Media Release

State Library Announces $185,000 in Fellowships

The State Library of Victoria today announced the recipients of a prestigious suite of Fellowships which will assist Australian writers, academics, artists, composers and researchers in their creative and intellectual endeavours.

This is the sixth year for the State Library Creative Fellowships and the fifth year for the Redmond Barry Fellowship, which is offered in association with the University of Melbourne. This year three additional fellowships are offered in partnership with philanthropic groups – the La Trobe Society Fellowship, the Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE Fellowship (supported by the Besen Family Foundation) and the Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship.

Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, CEO and State Librarian, says the Creative Fellowships represent the State Library of Victoria’s strong commitment to original scholarship, writing and creative endeavour and will help position the Library as a centre for ideas and public debate.

‘The chosen Fellows will be working in the Library using our unique collections, sharing their ideas with the public, and producing publications or works based on these collections.’
 
‘We are extremely grateful for the support of the State Library of Victoria Foundation, the University of Melbourne, the La Trobe Society, the Besen Family Foundation and the Georges Mora Foundation. Their combined support makes the Creative Fellowships possible,’ Ms Schwirtlich said.

The following Fellowships were announced during the presentation at the State Library of Victoria:

•  State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships ($100,000)
• The La Trobe Society Fellowship ($25,000)
• The inaugural Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE Fellowship ($20,000)
• The Redmond Barry Fellowship ($20,000)
• The Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship ($20,000)

Fellowships

State Library Creative Fellowships $100,000

The State Library Creative Fellowships are funded through a grant of $100,000 from the State Library Foundation. They are awarded by the Library Board of Victoria on the recommendation of the Board’s Writers and Readers Committee to applicants whose projects make use of the Library collections, and demonstrate innovation in product. Fellowships can be awarded for 12 months with a $50,000 stipend, 6 months with a $25,000 stipend and 3 months with a $12,500 stipend. Honorary fellowships may also be awarded. In addition to the stipend Fellows are given the use of a private study within the Library and additional access to the collections.

The La Trobe Society Fellowship $25,000

The La Trobe Society Fellowship, now in its second year, is for a period of six months with a stipend of $25,000. Funding for the Fellowship is provided by the La Trobe Society. It is awarded for historical research in the period of La Trobe’s tenure as Superintendent of the Port Phillip District and later Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of Victoria (1839 – 1853).  Like the State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships, the recipient has the use of a study and additional access to the collections. Selection of the successful applicant is made by recommendation of the Writers and Readers Committee to the Library Board of Victoria.

The State Library Creative Fellowships and the La Trobe Society Fellowship are appointed by the Library Board of Victoria on the recommendation of the Writers and Readers Committee.

The Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship $20,000

Now in its second year, this fellowship aims to provide artists with the opportunity to study and experiment in order to generate new thinking to be developed through their art.
 
With the support of the State Library of Victoria and Alliance Francaise, the Fellowship aims to provide maximum flexibility and autonomy for the chosen Fellow, particularly in their use of resources of the Library and studio facilities in Paris, to develop, interpret and present their challenging idea through art.

In addition to opportunities for mentoring, debate and discussion, this Fellowship attracts a stipend of up to $20,000.

During the Fellowship year the Embassy of France and the Alliance Française offer the chosen Fellow assistance in applying for residency at the Cite International des Arts, Paris.

The Fellowship is open to any Australian citizen or resident who has a recognised and reputable body of work in the field of contemporary art. There is no age limit.

Named in honour of Georges Mora – an inspirational figure in Australia’s art world – the Foundation aims to provide a platform for debate and discussion of the ideas behind art, and to support Australian contemporary artists in their development of new ideas.

The Redmond Barry Fellowship

This Fellowship provides a stipend of $20,000 for tenure of between 3 and 6 months and is awarded jointly with the University of Melbourne.  This Fellowship commemorates Sir Redmond Barry, President of the Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library (later State Library of Victoria) and Chancellor of the University, positions he held from the inception of both institutions until his death in 1880.

The Redmond Barry Fellow will make use of the collections of both institutions, and is provided with a study at the State Library.  The Fellowship is funded by the University and selection is made by a joint committee of the Library and the University.

Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE Fellowship

This is inaugural year of the Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE Fellowship. It was created to celebrate the work of Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE following the very generous donation of his archive to the State Library of Victoria.

The Fellowship will be offered to an Australian Resident in each of the next three years and is for six months duration. It includes a stipend of $20,000 and the use of a study off the La Trobe Reading Room.

