Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2-3, 2015

In the days of silent movies, J. E. Williamson became famous for filming a 1916 adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). It was the first underwater film ever shot – using a submarine contraption he was able to photograph under the sea and stay dry. Almost immediately, his name, films and publications received attention in the Australian press. ‘Why not bring Williamson to Australia to explore the Great Barrier Reef underwater?’ asked one newspaper report. There were reports at the Great Barrier Reef of a giant sea serpent. But Williamson was already on his way to Scotland to hunt the Loch Ness Monster. Williamson did not visit Australia, but through a strange twist of fate one of his underwater photographs taken at the Bahamas became retitled ‘The Treasure Bridge of the Australian Great Barrier Reef’ by André Breton, leader of the Surrealists. This story unfolds between the years 1914 and 1940 and is the subject of the following article. The discussion emphasizes three points: the fluid world of image culture that emerged with new printing technologies and transport systems in the early twentieth century; the way this modern era valorized the film-maker who was also explorer and showman and in the process confused the boundaries between science and fiction; and how fear and loathing engendered by the sea had dire consequences for marine animals.

Bernie Su and Hank Green’s online adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ([1813] 1995), the Lizzie Bennett Diaries (2012, LBD hereafter), offers a new authorship device and a potential way to negotiate the current tensions engendered by struggles over cultural production and reproduction on the Internet. A great part of LBD’s success, confirmed by the many awards the series received, was its complication of authorial power and textual ownership. Fans occupied the same space as characters to become characters themselves; producers became viewers who carefully followed fan responses and incorporated them into the storyline; fans’ blogs and texts developed character arcs, deepened understanding of characters themselves and moved the narrative as a whole; and producers entered fan spaces to discuss narrative developments. However, while LBD does offer some possibilities going forward, it also illuminates the tensions between existing and emergent production paradigms created by an increase in Internet participatory culture that remain to be overcome.

The Queensland Museum geosciences collection is vast, with over five million individual items, intriguing, and of great interest to a wide variety of audiences in Australia and overseas. Recent developments in imaging technologies, the rapid evolution of the Internet, a corresponding increase in ‘digital natives’ and expectations of greater access to virtual collections are impetuses for museums, worldwide, to digitize their collections. This trend may be considered in a democratic context, as museums strive to provide online access. Their goal, in contrast to the two-­dimensional (2D) digitization of collections in Libraries/Art galleries/Herbaria, is to provide access to three-dimensional (3D) digital objects. The Queensland Museum, like most museums, only has a small portion of the collection on display and the most scientifically significant specimens are kept in a secure, environmentally controlled type store. This is one of the essential paradoxes of museums – that in order to protect and conserve natural history collections, physical access has to be restricted. However, we argue that in response to these emerging imaging technologies the traditional, scientific research culture of the museum is evolving and adapting novel research methodologies to enhance access to the most significant specimens held by the museum. As a result, the following artist–scientist–technology ­collaboration highlights our use of digital imaging techniques; specifically photogrammetry and medical computed tomography (CT) scanning to create ‘virtual’ type specimens. Two digitized type specimens are presented here as exemplars. We consider these as exciting first steps to democratizing the Museum’s geosciences collection, as an accessible on-line resource for a diversity of end users.

In the post-war period, Australian companies adopted sophisticated American marketing methods to promote a range of products, including foods, to Australian housewives. Modelled on America’s Pillsbury Bake-Off, The Dairy White Wings Bake-Off was an extraordinary marketing event for its many sponsors. In its early years Australia’s Bake-Off claimed to be a significant event for any housewife. Throughout its life, however, the competition became less about housewives and their baking skills and more about marketing the goods and services offered by its various sponsors to the working woman, the perfect hostess and men who increasingly found a place in the domestic kitchen. The Australian Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, both popular women’s magazines then and now, covered the event and featured many advertisements by its sponsors. This article shows, how by using information from these magazine articles and advertisements (material culture) for the Bake-Off, it is possible to investigate a changing domestic culture in Australia through the way in which the Bake-Off, over its life, changed its rules and categories to appeal less to the housewife and increasingly to working women as well as men.

As a primary site for the transmission and reception of popular visual culture, the cinema theatre occupied a very particular position for much of the twentieth century. Today these buildings maintain a strong hold on the public imagination, existing as models of both collective spectatorship and individual subjectivity that have been largely supplanted by a range of technological and social forces. This article investigates the resonances of these lost sites of spectatorship through a body of films held by the National Film and Sound Archive that document the destruction of Sydney’s cinemas from the 1960s to the 1980s. Drawing on my own recent work with this footage, the article explores the archival function of the moving image. Central to this discussion is the recognition that these filmic documents function not only as records of physical and architectural loss but also point towards a more profound sense of loss tied to the passage of a phase of spectacular consumption and ­individual subjectivity.

This article explores the legacy of the Sirens in contemporary visual culture, considering the persistent theme of women who, like these mythical beings, would bewitch and then devour men. It considers the significant and highly visible problem of representations of femininity, focusing on how the connection between women and cannibalism reflects the common trope of the danger inherent within the female body. The various, and often interwoven, responses of allure, fear and revulsion provoked by such a display of female power emerge in the works that will be closely focused on here: John Longstaff’s painting The Sirens (1891), the film Teeth (2007) by Lichtenstein, the Queens Of The Stone Age music video Sick, Sick, Sick (2007), and the characters Poison Ivy from DC comics (1966–) and Mileena from the video game franchise Mortal Kombat (1993–). Though other examples will be discussed, these texts are noteworthy not simply for the images that they offer but, perhaps more so, for their place within popular culture. Unlike the arguably limited reach of fine art, these texts are widely engaged with and so disseminate these ideas about women to a broad audience. The dangers inherent within the female body manifest in these media in numerous ways, envisioned variously – and often simultaneously – as abject, erotic, maternal, monstrous, natural and, ultimately, unknowable.

The James Bond film franchise has attracted much criticism for its depiction of women. The casting of Judi Dench as M, however, signalled the series’ potential to interrogate its own sexism. This article argues that Casino Royale (2006) by Campbell – the fifth film starring Dench as M and the first starring Daniel Craig as Bond – effects the most significant revision of gender roles in the franchise to date. Taking us back to the beginning of his career, Casino Royale reconfigures Bond as fallible, vulnerable and psychologically unstable, a man struggling to secure his identity as 007. Playing a much more significant role than she did in the Pierce Brosnan films, M criticizes Bond’s weaknesses and mistakes, but she also contributes in important ways to shaping his identity-in-process in her complex role as boss/mentor/mother. Nevertheless, in Quantum of Solace by Forster (2008) and Skyfall by Mendes (2012), M’s power over Bond is contained within a familiar ideology of motherhood, which subordinates her to the active male agent. Furthermore, this article contends that in Skyfall the series reverts to its tradition of undermining, containing and erasing powerful women by killing off the female usurper and restoring MI6 to a male-dominated space.

Conjoining body & object: Review of A Fine Possession: Jewellery & Identity Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Formerly Powerhouse Musuem), 23 September 2014–20 September 2015

Koen Wastijn, Johan Deschuymer and Andreas Johnen at Loods 12, Wetteren, Belgium, December 2014–January 2015

‘Bandiera Nera’, by John Di Stefano, SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts, THE UNIVERSITY of Sydney, 23 January–21 February 2015

Review of The Twilight Girls, THE DEAD SEA, ‘Plato’s Cave at EIDIA House’, New York, 2014

‘Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion’, Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 12 November 2014–1 February 2015