The Royal Academy of Arts presents a Focus Day on 'Australian Identity' Friday, 1st November, 1pm - 5.30pm. This half-day event considers the representation and reinvention of Australian identity through Australian film, art, cultural legend, television, design, and cuisine.
Supported by the Victorian Government of Australia.
Speakers include:
Professor Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne
Professor Ian McLean, University of Wollongong
Professor Philip Goad, University of Melbourne
Dr Ian Henderson, King’s College London
Dr Simon Sleight, King’s College London
Bill Granger, restaurateur, cook & food writer
Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon restaurants
Speakers running order
1. Australian Legends: Ned Kelly and Other Colonial Tales
Professor Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne
Contemporary Australian culture is rich with tales drawn from its colonial past,
including that of Ned Kelly, the amour-wearing bushranger and folk hero. This talk
examines Kelly and other Australian legends in the historical and visual context of
Australian national identity.
2. Anxious identities: Reinventing Australia in a changing world
Professor Ian McLean, University of Wollongong
The cliché that Australia is a young nation anxiously searching for an identity is no
more or less true of other nations as they continuously reinvent themselves in a
changing world. However Australia does have its distinctive anxieties, the most
remarkable being evident in its attempts to fashion a modern culture between
powerful Western centres and local Indigenous traditions. This talk examines a
history of these attempts in Australian painting from the age of empire to that of the
nation state and the post-national post-Western identities of globalization
3. Marks on the Land: Identity and Australian architecture
Professor Philip Goad, University of Melbourne
In 2013, Canberra, Australia’s capital, celebrates its centenary. It’s a city that some
believe was built in the middle of nowhere. This understanding of building being
inflicted upon a land, which previously held no orthodox Western architectural
traditions, was once common - but no more. This talk outlines a diverse and
contested search for identity through architecture from standpoints of fear, mastery,
commemoration, engagement and reconciliation with an ancient landscape.
4. ‘Landscape and Identity in Two ‘New Wave’ Australian Films: Picnic at
Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) and My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong,
1979)’
Dr Ian Henderson, King’s College London
Australian cinema of the 1970s ‘New Wave’ often celebrated distinctively ‘Australian’
identities by depicting white characters’ struggles against the harsh conditions of
living in the bush. In Armstrong’s film, this trope was given a new twist, focusing not
on the usual working-class bushman, but on a young woman who sought to become
a writer. Armstrong, like Miles Franklin (the author whose novel inspired the film),
also celebrates variety in the Australian landscape, while expressing considerable
ambivalence about its effect on creativity and on women’s lives in general. Weir’s
Picnic at Hanging Rock, meanwhile, a film that catapulted Australian cinema to new
international fame, focused on the brooding, mysterious and gothic qualities of the
bush. This talk looks to some of the influences on Weir’s and Armstrong’s
landscapes from the history of Australian art, and then suggests how, in these films,
the challenges faced by European settlers in ‘taming’ the bush might be said to
‘stand in’ for those more explicit representations of Aboriginal dispossession which
would preoccupy later film-makers.
5. Consuming Australia in Britain: A Pop Culture Mélange
Dr Simon Sleight , King’s College London
How is Australia represented to the British public? From the sunlit suburban
dreamland of Neighbours, to more edgy filmic depictions of outback misadventure,
and on to the steady drip-feed diet of news in the British media, Australia looms
(surprisingly?) large in the British imagination. In this, a double Ashes year, I
examine the long history of British projections of the ‘Great Southern Land’ and
Australian portrayals of a characteristic Antipodes. Commencing with the Punch
cartoons of the later nineteenth century and skipping through time to the present, this
discussion dissects the Australian menu on offer here, and unsettles some common
assumptions concerning both people and place.
6. Food, Culture and Cuisine: Creating a national identity for Australia
Bill Granger, restaurateur & Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon restaurants
Restaurateur, cook and food writer Bill Granger joins Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of
Leon restaurants to discuss the influence of Australian food, culture and cuisine
around the world
1–5.30pm
£35 / £20 reductions (students, jobseekers and people with disabilities)
Tickets include Focus Day, entry to Australia and a drink.
For tickets, please call 020 7300 5839 or book online at http://royalacademy.org.uk/events/conferences-and-symposia/australian-identity,2608,EV.html
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