Harriet Edquist | RMIT University (original) (raw)

Conference Proceedings by Harriet Edquist

Automotive Historians Australia Conference Proceedings, 2017

ate sector In 1966 Jack Brabham (1926-2014) became the first, and still the only, person to win a... more ate sector
In 1966 Jack Brabham (1926-2014) became the first, and still the only, person to win a Formula One world championship driving one of his own cars. The BT19 was designed by Ron Tauranac and powered by a Repco Brabham engine (RB620) designed by Phil Irving and engineered by Repco under the supervision of Frank Hallam in Melbourne. While built in England, the BT19 was an all-Australian affair.
Brabham's story is well known; an online search will brings up dozens of sites dedicated to him and his three Formula One world championships. The contribution of those who worked with him is less well known to the general public, if not to those interested in the history of Australian motorsport.1 With this in mind, the intention of the present paper was to account for the surprisingly widespread Australian involvement in international post war racing, focussing on Brabham, Tauranac and Irving with some consideration of Repco. Once in the Repco archive, however, my attention turned to the company itself and the development of its racing program. This research showed that Repco's commitment to racing was almost as old as the company, and was not a response to Brabham's 1963 request for a replacement for the Coventry Climax engine, as much of the literature suggests. It also showed that Repco's decentralised company structure, that encouraged personal initiative within its groups, may have been instrumental in providing the conditions under which a racing culture could thrive, a culture that was not necessarily nurtured for financial gain.

Annual Conference Automotive Historians Australia , 2017

This paper will discuss the legacy of the Australian automotive industry in terms of research and... more This paper will discuss the legacy of the Australian automotive industry in terms of research and innovation, in particular, those aspects that relate to design. This is an under-researched area of our design history but one which offers numerous fruitful avenues of exploration. In his 2014 survey of Australian design historiography Dan Huppatz noted "modernism is a key theme in Australian design history and the nation-state as the obsessive framework for the repetition of anxieties about distinction from or conformity to international standards". (209). He suggests that Australian design history "requires a shift in focus away from the limited definition of design as a modernist professional practice (with little interest beyond the design world) and away from an autonomous nationalist framework (which ultimately generates little interest beyond Australia)". 1 Within this remit, he believes transnational and global histories might be useful. The automotive industry is, I would suggest, a promising field in which to develop new Australian design histories as from its origins in the late nineteenth century it has been a transnational and global phenomenon. And while it did foster individual achievement, particularly around patents, design innovation and advancement tended to be collaborative enterprises to which it is sometimes impossible to put one name. In academic design history where agency is so often attributed to a sole designer, anonymous corporate design has historically been overlooked. The fact that most histories of the automotive sector here have focused on Australian manufacture as a marker of national identity has deflected us away from larger issues. However, Norm Darwin's research on the history of automotive design in Australia offers an alternative avenue of enquiry because while it identifies local design innovation it also places it within a transnational context. This is particularly so with his in-depth study of the origins and achievements of the GM-H design studio. This paper is positioned within a broader context of design history and uses as a case study the Australian auto parts company Repco. The argument will operate on two registers. Firstly, it will use Cantwell and Fai's idea of the firm as a source of innovation and growth to examine the internal culture of innovation promoted by Repco in the postwar period. This is in contradistinction, for example, to Tony Fry's argument that innovation in firms is dependent on external stimuli, primarily market forces. 2 Secondly, it will look at examples of Repco's innovation that we can claim for Australia's design history.

Autopia: the car and the modern city. Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference of Automotive Historians Australia, 2018

Proceedings of 'Autopia. the car and the modern city', the 3rd annual conference of Automotive H... more Proceedings of 'Autopia. the car and the modern city', the 3rd annual conference of Automotive Historians Australia held in Melbourne, 2018.

Automotive Histories: Driving Futures. Proceeding of 1st AHA Conference Melbourne 2016, 2017

Harriet Edquist, Mark Richardson, Simon Lockrey eds, Automotive Histories: Driving Futures, Proce... more Harriet Edquist, Mark Richardson, Simon Lockrey eds, Automotive Histories: Driving Futures, Proceedings of the inaugural Automotive Historian Australia Inc Conference held in Melbourne 2016

In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of t... more In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the “urban” in legends of the Australian “bush”.1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and those frontiers thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia’s south and southeastern coasts, and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, milling and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established colonial infrastructural architecture effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histories. [...]
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016

Edited Journals by Harriet Edquist

RMIT Design Archives Journal 28 13:1, 2023

Essays and catalogue to accompany the exhibition "Radical Utopia: an archaeology of a creative ci... more Essays and catalogue to accompany the exhibition "Radical Utopia: an archaeology of a creative city", RMIT Gallery, February-May 2023

