An Antarctic joke and the journey to Australia

Alice Margrison

Raymond Priestley's Australian diary, 1935
Raymond Priestley’s Australian diary, 1935. Raymond Priestley collection, 1973.0079.00002

Antarctic explorer and University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Raymond Priestley (1886-1974) kept a meticulous diary detailing his daily activities. This entry comes from the first volume of his “Australian diary” (item no. 1973.0079.00002), covering his activities on Wednesday January 30, 1935. The diary is typewritten, on one side of each page. It appears that Priestly added his own page numbers in handwriting in the top right-hand corner of each page. He also seems have been having trouble with his typewriter, as words have been corrected by hand, with blue ink, replacing letters skipped by the typewriter or cropped by the pages’ edges. Continue reading “An Antarctic joke and the journey to Australia” →

Impoverished Artists

Laurence Marvin S. Castillo

The Daub art magazines produced by the students of the National Gallery Art School offer glimpses into the practices of art pedagogy in mid-twentieth century Australia. The magazines feature essays, short stories, poetry and drawings by students that critically and creatively index the contours of, and contradictions in, the learning institution as a cultural field.

The 1948 issue is particularly revealing of how art was viewed and located in the socio-economic grid of industrialisation after the second World War and it registers student concerns about the apparent subordination of the arts in Victoria’s pedagogical ambitions.

Excerpt from “What Then?” Daub 1948
Figure 1. Excerpt from “What Then?” Daub 1948. Lucy Kerley collection, 2007.0060.00151

Lucy Kerley’s article, “What Then?,” for instance, lamented the inadequacy of cultural training in the art school. While most students content themselves with skills-based training, Kerley believed that it was also important to pursue a theoretical and discursive intellectual trajectory that would acquaint students with topics like the history of art. She went on to suggest that such gaps stemmed from the lack of state support. Continue reading “Impoverished Artists” →

Vicarious communist: a reflection on the empathetic archivist

Adapted from a presentation given at the symposium ‘Bernie Taft and 1968: Tanks in Prague, Turmoil in Australian Universities’, Friday 24th August 2018 by Jane Beattie, Assistant Archivist, University of Melbourne.

Black and white flyer of an event called Wednesday Night at the CPA. The flyer features cartoon sketches of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
Wednesday Night at the CPA, flyer, c.1975-1981, Bernie Taft Collection, UMA, 2010.0053.00537

 

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 2016, I wrote a blog post about Lloyd Edmonds. Lloyd’s family donated his letters, written mostly to his father, from the battlegrounds in Spain. Lloyd was studying in London when Franco invaded and felt so strongly in the Republican cause, and that Spain should not fall to fascism, that he joined the International brigade, along with 64 other Australians volunteering in Spain. Soon after this anniversary, the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) ran a tutorial for a Hispanic Cultural Studies class, introducing students to the Archives using Lloyd’s letters and other material held at UMA about the war. Continue reading “Vicarious communist: a reflection on the empathetic archivist” →

Number of posts found: 411

Post type

Previous posts