rock formations downunder

On the 24th and 25th of June, my housemate Stef, took me on a roadtrip to her beachhouse in Anglesea. Anglesea is along the Great Ocean Road, east of Melbourne. During our stay we went to Lorne (pronounced "Lawn" in Australian accent" to explore the beach as well as take a hike down to the Erksine Falls.

At Lorne Beach I was fascinated by the rock holes along the shore. It seems as though the water has fossilized and molded the rock into holes that look like a sponge. It was cold at the beach (as it is winter here in June), but the spectacular rock formations made up for the weather.

As I walked along, I also found a small monument of 12 rocks set up by beach-goers, to replicate the "12 Apostles." The 12 Apostles are large rock formations that protrude out of the ocean along the Great Ocean Road (See image below).

back to booktown down under

At La Trobe University I also had the privilege of being hired to make a short 5 minute documentary on the Clunes Back to Book-Town Festival that happened in the second weekend of May. La Trobe University hired a car out for me to drive to Clunes. The drive was about 2 hours from the central business district of Melbourne. The drive was an experience to! It was the first time that I had driven by myself on the right side of the car, let alone navigated around the victorian roads. I kept putting the windshield wipers on every-time I went to indicate, but I got the hang of it after a while :)! Clunes was a lovely little historic town and it was great to be able to drive out and see another part of Victoria outside of Melbourne. The people in the town were lovely and had so much local australian spirit. Check out the short documentary I produced below to get an impression of the area.

future students center down under

At La Trobe, I was hired to make 7 digital shorts for the Future Students Center at La Trobe University. The FSC is putting on a "La Trobe Experience Panel" July 2010, just around the corner! And each short video I produced will play before the beginning of each panel. The panels included: Research@LaTrobe, Learning Environments@LaTrobe, UniLife@LaTrobe, Exchange@LaTrobe, and more. I want to thank Amanda Kerley and Harshi Kulathilaka as well as the actors for their advice and collaboration on the project. Thanks so much! Check one of them out below:

in between and down under

After checking in at the Alice Springs YHA (Youth Hostel Association), I decided to walk up the Anzac Memorial HIll that is about a 10 minute walk from the Hostel on the north side of Alice Springs' "CBD". The walk up the hill (Lion's Walk) was about 5-minutes. The pathway up to the top was made out of rocky sandstone and was very well maintained. At the top of the hill there was the memorial, just a small white statue commemorating the war effort in WWI and WWWII, on one side of the statue there was the famous inscription, "Lest we forget." The memorial was starch white against the desert which also provided a contrast to the brown letters of "Lest me forget inscribed on the side stood out like sore thumb. There was also two flags, the Australian flag to the East and the Aboriginal Flag to the west. There was something different about this memorial- it wasn't like the grandeur site of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, it was small and insignificant. Although it is on the top of a hill in the desert, the memorial lies in-between the thoughts of Alice Springs' community.
As I continued to admire this simple yet complex memorial, a family sat around eating subway sandwiches while looking out to the view of Alice Springs. Some read the plaques about the war and others took photos with the landscape in the background. I have to say that the view was not spectacular- the hill was only about 100m high. And the view consisted of houses, industrial zones, telegraph lines, and cars- all things that didn't seem to fit in the desert. The memorial seemed out of place, it seemed against the idea of trying to live harmoniously with the indigenous populations.

I couldn't help but feel "in-between" about this memorial. The site itself, just like the telegraph station, is a western European monument, built to provide a view to the developed land that was once free from European Influence. Due to this in-betweenness, the memorial suffers much vandalism. On the stones graffiti and trash impair the memorials significance. (I don't think the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne CBD has a single mark on it.) The site itself becomes a controversy. It embodies the in-congruence between European Memorialisation and Indigenous ways of remembering (non-visual, non-memorial). In other words, this site, among many others in Alice, is embedded with the tension of living in paradoxical society full of a guilty past and a hopeful future.

alice springs down under

During my stay at Alice Springs I was able to spend some time exploring the historical site of the old telegraph station. Several tourists were there during my visit- most of whom came to see the historical place where Alice Springs began. The station was set up in 1872 and it linked national communication between Darwin and Adelaide. Maintaining this connection was hard though- the harsh weather and environment of Australia's red center desert interrupted and often caused many technological problems with receiving and sending messages across the land. This is why people come to visit. To see how a station so remote, could function.


Although, I was excited about seeing the station I had read about in books in the states before I came over, I couldn't help but feel a bit unease while I was there. What I found interesting about the station is that it memorializes the original site of European Settlement in desert. In other words, it praises the colonization of the Indigenous populations. The telegraph lines that line Alice Springs (up and down telegraph terrace) up to the original station create cultural interruptions between Indigenous understandings of the landscape and European vision. The telegraph lines thus embody a cultural tension- they dissect and interrupt the traditional indigenous song-lines that inhabited the landscape.