RMIT Design Archives Journal Vol 12 No 2 , 2022

This issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal explores how design archives can provide insight i... more This issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal explores how design archives can provide insight into less expected histories, depending on the slice we take through them. The 'slice' for this issue is Australian designers' relationships with Japan,1960-1990

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL vol 12 no 1, 2022

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL 11:2, 2021

This issue of the RDAJ explores the significance of design archives – and the process of design a... more This issue of the RDAJ explores the significance of design archives – and the process of design archiving – in general, and of the RMIT Design Archives more specifically. There are multiple ways to describe an archive, its significance, and to whom and why it is significant and each of the articles reflects on these complexities in different ways.
The contributors to this issue showcase the value of design – social, cultural, emotional, environmental – as artefact from the past and as a future-facing practice. To different degrees and in different registers, each article also articulates the value of design history as a lens with which to view the world, and the value of design archives as a resource with which to intervene in the world.

RMIT Design Archives Journal 11:1 2021, 2021

This issue, guest edited by Noel Waite, is dedicated to the work of graphic designer and corporat... more This issue, guest edited by Noel Waite, is dedicated to the work of graphic designer and corporate identity designer Pieter Huveneers

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL Vol 5 No 1, 2015

Australia has a highly developed and very active car culture, the realm of museum curators, histo... more Australia has a highly developed and very active car
culture, the realm of museum curators, historians,
enthusiasts, collectors, car clubs, car manufacturers
and entities such as the racv and Victorian
Historic Racing Register who collectively possess
a wealth of knowledge, much of it tacit and
unrecorded. The academy, which has hitherto
supplied engineers and designers to this industry,
but not historians, can play a significant part in
the articulation and dissemination of this historical
knowledge, and in so doing help to build a
scholarly history of Australian automotive design,
developing not only research protocols and models
but also the next generation of scholars to carry
forward the work. And it is timely that this work
is undertaken now, as the industry undergoes its
most dramatic restructure for a century and the
Australian-made family car becomes a distant
memory.

RMIT Design Archives Journal 10 2, 2020

The theme of this issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal 'Design and Manufacturing' will, we h... more The theme of this issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal 'Design and Manufacturing' will, we hope, provide an impetus to a field of research which has not yet, in Australia, developed a vigorous discourse. It is potentially vast if we take into consideration the disciplines of design - from the built environment fields of architecture, interior and landscape architecture to those which rely on prototyping - design for manufacture - as in fashion and industrially produced objects like bicycles. But, as these essays confirm, such a focus has the ability to reconceptualise some of the norms of design history.

Philip Goad opens the collection with an examination of post-war Australia when "architects, artists and designers were enlisted as part of a broader push in a new and vital project of national recovery: the establishment and growth of a resilient local manufacturing industry." What Goad argues for here is multi-disciplinary design research, an approach which is not common in Australia, particularly in architectural history. After a survey of both the history and historiography of the field, Goad focuses on the textile manufacturer Bruck Mills at Wangaratta as his case study for it "can be read as a metaphor for the fate of manufacturing in Australia . . .when the physical and aesthetic attributes of art, design, photography and architecture could all combine to give image to post-war economic recovery, the building of a multi-cultural workforce, and above all, pride in the business of making."

Giorgio Marfella, by contrast, focuses on the design of the headquarters of another major textile manufacturer, Feltex on the edge of central Melbourne. Feltex was "one of the largest Australian-owned manufacturing corporations, controlling a network of subsidiary wool and textile manufacturing companies with 7,000 workers and 65 factories in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa." Designed in 1959 by Guilford Bell and David Godsell, Feltex House adjoined ICI House in East Melbourne and Marfella discusses its design as both a study in post-war, American-inspired office typology and an instance of a changing urban morphology which saw major industrial and manufacturing concerns establish their headquarters in central Melbourne.

Laura Jocic and Robbie Napper adopt a different point of view from Goad and Marfella, as both discuss the ways in which manufacturing impacts on the design process. Through her study of the Sara Thorn and Bruce Slorach fashion studio in the 1980s and 90s, Jocic documents the intricate relationship between designer and manufacturer when Melbourne's CBD hummed and Flinders Lane was still a viable fashion precinct. She notes: "Slorach and Thorn produced all their garments locally and drew on the expertise and specialised production processes of local manufacturers and fabricators to create their own highly individual designs." They also worked with specialised artisans to produce accessories such as belt buckles and belts and, as Jocic observes: "These types of creative and technical-based interactions between designer and manufacturer forged an environment where creativity and problem-solving worked hand-in-hand to flesh out and realise conceptual ideas."

Robbie Napper's examination of bicycle design brings us into the present and provides some respite from the overwhelming sense of loss that one feels contemplating the fate of post-war manufacturing in Victoria. Focusing on bicycle manufacture, Napper comments that his research:

determines that while the principles of mass customisation create ideal conditions for both manufacturer and consumer with regard to the end product, they also set up conditions for reinvention. Reinvention occurs when consumers conceive of and develop novel product variants, and the bicycle provides an instructive example of design and manufacturing-assembly processes being available at a local level.

