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What are the hundreds of dreaming tracks in the desert?What happens at a corroboree?What would you do with a witchetty grub?Many Australian Aboriginal people live in the enormous region called the Central Desert in Australia.There are a lot of weird and wonderful things in the desert including giant blood-red rocks, wallabies, carpet snakes, and honey ants. ... Read more

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Accounting for Tastes is the most systematic and substantial study of Australian cultural tastes, preferences and activities ever published. While based on the findings of a survey, the book also includes transcripts from interviews where respondents talk freely about what governs their tastes and preferences in home furnishings, music, books, sports, television programs, and art. It is a book that makes a substantial contribution to the empirical and policy-oriented social inquiry into questions of cultural practices and preferences. ... Read more

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Aussie True Blue
Australia and Australians are truely unique to the world.They see thingsdifferently, express them differently and seem as laid back as theiraccent.This book lets you share in the Australian lifestyle and throughimages produced with Tony Bennet's words you can see, touch and taste theAustralian lifestyle.Everyone should experience a little of the Land DownUnder and if you can't afford the plane ticket this book is the next bestthing.Sit back in a comfortable chair, take the phone off your hook andget lost in Australia.Share a few hours with the regular Aussie andrelax. ... Read more

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Max Dupainis regarded as one of Australia's most significant photographers. For the first time, this book charts his work in relation to the impact in Australia of 'body culture', a broad ranging movement in the interwar period that was concerned with the revitalisation of the individual and social body. In this engaging and dynamic book, Dr Crobie persuasively argues, through both text and illustrations, that our understanding of photography is enlivened when it is seen as part of this movement. In particular, she shows how Australia's most distinctive contrbution to 'body culture', was through the depiction of the lifesaver and the surfer and that the popularity of these iconic figures was largely assembled through photography. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Journal of Australian Studies, published by Thomson Gale on March 1, 2007. The length of the article is 1206 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Introduction.(Editorial)
Author: Dawn Bennett
Publication: Journal of Australian Studies (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Issue: 91Page: vii(3)

Article Type: Editorial

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Sixteen of Australia's foremost poets are featured in this volume. They talk candidly about their lives and work: of the craft, the rigour, the pangs and pleasures of their calling; of winged moments caught, however fleetingly, on the page.
These writers also speak of transformation and transcendence, the creative process, their individual modes and methods of writing and the act of writing itself. The interviews provide valuable insights on such topics as: gender and writing; landscape; the function of poetry and the poet's social role; influences embraced and withstood - literary, personal, local, regional, national, international. The writers and their poetry are discussed from both within and beyond "Australian" borders.
This collection offers a broad range of Australian poets, most of whom are now in the middle to later years of their career. These poets have contributed significantly to the life and quality of poetry in Australia over recent decades, and continue to play pivotal roles in Australia's cultural domain today, as the country moves towards the threshold of a new century.
... Read more

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In any settler and/or postcolonial society, heritage is a complex and contested topic that involves indigenous, imperial and other migrant components. In Australia, this situation is compounded by the unique characteristics of the country's natural environment, the considerable diversity of its migrant intake and the demographic and technological imbalances between its indigenous and settler populations. The contributors to this proposed volume are predominantly geographers by training, and, while younger scholars are represented, in many cases they are long established expert authorities, internationally recognised within their respective fields. Their interests span the full range of the discipline and their practical experience extends through the areas of tourism, planning, heritage management, environmental studies and local government. The aim of this book is to demonstrate, through a representative set of case studies from across the country's states and capital cities, the range and diversity of heritage issues currently confronting Australia and the value of geographical approaches in their description, analysis and, possibly, resolution. ... Read more

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Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upcale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often as a participant-observer—the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at the ways the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture, and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves, representing their hopes for new levels of recognition.

Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique "local art history, " a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice! Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Interesting but dry
If you get through it it is very interesting, but you better be ready for some dry academic writing.

