Australian modernism

Melbourne's Cafe Australia was designed by Walter Burley Griffin's practice in 1915-1916. The architects used painters, sculptors, innovative lighting, furniture designers and makers and interior architecture to create a restaurant that proved to be one of the City's most innovative interiors.

Interwar Australia has often been seen as geographically and culturally distant from the centres of modernity, with 1930s Australian literary culture viewed through the tropes of isolation, insularity and quarantine. Through a reading of Eleanor Dark's experimental novel Prelude to Christopher (1934), I contest this idea, arguing that interwar Australia contained its own latent modernisms and modernities, which were often hidden alongside anti-modernist positions and inside other discourses such as cultural nationalism. This essay contributes to recent reinvestigations of the cosmopolitanism/nationalism binary and calls for these categories to be rethought in more interconnected terms. It also examines Dark's modernist and gendered critique of eugenics in light of the larger project of settler colonialism.

The dream of the “machine-made house” was part of the early 20th century modernist vision of standardised housing with factory-produced interchangeable components, modular plans and elevations produced at a price accessible to every citizen. The ambitious prefabricated steel house known as “the Beaufort House” was designed and developed by the Beaufort Division of the Commonwealth Department of Aircraft Production (DAP) located at Fishermen’s Bend, Melbourne and Essendon Airport. The highly efficient Beaufort Division manufactured twin engine Beaufort Bombers under license during the 1939-45 War. The Beaufort House was designed by Arthur Baldwinson (Chief Architect) and the staff of the Beaufort Division.

The two articles by Harriet Edquist and Philip Goad in this issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal elucidate for the first time architectural concerns and tropes that were worked out in Vienna in the interwar years and brought to Australia, to undergo a dynamic process of translation into forms and spaces that suited their new situations.

As 1960s Australia struggled to reconcile its emerging identity, Sidney Nolan explored the country’s contemporary character creating portraits of everyday women and giving them mythic makeovers, mixing national and international artistic icons with memories of Australia’s light and the spirit of the country.

Nolan had demonstrated time-and-time again, that both the heroic and the tragic formed part of the distinctive Australian consciousness. From London he said of his February 1964 trip to Australia “I was fascinated by truly Australian faces. I found myself looking at them for the first time and I wanted to paint them, but not masked as I had painted Ned Kelly”. In a contemporary series, of over 50 works completed between 27 April and 12 June 1964, he considered women heroes and anti-heroes, their countenance an attempt to hold a human significance in the vastness of the country, a modern representation of so much of the adversity, distance, size, social background and class difference in white Australia’s short but intense history.

His desire to paint them was a way of capturing their spirit and he dubbed them, with great affection, his ‘Adelaide Ladies’. Nolan’s deft touch nationalised bitter, optimistic and even cosmic themes. He pinpointed a time in modern society and a role that only women could own.

For all their size, they were full of expressive depths. For all their stillness, they were full of life and the spirit of the country. They flashed around the globe on the covers of international bestsellers, took part in New York exhibitions and graced London poetry festivals, personifying Australian isolation and self-examination. But their gender and nature blinded male critics and curators to the artistic, tragic and heroic identities hidden within. Many of their secrets have been forgotten, but they should always be remembered as a master painter’s response to the face of contemporary Australia in the 1960s.

To cite this article use: 
Andrew Turley, ‘Painted Ladies’, Portrait: Magazine of Australian and International Portraiture, NPG Australia, Spring (Sept) 2015, p.62-67

This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.

The Rose Seidler House (Harry Seidler, 1948-1950) is one of Australia's most widely known domestic architecture commissions. The editorial response to this work in popular "home-maker" magazines was unprecedented. The media coverage provides an opportunity to explore some of the era's response to modernism in architecture and interior design.

Also delivered as a pre-print and paper,  "Modernism and the Media."  for The Society of Architectural Historians, ANZ. Conference: "Early Modernist Architecture in Australia."  University of WA, Perth. September, 1993.

This paper examines the work of Catherine Hardess and Mollie Grove who established their weaving studio eclarte in Melbourne just before World War II. It was a pioneering effort to transform hitherto craft-based weaving  practices in Australia into financially viable businesses.

"Research and presentation A Heart Ripped Open commissioned by Radio Eye, Radio National, produced by Eurydice Aroney & Kirsty Lee. National broadcast June 2004 & 2006. Tribute to Serge Ermoll & Elvis Presley broadcast Into the Music, ABC Radio National, July 2011. Previously presented promotions for ABC News Radio & freelance stories for ABC Radio National Life Matters & Arts Today. Research & Presentation: Tatiana Pentes

"For nearly 40 years, pianist Serge Ermoll was the wild man of Australian jazz. His group Free Kata, formed in the 1970s, 'ripped open the heart of music aesthetics in Australia' (John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald, August 2003). Ermoll played with some of the greats of the international jazz scene, such as the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie; but his desire to 'be free' -- and a chaotic life -- has kept him out on the wild frontier of Australian music making..."

