Australian Literature- Art Gallery Visit 2019

What a great turn-out for this visit! Thank you all for your keen participation. We covered a wealth of material in the allocated hour from early 19th Century through to contemporary and Indigenous Art. Hoping that this will provide lots of useful insight for your blogs and your quiz! I have attached the audio talk tour below, just in case you want to listen to the lecture from your phone as you make your own tour around the gallery. For me it is always great to see these paintings again and again, but a special favourite of mine is this one by Arthur Streeton “Fire’s On: Lapstone Tunnel”. It gives such a graphic expression to the core Australian theme about the majestic power of the landscape, but also the destructive force that we humans can apply to it. It is like a painting that shows the balance point of two huge forces: human and natural. This is a theme that recurs so often in Australian literature and will be one of the most important themes in David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter.

Bog Topics this week (these are for week 4) are easy:

Here are two:

1/ CREATIVE Take any single Australian painting that you saw at the gallery yesterday (it must be one that you saw) and write a description either in poetry or prose. Pay close attention to detail in your description. What you are in fact doing in this exercise is a piece of Ekphrastic Writing. Check up the meaning of this word!

2/ CRITICAL Write a brief (illustrated) summary of what you learnt in the gallery yesterday and/or focussing on the one or two works that you found most challenging or interesting.

3/ CRITICAL Write a brief account of how you think art and literature interact in a person’s experience?

4/ CREATIVE Write and imaginary conversation you are having either with one of the artists that you looked at yesterday or one of the characters that you saw in one of the paintings (eg the man who had received the letter by horse; or Ned Kell; or Margaret Preston)

Here is the Audio Tour- in 2 versions!: