AFTERSTORM: Gardens, Art and Conflict

An ARC Discovery Project. Presented by the Victorian College of the Arts and in partnership with Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.

DAY 1 – FRIDAY 25 OCTOBER 2019 (11-4pm)

11am – Welcome from RBG and Acknowledgement of Country (at the Herbarium)

11.15 am – Introduction Afterstorm (Storm Part 2): history of an event (background to the symposium and acknowledgements), Prof Charles Green

11.30am – Keynote 1: Professor Paul Gough, RMIT University ‘That dastardly plot’: the garden as weapon of war and peace (Introduced and discussion moderated by Charles Green)

12.30pm – Break for Lunch (self-catered)

1.30pm – Frontier Storm: White Settler’s Gardens/Black Peoples’ Lands

CHAIR: • Ian McLean

SPEAKERS: • Richard Frankland, VCA, Melbourne University • Judy Watson, Experimental Beds • Brian Martin, Monash University

2.30 pm – European Storms: When and Why were Gardens in Western Art and Europe’s Wars

CHAIR: • Charles Green

SPEAKERS: • Richard Frankland, VCA, Melbourne University • Jennifer Milam, Melbourne University (After the American Revolution: Transatlantic Gardens c1800) • Lisa Beaven, Deakin University (Weather, land and landscape: Landscape painting and the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century) • Janine Burke (Nature as War Zone: Healing and Resuscitation in Janet Laurence’s Gardens’)

4pm – Reception and Book Launch: The Flowers of War Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Domain House, Dallas Brooks Drive. DAY 2 – SATURDAY 26 OCTOBER 2019 (11-4pm)

11am – Welcome from RBG and Acknowledgement of Country and walk in the Gardens with RBGV Aboriginal Cultural Guide, Jakobi (meet at the Herbarium)

12pm – Keynote 2 Professor Chris McAuliffe, ANU. Sanctuary, battlefield, ark: What gardens mean in science-fiction (Introduced and discussion moderated by Jon Cattapan)

1pm – Break for Lunch (self-catered)

1.30pm – Postcolonial Storm: On the Ruins of Empire; Beyond the North Atlantic

CHAIR: • Charles Green

SPEAKERS: • Tessa Laird, VCA, Melbourne University (The Screaming Carrot: Attuning to Vegetal Voices in the Planthropocene) • Kit Messham-Muir, Curtin University (A Sweet Symphony of Absurdity: The Recurrent Garden in the Work of Mladen Miljanović Janine Burke (Nature as War Zone: Healing and Resuscitation in Janet Laurence’s Gardens’) • Micaela Sahhar (Reflections on Tom Nicholsen’s Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah): Towards a methodology of magnification)

2.30 pm – After the Storm: What happens when the tides recede, and the wind dies down? The Gardeners’ Nightmare, 2020

CHAIR: • Jon Cattapan

SPEAKERS: • Kate Daw, VCA, Melbourne University (Albertine and the Looping of Time) • Rebecca Mayo, ANU (Gardening through the storm: practicing care with plants) • Gary Anderson, Melbourne University (Gardens of war: Gardens of healing. The long march of Dioscoride’s De Materia Medica)

CLOSING REMARKS

4pm – Conference Close

SPEAKERS

JON CATTAPAN Professor Jon Cattapan is Director of the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. His research interests centre around how painting can picture the urban environment, globalised societies and contemporary conflict. He has a substantial research track record and has a substantial record of research supervisions with Visual art candidates

CHARLES GREEN Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Author of Peripheral Vision (Craftsman House, 1996) and The Third Hand (U Minnesota Press, 2001), he recently published a history of biennials in contemporary art, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), with Associate Professor Anthony Gardner (Oxford University), assisted by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

JANINE BURKE Dr Janine Burke is the author of twenty books including Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art and Writing (2009) and Nest: The Art of Birds (2012). Her current project is Sentience: the rites and rights of nature, a symposium and exhibition to take place in October 2020 at Victorian College of the Arts and Royal Botanic Gardens.

KIT MESSHAM MUIR Associate Professor Kit Messham-Muir is an art theorist at Curtin University in Perth. He is the author of Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and is currently lead investigator on ‘Art in Conflict’, a three- year ARC Linkage Project with the Australian War Memorial, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, UNSW and the University of Manchester.

CHRIS MCAULIFFE Dr McAuliffe taught art history and theory at the University of Melbourne (1988–2000) and Victoria College, Prahran (1988–89). In 2011–12, he was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University, based in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Chris McAuliffe is an art historian, writer and curator based in Melbourne and Victoria’s central goldfields region.

TESSA LAIRD Dr Tessa Laird is a lecturer in critical and theoretical studies in the School of Art of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. A noted New Zealand art critic, she is the founder of art magazines Monica Reviews Art and LOG Illustrated and the author of A Rainbow Reader.

