Mary Tomsic
University of Melbourne
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Australian Feminist Studies | 2007
Mary Tomsic
These statements are from ‘Great Experimentation’, a woman’s story included in A Book about Australian Women (1974). While the identity of the woman is not disclosed, she tells of her recent life, relationships, pregnancies, increasing feminist awareness and interest in filmmaking. The book includes the text of ‘some individual experiences of being a female person in this society’ such as this one, as well as photographs of ‘painters, sculptors, writers, poets, filmmakers, printmakers, photographers, designers, dancers, musicians, actresses and strippers . . . women’s liberationists, Aboriginal spokeswomen, activists, revolutionaries, teachers, students, drop-outs, mothers, prostitutes, lesbians and friends’ (Jerrems and Fraser 1974, 3). In this one compilation about Australian women, at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement, filmmakers are conspicuously present. As expressed in ‘Great Experimentation’, film was recognised as an important means through which newly considered political messages could be disseminated. As part of achieving this, some women were able to realise their potential for creative work with film. Films provided an avenue through which feminist messages were presented to many audiences throughout the country and internationally. The public actions of women’s liberationists of the 1960s and 1970s have been examined by feminist scholars, and the protests carried out in pubs, on trams and in front of government buildings have gained iconic status in Australian history. Filmmaking as part of women’s liberation activism, however, has not received such attention. Consequently, a critical aspect of feminist activity has been neglected in the historiography. The position that film played in feminist political action can be seen in a diverse range of primary sources but it is rarely addressed in the written history of feminism in Australia. In the 1970s, articles recording and examining women and film were published in film journals and feminist periodicals, and these were often written by filmworkers themselves. The edited collections of Don’t Shoot Darling! (Blonski, Creed, and Freiberg 1987) and the more recent Womenvision (French 2003) have collated and traced many vital aspects of feminist filmmaking and media-related work in Australia. Felicity Collins has carried out some of the most insightful recent analysis of feminist filmmaking. She
History Australia | 2018
Mary Tomsic
Abstract This article uses cultural representations to write refugee history. It examines twenty-first-century picture books about displaced children, alongside published responses to them, to explore how refugee experiences and histories are constructed, both for and about children, in an Australian context. The visual literary form of picture books as political texts is examined as a space for discussion and dialogue. Published responses to them, however, more commonly reveal rigid interpretations of imagined readers, invoking binary divisions between displaced and non-displaced children. Through these sources, questions of humanisation and (de)politicisations in refugee history are considered.
Archive | 2014
Mary Tomsic
Mrs John Jones, president of the Victorian Women’s Citizen Movement, presented the above evidence to the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia in 1927.2 Jones compared the exploited children with exploited ‘natives’—both presumably requiring protection in the form of benevolent control. And it was a particular type and class of woman who could provide such control and guidance. For the women reformers, and also men, who appeared before the commission, the cinema was understood as a public arena in which a novel visual language was spoken. The relative accessibility of the cinema to all classes of people concerned women reformers, and the effects of motion pictures on children were scrutinised in much detail. These women reformers saw a place for themselves in the regulation of film viewing. It was a way in which a ‘natural’ maternal role, usually private, was made public; they acted as the ‘responsible’ mothers for the nation’s children.
Latomus | 2012
Mary Tomsic
Abstract The Australian government has long been involved in creating, collecting and circulating photographs of newly arrived immigrants, displaced people and refugees. Many of these images have been used for internal and external promotional/propaganda purposes. In this article I use news reports and visual photographic material depicting Hungarian refugee children and their families, alongside an analysis of government agendas and communication strategies, to examine how these ‘new Australians’ were understood and presented to the nation. After the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, just over 14,000 Hungarian refugees were resettled in Australia. The federal government specially sought out a number of ‘compassionate cases such as children’, and many groups and individuals within the host population offered support to care for what they imagined would be large numbers of orphaned and unaccompanied Hungarian children. These Hungarian refugees came to Australia in the context of increased government interest in public relations and publicity around immigration. A Public Relations director in the Department of Immigration was appointed in 1955 and a publicity section was also established as part of the Planning and Research Division. Discussions by the Immigration Planning Council during 1956 plainly stated that ‘business’ was now the driving force for immigration rather than ‘the “refugee” concept’. Tasman Heyes, the Secretary of the Department of Immigration, agreed but also felt that these two forces were and could be combined, pointing out that since 1951 Australia had received ‘international credit for contributing to the solution of an international problem’ by achieving the integration of these aims. This article examines how refugee children and families were positioned in relation to the fraught pairing of economic and humanitarian concerns, thus interrogating broader understandings of immigration, children and families within the Australian nation that are revealed in these moments of photographic capture and circulation.
Journal of Australian Studies | 2017
Mary Tomsic
Archives and Manuscripts | 2016
Mary Tomsic
Archive | 2014
Joy Damousi; Kim Rubenstein; Mary Tomsic
Archive | 2014
Joy Damousi; Mary Tomsic
Archive | 2014
Joy Damousi; Kim Rubenstein; Mary Tomsic
History Australia | 2005
Mary Tomsic