The Fellowship is awarded for the scholarly and creative use of the Library's collections in the pursuit of the history of Australian art, and the production of publications based on them. The Fellowship is supported by a grant from the Besen Family Foundation.

Summary of projects

State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowships 2008-09

Six Month Fellowship

Ms Angela Betzien, Ms Leticia Caceres

One Night the Dead: A new concept for a location based game and live performance event for young people by artistic team Real TV in association with independent game designer Deb Polson.

The narrative is set in Melbourne at an indeterminate time in the future. A global economic meltdown sparked by the onset of peak oil crisis and global warming has plunged the country into a totalitarian state. Without oil supplies, technology has regresses one hundred and fifty years and the inhabitants of this world have no idea of how to survive without the Old Knowledge.

The people desperately need information from the past however schools and libraries have been closed and learning has been banned. Reports are surfacing that books, records, maps, objects, places and even children are disappearing, literally vanishing into thin air.

In this dark world, rumours of a secret organisation have emerged, a group fighting against the systematic liquidation of memory. It is believed the members of this group are identified only by a thin red string tied to their left thumb. At night they risk their lives to hunt down and memorise precious records of the past.

At the commencement of each game each player receives an sms “ R U 1 of Them or Us? ”.

One Night the Dead is a socio/science fiction fantasia, a grim Orwellian forecast of the future. A future that must be saved by the players of the game by plunging into the past, before history itself has disappeared.

Three Month Fellowships

Dr Meredith Fletcher
Biography of Jean Galbraith: Gardener, botanist, conservationist and writer.

Jean Galbraith (1906 -1999) lived a passionate life among plants. For over 60 years she influenced and inspired generations of Victorians and Australians through her exquisitely written gardening articles and books, her comprehensive field guides to Victorian and Australian wildflowers, her nature writing and the scripts she prepared for school radio broadcasts.

Living modestly in her home at Tyers for nearly ninety years, she was constantly inspired by the landscapes that surrounded her. She overcame limited educational opportunities and distance from specialist libraries to study and write about plants. Her achievements were significant. Jean Galbraith developed new approaches to garden writing that drew on autobiography, nature writing and place. She helped change Australians’ attitudes to native plants: to see them in new ways, to value them in the bush and to realise their potential in home gardens.

Through telling the story of a remarkable Gippsland woman and her life, this biography explores important themes in Australia’s twentieth century history: environmental history, garden history, settler Australian relationships with the land, engagement with modernity and evolving conservation awareness.

Ms Margaret Geddes
Fighting for Peace: Victorian women peace activists during World War One (book manuscript)

This project seeks to explore the part played by religion, politics, class and personality in the Women’s peace and anti-conscription organisations founded in Victoria during World War One.

At the outbreak of war, Australia’s involvement was enormously popular with the general public. The relatively small group of highly motivated women who opposed it needed strong personalities and fought fierce campaigns.

Renowned feminist campaigner Vida Goldstein formed the Women’s Peace Army (an offshoot of the Women’s Political Association) in 1915. The Sisterhood for International Peace (later the International League for Peace and Freedom) was also formed in Melbourne in 1915, with pacifist Eleanor Moore as a founding member.

Other women involved in the peace movement included Adela Pankhurst (daughter of British women’s suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst) who formed the Victorian Socialist Party’s Women’s Peace League in 1917, and Labor activists Muriel Heagney and May Brodney of the Labor Women’s Anti-Conscription Campaign. Most of these women knew each other, they worked together, some were members of more than one organisation. Their organisations while not achieving world peace, provided a crucial learning ground for future women activists like Doris Blackburn, who became Victoria’s first female Federal Member of Parliament in 1946.

Mr Kevin Morgan
A book manuscript on the career of Frederick John Piggott, CIB Superintendent 1913 – 1928

This project is a two-fold biographical study, being of (1) legendary CIB Superintendent Frederick John Piggott (1874-1962), focusing on the most brilliant phase of his career, and (2) of Melbourne as a ‘dark city’, at once recognisable but strangely unfamiliar, refracted through the prism of its criminality during a unique period in Victoria’s policing history.

It was a time when police applicants could be accepted with little more than a grade four education, their duties seen as more reliant on physical strength than educational attributes. In this era of notoriously under-educated and under-resourced policing, Detective (later Superintendent) Piggott consistently exercised an intelligence and forensic attention to detail unparalleled in the Victoria Police of the time. A detective no less determined than Alva Burvett or John Christie, Piggott’s gifts were superior. His were the grimmest, most difficult cases to solve and by dint of ingenuity, acuity and a forensic insight far ahead of his time he routinely succeeded, often against overwhelming odds.