SPEAKERS

JENNIFER MILAM Jennifer Milam is Head of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She was previously the ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Art History and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. Her ARC Future Fellowship considered the visual contexts of garden spaces in which ideas related to cosmopolitanism, national identity and imperialistic ambitions have been expressed and experienced.

LISA BEAVEN Lisa Beaven was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne from 2015−2017 in the ‘Change’ Program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion, working with Charles Zika. In 2018, she returned to Bundoora (Melbourne) campus as Lecturer in Art history. Her doctoral research involved reconstructing the collecting and art patronage of Cardinal Camillo Massimo (1620−1677) in seventeenth-century Rome (2001, The University of Melbourne).

JUDY WATSON Judy Watson graduated from the University of Southern Queensland in 1979, the University of Tasmania in 1982 and the Monash University in Gippsland in 1986, and currently lives and works in Brisbane. Her matrilineal family is from Waanyi country in Northwest Queensland and her oeuvre – which includes painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and video – is inspired by Aboriginal history and culture. It is often concerned with collective memory and uses archival documents to unveil institutionalised discrimination against Aboriginal people.

RICHARD FRANKLAND Richard Frankland is a writer/director and proud Gunditjmara Man who lives on country in south-west Victoria. Frankland was an Investigator for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody from 1987-91. In 2007 he completed his Master of Arts at RMIT University with a thesis entitled ‘The Art, Freedom and Responsibility of Voice’ Richard is a current Candidate for a Higher Doctorate Degree in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Melbourne

BRIAN MARTIN Dr Brian Martin is the faculty’s inaugural Associate Dean, Indigenous. Brian is a descendant of Muruwari, Bundjalung and Kamilaroi peoples. Brian is represented by William Mora Galleries. He has been a practising artist for twenty- seven years and has exhibited both nationally and internationally specifically in the media of painting and drawing. His research and practice focuses on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to “Country”. Brian was previously Professor and Head of Research at the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University. He is also Honorary Professor of Eminence at Centurion University of Technology and Management in Odisha, India.

SPEAKERS

MICAELA SAHHAR Dr Micaela Sahhar is an Australian-Palestinian researcher and lecturer as well as an activist and commentator on the politics of the Israel-Palestinian question. Trained in law, history and literature, she often works at the intersection of disciplines in her research practice. Micaela completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne on Israeli national narrative and Western media coverage in the 21st century. This work was particularly concerned with the elision of Palestinian narrative, and the possibilities of its recuperation. Current research interests include comparative settler colonialism, identity and indigeneity, and questions of resistance in settler-colonial societies.

KATE DAW Kate Daw is Head of the School of Art, Victorian College of the Artsand is a practising artist who explores authorship, narrative and the creative process in her work. She has been the recipient of many grants and awards including The Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and New Work grants from the Australia Council and Creative Victoria. Daw has been a member of the Visual Art and Craft Board of the Australia Council (2011-2013) and Board Member and Chair of Next Wave Festival (2003- 2006). She has undertaken residencies at the Asialink studio in India, the Glasgow School of Art, the Victorian Tapestry Workshop and IASKA and in 2010 she undertook the inaugural Basil Sellers Fellowship with Stewart Russell at Melbourne’s MCG. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia, University of Melbourne, Monash University and Artbank.

REBECCA MAYO Rebecca Mayo joined the School of Art & Design in 2017. She is a visual artist whose practice draws upon her background and training in printmaking. Recent exhibitions include 'Local Colour' at UNSW Galleries (curator Liz Williamson), 'Water + Wisdom: Australia India' at RMIT Gallery and 'Habitus' at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Her work is held in state and national collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and Artbank.

GARY ANDERSON Gary P. Anderson, PhD Gary Anderson is a pharmacologist and immunologist based in the Medical Faculty at the University of Melbourne, Australia, one of the world’s leading research-intensive Universities and Medical Schools (www.unimelb.edu.au) where he is a tenured Professor and Director of the Centre for Lung Health Research.

PAUL GOUGH Paul Gough is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice President, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University. A painter, broadcaster and writer, Paul Gough has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, most recently in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and is represented in several permanent art collections – including Imperial War Museum, London; Canadian War Museum, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. SPEAKERS

IAN MCLEAN Professor Ian McLean is the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. Professor McLean was previously the Senior Research Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong and adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia. He has published extensively on the subject of Australian art, particularly Indigenous and contemporary art.

CHRISTOPHER JAKOBI (JAKOBI) Jakobi, a Gunditjmara and Tjapwurrung man is an Aboriginal Programs Facilitator at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and volunteers for Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network. He is passionate about communicating the severe impacts of climate change on First Nations cultures and the need for true climate justice, the revival of traditional plant-based knowledge and indigenous plants of the South-east. In his role at the Gardens, he is developing new educational and tourism programs.