James Northfield’s ‘Canberra’, ca.1930

Just came across this amazing tourism poster for Canberra, printed in about 1930.

Everything I know about this image comes from page 44 of James Northfield and the art of selling Australia (2006) where the image is reproduced with the following caption: “On 31 August 1933 Charles Holmes, Director of the Australian National Travel Association, wrote to C.S. Daley who was then Civic Representative of the Department of the Interior, Canberra. Holmes was replying to Daley’s request for ways of popularising Canberra as a tourist resort amongst Australians. Holmes […] mentioned that he had arranged for James Northfield, whom he considered ‘one of the leading commercial artists in Australia’, to pay a visit to Canberra with a veiw to producing a poster which would be circulated ‘throughout the English speaking world'”.

What fascinates me is the way it captures the early utopian vision for Canberra a style that is more directly associated with European pre-war art and propaganda. There are traces here of Metropolis, German Expressionism and Italian Futurism except the vision that is being sold is of a civilised pastoral metropolis, as opposed to a dynamic techno-utopia.

And interestingly this is still how Canberra is represented today: a ‘bush capital’ marked out by imposing civil institutions.

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The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics

I have just received notification that I am this year’s winner of the the Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics! Feeling very pleased with myself.

Piers Kelly is the winner of the second Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics for his thesis entitled ‘The word made flesh: An ethnographic history of Eskayan, a utopian language and script in the southern Philippines’. The thesis was submitted to ANU in December 2012 and was an outstanding piece of innovative and creative linguistic scholarship.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize awarded to the best PhD (judged by the Panel) which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact.).

A lite version of my thesis (abstract-contents-intro) can be downloaded here.

Collection fishing

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa

Recently posted to AASnet, a link to the first edition of the notorious Coming of age in Samoa (1928), now digitised by the University of California and available on the Internet Archive. This is a well-worn edition with lots of underlining and annotation by – presumably – numerous young scholars over the course of the twentieth century.