Catherine De Lorenzo

Confronting amnesia: Aboriginality and public space

For much of their history since 1788, non‐Indigenous Australians have virtually erased from their public art practice any reference to a conflictual history of occupation. Yet since the bicentennial of settler occupation of Australia in 1988, artists, reconciliation groups and government authorities, amongst others, have sought to address intercultural issues in the public domain, by reference to historical contexts and contemporary aspirations. After providing a brief overview of recent cultural politics in Australia, this paper examines three prominent public art projects that address themes of occupation and reconciliation. All three works, whilst radically different in purpose, address issues that might be seen as constitutive of contemporary Australian cultural debates. It is argued that together they mark a shift in Australian public art practice even though individually they proclaim starkly different geneses and purposes.For much of their history since 1788, non‐Indigenous Australians have virtually erased from their public art practice any reference to a conflictual history of occupation. Yet since the bicentennial of settler occupation of Australia in 1988, artists, reconciliation groups and government authorities, amongst others, have sought to address intercultural issues in the public domain, by reference to historical contexts and contemporary aspirations. After providing a brief overview of recent cultural politics in Australia, this paper examines three prominent public art projects that address themes of occupation and reconciliation. All three works, whilst radically different in purpose, address issues that might be seen as constitutive of contemporary Australian cultural debates. It is argued that together they mark a shift in Australian public art practice even though individually they proclaim starkly different geneses and purposes.

Integrating Public Art, Environmental Sustainability, and Education: Australia's ‘Creative Village’ Model

This paper will attempt to position the Creative Village project within the parameters of an international debate on public art, sustainability and education. It will begin with a brief history of the project and its community and arts origins, then examine its engagement with environmentally-responsive art and design, and finally its integrative educational paradigm. I will argue that the value and significance of the programme is that it has successfully bridged complex educational, design, community and environmental goals through having clear core values and a practice of flexible delivery.

‘Our Australian Switzerland’: Lindt, Humboldt and the Victorian landscape

Abstract The convergence of natural philosophy, landscape design and photography in the design and representation of the Hermitage, the home and garden of the celebrated Melbourne photographer John William Lindt (1845–1926) (figure 1), reflects the impact of Humboldtian thinking on the Australian arts in the late nineteenth century.2 Lindt built his horne, studio and guest house at Black Spur3 near Healesville in the Yarra Ranges, a little to the northeast of Melbourne. Begun in 1894 after the depression of the early 1890s had forced the closure of Lindts Melbourne studio, the building and its setting are testinwny, we argue, to the ideas on nature in the writings of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) whose five-volumed Cosmos (1845–1858) was still being read and discussed in the scientific and artistic circles in Melbourne with which Lindt was associated.4Abstract The convergence of natural philosophy, landscape design and photography in the design and representation of the Hermitage, the home and garden of the celebrated Melbourne photographer John William Lindt (1845–1926) (figure 1), reflects the impact of Humboldtian thinking on the Australian arts in the late nineteenth century.2 Lindt built his horne, studio and guest house at Black Spur3 near Healesville in the Yarra Ranges, a little to the northeast of Melbourne. Begun in 1894 after the depression of the early 1890s had forced the closure of Lindts Melbourne studio, the building and its setting are testinwny, we argue, to the ideas on nature in the writings of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) whose five-volumed Cosmos (1845–1858) was still being read and discussed in the scientific and artistic circles in Melbourne with which Lindt was associated.4

