The subject of this paper is a living-room designed by Melbourne architect Maggie Edmond for her own use. Labelled on the plan Vienna Room, it forms part of a 2018 renovation of Edmond's inner-city house in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. Contextualised within recent studies of Australian interiors that use innovative forms of research and publication - exhibition, house biography, illustration - and referencing the work of Edward Hollis and Mario Praz, the paper employs the methodology of thick description, with some reference to iconology. This mode of research foregrounds the writing of the author/viewer as a locus of meaning, rather than, say, an imposed theoretical proposition. The room is treated as a pictorial device in which, it is argued, the architect's arrangement of paintings, furniture, books, and decorative objects can be understood as a "family album," a staging of personal and family heritage. The approach suits the aims of the paper which are, on the one hand, to explore the application of thick description to architectural interiors and on the other, to suggest how the Vienna Room might reflect back on Edmond's practice as a founding partner of one of Melbourne's most celebrated architectural firms, Edmond and Corrigan.

Over the last forty years feminist historians have commented on the under-representation or marginalisation of women thinkers and makers in design, craft, and material culture. (Kirkham and Attfield, 1989; Attfield, 2000; Howard, 2000: Buckley, 1986; Buckley, 2020:). In response particular strategies have been developed to write women back into history. These methods expand the sites, objects and voices engaged in thinking about making and the space of the everyday world. The problem, however, is even more acute in Australia where we lack secondary histories of many design disciplines. With the notable exception of Julie Willis and Bronwyn Hanna (2001) or Burns and Edquist (1988) we have very few overview histories. This paper will examine women’s contribution to design thinking and making in Australia as a form of cultural history. It will explore the methods and challenges in developing a chronological and thematic history of women’s design making practice and design thinking in Australia from 1870 – 1920 where the subjects are not only designers but also journalists, novelists, exhibiters, and correspondents. We are interested in using media (exhibitions and print culture) as a prism: to examine how and where women spoke to design and making, what topics they addressed, and the ideas they formed to articulate the nexus between women, making and place.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the European colonisation of Portland Bay, Port Phillip District of New South Wales from 1828 to 1836. Its starting point is the mercantile origins of settlement which began with activities of sealers in the 1820s and whalers from 1833. In 1834 the Henty family from Launceston but originally from Sussex, England, established a permanent base there. The paper argues that these whaling establishments, hitherto unstudied in the architectural literature, with their industrial infrastructure (“grey architecture” after Bremner) were the beginning of European architecture in Victoria. Evidence is drawn from primary sources including sketches of the bay by John Helder Wedge (1835), the Henty Journals (1834–36), the 1835 watercolour of the bay by George Jackson and the record of Major Thomas Mitchell’s visit to the bay in 1836. By uncovering the Henty family’s extensive mercantile interests in Australia from their arrival on the Swan River in 1829 it reveals the relationship between whaling, trade, shipping, and settlement.

No AccessTextile Modernism in Australia: The Impact of Emigré Designer Gerard Herbst at the Prestige Textile Design Studio in Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950sHarriet Edquist, Isabel WünscheHarriet Edquist, Isabel Wünschehttps://doi.org/10.7788/9783412518066.383SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous chapter Next chapter FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book covermode globalVolume 3 1. AuflageISBN: 978-3-412-51459-4 eISBN: 978-3-412-51806-6HistoryPublished online:October 2019 PDF download

This paper is concerned with the family as one of the key entrepreneurial and capitalist agents in the colonisation of Australia. Private enterprise has long been understood to be one of the prime factors in this history and Scottish families were particularly active. My case study is the Learmonth family who hailed from the Falkirk area in Stirlingshire, 44 km west of Edinburgh. Their story exemplifies the imbrication of family identity in its dynastic character with the opportunities afforded by the colonial expansion of the British empire and how this was figured in built works. Of significance for the paper is an understanding of what was at stake in Scotland for the Learmonth family and its lineage and how Thomas Learmonth, youngest of four sons, and his sons used colonial acquisitions to embellish their family status and identity at home. Ercildoun, the famous sheep station they established near Ballarat in Victoria was the final achievement of their Australian sojourn and it propelled them from the margins of Scottish life to somewhere much nearer its centre. The paper will show how they, as pastoralists and breeders of the "pure Australian merino" operated in the colonial enterprise-driven and global modality of economic migration that drove the expansion of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s.

