Narrative and Myth - within Australian Films and Australian Impressionist Painting

Public Lecture at ADFAS (Australian Decorative and Fine Art Society) at Wagga Wagga Civic Centre - 31st March 2017 - "Narrative and Myth - within Australian Films and Australian Impressionist Painting." - centred on depictions of British mores in the particular representation of regional and inland Australia. The lecture focused on speculative narratives constructed of rural Australia, primarily through the history of colonial landscape painting and the tropes of terra nullis enacted through visual arts histories. The impact of the lecture was in engaging a wide audience across the regional and national arts sectors, including diverse gallery and museum sector representatives. It focused on the relationship between regional and metropolitan depictions of "national mythologies" across literature and visual cultures.

Its intent was in contesting the British and metropolitan view of inland Australia; as a harsh, forbidding place into which European wayfarers mistakenly wandered and perished. There is of course a deep underlying truth to the hardship and rigour colonial settlers faced in inland Australia; of its deserts and what became known as the outback. But this mythology of harshness has relied on a visually encoded language – first in Australian painting, then in Australian film. These visual tropes have changed markedly since the 1930s. I sought to engage discourse regarding the pictures we now hold in our minds of what the Australian landscape is, and how these images have shifted.