The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights

ley’s emergence as a show business entrepreneur. In London in late 1916, Hurley worked hard to secure rights to three Antarctic films (from Mawson’s 1911 14, Shackleton’s 1914 17 and Scott’s 1910 13 expeditions), that would establish his business in Australia after the war. At this time, exploration was of great public interest*and largely funded by media exploitation. The experience of touring across regional and urban Australia is vividly evoked by quotes from Hurley’s Diaries, a companion volume to Dixon’s book*for example when he spoke at Melbourne’s St Kilda Palais he had to compete with sometimes incongruous screams from the neighbouring Luna Park switchback ride, but ‘When the dogs were killed it synchronised remarkably’ (131). In chapter four, through the example of Hurley’s filming aboard Captain Ross Smith’s England Australia air race, Dixon argues that new forms of visual technology and representation that originated in war*notably aerial photography*were then applied to other domains after the war, such as entertainment, tourism and colonial administration. Dixon suggests that the final years of the Great War marked a crisis in visual representation, and Hurley struggled to preserve a space for nature and humanity that was outside the amoral, abstract spaces of industrial modernity. As chapter five explores, Hurley’s 1920s Papua travelogue, Pearls and Savages, was his most nationally-based, yet internationally most successful venture. Drawing upon an older visual tradition of popular ethnographic film that turned faraway places and people into commodities, colonial territory became a space of entertainment owing much to fairground sensation. Despite its success, the tour had failed to gain sponsorship in Hollywood, lost £8,000, and was balked by the logistics of an American tour*leading Dixon to conclude that decentred conceptions of imperial relations do not adequately account for the uneven distribution of cultural authority or opportunities after all. Dixon draws very extensive archival research and empirical evidence*including the Diaries, themselves a significant new resource* into lively conversation with scholars working across transnational and colonial history, theorists and historians of early cinema and modernity, and the substantial work already conducted around Hurley’s life and works. One minor criticism is that sometimes Dixon assumes that we already know the stories and timing of the events that were the stuff of Hurley’s representations*and the chronology of Hurley’s extremely energetic years during the Great War is sometimes confusing. Yet Dixon successfully evokes the exciting, cosmopolitan visual culture of this turbulent period, producing a nuanced, perceptive account that will remain an essential reference for students and researchers in this field.

The composite enigma of Nadar

Abstract In the Nadar archives at tlie Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris there exists a set of portraits of ‘lec freres Reclus’, (the brothers Elie, Eliee, Onesime, Armand and Paul), taken in teh mid-1800s by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, known universally as Nadar (1820–1910). At different times from the early 1870s to the 1890s, the individual brothers were photographed by Nadar. In 1885, however , all five brothers were in the studio at the same time. On this occasion Nadar took three sets of images: individual portraits against a plain backdrop: a group photograph with all five brothers standing in front of a painted scene; and two composite portraits of the five brothers. These composite portraits, overlooked in scholarship on Nadars work, invite a number of interpretations that throw new light on the photograplier and on his relatioinship with intellectials. My purpose, however, is not simply to demonstrate that Nadars foray into composite imaging is a response to comtemiporary scientific theories relat...Abstract In the Nadar archives at tlie Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris there exists a set of portraits of ‘lec frères Reclus’, (the brothers Élie, Éliee, Onésime, Armand and Paul), taken in teh mid-1800s by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known universally as Nadar (1820–1910). At different times from the early 1870s to the 1890s, the individual brothers were photographed by Nadar. In 1885, however , all five brothers were in the studio at the same time. On this occasion Nadar took three sets of images: individual portraits against a plain backdrop: a group photograph with all five brothers standing in front of a painted scene; and two composite portraits of the five brothers. These composite portraits, overlooked in scholarship on Nadars work, invite a number of interpretations that throw new light on the photograplier and on his relatioinship with intellectials. My purpose, however, is not simply to demonstrate that Nadars foray into composite imaging is a response to comtemiporary scientific theories related to eugenics and typologies (which in part it is), but to argue that these unusual images in his repertoire to reveal an attempt by the photographer to express both his fraternal love for the brothers and his sympathy for a cluster of socio-political beliefs espoused by the two older brothers.

Appropriating Anthropology? Document and Rhetoric

The use of Copyright Registers by photographers and other artists provides a useful barometer of cultural assumptions over the period from the 1870s to the 1950s. This paper will explore images that both appropriate and subvert anthropological claims about Aboriginality. It is possible to demonstrate that whilst the field appears to require an engagement with anthropologically-derived visual constructions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘Aboriginality’, commercial photographers used this anchoring as a base from which to project diverse and contested claims of Aboriginality. I will argue, however, that commercial photographers did not so much diminish or contaminate an anthropological paradigm as extend a rhetorical activity of inventing and reinventing authenticity.