Thus his paper differs from the other three because within the ecology of bicycle design and manufacture the customer has a central role. Not only is there supply of design, there is demand, and demand influences supply. So, from his observations of cyclists in action he notes "a variety of treatments representing reinvention of the bicycle, for example the addition of components such as luggage racks and pannier bags. Also noteworthy are the reinvention acts which remove parts from the bicycle, the extreme example of which turns an otherwise ordinary bicycle into a pared down fixie." Central to mass customisation and reinvention is the bicycle shop which provides the space for exchanges between designer, product manager and customer. Napper concludes:

Manufacturing and design are typically viewed as industrialised practices which occur behind closed doors. In the case of bicycle design, this research has identified that the approach of mass customisation brings design and manufacturing into the realm of the consumer, with one of the main actors in this system being the bicycle shop, which is reconceived as an important outpost of design and manufacturing capability.

There is something optimistic about this statement. As we draw to the end of a difficult year where in isolation we have been driven onto our own resources and led to question the apparent certainties of globalised production and consumption and at the same time observe the fragility of national prosperity and well-being, the image of the local shop where design is embodied and exchanged is comforting indeed.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2020

This issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal brings together diverse essays on Melbourne post-... more This issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal brings together diverse essays
on Melbourne post-war and more recent architecture and architectural education.
It is bookended by first-person narratives that in contrasting ways reflect on
architectural education at RMIT over a 35-year period.
Michael Spooner opens with an investigation of Edmond and Corrigan’s office in Little La Trobe Street which was the site not only of the architects’ labour but also of Corrigan’s
teaching. Using research devices that are both empirical and creative, Spooner offers a new way of communicating architecture. Spurred on by the shock of entering the offices
vacated after the death of Peter Corrigan in 2016, Spooner sets himself the task of reanimating the space before it is lost to history; it is indeed a heritage project. Corralling
his memories as well as those of others who worked there, he brings together formal architectural analyses of the building’s modernist lineage, a first-person account of
moving through the space, a sort of animated architectural section, analysis of the architects’ design process in forming the interiors and, a reanimation of the space through architectural studios he has conducted there. This text is accompanied by a set of remarkable drawings carried out by Spooner, Jack Murray and William Bennie; plans,
sections and four ‘capriccios’ which are dense compendia of the research underpinning the text.
Peter Downton, by contrast, consults his own memory, the recollections of others and various notes and diagrams to put together “a speculative memoir” of the 1985 RMIT Architecture course which, I must confess, I particularly admired. Downton and Tom Emodi wrote a proposal for a new architectural course in 1982, and after development and refinement by the architecture staff it was operational by first semester 1985. Downton’s article, like Spooner’s, exists as a first-person textual account, but also as a set
of illustrations, the alluring 1985 flow chart for the course being a magisterial pedagogical diagram. Downton’s act of historical recovery and reconceptualisation affirms a particular view of the university’s role in student education. It was an experiment in student-focussed design pedagogy where each student could, and did, design their own pathway through the course offerings, negotiating core and elective subjects to suit their needs. The course unfortunately did not survive the rigours of RMIT
bureaucracy for more than a few years. It lives on, however, as an elusive and compelling idea whose day might come again through digital means.
The three internal essays in this collection also have some common characteristics. Each focuses on one architectural practice during the 1950s and 1960s and foregrounds the agency of the client - corporate, personal and institutional in the design process.
Stuart King’s essay is broadly conceived, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ activities of one corporation, the Van Diemen’s Land Company in Tasmania
founded in 1825, and its Victorian agents Alan and Blyth Ritchie. It is in this historical context that he positions Geoffrey Woodfall’s Woolnorth homestead, deftly spinning
around this architectural object the threads of colonial and postcolonial Tasmanian histories, dynastic ambition and architectural form. The latter is important for, while
Woodfall’s work has been discussed in terms of Melbourne’s Wrightian legacy, this is the first major architectural study of one of his key buildings that includes a close analysis
of its spatial and tectonic form and Woodfall’s “increasing rationalisation of space, structure and construction”.King thus draws Woodfall out of the historiographical niche
in which he has rather languished and placed him firmly in important architectural discourses of the late 1960s,including that of “regionalism”.
Roger Benjamin’s recovery of an almost unknown work by Czech émigré architect Alex Jelinek foregrounds the architect’s relationship with Melbourne painter and client Lina Bryans and her role in promoting Jelinek’s architectural practice, through her
family and other connections. While Jelinek’s Benjamin house in ACT is a celebrated example of experimental modernism, the small studio that he designed for Bryans
in Richmond, which still exists, has never been published. It is in its own way, original and striking and surprisingly contemporary, especially in the way the architect distinguishes his new work from the Victorian mansion to which it is attached. With access to correspondence between Jelinek and Bryans and photographs from the time of their occupation of the house, Benjamin offers an intimate account of the studio’s creation.
Finally, Harriet Edquist’s essay on Frederick Romberg, delivered at a conference on religious architecture convened at Melbourne School of Design in 2018, brings to attention the architect’s work for the Lutheran community in Victoria, ACT and Northern Territory. Through this case study the impact of religious communities on the
development of Australian modernism can be seen as “a pivotal component in the construction of culture and community in rural and suburban expansion”.1 Each of
the five essays published here is richly supported by archival evidence, relying for its argument on maps, drawings, diagrams, correspondence and fallible, but potent, memories.