I felt this tension more clearly when I walked around Alice Springs' town center. The young tourists whiz to and from the town in this Hi-Top Caravans to "experience" the desert, while the original owners of the land sit on the sidewalk begging for money. Although, this old telegraph station's history marks part of the beginning of Australia's triumph of the desert and mobility towards better "civilization", it also is a site of much cultural controversy; controversy that I felt just walking the streets of Alice Springs. What do indigenous populations feel about the station's history? Are they happy now that this past technological has evolved to allow them to to have their own cable stations on TV in the desert? Or are they mournful that these lines have dominated their landscape?

undergraduate research award down under!

I know...It has been a long time since I've posted on here, but it doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything! During this time I have been working hard at Uni and I'd like to say that I just found out that I received Honorable Mention for my application to the UC EAP Undergraduate Research Award for my Art HIstory project here at La Trobe University in Australia. I will receive $500 dollars as a reward as well as a published article in a issue of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. http://www.frontiersjournal.com/

The title of my project was "Surfacing the Australian Desert: The Local Environmental Art of John Wolseley."

John Wolseley at Work in the Desert

Abstract:

"Australian identity is a complex conversation of ownership, language, myth, and environmentalism. Landscape art is a powerful way to access the core of Australia’s complex national identity. In each painting there are several narratives, dissolving and overlapping with one another, some dominating and some repressing a desire to reveal the beauty and fear of the Australian landscape. John Wolseley’s contemporary landscape art, unlike traditional landscape painting, addresses the discomforts and ambiguities of the Australian landscape by using a multiplicity of styles and mediums. His local environmental art becomes a microcosm for the shifting identities and environmental diversity embedded in the layers of the Australian desert. Through a discussion of Wolseley’s desert landscape art, issues of colonization, archeology, and environmentalism become visible and the complex consciousness of Australia's identity becomes perceivable. The paper will also discuss the following questions: How were British ‘ways of seeing’ transferred to Australian landscapes? How did this contrast with Aboriginal conceptions of land? How can artists synthesize the European conception of the land with Aboriginal beliefs to make true “Australian art”? With this is in mind, this research paper will open up discourse for different ways in which Australia’s contemporary identity copes with preserving and archiving the Australian environment through art. `

Through this project I was able to visit the Australian desert and speak to the artist, John Wolseley himself, about his goals with art and how he aims to synthesize European and Indigenous ways of understanding the landscape through art.

John Wolseley,"Dunes Climbing A Mountain," 1992-3, Pencil, Chalk, Ink. Australian Galleries

The paradox of nature and modernity down under

Last Friday I went to the Hiede Museum of Modern Art for my Art History class, "Australia: Environment and Visual Culture" to look at Sidney Nolan's collection. (I must say it is quite a trek from St. Kilda by Public Transport, but a trek well worth it). Sidney's paintings reinvented the Australian landscape; he searched for a modern language that could express the ambiguity of the Australian landscape. Up until Sidney Nolan in the 1940's, classical Hiedelberg landscapes painters borrowed art language from the European and Claudian vision of the landscape as the "picturesque." In fact, Hiedelberg artists perception of the landscape was influenced by "anti-industrial sentiments of the industralised" world. Sidney, however, was one of the first artists to realize and visualize how the colonization of Australia would not leave the landscape untouched by industralisation. Sidney's work critiques the idea of dealing with intersection of urban experience (expansion of telecommunication line and railways) and country life. Ian Burn wrote, "The landscapes continue to convey the country as an ideal and as productive, but the image is now integrated into modern urban experience." In the painting below, called Railway Guard 1943 by Sidney Nolan, symbols of transport intersect with the railway guard's head. The spatial ambiguity and mixture of flat and modelled forms create a tension in the painting- a visual paradox.

With all of this in mind, the Heide's green pastures adjacent to the Museum ), there lived two cows that belonged to Mr and Mrs Reed who were famous art collectors and founders of the Heide. As a remembrance of the Reed's beloved cows, artists have installed metal statues of cows on the green grass. I enjoyed taking pictures (see below) of the cows because I could see the telegraph lines that intersected with them. It is powerful when forms art, technology, and nature collide. It is as each of these forms merge with one another and speak to each other. This intersection also reminds me of Nolan's paintings and the way in which he internalizes the process of understanding the landscape through objective realism.

It seems that no matter where I go in Australia there is a tension between the old and the new. In the city, there are old victorian buildings next to contemporary buildings. In Tasmania, the vegetation of Mt. Wellington is embedded with telecommunication facilities. It was Sidney's art that made this paradox evident to me, a paradox that it is crucial to Australia's national Identity. Ian Burn wrote, "We are still learning to with the landscape of this country (Australia). That remains the cultural paradox, even at the end of the twentieth century" (85).