The Early Career Publishing Program is an initiative developed by AAANZ in association with publishing house Taylor & Francis, with the intention of publishing a series of five monographs. This is the second round, with proposals for the first two monographs selected during the first round in 2022. In 2024 a committee comprising of senior and early career art historians selected a further two recently completed PhD theses to be revised and published within the next two to three years. The selected writers will work with the series editors, Rex Butler and Anthony White, who will assist in the development of a manuscript suitable for publication.
Monograph 2
Ivana Ninic, ‘The Escape Artist: Charles Conder, Women and Modernity in late nineteenth century Australia’, (University of Western Australia)
Romantic sensibility is the attribute of the Romantic tradition in nineteenth-century literature and arts. But it is also as a concept associated with subjectivity that reoccurs and modifies through time to shape identities, ideologies or to mobilise cultural and social change by means of the arts. This book explores how artists, such as Lucien Henry, Mary Morton Allport, Emma Minnie Boyd, Constance Roth, Charles Conder, Phil May, Girolamo Nerli, Alfred Daplyn, Margaret Forrest, Arthur Streeton, Jane Sutherland, John Mather, Clara Southern, Ina Gregory and Alice Chapman, in the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultivated a distinctive romantic sensibility in art and visual culture in the settler colonial context of Australia. Diverting from the well-known narrative of Australian Impressionism as a national version of globally emerging impressionist movements, this book argues for the significance of romantic sensibility and modernity as the elective affinity (Weber). By presenting the genealogy of romantic sensibility as the aesthetic experience within the context of changes brought by modernity – imperialism, globalisation, industrialisation, nation, commercialisation, the self and gender – this book shifts the story of Australian art towards trans-culturalism and a greater inclusivity of the overlooked or marginalised artists and offering new interpretations of the well-known ones, across different mediums and genres, including landscape, portraiture, still life, prints and decorative arts. Gathering evidence from arts (painting), literature (novels, plays, poetry), natural history (botany), fashion, design, diaries, letters, sketchbooks, art criticism and popular culture (illustrations, cartoons), this book promotes the interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on the intercorrelation between art, philosophy, literature, cultural and social studies to establish new threads between artists and links to some aspects of Australian modernism.
Monograph 3
Rebecca Richards, ‘Muda is bigger than the archive: Analysing Adnyamathanha use of archival photographs in communicating and negotiating Adnyamathanha Aboriginal identities’, (University of Adelaide)
This book analyses Adnyamathanha photography, focusing on Charles Mountford’s photographs within the archives and their repatriation to the Adnyamathanha community. Throughout this book, I weave a pathway through various Adnyamathanha
interpretations of historical photographs of ourselves and our Country and contrast these understandings to Udnyu (or Western people’s) understandings of these photographs.
I am an Adnyamathanha woman collaborating with my community for this research. This book is based on fieldwork, including interviews, workshops, and photo elicitation. I chose a range of photographs from the Mountford collection in the State Library
of South Australia to take back to Adnyamathanha. I conducted interviews with Elders, sometimes alone or with their families. I held workshops in several schools with young people to gain artistic responses to the photographs. I also curated the Minaaka
Apinhanga: Through Many Eyes exhibition (Richards 2019)— hereafter referred to as ‘the Exhibition’— at the South Australian Museum in 2019 of photographs, objects and artworks made in response to photographs.
I predicate this book on knowledge and understanding of Adnyamathanha epistemology, especially about photographs, rather than an analysis of Euro-Western understandings and anthropological theories of Adnyamathanha society. I explicate Muda as
encompassing Adnyamathanha law, history, and Creation stories. Muda underlies Adnyamathanha vision, interpretation, and discussion of many aspects of relationships. It is an overarching concept I need to address to understand how Adnyamathanha people view photographs. I aspire to fulfil, in some measure, the first aspect of Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999: xiii) call for decolonising methodologies: to ‘open up possibilities for knowing and understanding the world differently’. This is an Adnyamathanha-grounded theory of Adnyamathanha interpretation and uses of photography. These are our stories.
Across the generations, perceptions of photographs have a consistency as well as significant differences. The continuity of concepts in Adnyamathanha understandings of photographs shows the strength of the intergenerational transmission of culture. There have been over 180 years of Adnyamathanha contact with Udnyu people. However, many aspects of interpretations of the photographs are culturally specific, showing the power of those interpretations for both young and old Adnyamathanha participants regardless of Udnyu pressures to assimilate into Udnyu (Western) culture. This is particularly the case with Adnyamathanha’s understanding of Spirit in the photograph, as shown within this thesis.
Analysis of Adnyamathanha understandings of photographs reveals historical and colonial misconceptions of the interpretation of Adnyamathanha gender relationships, which research has sometimes erroneously imputed to Adnyamathanha society today. This thesis shows how some of these misunderstandings of gender relationships have shaped contemporary understandings of kinship, relationality, and gender relationships.
The second aspect of Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999: xiii) call seeks solutions to problems caused by colonisation. I endeavoured to suggest ways such efforts can be further advanced in managing archives and in representing Indigenous people. To avoid misconceptions arising from some earlier representations of Adnyamathanha and Aboriginal people in general, I suggest a way to manage more adequate representations in conjunction with the contemporary subjects and owners of that representation.