Listen Online http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/tributes-to-serge-ermoll-and-elvis-presley/2923554


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Adrian Feint was a significant Australian artist whose body of work included illustrations, graphic design, murals, and textile designs. Well-respected by patrons and peers, his art, prints and bookplates are collected publicly and privately, both in Australia and overseas. While today Feint's name brings to mind imagery of floral still lifes and surreal landscapes, the artist devoted his early career to creating bookplates - 221 over his career. What comes across in his plates is a profound intuition and ability to create a work unique and personal to its owner. The bookplates of Adrian Feint have been largely overlooked by Australian art history, but reveal a rich story of Australian art and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this essay, I argue that Waterway’s form and features cannot be disentangled from its ethicopolitical considerations: Dark’s handling of narrative space, her deployment of modernist techniques alongside localised iconography, is crucial to the book’s intervention in the ethics of urban space and Australian settler modernity.

This comprises a short illustrated discussion of drought photographs taken in 1952 by the major Australian artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992).
Analysing several examples, the piece discusses the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, and Nolan's working methods with his cameras.  It also shows how the artist's grim images of animal carcasses was steeped in post-war creative values.  Besides directly alluding to Existentialist-inclined art, Nolan used the camera to visually invoke motifs from Picasso's art, Hemingway's writing, and Holocaust photographs.
3pp. & 4 illus.

Designing Australia is an anthology of authoritative readings by Australian scholars, designers and observers of the history of Australian design during the 19th and 20th centuries. The selection includes essays and descriptions of graphic arts, architecture, interior architecture, design history, industrial design, textiles and costume, furniture design, early modernist architecture and design education. Includes case studies of John Oldham, Sam Atyeo, Avis Higgs and Fred Ward and selected designers by authorities in their fields such as Julian Goddard (WA), Judith O'Callaghan (NSW), John McPhee, Lindie Ward, Margaret Maynard, Anne-Marie van de Ven and others.

This a text-only edition of the original chapter in Australia Modern. While many Australian architects and interior designers designed furniture during their career, very few saw their work progress to commercial reality. While anyone can be a furniture designer, very few could remain one. Furniture design and manufacturing in regional timbers in Australia were well established after 1925, and by the 1950s new generation materials (high quality steel, aluminium, moulded plywood, plastics) were in use. Timber, however, easily remained the preferred medium for modernist furniture through 1975.

An interview transcript commissioned through the patronage of the Australian Institute of Architects (NSW). Keith Cottier trained in architecture at Sydney Technical College when with Frederick Towndrow was head of school. His first position was with Fowell, Mansfield and Maclurcan, later with John Allan and Russell Jack which ultimately became Allan, Jack and Cottier.

The article examines the Still Life paintings of the major Australian artist John Brack (1920-1999), specifically his "battle" series. It explains how we can understand these strange modernist pictures - which depict groups of pencils, pens and playing cards gathered on table tops - as signifying battles. Several specific paintings are analysed. Noting Brack's reference in conversation to Tolstoy, the discussion sets the paintings against the Russian novelist's explanation (in an article on "War & Peace") of how an artist or writer can represent something as complex as a battle. Especial attention is focussed on the still life painting based on a diagram of the Battle of Waterloo. The last part of the discussion probes the potential meaning of the later "Battle" still-life paintings, where the playing cards spell out words. A potential allusion here to Richard Hoggart's "The Uses of Literacy" is tested. pp8.

In a 1925 article on the flower paintings of well-known Australian artist Hans Heysen, prominent critic Lionel Lindsay, while highly admiring of Heysen's work, described flowers themselves as the ‘apotheosis of Useless Beauty’. Taking this as her critical point of departure, Ann Elias argues that, far from being useless, flowers were in fact of great importance to Australia artists of the pre-modern and modern era.

An interview transcript commissioned through the patronage of the Australian Institute of Architects (NSW). Keith Cottier trained in architecture at Sydney Technical College when with Frederick Towndrow was head of school. His first position was with Fowell, Mansfield and Maclurcan, later with John Allan and Russell Jack which ultimately became Allan, Jack and Cottier.

An interview transcript commissioned through the patronage of Alan Matthews for the Australian Institute of Architects (NSW). Anne Colville studied at Melbourne University taking courses with Fritz Janeba [1886-1983], a Vienna trained architect (Technische Hochschule, Vienna). Other lecturers/speakers included Roy Grounds and Ellison Harvey. She worked with Llewellyn, Smith & Waters, London, then returned to Australia working with Kolos and Bryant. She is a sole practitioner  since ca.1980 and a supporter of the Constructive Women organisation and the magazine Constructive Times.

The moment of creative transition for Fred Williams is signalled by a painting he completed after he had been in London nearly four years. Tree Loppers, a large oil of 1955, marks that step where the promising youngster metamorphoses into a mature artist.

O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism brought together the American Georgia O’Keeffe and two Australians: Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith. Setting each artist’s work in its own tightly hung space, the curators (and there were many) presented an enticingly simple premise. In unison they stated: Here are three significant Modernists. Their work revealed to us rich similarities in ambition and productive differences in context and technique. Do you see them, too?