This paper examines the European colonisation of Portland Bay, Port Phillip District of New South Wales from 1828 to 1836. Its starting point is the mercantile origins of settlement which began with activities of sealers in the 1820s and whalers from 1833. In 1834 the Henty family from Launceston but originally from Sussex, England, established a permanent base there. The paper argues that these whaling establishments, hitherto unstudied in the architectural literature, with their industrial infrastructure ("grey architecture" after Bremner) were the beginning of European architecture in Victoria. Evidence is drawn from primary sources including sketches of the bay by John fielder Wedge (1835), the Henty Journals (1834-36), the 1835 watercolour of the bay by George Jackson and the record of Major Thomas Mitchell's visit to the bay in 1836. By uncovering the Henty family's extensive mercantile interests in Australia from their arrival on the Swan River in 1829 it reveals the relationship between whaling, trade, shipping, and settlement.

Building the British Atlantic World edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman contributes to the growing scholarship that understands architectural history to reside at the “intersection of ti...

Nineteenth-century Scottish 'pastoralists'(1) in Western Victoria were responsible for one of the most extraordinary episodes in Australian architectural history, the 'Western District homestead', which has almost legendary status in Victoria.(2) In a relatively short space of time, from the 1840s to the 1880s, they commissioned hundreds of homesteads, station outbuildings and associated structures to house their burgeoning enterprises. Through these settlements they produced a tight network of family, community and business interests extending from one end of the District to the other and they transformed themselves from economic adventurers into a powerful social and political elite.(3) While these Scots were prodigious builders, Scottish architects were relatively few in the District although their contribution was substantial, particularly Alexander Hamilton of Colac and the Davidson and Henderson partnership of Geelong. In the following broad survey of the Scottish contribution to Victoria's early architectural history attention will be paid to the Scots as both clients and architects, while first setting the social and economic context of this extraordinary output.

This paper examines Eleanor Dark’s fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, for what it tells us about literature, history and place. By attending to where action takes place in her novels we find a particular engagement with Sydney and its origins, as they are represented in the landscape, in urban form, in language and in maps. Dark’s constructs a literary map of Sydney in which the past sits beside the present, refusing to be silent, and this juxtaposition of past and present provides one of the most powerful tools for social and cultural critique in her work.

When Michael O'Connell returned to England in 1937 after a seventeen-year absence in Melbourne, he did so as a promising up-and-coming modern textile designer. Within a year he was exhibiting publicly and had at least three designs on display at the 1938 Ideal Home Exhibition with Harrods, Ian Henderson's and the London School of Interior Decoration. These so impressed the young Xan (Alexander) Fielding that he published a review of O'Connell in Decoration. This piece contained a potted and somewhat fanciful biography of the designer but it was clear that the work impressed: "The three fabrics which I had admired [had] one thing in common - an element of the primitive. Some of the designs are based on native and animal life; some are subdued; some are barbaric; nearly all are highly colourful, yet they harmonise perfectly with sophisticated surroundings." How did O'Connell, a newcomer to the well-established British textile scene, do it? How had he established his career in Australia, a country with almost no history in this field of design prior to 1930? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining in some detail events in the 1920s which led to O'Connell's transition to textile design in 1930.

This paper discusses the possibility of constructing a literary geography of twenty Australian novels published by writers from New South Wales between the Depression and the end of World War II. Using Franco Moretti’s approach that examines where action takes place in novels (Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Verso, London and New York, 1999) it argues that in the Australian novels, action is confi ned to relatively few places. These are the city of Sydney itself, a few harbourside suburbs and the rural hinterland in the south and west of New South Wales. The paper further argues that each locale gives rise to its own characteristic action: the city is the space of political struggle, the harbour suburbs are places for refiection on the European colonisation of the land, and the hinterland is the place where white Australians wrestle with issues of national identity. It concludes by observing that the most striking quality of this geography is its partial nature in that it ignores suburbia, the urban condition that has defined Australian settlement since the nineteenth century.

This paper will examine the literary representation of space and place in Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), the first published novel of one of Australia's foremost writers, Christina Stead. Seven Poor Men of Sydney is held to be one of the most accurate and vivid representations of Sydney in modern Australian literature, but by focusing attention on where action actually takes place in the novel, this paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of Stead's literary geography. It shows how only a relatively small part of Sydney is actually described and how imprecisely described and vague locales occupy more textual space than the city itself, thereby throwing into contention accepted understandings of the relationship between Stead and her fictional settings.