Harriet Edquist
Editor

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

Continuing a project initiated by Transition magazine 30 years ago, this issue of RMIT Design Arc... more Continuing a project initiated by Transition magazine 30 years ago, this issue of RMIT Design Archives Journal examines Robin Boyd's use of the media to build a consensus about the role of architecture in post-war Australia .

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

The two articles by Harriet Edquist and Philip Goad in this issue of the RMIT Design Archives Jou... more The two articles by Harriet Edquist and Philip Goad in this issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal elucidate for the first time architectural concerns and tropes that were worked out in Vienna in the interwar years and brought to Australia, to undergo a dynamic process of translation into forms and spaces that suited their new situations.

Journal Articles by Harriet Edquist

RMIT Design Archives Journal 13:1, 2023

A brief survey of Robert Pearce 's 10-year career as an illustrator, curator and fashion entrepre... more A brief survey of Robert Pearce 's 10-year career as an illustrator, curator and fashion entrepreneur in Melbourne 1979-1989

RMIT Design Archives Journal vol 12 no 2, 2022

This article examines the Australian trade pavilions designed by George Kral and Bernard Joyce 19... more This article examines the Australian trade pavilions designed by George Kral and Bernard Joyce 1960-61 for the Tokyo and Osaka International Trade Fairs. It situates them within the context of Australia's post-war trading relationship with Japan, and suggests a position within the theoretical concept of 'grey architecture'.

RMIT Design Archives Journal Vol 12 No 1, 2022

This article explores the beginning of art woodcarving in Australia, taking the formative years i... more This article explores the beginning of art woodcarving in Australia, taking the formative years in Melbourne of Tasmanian woodcarver Ellen Nora Payne as a case study. It does this with a view to addressing the marginalisation and under-representation of women entrepreneurs and makers in the present histories of Australian design, craft and material culture, a situation which is not unique to this country. At issue here is what Marisa Fuentes has identified as the "fragmentary and incomplete" nature of women's archives which often renders them and their work invisible in the larger narratives of modernism. Added to this are the gender ideologies of the nineteenth century which tended to align middle-class women to the domestic sphere where their hand work could be dismissed as amateur. By the late nineteenth century, however, Australian women were mobilising their domestic expertise in craft and handwork to claim space in the public sphere although they did so against vocal and well-organised resistance by men. In this battle for 'a room of their own', home studios became significant sites of a contested subjecthood. This examination of Payne's early career casts light on all these issues and suggests new ways to approach the historiography of women’s work and its place in the Australian Arts and Crafts movement

Automotive Historians Australia Conference Proceedings, 2017

Annual Conference Automotive Historians Australia , 2017

Autopia: the car and the modern city. Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference of Automotive Historians Australia, 2018

Automotive Histories: Driving Futures. Proceeding of 1st AHA Conference Melbourne 2016, 2017