From the eve of the Great War to the eve of the Great Depression, this account will span the darkest days of the Empire, the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, gun battles between Melbourne’s underworld figures, and the rise and fall of “Squizzy” Taylor (Piggott was his nemesis), the Victoria Police Strike and the roaring twenties.

Dr Andrián Pertout
Twenty four solo piano miniatures incorporating quotations from early Australian composers (musical composition)

This composition project is dedicated to researching melodic material from the State Library of Victoria’s Australian Manuscripts collection in order to compose a set of twenty-four piano miniatures, utilising this material in various ways: quotation, theme and variations, canonic manipulation, reharmonisation, etc. It is intended that a significant number of composers be represented within the various compositions, and that the project ultimately also serve to uncover ‘undiscovered’ Australian gems. With regard to further pitch material, one of the possible paths for exploration is the post-tonal harmonic possibilities within the twelve-note chromatic scale as presented by Elliot Carter in his monumental publication of the Harmony Book. It is further envisaged that the piano music of the Argentinian composer Alberto Evaristo Ginastera (1916-83) also serve as an inspirational force. A multi-movement structure with a total length of at least twenty minutes is planned, with the aesthetic ambitions for the project firmly focused on showcasing the incredible talents of Michael Kieran Harvey, yet ultimately aspiring for a bold display of highly emotive music.

Dr Tom Petsinis
A novel framed in present day Fitzroy focusing on a childhood in the 1960s

The project will utilise the resources and collections of the Library to produce the first draft of a novel set in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, at a time when it was still working-class, with a large number of European immigrants. The novel will be narrated by Nick Mangos, a successful barrister and QC aspirant who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Having devoted his life to climbing the legal ladder, Nick suddenly finds himself alone, afraid, succumbing to thoughts of suicide. One morning in early Autumn he finds himself in Fitzroy, drawn to what was the family home. He sets of on a journey of memory and rediscovery.

Ms Fiona Tuomy, Ms Liz Burke
Australian Cultural Identity: An exploration of the development of Australian arts and cultural identity in the 1970s using the novel Monkey Grip  as a case study (documentary script)

The project is a documentary about a writer, her first novel and an independent publisher.   In 1976 a then unknown writer, Helen Garner, wrote Monkey Grip  in the Domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria. Her book is published by McPhee Gribble, is a best seller, wins awards and is made into a feature film starring Noni Hazelhurst and Colin Friels. The novel becomes the voice of a generation. It is about a particular time and place when Australia was searching for its own artistic and cultural identity.

In Monkey Grip , Helen Garner documented the 1970’s Melbourne inner city world she lived in – a sub culture of artists, musicians, actors, writers and filmmakers living in communal households searching for creative expression, sexual and individual freedoms, alternative roles for women and ways of bringing up children. The 1970s in Australia forged many of the foundations of Australian cultural identity as we know it today. As a major Australian writer’s first novel published by a now defunct but influential publisher and made into an internationally praised feature film, Monkey Grip is a unique case study to historically explore Australian arts and cultural identity.

Honorary Fellowships

Morris Gleitzman
Three children’s novels

1.  A children’s novel about the role played by camels and cameleers in the opening up of Australia’s inland in the nineteenth-century, and the transport of vital supplies to Victoria’s rural communities. The story is about a boy and his best friend, a camel, both rejected by the community that depends on them. There will also be a contemporary strand to the narrative.

2 . A children’s novel about the dwindling community of Holocaust survivors in Melbourne. The granddaughter of one of them finds unexpected solutions for her own problems in her family’s history.

3.  A children’s novel about three generations of a fundamentalist Christian family living in rural Victoria. An 11 year old girl must choose between her loving but insular family and a very important friendship in the big world beyond the front gate. Discoveries she makes about her parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods makes her choice even more difficult.

Dr Jessie Mitchell
In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire 1825 – 1855 (book manuscript and articles)

This project examines how Australia’s first missionaries and Aboriginal Protectors and their broader religious networks tried to understand and shape Indigenous people as subjects of empire and of ‘civilising’ regimes. The project aims to make a number of original contributions to Australian historiography – notably by providing a detailed picture of life on early mission stations, by situating these local histories within a much broader historical context, and by linking colonial Aboriginal histories with histories of the rise of Australian self-government (a connection which has received surprisingly little historical attention). This work will be distinguished by its attention to relationships and conversations between philanthropists and Aboriginal people, its situation of Australian missionaries within the global context of Evangelical faith and British imperialism, and its detailed use of local and international sources. It emphasises the need to explore further the conflicted meanings of rights and charity within histories of Indigenous governance, the staunchly pro-imperial and pro-governance attitudes of Australia’s first white humanitarians, and the troubled place of Indigenous Australia within global missionary discourse.

