Connecting you with Australian culture online
Centred around poet Max Harris, the movement took their name from an art and literary magazine first published by Harris in 1940. The Angry Penguins, to quote Max Harris, expressed 'a noisy and aggressive revolutionary modernism' and represented the new l...
Barbara Tucker, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, Hurstbridge, c. The Angry Penguin painters are considered to be the major figures of a modernist movement in Australian art, based in Melbourne, which has determined and shaped Australian conte...
Image courtesy of the National Australia Day Council. On Australia Day - 26 January - each year, the Prime Minister of Australia announces the Australian of the Year, Young Australian of the Year, Senior Australian of the Year, and Local Heroes Awards. T...
Brett Whiteley is one of Australia's most revered artists. He won many prizes and awards and his work hangs in numerous galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New Yor...
The bush has an iconic status in Australian life and features strongly in any debate about national identity, especially as expressed in Australian literature, painting, popular music, films and foods. The bush was revered as a source of national ideals b...
Australian children's literature rests on the enthusiasm and talents of many individuals, including a great many more Australian writers, illustrators and books than can be listed in this article. The earliest books published for children were mostly ins...
Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) was a leading Sydney painter in the Australian modernist movement, and her painting The Sock Knitter (1915) is generally regarded as Australia's first modernist work. Grace Cossington Smith, The Bridge in-Curve, c.1930, ...
Today, the term refers to a number of artists, including Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who painted scenes 'en plein air' (in the open air) of Australia, particularly in Melbourne and its surrounds. Over the years they were joined b...
Russell Drysdale, Picture of Donald Friend, 1948. Hill End, a gold-rush town, 85km north of Bathurst in central New South Wales (NSW) is a sacred site in both NSW and also Australian art history. These artists include: John Olsen, Margaret Olley, Jeffre...
He has brought to the Internet, Jacket, a website dedicated to Australian literary history, reviews, articles and interviews and everything to do with poetry. Extensive content relating to the Ern Malley affair appears in Jacket 1, including some of Mall...
From the Australian Magazine's debut in 1821, Australia's magazine industry developed rapidly in the late nineteenth century through popular titles such as the Bulletin and Melbourne Punch. Alongside these more mainstream publications, a series of small,...
Australian novels are an impressive collection of written works, and represent a dynamic body of excellent writers, some with significant international awards to their credit. The Australian poet Alec Hope said that, 'The Bunyip of Australian literature ...
Australian language, letters and literature in Australia has been influenced by Aboriginal storytelling, convict tales and the desire by colonists to relate their experiences in a new country. Similarly, the bush ballads of Henry Lawson and Andrew 'Banjo...
Margaret Preston was an Australian painter and printmaker who was a leading example of early Australian modernism. Her essays and articles were published in Australian journals including Art in Australia , Undergrowth, Jindyworobak Review and Australia N...
John Glover (1767-1849), Australian landscape with cattle: the artist's property Patterdale , c. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia: an2253188. The Heidelberg School was the first significant art movement in Australia. ...
Modern Australian poetry seeks to tell Australian stories and truths with a poetic significance so that 'they sear into the soul and can never be untold' (Dorothy Porter). The Jindyworobaks encouraged Australian writers to express themselves in language ...
Brian Bird, Lincoln Coffee Lounge & Cafe, Rowe Street, Sydney, 1948-1951. There were many contradictions inside the Push: it was a movement born from forces within Sydney University during the 1950s, but it took an anti-intellectual stance. Anti-authori...
Section of a glossary of Australian terms, 1936, Allan & Co. Image courtesy of National Library of Australia. Linguists and other cultural theorists value the study of Australian colloquialisms as a way of observing how the Australian character has develo...
But Australia has a significant and untameable high country where another set of Australian myths and traditions of Australian identity were born - the high country of the Snowy Mountains. The Man from Snowy River is one of Australia's most famous poems ...
Employing dream imagery, poetry and precarious juxtapositions, Australian artists in the 1930s and early 1940s responded to European surrealists and were part of an international surrealist movement - 'in all its clarity'. Many of Australia's best known a...
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