RMIT Design Archives Journal 28 13:1, 2023

RMIT Design Archives Journal Vol 12 No 2 , 2022

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL vol 12 no 1, 2022

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL 11:2, 2021

RMIT Design Archives Journal 11:1 2021, 2021

RMIT DESIGN ARCHIVES JOURNAL Vol 5 No 1, 2015

RMIT Design Archives Journal 10 2, 2020

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2020

Harriet Edquist
Editor

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

RMIT Design Archives Journal 13:1, 2023

RMIT Design Archives Journal vol 12 no 2, 2022

RMIT Design Archives Journal Vol 12 No 1, 2022

RMIT Design Archives Journal Vol 10 no 1, 2020

Frederick Romberg’s Lutheran connections lie deep in his ancestry. Among the eminent lawyers, pro... more Frederick Romberg’s Lutheran connections lie deep in his ancestry. Among the eminent lawyers, professors and civil servants who fill his robust family tree is his great great grandfather, theologian Julius Wegscheider born in
1771. Wegscheider studied theology at the University of Helmstedt, produced a dissertation in 1805 at the University of Göttingen and was professor of theology at the universities of Rinteln in Hesse and Halle. He was a leading figure in early nineteenth-century rationalist Lutheran
theology.1 According to Romberg however, he was part of the opposition movement to King Friedrich Wilhelm III’s attempt to merge the Lutheran (the majority of Prussian Protestants was Lutheran) and Reformed churches into one, centrally controlled, Prussian state church.2 It was in
protest against this authoritarianism that the first Lutherans came to Australia, arriving in South Australia in 1838 with Pastor August Kavel.3
This paper explores Romberg’s relationship with the Lutheran church as an architect in the practice of Grounds Romberg and Boyd. His three known Lutheran buildings expressed different needs for different, disbursed
congregations; a church hall in inner Melbourne, a school in an outer semi-rural suburb of Melbourne and a suburban church in Canberra. The three buildings were commissioned by the Lutheran church and funded
by local congregations and district councils to provide accommodation for a growing range of services including memorialisation, worship, youth activities and education.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

The letters between the Gromboyd partners (Roy Grounds, Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd) written... more The letters between the Gromboyd partners (Roy Grounds, Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd) written during Boyd’s absence in the United States from 1956 to1957 together with Romberg’s commentary offer insights into the value of attending to correspondence as an integral component of practice history. They uncover the dynamic relationship between the three principals and something of the way their architecture was conceived and put together. The letters preserve not only the voices and thinking of the three principals but also of clients, colleagues and fellow professionals through whose agency their architecture was made.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

Editorial RMIT Design Archives Journal 9:2 2019

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

As an architecture student at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s, Peter Corrigan kept an ey... more As an architecture student at the University of Melbourne in the
1960s, Peter Corrigan kept an eye on Robin Boyd. Small but telling
traces of the connection between the two architects can be found
in the Edmond and Corrigan Archive, shelved only a few metres
away from the Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd collection,
in the RMIT Design Archives. They set up a conversation.

Fabrications, 2019

ABSTRACT This paper examines the European colonisation of Portland Bay, Port Phillip District o... more 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 the beginnings of European.architecture in Victoria.

ABE Journal, 2019

This essay presents the case study of the Learmonth family who hailed from the Falkirk area in St... more This essay presents the case study of 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. Unlike the majority of western district squatters in Victoria, the Learmonth family (Thomas and Christian, their sons John, Thomas, Somerville and Andrew and daughters Elizabeth, Margaret and Christian) did not stay in Australia. They arrived in 1835 and by 1873 all (except Thomas’s wife Christian, who died in Van Diemen’s Land) had returned to Scotland, England, or India. One of the family’s greatest legacies in Australia is Ercildoun, an extensive run near Ballarat on land they expropriated in 1837 and used as a base to breed some of the country’s finest merino wool. Ercildoun was in the long term, however, of more benefit to the Learmonths in Britain than in Australia. As the final achievement of their Australian sojourn it propelled them from the margins of Scottish life to somewhere nearer its centre. Along the way they took up land and built homes on a scale not possible in Scotland and they gave their houses names that vaunted their family ancestry and ambition.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2019

The idea of a society in exile, such as that described by Marc Raeff in Russia Abroad, his study ... more The idea of a society in exile, such as that described by Marc Raeff in Russia Abroad, his study of the interwar Russian diaspora, is a useful framework for gathering together the experiences and contributions of a small group of exiles and émigré designers who came to Australia from Vienna.

Fabrications, 2003

David Syme was buried a Presbyterian. Educated for the kirk, the son of a Scottish schoolmaster, ... more David Syme was buried a Presbyterian. Educated for the kirk, the son of a Scottish schoolmaster, and probably descended from that Syme of Ayrshire who befriended the poet Burns, David stepped out from the ministry to seek a broader field in journalism. But the ...

Fabrications, 1999

This article examines the mortuary temple Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear designed for... more This article examines the mortuary temple Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear designed for Dr John Springthorpe as a burial chamber for his wide Annie in the late 1890s. It argues that it was a seminal work in the Australian Arts ad Crafts Movement and one of its most ambitious monuments. Influenced by the writings of William Lethaby, the architect designed the tomb as square-plan sun temple, combining Greek and Roman forms with an Art Nouveau- inspired glazed roof.

Fabrications the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, 2011

When Michael O'Connell returned to England in 1937 after a seventeen-year absence in Melbourne, h... more 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.

Fabrications , Dec 1, 2008

Abstract: The capacity of literature to represent the problems and conditions of the modern city ... more Abstract: The capacity of literature to represent the problems and conditions of the modern city has been little explored by Australian architectural historians. When we seek to understand the discourse of the modern, twentieth-century city and its architectural legacies we tend to ...

