Take 5

Demand Cultural Independence (1976) by an unknown artist, depicts a green hillside crowded with familiar figures from classic Australian children’s books. Dorothy Walls’ Blinky Bill, May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, have gathered together to wave flags and banners calling for support of home-grown culture, opposing the US and promoting Aboriginal land rights and the spirit of Eureka. All created in the early twentieth century, these charming characters stand before a menacing, shadowy cityscape. They evoke both longing for a distinctively Australian cultural past, untainted by America, and recognition of the violation of First Nations cultures by the British.  

_{Artist unknown, Demand cultural independence, c. 1976, silkscreen print, ink on paper, 53.2 x 43.4 cm (image and sheet), Gift of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Collection of Flinders University Museum of Art 2879.016}

Ann Newmarch, with Professor of Philosophy, Brian Medlin, established the Politics and Art Course and PAM at Flinders University. A leading light in feminist art, she was a founding member of Adelaide’s Women’s Art Movement in 1976. Her Look Rich (1975), critiques patriarchy from a feminist perspective. It points to the class dimensions of the socialisation of idealised femininity, offering examples of how women are taught to assume the heterosexual male gaze in order to learn to present themselves for objectification: the hand-held mirror, the glamorous cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly and the text instructing women to ‘look rich’ when they travel in order to attract men who will open doors to ‘some of the best places’. The feminist message in purple text We must risk unlearning all those things that kept us alive for so long is written over the familiar Newmarch figure of a woman, vulnerable in her nakedness and hunched in pain. She represents both the pain of objectification and the challenge of living a feminist life; of transitioning to a new status quo which does not require the male gaze for a woman’s survival.

_{Ann Newmarch, Look rich, 1975, screenprint, ink on paper, edition 31/40, 70.9 x 55.0 cm (image), 77.7 x 63.2 cm (sheet), Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Amanda Martin, Collection of Flinders University Museum of Art 5021, © the estate of the artist}

While Look Rich is a consciousness-raising rallying cry to unlearn idealised femininity, Dollies for the Australian Uranium Producers’ Forum (1979) shines a light on the intersection of big business, environmental destruction and motherhood. Based on medical research identifying the risks of uranium mining to maternal and reproductive health, the uncanny line-drawing of deformed baby dolls with extra and misplaced limbs conveys the risks to women and babies that uranium miners are prepared to take. Each doll has a ribbon-tied label at the end of one limb that calls out an offending mining company. Its sister image, We accuse (1979) depicts similarly affected babies, one with two heads, and lists the names of mining companies and implicates the prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

_{Artist unknown, Ann Newmarch, Dollies for the Australian Uranium Producers Forum, 1979, silkscreen print, ink on paper, 39.0 x 40.0 cm (image), 76.0 x 56.0 cm (sheet), Ann Newmarch Collection, © the estate of the artist}