Friday 4th November, 1:30pm-3:30pm
University of Wollongong – 3.122
Ellie Crookes
Havelock North: a Medieval Town in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Respondent: Emma Darragh
Our village is not ordinary,
In fact it’s quite unique
Another village just like ours
We’d journey far to seek.
It likes to take up new ideas,
(Sometimes they’re very old)
To try its hand at this and that
And to feel a little bold
[…]
We study drama, arts and crafts,
And philanthropic schemes
Discuss the latest theories
On scientific themes.
Societies would link their names
And awe-inspiring views
Find votaries of every age
Who learnedly enthuse.
Some seek descent from Jewish tribes
While others claim to be
Re-incarnated folk, who died
Some thousand years BC’
[…]
In short, we try to find a way
To ease man’s troubled lot
Our lives are all quite wrong they say,
So after all – why not?’
(Quoted partly in Von Dadelszen 1983, 39; and Flashoff 2000, 48; and in full by Fowler in a 2009 conference paper)
This poem titled ‘Our Village’ by Havelock North resident Eleanor Adkins was written in the 1940s and yet it weaves together ideological strands – utopianism, the Occult/Spiritual Revival, the Arts and Crafts Movement – which existed much earlier in the village of Havelock North, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century. Havelock North seemingly lived in a kind of temporal stasis in the early twentieth century which extended far beyond a seeming reluctance to move past the habits and fashions of the Victorian age; indeed, in several peculiar ways the residents of this small village in the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand had their sights set much further back in time, to the Middle Ages. This presentation will explore the interwoven elements of medievalist activity that pervaded this town at the beginning of the twentieth century, complicating the typical practice of medievalismist scholarship by examining a temporal/spatial exemplar – a small town in the early twentieth century – instead of a more concrete artifact of medieval reception. I will survey the various and often-problematic ideological impulses that informed medievalist activity in Havelock North; examining the complex and multifarious issues that arise from the establishment of a ‘medieval’ town, a ‘little Medieval Britain’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Ellie Crookes completed her PhD in nineteenth-century Medievalism at Macquarie University in 2018. She is a lecturer at the University of Wollongong in the discipline of English and Creative Writing, teaching courses on the literature of the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century. Her research focus is late-medieval Britain, Ireland, and France; examining how texts, legends, and characters of the medieval past were adopted, adapted, and manipulated to suit the needs of artists, writers, and activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research centres primarily the issues of gender, empire, and the occult. Currently under contract is her monograph Joans of Arc Worldwide: Embodying Global Medievalism (ARC Humanities), and the co-edited collection Medievalism and Reception (Boydell and Brewer).
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Jen Saunders
Counter-map, archive, interview, lyric essay
Respondent: Cath McKinnon
I will be reading an excerpt from Spider Bird Tree Stone, the creative component of my PhD thesis. I will also briefly show examples of how counter-mapping—using archival research, interview and lyric essay—can counter settler colonial narratives of place.
Jen Saunders is a researcher using creative writing, visual art and sound to examine local communities, histories and landscapes. Her PhD project – ‘But wait there’s more: counter-mapping place with the lyric essay’ is under examination. She has just been named the inaugural Liz Hilton Memorial Fellowand will be undertaking research in the UOW Archives with the project ‘Cross-reading South Coast histories’.
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Teo Treloar
And Now, The Plague
Respondent: Luke Johnson
The drawings and Illustrations for And Now, The Plague, the new body of work created between 2021 – 2022, use Albert Camus novel “The Plague” as its starting point. The graphite pencil drawings I have made investigate the themes of isolation, existential threat, and the absurd realities of life during a pandemic. Further, this body of work focuses on how the act of drawing can be a primary means of creative expression during times of crisis.
I created the drawings and illustrations with two distinct approaches. The first is related to my collecting different editions of The Plague from online second-hand book sellers worldwide. My original goal was to get one copy from as many individual countries that were experiencing dire outcomes from the pandemic; in my mind, this was a small way to connect to the shared global experience through the physical object of a book that tells a story of pestilence. I intended to initially collect the books only. However, it eventually occurred to me that drawing them was an effective and interesting way to create work around the sociocultural themes that have arisen over the last few years.
The second approach was to try and illustrate the absurdity of the social and cultural locked-in syndrome that many experienced during this time. Communication, work, and cultural activity was mass transported into a mediated context. There is much to be thankful for regarding this; technologies such as zoom enable communication with colleagues and friends and allow us to work, and the internet provides ways to engage with cultural events. However, there is a dark side to this; personally, it heightened my state of awareness of our ever-increasing velocity toward a dystopian future. Furthermore, my sense of isolation and anxiety was exacerbated by my interactions with technology, news media, and the endless flow of information being generated by the pandemic.
And Now, The Plague is currently showing in a solo exhibition at Grafton Regional Gallery from September 17 – November 13. It then moves to Olsen Gallery in Sydney for my debut exhibition with the Gallery and will Run from November 30 – November 17.
Teo Treloar is a visual artist whose work focuses on drawing and illustration. He is interested in how drawing can be used to represent the inner worlds of his psychology. Further, he is interested in how existential aesthetics, usually associated with literature, can materialise visually in his illustration practice. Teo is a lecturer in Visual Art at The University of Wollongong and lives and Works in Dharawal Country in NSW, Australia.
Teo Treloar received a Masters Degree from Sydney College of the Arts in 2006. He has taught Visual Art and drawing for the last fifteen years, and currently works at Wollongong University as a Lecturer in Visual Arts.