107-416 The Visual Culture of Colonial Australia

Formerly available as 107-151. Students who have completed 107-151 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

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, such as 'the gaze' or spectatorship will be related to a wide range of cultural productions that date from the early days of white exploration and settlement of the continent to the art of Australian Impressionism towards the end of the 19th century. The subject first considers natural history and the interpretation of early colonial images of flora and fauna from a Foucauldian point of view. It then considers the historical construction of vision through the aesthetic doctrine known as the 'association of ideas' and its relationship to the classic aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque. The subject, however, looks further, beyond aesthetics, to extend the boundaries of interpretation relevant to the colonial pictorial archive and colonial culture. 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 age by studying representations of Tasmanian Aborigines, the bushranger Ned Kelly and colonial children. Late 19th century images of the female nude in the landscape and of the Australian beach or seaside resort will also be examined to engage with issues concerning gender, class and leisure. The importance of the visibility of appearances will be demonstrated to illustrate how the emerging middle classes in the modern age of commercialism, in an Australian colonial environment, defined themselves and their place in opposition to other classes such as the convict class. Portraits and other images of 'the gentleman' will be examined to see through colonial ideas of fashion to the forging of gender difference and masculine identity in the emerging world of modern commercialism