Ms Trudy White
Catalogue of the World – an illustrated book for children

To develop a manuscript, including text, illustrations and design roughs for a picture book proposed tome by publisher Paolo Canton of Topipittori books in Milan, during a meeting in January 2007.

To record the book’s development for a possible exhibition and series of public workshops at the Library.

The book is an illustrated ‘Catalogue of the World’ for children learning the importance of things around them. The book will be divided into topics with stories, and illustrated with full colour. It will be published in English and Italian editions.

This project will utilise the Library’s Children’s Literature collection to develop the manuscript, drawings and design.

Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE Fellowship

Mr Rodney James
Letters to a Critic: Alan McCulloch’s world of Art.
A manuscript for an illustrated book of edited letters to and from Alan McCulloch AO

This project will research the letters, writings and talks, art and life of Alan McCulloch and his contribution to Australian art and scholarship over a 60 year period. The project will be based largely on the McCulloch papers and other associated books, manuscripts and pictures held by the State Library of Victoria.

The research will form the basis of a future publication which will feature primary sources such as letters, autobiography, illustrations and reproductions of works of art combined with the first critical assessment of Alan McCulloch’s long career as a newspaper critic, museum director, illustrator and mentor to many of Australia’s best known artists, writers and personalities.

The La Trobe Society Fellowship

Dr Wayne Caldow
Perceptions of Place: The European Experience of Gippsland 1839 to 1844.
A book manuscript

In the late 1830s and early 1840s, a number of unofficial expeditions set out to cross the unexplored vastness of Gippsland. These included the journeys of Angus McMillan, James Macarthur and Captain John Orr. These expeditions were largely for commercial purposes to discover new grazing lands and new ports.

Some members of these expeditions recorded their varying impressions of the landscape and their experiences on first contact with the local indigenous people. Their accounts also record impressions of flora and fauna, climate, commercial prospects and the hardships of their journeys.

Typically historical accounts of Gippsland have concentrated on the explorers rather than their perceptions and observations. The aim of this project is to draw on first hand accounts of exploration and early settlement in Gippsland to illustrate how the first Europeans perceived this new environment. The emphasis will be on primary source material, particularly letters and journals. The period 1839 to 1844 will cover the transition from exploration to settlement and illustrate changing attitudes to the land, its exploitation and its indigenous people.

The second part of the project will examine the role of the Colonial government through the journeys of exploration of Superintendent Charles La Trobe and Charles Tyers and the latter’s attempts to impose law and order in the province.

The Redmond Barry Fellowship

Dr Danielle Clode
A Future in Flames: Wildfire in a changing climate
(Book manuscript)

Fire is a quintessential part of Australian landscape, ecology, history and culture. Fire has shaped our plants and animals – it has modified our rural landscapes and threatened most of our major cities. Australians, perhaps more than any other nationality, have learnt to live with the experience of fire as both an ever-present threat and a natural part of our ecosystem. With climate-change increasing both the severity and intensity of wildfires in Australia and overseas, A Future in Flames will review what we have learnt from our major fires and what we can expect from the future. Drawing on recent major fires across Australia, A Future in Flames  will illustrate and explore the major issues involved in fire ecology, behaviour, control, climate and psychology. A Future in Flames  will provide a valuable resource for all Australians whose future, directly or indirectly, is affected by climate-change induced increases in fire.

The Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship

Ms Cyrus Tang
Nursery

Cyrus Tang will use fire and water as agents of loss – in this instance the loss of childhood memory. Through the combination of displacement and the destruction of mementos and other material evidence of the past, Tang shows anxiety as a characteristic of immigrants unable to revisit their childhood except in the imagination. Miniaturising the place (the nursery) and the person (herself as a child), Tang will re-enact her desire to regain the ground of her past via her vision of these events. She will present this as a multi-media performance that will communicate a strong curiosity tied to a clear sense of the desire to restore the self through memory.

Media inquiries

Matthew van Hasselt
Ph: 03 8664 7263
Email: mvanhasselt@slv.vic.gov.au