Joel Elenberg’s depiction of his wife Anna Schwartz set an auction record for a sculpture in Australia, while Arthur Streeton’s cigar box lid had plenty of admirers.
Background This report offers a review of recent significant acquisitions by the Library and of collecting activities. It does not describe the large volume of acquisitions of both Australian and overseas materials that are routinely acquired through deposit, purchase or donation.
This week Dr Caroline Wallace and I present a study of two artists working in Morocco in the early twentieth century; the British Royal Academy painter John Lavery and the Australian modernist Hilda Rix Nicholas. They examine how these artists used orientalist conventions to represent a European point of view of life in Morocco. In this unit we consider how colonialism, orientalism and gender relate to each other, impacting upon academic and modernist art in a variety of ways that are not immediately apparent. We discuss how orientalist art is gendered, investigating why Rix Nicholas’ practice has been described as counter-orientalist.
CBRLife = 堪 生 活 is now being received through legal deposit. Published by a group of young Chinese Australians, it is a ‘magazine for Chinese Australians living in Canberra, recording their lives and memories with connection of this City .
While many multicultural publishers are pleased to deposit their works with the Library, others can be less responsive to the Library’s standard ‘official’ approach. There was a good example recently with the acquisition of three volumes of
Aodaliya hua ren nian jian = Yearbook of Chinese in Australia, which we believe to be the first Chinese language yearbooks published in Australia. The acquisition was achieved indirectly, as the publisher did not respond to direct approaches requesting deposit. One of the Library’s volunteers made contact with the editor via his personal network, at which point the volumes were deposited. In these situations, the ‘community-based’ collecting approach is liable to be more successful, and