expressive gestures and movements over time’. An example is Dupain’s 1940s photograph Dancers with Light Traces, in which ‘a semi-nude female dancer holding a torch makes a succession of sweeping movements in front of Dupain’s camera, the slow exposure registering the motion of light as a series of gestural luminous swirls and doubling the figure herself’. It is worth noting also that Miles’s book effectively applies many of the lessons offered by poststructuralism, perhaps the most obvious sign of this being that all of her analyses stress the subjective and contextual nature of photography. In this regard, she says photographs ‘do not signal once and for all. Their meanings were not set with the click of the camera’s shutter’ but ‘restaged and reproduced continually in the ever-changing contexts in which they are exhibited, reviewed, analysed and consumed’. Her critical approach shows the influence of the ‘cultural turn’ that, beginning in the 1990s, saw critics rejecting the sort of ‘picture-centred’ method that had dominated art historical circles and exhibitions for so long with its emphasis on a photograph’s formal attributes, pictorial power, artistic merit and canons, developing instead an approach that ‘highlights the wider social, economic, political and historical contexts in which photographs are produced and consumed’. This ‘cultural turn’ has resulted in some historians widening their focus to include the photographers who worked in a commercial capacity and not just those who were artists. Miles’s study, however, stays firmly focused on artistic works presumably because she believes these better convey Australians’ sense of who they are and are a clearer guide to their changing cultural values. Miles is justified in stressing approaches that go beyond the formal properties and content of images to consider the wider social and cultural contexts of their making and reception; however, in comparing her own approach with those of the historical surveys of Australian photography produced in the 1980s, Miles would seem to be inviting us to see her book as yet another history of Australian photography, only a better one. This is where for me the argument becomes slightly confusing: Miles in her introduction is at pains to explain that her book is not primarily about Australian photography as such or another historical survey, but about the way that photography has changed Australians’ conceptions of light and place to the point of impacting on their sense of identity, which raises the question of whether it is comparable with the earlier histories that aim for something else. Or is Miles’s point that, given the inherent selectivity and elitism of the survey approach, only partial histories like hers, which focus on specific subjects like light, would today seem viable? There is also the problem of how to control the contextual approach that Miles champions so that the focus remains firmly on photography as such. At several points in the book, the subject of photography slips so far from view that one could almost be forgiven for thinking the book was primarily about Australian light. These reservations aside, Miles’s book is but one of a very small number of works ostensibly seeking a deeper understanding of the preoccupations, forms, and applications of Australian photography in the twentieth century. Although arbitrarily selected, the images are many and varied, making it one of the more informative and original accounts of twentieth-century Australian photography on offer. Adding to the book’s attractiveness is its near-A4 size and the high standard of its reproductions. The text itself draws on a wide range of critical theorists of photography from different moments in the century and Reviews

OCEANA REVISITED: J. A. FROUDE'S 1884 JOURNEY TO NEW ZEALAND AND THE PINK AND WHITE TERRACES

In his popular Romance of London (1867), John Timbs refers to Thomas Babington Macaulays oft-repeated metaphor of a “New Zealander sitting, like a hundredth-century Marius, on the mouldering arches of London Bridge, contemplating the colossal ruins of St Pauls” (290). Originally intended as an illustration of the vigor and durability of the Roman Catholic Church despite the triumph of the Reformation, Macaulays most famous evocation of this idea dates from 1840, the year of New Zealands annexation; hence it is reasonable to suppose that this figure is a Maori (Bellich 297–98). For Timbs and subsequent generations, however, the image conveyed the sobering idea of the rise and fall of civilizations and in particular of England being invaded and overrun, if not by a horde of savages, then by a more robust class of Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the world.

Camera, Colony, Künstlerroman: Photography in Three Australian Novels

ABSTRACT This article traces the practices of photography that have been portrayed in three Australian artists’ novels: Patrick White’s The Vivisector, David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre, and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights. Photography’s shifting status in relation to art, modes of knowledge, modes of production, and methods of relating to space suggest a growing discomfort in the nation’s literary imagination towards colonial art’s mobilisation of the imagination to authorise “sacred” settler belonging.

