107-416 The Visual Culture of Colonial Australia

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in art history.

This subject guides students towards an understanding of the visual culture of colonial Australia. It engages with the key concepts of vision that are central to recent art history and theory. Visual concepts will be related to a wide range of cultural productions from the early days of white Australian exploration and settlement to the Heidelberg School era. The pictorial archive to be studied includes landscape imagery, portraits, botanical and topographical studies, maps, cartoons and photographs. The subject considers the construction of vision first through the aesthetic doctrine known as the association of ideas and its relationship to aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque. Students will engage with themes relevant to immigration and early settlement such as nostalgia, memory and alienation. They will also engage with issues of race, class and gender by exploring themes and subjects such as the imperial claim to land ownership and the concept of terra nullius, urban development, the middle classes and patronage of the arts. The colonial pictorial archive will also be scrutinised in order to see through colonial fashion to the forging of gender difference and identity in the emerging world of modern commercialism.