Cartographic Journal, 2009

An examination of 1930s Sydney portrayed in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney usin... more An examination of 1930s Sydney portrayed in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney using the framework of literary geography.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2013

The first survey of the work of Czech emigre George Kral, graphic designer and interior designer ... more The first survey of the work of Czech emigre George Kral, graphic designer and interior designer who was active in Melbourne from the 1950s to the 1970s.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2015

This survey of current research into the Australian automobile industry focuses on the ways in wh... more This survey of current research into the Australian automobile industry focuses on the ways in which women experienced the new technologies of speed and mobility in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is organised into three themes: women as drivers and mechanics, their opportunities as production workers, and as designers and engineers.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2014

This paper examines the work of Catherine Hardess and Mollie Grove who established their weaving ... more This paper examines the work of Catherine Hardess and Mollie Grove who established their weaving studio eclarte in Melbourne just before World War II. It was a pioneering effort to transform hitherto craft-based weaving practices in Australia into financially viable businesses.

RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2012

This paper examines the contribution of Joyce Coffey to post-war Australian product design. Using... more This paper examines the contribution of Joyce Coffey to post-war Australian product design. Using the Kempthorne Lighting collection in the RMIT Design Archives it details her work as a lighting designer in collaboration with her husband Selwyn Coffey.

Automotive Historians Australia Proceedings 2, 2019

This paper argues that Eleanor Dark's novel Return to Coolami (1936) was the first Australian roa... more This paper argues that Eleanor Dark's novel Return to Coolami (1936) was the first Australian road novel, preceding the other contender Eve Langley's The Pea Pickers, by several years. By drawing comparisons with Sinclair Lewis's popular 1919 novel Free Air, the paper shows how both authors combined the well developed literary tropes that formed the basis of the road novel with modern types of writing like the automotive touring guide. In Return to Coolami Dark used the new genre to meditate on Australia's Indigenous history and the crisis of modernity, themes which led eventually to her most celebrated work The Timeless Land (1941).

Proceedings of the 27th SAHANZ Conference, Newcastle, NSW, 2010

This paper examines how Australian novelist Ada Cambridge's literary imagination was informed by ... more This paper examines how Australian novelist Ada Cambridge's literary imagination was informed by contemporary theories of modern life and how her fictional Melbourne is drawn with knowledge of current radical thought, the theories of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris; it also has parallels to Baudelaire's representations of urban life. The paper argues that within the nineteenth-century literary conventions of romantic love, Cambridge has posited a radically new argument about Australian national identity which is located within an urban framework and defined by women as modern subjects.

Cultural Crossroads. Proceedings of the 26th International SAHANZ Conference, 2009

The Port Phillip District of New South Wales was more rapidly occupied by Europeans than any othe... more The Port Phillip District of New South Wales was more rapidly occupied by Europeans than any other region in Australia and its Western District soon claimed its place as a powerhouse of the Australian wool industry. The rapidity and success of the colonisation of Port Phillip (1834-1850) was for more than a century a cause for self-congratulation in Victoria. If its successes were legendary, so was its well-documented brutality, its landscape witness to massacres and the ruthless substitution of indigenous habitation for alien sheep and cattle runs. This 'distant field of murder' is a vast, rich savannah, Major Thomas Mitchell's Australia Felix, one of the youngest volcanic regions on earth. Stretching from South Australia across the south west of Victoria, dotted with volcanic cones and crater lakes, its prominent features and their lava flows mark out the landscape in a unique way. They also suggest another way of reading its contested history. Mindful of Vincent Scully's arguments for the reciprocal relationship between 'landscape and sanctuary' in ancient Greece, this paper will examine the ways in which the landscape of Australia Felix has shaped dwelling on the one hand, and how its representations have conditioned our understanding of the landscape on the other. Indigenous Gunditj Mara settlements on Mt Eccles, colonial homesteads in the Southern Grampians and homestead portraits by Eugen von Guerard and others will be used to interrogate the intricate relationships between people, place and culture.

Slawa-Horowitz-Duldig. Modernist Art & Design edited by Melinda Mockridge, 2023

The avant-garde design of the Vienna Secession and its offshoot, the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese ... more The avant-garde design of the Vienna Secession and its offshoot, the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese workshops), are the most celebrated examples of early twentieth-century Austrian modernism. The Wiener Werkstätte were established by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903 as a cooperative of craftspeople and designers aimed at improving the function and look of the objects of everyday life. Australians are familiar with this story because of the extraordinary survival of two suites of furniture, designed by Hoffmann and fellow Austrian architect
Adolf Loos during the early years of the Wiener Werkstätte.
However, the Gallia suite (1913) and Langer suite (1903) now
in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria typify two
distinct strands of Viennese modernism. In Hoffmann’s Gallia
apartment, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (the ‘total work of
art’) dominates; every element of the interior was designed and
accounted for by the architect. For the Langer suite, by contrast,
Loos assembled a group of furniture pieces that included those
of his own design together with some based on historical, mainly
English, precedents such as the Chippendale chair, which were
held in high favour in Vienna. There was no need to continually
design new furniture, Loos argued, when perfectly good historical
designs existed. The Gallia and Langer suites, commissioned
by wealthy clients early in the century, were not characteristic
of most of the Viennese furniture brought to Australia in the
late 1930s, when families were forced to leave their homeland.
Several collections survive in Melbourne with the descendants
of the original émigrés and they represent interwar design when
lavish suites were less common or even possible. Commissioned in 1931, Slawa Horowitz-Duldig’s suite of furniture belongs to this latter group.

The Encyclopaedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia

Architecture and Design The growth of Australian women's leadership in the fields of architecture... more Architecture and Design
The growth of Australian women's leadership in the fields of architecture and design was slow and hard fought. While a few notable women exercised leadership from the early 19th century, they did so as amateurs. The professionalisation of the architecture and design disciplines was a long process that took place in fits and starts over the course of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Architects were the first to organise themselves into professional bodies and, by the beginning of the 20th century, there were institutes of architects in all capital cities. These were entirely male affairs, vigorously guarded, and the control of them remained in the hands of men for the better part of a century or more. In 1930, the national Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) was formed, now known as the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA). Industrial designers founded the Society for Designers for Industry around 1947; it became the Design Institute of Australia (DIA) in 1982, absorbing the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA) in 1998. The Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA) was not established until 1966. Professional education in tertiary institutions followed a similar trajectory. Hence almost no 19th-century women feature in this part of the story, only slowly emerging in the first decades of the 20th.

see full chapter at
http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0030b.htm

Textile Moderne/Textile Modernism, 2019

Textile Modernism in Australia: The Impact of Emigré Designer Gerard Herbst at the Prestige Text... more Textile Modernism in Australia: The Impact of Emigré Designer Gerard Herbst
at the Prestige Textile Design Studio in Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s

De-Signing Design. Cartographies of Theory and Practice, 2015

This paper is a discussion about Ada Cambridge's construction of modern female subject hood and t... more This paper is a discussion about Ada Cambridge's construction of modern female subject hood and the agency of the late nineteenth-century city.

Melbourne Modern. European Art and Design at RMIT since 1945, 2019

In 1960, after more than a decade of teaching part-time, German-born and trained designer Gerard ... more In 1960, after more than a decade of teaching part-time, German-born and trained designer Gerard Herbst was appointed full-time senior lecturer in industrial Design at RMIT.
Herbst’s contribution to industrial design pedagogy at RMIT was significant. Through his unorthodox but charismatic teaching he
developed the design studio as a site of speculation where
students could move beyond an instrumentalised conception
of design for industry to one based on a broader view of
design’s role in society and the environment. He was in tune
with the times. The 1960s and 70s radicalised students across
Australian tertiary campuses and Herbst gave his students
some useful tools with which they too could become agents
of change.

Melbourne Modern. European Art and Design at RMIT since 1945, 2019

In 1955 sculptor Victor Greenhalgh became head of the Department of Applied Art at Melbourne Tec... more In 1955 sculptor Victor Greenhalgh became head of the Department
of Applied Art at Melbourne Technical College. One of his first appointments was Vaclav (Victor) Vodicka, a Czech goldsmith who had migrated to Australia in 1950 after the Communist takeover in the former Czechoslovakia. He joined the College in 1955 and over the succeeding years transformed gold and silversmithing into the leading course
of its kind in Australia.

Melbourne Modern. European Art and Design at RMIT since 1945, 2019

After WWII several émigré architects and designers were appointed to staff in Melbourne Technical... more After WWII several émigré architects and designers were appointed to staff in Melbourne Technical College’s Department of Art and Applied Art.
Some of these émigrés were part-time and some full-time,
and they came from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy,
Holland, Lithuania and Latvia, Ireland and Scotland. In about 1946 Viennese-trained architects Frederick Sterne and Ernest Fooks and the
Swiss-trained German architect Frederick Romberg all joined
the staff. They were the first European designers to join Art
and Applied Art after the war but they were soon followed by
many more over the coming decades.

Art and Cartography, 2009

This paper discusses the possibility of constructing a literary geography of twenty Australian no... more 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 Moratti's concert of the 'literary atlas'.

Fabrications, 2018

Review of Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture edited by Dan... more Review of Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L Herman

Dream Factory. GMH Design at Fishermans Bend 1964-2020, 2021

Dream Factory is part of my ongoing investigation into the history of Australian automotive desi... more Dream Factory is part of my ongoing investigation into the history of Australian automotive design. It focuses on the GMH Technical Centre at Fishermans Bend through drawings of nine key designers who worked there from 1964 to 2020. The drawings were chosen to show the development of local design capacity from the HT Monaro GTS to the Efijy concept car of 2006. The curatorial focus on drawing and design development was a research strategy to highlight the GMH design studio as a model of collaborative industrial design; it was one of Australia's most successful design studios in the second half of the 20th century. The commissioned works, a film on GMH history by Lawrence Johnson and Dream My Monaro by emerging ceramic artist Jia Jia Chen were acquired by the City of Melbourne.