Modernist Photography and Women’s Social Networks: The Case of Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis

This article’s title refers to the larger project of illuminating the social networks informing Australian artistic communities from the late colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on developments in photography, the article itself asks what were the links between creative practices and the social relationships that characterised the modernist period in particular? It attempts to answer this question by examining the relationship between two retrospectively celebrated women photographers working in the war years in Australia – Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis. For a fair portion of their lives Cotton and Michaelis lived in the same city, worked contemporaneously in the relatively small field of studio photography, and shared similar artistic and commercial ambitions, yet they had virtually no professional or personal contact with each other. There is some evidence to suggest that social networks played a role in training early Australian women photographers, particularly those working in the professional studio system between the 1890s and the 1920s. Social networks would take on an explicitly political role in the consciousness-raising feminist context of women’s photography in Australia from the 1970s to the 1990s. Given that Cotton and Michaelis were professional photographers during the interval between these periods, one is bound to ask whether their lack of contact had a personal basis or there was a wider more socially determined reason. In other words, was there something about the social conditions effecting Australia’s artistic associations at this time that explains the lack of artistic connections between women, and if so was this lack the same across all the arts or particularly pronounced in photography?

Framing the Asia-Pacific: The Gerhard Sisters at the St. Louis World’s Fair

The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 was an occasion for celebrating the USA’s purchase of the State of Louisiana and the American government’s recent annexation of the Philippine Islands. So that Americans could familiarise themselves with the people from their latest acquisition, hundreds of live Filipinos were placed on display at the fair. Also featured were Asian people from a variety of Pacific Rim nations. A small group of women photographers were charged with the responsibility of photographing these visitors. This essay focuses on the work of two of these women – Emme and Mayme Gerhard from St. Louis. The essay examines some of the more stereotypical images of Japanese, Chinese, Alaskan and Filipino subjects they produced at the fair alongside images they created that awarded the same ethnic groups humanity and identity, asking how should we understand this seeming tension in their work? Was it the result of an implicitly imperialist mode of photography practised by white middle-class women as Laura Wexler has claimed, or were there other important factors at play?

Modern anthropology and the problem of the racial type: the photographs of Franz Boas

Franz Boas is best known for his pioneering work in the area of cultural anthropology. However in the 1890s, Boas created hundreds of anthropometric photographs as part of a vast study aimed at documenting the physical characteristics of Native Americans. The primary purpose of the Jesup Expedition, as the study was called, was to discover the racial origins of America’s Native peoples, but the data collected and the knowledge gained were also later used by Boas to report on the physical changes occurring to migrant children in the USA, and to mount an attack on the scientific credibility of the racial theories being used to hound and discriminate against Jewish and other racial minorities in Germany and Europe.

Book Review: Picturing place: photography and the geographical imagination

Braun prosecutes these two theoretical arguments by historicizing his subject matter, but his method is quite different from the craft of conventional historians. Rather than poring methodically through the archives and producing a chronologically ordered narrative, Braun has selected a series of episodes involving various forays into the history and practice of land policy, science, art, tourism and ecology. Each chapter starts by considering an artefact or anecdote, which, like the grain of sand in the oyster, provides the focus for a wide-ranging reading of some aspect of the cultural politics of nature on Canada’s west coast. As with stand-up comedy, there is nothing half-way about this kind of cultural studies: it either goes over a treat or stinks up the room. Braun is a deft writer, and his commentaries are always thoughtful, engaging and provocative. Each chapter offers intriguing insights into the contested cultural politics of nature and national identity in British Columbia, though in the absence of any explicit discussion of data, sources, methods, and selection criteria, they also feel somewhat haphazardly assembled. While Braun makes a merit of this narrative strategy, claiming that it highlights ‘the matter of nature’s multiplicity – and how we understand it’ (p. 26), that claim is undercut somewhat by a narrative practice in which material is ‘read symptomatically, as giving expression to deeply seated cultural discourses’ (p. 134). While the theoretical assumption of underlying and overdetermined cultural discourses does short-circuit the methodological critique often made of cultural studies that its symptomatic readings are anecdotal and not empirically representative, it does beg some theoretical questions about ideology, ontological contingency and how far the possibility of constru(ct)ing nature differently actually extends. These are difficult and important questions, and even if I don’t always agree with all of the responses offered by Braun in the book, it is difficult not to admire one of the more substantive empirical engagements with contemporary theories and cultural politics of nature.