Great Art Gets Some Deserved Attention
In the 1970s, an Anglo-Australian advisor to the Pintupi Aboriginal people of the remote Western Desert of Australia suggested that they transfer some of their traditional designs to modern European painting media (notably acrylic).The result was astonishing: a seemingly endless stream of brilliant, intense, moving paintings emerging from one of the most remote and impoverished places on earth.By incredible good fortune, Fred Myers, one of the most sensitive and wide-ranging ethnographers in anthropology, was there almost from the birth of the movement, recording what happened.This is his authoritative book on the meteoric rise of an art style that has achieved world reknown.
The art is enmeshed in Aboriginal religion, which in turn is enmeshed in the land.Most of the paintings are of religious landscapes. Myers is at his best in explaining the differences between Aboriginal views of the paintings (basically, as religious art connected with land and land rights) and westerners' views (basically, as beautiful pictures). Myers does not make the comparison, but it is rather like looking at Italian Renaissance religious scenes.You can't fully appreciate what's going on (however much you may enjoy the color scheme) if you have no idea who Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene were.
Other books have focused on the art and its makers (not only Pintupi; other groups had their own artistic triumphs, and now I am told that most of the artists in Australia belong to the tiny percentage who are of Aboriginal background).Myers thus concerns himself more with the reception that the paintings had in the wider world, and the whole process of winning recognition as "art" for what was once dismissed as mere "aboriginal craft" items--a racist dismissal.Myers is incredibly fair-minded (more than I would have been) to all parties, in the face of this, but sometimes anger inevitably breaks through; for example, after reporting one particularly dismissive review, he says "Here, then, were outsiders who knew more than the participants but did not bother to talk with them, outsiders whose representational practices directly thwarted the representations of Aboriginal painters" (p. 292).
Racism took several tactics.First and most odious was attacking the marketing of the paintings as "commodification" or "commoditization"--translation: it's fine for elite white artists to sell their stuff, but Immoral and Sinful for poor and nonwhite folks to make an honest dollar the same way.Related were attacks on the lack of "authenticity" of the art because old-time Aboriginals didn't have acrylic; again, no one attacks elite white artists for using media that Leonardo da Vinci didn't use.Then there was the early consignment of the art to "natural history" museums! (This had changed by the early 1990s.) Another tactic was glib talk of Aboriginals as "the Other," to be "situated in a discourse of alterity" or of "cultural construction" instead of treated as humans.(Not only do some perform the "othering," but also those who criticize it, can bury the whole matter in floods of jargon--not much help, in the event.)The last word on the subject of "the Other" was said long ago by Rimbaud: "je est en autre" ("I is another"); after that, we need no more on the issue.Add in patronizing bureaucrats, crooked dealers, and well-meaning but uncomprehending viewers, and the mix is such that one wonders how the Aboriginals keep going.
There is much more in the book (over 400 dense pages).Many less dramatic points are of more interest to the theorist.They defy summary here.Defying summary, too, is Myers' wonderful account of his own experiences in the Western Desert and in the urban art world.
The only problem with the book is that much of it is (necessarily, I fear) couched in the lingo of the art-criticism and culture-studies world--a lingo noted more for preciosite' than for comprehensibility.
Myers demolishes the simplistic rhetoric of "resistance" and "accommodation."What emerges is something far more powerful.Humans sometimes confront the most horrible oppression, racism, and brutality by transcending it--by marshalling all their resources in a cascade of concentrated brilliance that "outshines the sun."Delta blues is one example (and the source of my phrase). Roma music is another. In art, we have the explosion of Northwest Coast carving, painting and printmaking over the last 30 years.These and many other similar cases may be the best plea we have for redeeming the human species in spite of our countless sins. ... Read more

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This imaginative and resonant book looks at the constitution as a cultural artifact. Irving looks beyond the well-known events, places and figures to locate federation and the constitution in the context of broader social, political and cultural changes. Despite its paradoxical construction, there is something uniquely Australian about the constitution, and it marked a utopian moment as the old century gave way to the new. Irving analyzes the background and outcomes of the recent Constitutional Convention and considers its significance for Australia's future. A new chapter covers the development of the constitution in the twentieth century. ... Read more

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Culture in Australia offers an incisive and up-to-date examination of the forces that are reshaping Australian cultural priorities, policies and practices at the start of the twenty-first century.Drawing on the work ofsome of Australia's leading cultural analysts, its concerns range broadly across the cultural sector encompassing art and heritage institutions, publishing, broadcasting, tourism, museums, the music industry, film and youth cultures. ... Read more

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