Building a New World: a history of the State Library of Victoria 1853-1913, 2013

This book accompanied the exhibition Free, Secular and Democratic: building the Public Library 18... more This book accompanied the exhibition Free, Secular and Democratic: building the Public Library 1853-1913 held at the Murdoch Gallery, State Library of Victoria 2013-2014. It combined a chronological account of the built history of the Library, Gallery and Museum complex with a survey of the collections held therein.
The book is online http://building-a-new-world.slv.vic.gov.au

Keynote Lecture at Australasian Urban History / Planning History Conference, 5-7 Feb. 2020, Launceston., 2020

In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, argued tha... more In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, argued that the early European frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and they thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia’s south and southeastern coasts and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, timber-getting and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established infrastructural architecture exploiting resources, dispossessing indigenous peoples and effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histories.

In this presentation we will discuss our research on re-thinking the early colonial architecture of the Tasman World, a regional concept encompassing Australia and New Zealand linked by sea and traffic. We describe our project as ‘oceanic’ since the sea—its estuaries, coasts and oceans—is a prominent character as a conveyor of enterprise and ships, which were agents in global networks across oceans. It employs the insights offered by recent historians of the region and adopts a ‘ground-up’ approach that understands architecture to be the outcome of industry and building activity that shaped and brought into being the colonial world. We will focus on two intertwined industries: whaling, which encroached into the South Pacific in the 1770s and is rarely associated with architecture, and timber-getting. Together they provided trade staples and raw materials that made colonisation possible.

Our overarching questions concern the relations between early global industries in the region (sealing, whaling, wool, timber) and colonial architecture. How can a research focus on the Tasman World and colonial regionalism disrupt normative centre/periphery models of architectural history?

Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Appreciation lecture , 2022

A discussion about four 18th century English portraits of pug dogs from the point of view of bree... more A discussion about four 18th century English portraits of pug dogs from the point of view of breed history

Impact. AAANZ Conference Sydney, 2021

This paper looks at how a new breed of European dog - the pug - was transformed into a cultural o... more This paper looks at how a new breed of European dog - the pug - was transformed into a cultural object during the eighteenth century. For the purposes of my argument I focus primarily though not exclusively on the pugs modelled by Johann Joachim Kändler at the Meissen porcelain factory near Dresden in the 1730s and 1740s. Within a broad framework of the breed's early history, I propose that objects such as these, far from being merely 'decorative', were active agents in developing Enlightenment ideas about the relationship between humans and the non-human animal world.

Open House Open Floodplain , 2024

This text accompanied the Robin Boyd Foundation's exhibition Open House Open Floodplain that was ... more This text accompanied the Robin Boyd Foundation's exhibition Open House Open Floodplain that was a part of Melbourne Open House 23-24 March 2024. It points to some of the features of Harold Desbrowe-Annear's MacGeorge House (1910) that Robin Boyd thought presaged Melbourne modernist architecture

Australian Journal of Art, 1987

During WWI, as Bruce Scates argues, Australian women's unpaid voluntary labour formed a significa... more During WWI, as Bruce Scates argues, Australian women's unpaid voluntary labour formed a significant sector of the wartime economy by raising war funds, making products, comforting the sick and bereaved. 1 Scates introduces his subject by way of Grace Cossington-Smith's famous 1915 painting The Sock Knitter and with that image as an exemplar he focuses on the practical and emotional labour women undertook during the war, particularly through organisations such as the Red Cross. What he does not discuss is the other actor involved in this painting, namely the artist, and the work that people like her and the cultural sector in general, contributed to the war effort. The voluntary labour of the arts community is another under-recognised facet of the labour history Scates recounts, and in the case of Violet Teague, it is also the story of the Victorian Artists' Society an urban organisation headquartered in Albert street, Melbourne. Violet Teague (1872-1951) trained in fine art in Brussels and England between 1889 and 1895 and in Melbourne from 1897 to 1899 and, from her studio at 89 Collins Street exhibited regularly until the outbreak of war. She was a noted portrait painter and was a successful exhibitor in national and international exhibitions; her The Boy with the Palette (1911) for example, won silver prize from the Old Salon in Paris when exhibited in 1920. An innovator in print making and one of the first Australian artists to experiment with the traditions of Japanese woodblock printing, Teague was a member of Victorian Artists Society (VAS) and the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria and exhibited with both groups. One of her outstanding skills however was as an event organiser and during the war she used this skill to create new forms of memorialisation and public experience.