The first two monographs of the series were selected in 2022 with the intention of publishing. The initiative has been developed by AAANZ in association with publishing house Taylor & Francis.
Judges Professor Rex Butler, Pofessor Helen Ennis, Dr Chari Larsson, Professor Ngarino Ellis and Associate Professor Anthony White
Monograph 1
Recipient Victoria Souliman, University of Sydney (Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New England)
Thesis title “The remoteness that pains us” National identity, expatriatism and women’s agency in the artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain in the 1920s and 1930s
Proposed book blurb Australian Women in the Interwar Years: Art, Migration, and Identity presents new perspectives on the issues that arise from past nationalistic narratives of Australian art, specifically how they have denied women’s agency in defining Australian art and identity. Through a transnational theoretical framework, it examines the experience of migration of strong-minded Australian women who were influential cultural agents from the years directly following the end of World War I until 1941, a pivotal period in the history of cultural relations between Britain and its dominions but overlooked in art history. It explores the complexities of cultural identification between Australia and Britain and offers new insights on the inter-connectivity between Australia and British modernisms. This book will contribute to topical post-colonial debates relating to questions of the cultural survival of the Empire. Discussions around national identity, spatial mobility, global visual culture, modernism, women, and cultural policy are integral parts of this study. The interdisciplinary stance of the book will appeal to a wide range of scholars and researchers working in the disciplines of art history and women migration, with a particular area of focus on cultural transfers, national identity and modernism in interwar Australia and Britain. This book will also appeal to art curators as parts of the book not only deal with exhibition history, museum and curatorial studies, but also tackle topics that have been popular in recent exhibitions in both Australian and the United Kingdom.
Monograph 2
Recipient Brenda L. Croft, Australian National University
Thesis title Kurrwa (stone tool/axehead) to Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin): hand-made/held-ground. An enduring, collaborative, practice-led research journey representing a distinct Australian First Nations Storying/Storywork and First Nations Performative Autoethnography as subalter/N/ative archive and methodology – created from the rememorying, re/imagined standpoint of a Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra | Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish woman
Proposed book blurb Can a visual arts-Gurindji-specific culturally based, creative-led framework comprising collaborative exhibition and performative thesis, develop and present a Gurindji-specific storying of dispossession, cultural reclamation, transmission and exchange through dislocated kinship connections; and if so, how? What does a Gurindji-specific framework look like
conceptually, creatively, critically? What does it do to and for history, to theory, to cultural analysis? Is this framework relevant and if so, for whom?
This exegesis is a practice-led analysis drawing upon key cultural events and sites, and the involvement and displacement associated with singular and shared Gurindji ‘experience, location and visuality’. As a critical exploration, it radically inverts the limited recognition of what it is to be, do and enact as a Gurindji community member.