Catherine Speck

Fundamentalist Education and Creation Science.

It is argued that creation science education, because of its conservatism, has become accepted as a quiet presence in Australian education. The authors demonstrate, via an examination of the social studies and science components of a creation science education program, how these programs are at odds with widely accepted views on education in Australia and do not comply with requirements for registration of non-government schools, as set out by the Australian Education Council. Moreover the wider issue of creation science has been pushed aside as ‘too hard’ by Australian educators. It is argued that there is evidence to question seriously this narrow fundamentalist education operating in some Australian schools.

Edith Cavell: Martyr or patriot?

The transformation of British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans during World War I for spying and helping some French and British soldiers escape, from a patriot to a martyr in popular media representations is discussed. It is observed that her patriotic act was changed into an act of martyrdom to preserve the feminine image of nurses in English and Australian society, and also to make brave act of a woman acceptable to male politicians in the countries.

The 1970s: Curators Framing the Avant-Garde in Writing and Rewriting Art History

The 1970s was a time when previous cultural restrictions on middle-class Australia were lifted, and the country saw a transition to a raft of ‘alternative’ agendas.1 The vast majority of those work...

Rupert Bunny in Paris: Playing the Field

Introduction During the modern era, artists from the peripheries flocked to the metropoles of London, Paris and New York. International mobility defined engagement with modernism, and numerous ‘writers and artists worked in someone else’s metropolis’, with the modern city becoming the contact zone with modernism. The Australian Rupert Bunny (1864 1947) is one such artist. He stands out from many other expatriates because he spent close to 50 years living in Paris, exhibiting successfully there and in Britain, Europe, America and Australia. His paintings were widely collected, including 13 by the French state. As Deborah Edwards commented, ‘Bunny arguably became the most successful painter to have left [Australian] shores’. He worked during the belle epoque period and in the post First World War ‘return to order’ era, deftly negotiating his way around changes in style, thriving until the Depression forced him back to Australia in 1932. Bunny was a consummate networker. As Mary Eagle suggests in the exhibition catalogue accompanying her 1991 exhibition, Bunny’s successful career in Paris is often put down to his being well connected, and to his sensitive reading of successful trends in Paris. Two exhibitions—The Art of Rupert Bunny (National Gallery of Australia, 1991) and Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009)—have explored the extent of his oeuvre. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of how Bunny operated within an international ethos. This paper explores the artist’s strategic working methods and examines his expatriate career in terms of his networking and exhibiting. In doing so, it draws on key theoretical terms developed by Pierre Bourdieu—‘the field’ and ‘habitus’—to explain Bunny’s approach and success. Bourdieu questions the adequacy of art histories written principally around individual artists and their art. He calls this a ‘substantialist mode of thought’ that ‘tends to foreground the individual’. In contrast, he advocates ‘relational thinking’, and believes it more fruitful to consider works of art and literature by ‘constructing the space of positions and the space of position takings (prises de position) in which they are expressed’. Central to this mode of analysing the social construction of artistic practice is the notion of ‘the field’ as a structured space occupied by social agents, which, as Bourdieu says, is ‘a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles’:

L. Bernard Hall: The Man the Art World Forgot

and recorded sound. From the first recording, Follow the Sun, Neuenfeldt enlisted a group of experienced musicians from Torres Strait and Cairns, and importantly, recruited recording producer Nigel Pegrum. Pegrum had been the drummer in the seminal English folk-rock group Steeleye Span, and his and Neuenfeldt’s arrangements fashioned what became the Seaman Dan sound. These augmented Seaman Dan’s swaying island-strum guitar with touches of PNG string band style, hints of nostalgic big band sound harking back to the influences of African-American servicemen during the Second World War, or to tea-room orchestras of colonial pasts. The songs are mostly by Dan, often with co-write credits to Neuenfeldt or others, with a few favourites of the singer by other local writers. All are strongly evocative of place, time and culture in lyrics and in musical style. The first half of the book presents Dan’s life and its historic context, and the second half illuminates how he has expressed this in his songs, with detailed explanations and interpretations of the songs and their arrangements. The accompanying CD enables us to follow this with close listening. Songs showcase Seaman Dan’s life experiences, often set within conventional songmakers’ tropes of love and loss. A song like “Forty Fathoms” maps the perils of diving in dangerous but rich oyster beds and is linked to a chorus with a touching lyric of longing. Others like “TI taxi” affectionately describe the small-town community of Thursday Island. The anthemic “Old TI (my beautiful home)” is one of the first generation of Torres Strait songs composed in the 1940s and is known throughout the Torres Strait and Indigenous Australia. It is powerfully presented here with Dan’s arrestingly intimate voice supported by a North Queensland Indigenous children’s choir. This book brings Seaman Dan’s first person narrative voice and Karl Neuenfeldt’s contextualisation together, and its strength is in the partnership. The impact of the recordings is enhanced by the way cultural and historical backgrounding is supported by the documentation of the processes through which this performer has reached a national and global audience. Together the package is a valuable manifestation of the move to polyvocal and collaborative forms within contemporary anthropology.

Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, 14 June – 7 September 2014

Dorrit Black is an elusive figure in Australian modernism, despite being the first artist to establish a modern teaching and exhibiting space, the Modern Art Centre, which she ran in Margaret Stree...

Art History and Exhibitions: Same or Different?

Art history, in all its pluralist approaches, is perceived as an academic enterprise and a modern institutional practice, while exhibitions are public and performative encounters with art history, ...

Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science and War

issue. If such arbitrary and vindictive punishment was possible then, it is possible now. As a historian who has crossed swords with Andrew Moore in the past, it is pleasant to be able to commend this book. With a few unimportant exceptions, such as gratuitously describing a conservative politician as ‘widely regarded as a closet Nazi by left-wing Australians’ (174), this is a well-written, nuanced and fair-minded history. Taking the reader into the heart of a near-forgotten controversy, Moore has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of politics and free speech in Australia.

Cosmopolitanism and Modernism: On Writing a New Australian Art History

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is very complex, especially from the point of view of Australian art history. National accounts form only a part of a whole, and hence, such a way of writing Australian art history would disperse with accounts of modernism and in terms of its passive reception or as a local manifestation.