We begin with an acknowledgement of Professor Lyndall Ryan, who transformed our understanding of colonial violence and its ongoing repercussions. She will be greatly missed by the Australian Studies community among the many others she influenced so powerfully. Her commitment to truth-telling in Australia is an ongoing legacy that motivates many of us. We would also like to announce and celebrate the winners of the Barrett Award, Cam Coventry (Postgraduate Category) and Jordana Silverstein (Open Category), with the Highly Commended award going to the joint-authored paper by Danielle Carney Flakelar and Emily O’Gorman.
This is the final issue of the Journal of Australian Studies under our editorship, and we are pleased to present a collection of articles that showcase the diversity and wide interests of the field. The issue begins with Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson’s article on queer Australian artists, art historians and gallerists in London from 1930 to 1961. The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is when the idea of Australian art as “isolated” and “exotic” first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures. The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumption. What is overlooked in accounts of the show is that many of its artists were not “isolated”, frequently having spent extended periods living and studying in Britain. But, more than this, what is rarely if ever discussed is how many of the artists in the show were queer, as was its curator, the director of the Whitechapel, Bryan Robertson. Their shared homosexuality was a conduit through which these Australian artists forged important social and professional connections with British artists; it was this that put them in connection with the British art scene and that, in part, explains their influence upon it. Queerness has often connected Australian artists to those around the world, as was the case for the Australian women artists in Paris before and after World War I.
In the following article, Wayne Bradshaw reconsiders A. D. Hope’s cutting appraisal of the group of young poets and artists from the University of Adelaide who have come to be known colloquially as “the Angry Penguins”. Setting aside the influence of the Ern Malley affair on the Penguins’ perceived importance, the article proposes that Hope has contributed to fundamental misapprehensions about the identities of the Penguins cohort and their aspirations for Australian literary identity. Contrary to popular belief, the Angry Penguins—at least in the initial phase of their development—were not purveyors of an impenetrable brand of Australian surrealism, but were, rather, a group of diverse young poets advocating the internationalisation of Australian cultural identity.
Lorinda Cramer and Melissa Bellanta’s article takes us to the Melbourne Cup, to scrutinise the dress practices of attendees. In the 1970s, a shift took place in dressing, marking out the period from the conservative formality of the decade before. Evident in the public areas of Flemington Racecourse, this new trend saw boisterous young racegoers of both sexes dress in satiric, comedic or raunchy attire. Commenting on this trend in the late seventies, the journalist Keith Dunstan decided that unruly young people engaging in these madcap dress practices had turned the Cup into a “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”. In this article, Cramer and Bellanta use Dunstan’s commentary and an extensive archive of images taken at Flemington by the photographer Rennie Ellis to argue that the culture of mockery and ludicrous dress emerging at the Cup was a form of carnivalesque disorder that appealed not only to boorish, beer-swilling ocker men but also young female revellers determined to contest convention and members of countercultures who creatively pushed sartorial boundaries. The authors argue that the best way to understand the rise of carnivalesque dress at the Cup is to see it as part of a wider suite of practices, throughout the 1970s, that had the cumulative effect of changing approaches to sexual, gender and social decorum.
Grace Brooks, Laurent Shervington and Simon Aplin continue this focus on the 1970s with their discussion of dominant narratives of the Australian New Wave through analysis of two films from lauded Australian director Peter Weir: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and Gallipoli (1981). They argue that the efflorescence of national filmmaking in the 1970s is generally seen through the lens of Gough Whitlam’s brand of cultural nationalism. The narrative usually runs as follows: state-funded films tended to favour a conservative, genteel and respectable aesthetic that came to be known as the “Australian Film Commission genre”. This article uses Mark Fisher’s concept of “popular modernism” to challenge the dominant account of the Australian New Wave first proposed by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, outlining the ways in which social democracy and state funding provided the conditions that allowed filmmakers to produce radical films that were antinationalist in character. As Brooks et al. argue, when national film production deviated from this configuration and became circumscribed by neoliberal restructuring and economic rationalism in the 1980s, the New Wave took on an increasingly nationalist impulse.
Xiang Li’s article explores Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri artist Leah Purcell’s recent multimedia project, “The Legend of Molly Johnson”. Beginning as an adaptation of Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife”, the project fundamentally defamiliarises and subverts Lawson’s story from the standpoint of an Aboriginal woman. Evolving across different genres—from play to novel and film—Purcell’s project is a unique case of adaptation, identity-making and transmedia world-building. This article considers Purcell’s adaptations as a form of franchise storytelling, and central to her cultural and political interventions is the figure of Molly Johnson. As an iconic Aboriginal heroine, Molly is empowered by her deep connection with Country and her role as a mother. The article argues that an important aspect of Purcell’s interventions lies in her intersectional critique of mainstream White feminism, expressed through the relationship between Molly and Louisa Clintoff, a character introduced in the novel and film versions.
In her contribution to this issue, Tracey Mee observes that the cultural significance of the British flag that sits within the Australian national flag warrants focused consideration, as it symbolises the moment Australia became a British possession in multifarious ways. In this article, a critical analysis of the Australian flag demonstrates how the primary symbol of the nation can heighten White privilege through its official point of honour. Vexillology and Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogy provide a framework from which to deconstruct the Australian flag. Mee provides a critical examination of the social, institutional and historical frameworks that support the flag and establish it as an ongoing signifier of White cultural power.
In the following article, Amy Clarke and Kate Kirby draw our attention school sports houses as potent examples of banal nationalism, whereby elements of Australianness are reinforced through the tradition of school athletics and swimming carnivals. The overlap between the school-based agenda of encouraging group identity with the broader notion of the nation as an imagined community is thoughtfully interrogated. By focusing on a comprehensive dataset of Queensland high school sport houses in 1969 and 2023, the authors observe several trends, such as the persistence of houses named after colonial explorers and other well-known men. They consider, too, the role of school sports houses as “identity primers”, or scripts, that encourage schoolchildren to identify with specific historic figures, landforms, animal totems, character traits and other qualities as indicators of the region and nation in which they live.
Robyn Dunlop poses a pressing question of the 21st century: how do we negotiate places with complex colonial pasts? In the mid-north of South Australia, rugged mountain ranges rise up from stony plains. Adnyamathanha-speaking people have lived there and maintained connections to Country for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1920s, artist Hans Heysen travelled to the area known as the Flinders Ranges and stayed at Aroona, an outstation on a pastoral property, painting landscapes of a dry, uninhabited place. At the same time, a memoir of colonial settler J. F. Howard was printed that openly described attempts at dispossession of Aboriginal people for pastoral interests. With a focus on gardens and food in representations of Flinders Ranges landscapes, Dunlop’s article revisits old material with new concerns, arguing that combining the environmental humanities with settler-colonial histories offers ways forward for postcolonial histories of place.
And so we bid farewell to JAS. It has been an incredible privilege to be a part of the team, and we look forward to reading more thought-provoking works of Australian Studies scholarship in the future.
Brigid and Emily