Remembrance of things past: historical commemoration in an educational setting

This chapter explores how an Australian day and boarding college for male students between the ages of 10 and 17 partnered with a regional university to explore the centenary commemoration of World War 1 through an Australian Government Arts and Culture Public Fund grant. The respective institutions eschewed traditional commemorative options such as statues, honour rolls and community histories and instead utilised a range of arts forms including music, visual art, multimedia and literature to commemorate the ANZAC Centenary. This approach allowed for an alternative vision with major outputs including four large-scale dioramas, a six-panel textile artwork, a children’s picture book, a museum display and a sound and light show projected onto the heritage listed main building of the college

With both pen and sword: a biography of Sir Henry (Harry) Gullett (1878-1940)

The centenary commemorations of the First World War (1914-1918) have inevitably brought with them a re-evaluation of the conflict and its enduring impact. It has also stimulated further investigation into the means by which societies have come to understand the war, a process characterised by Samuel Hynes as a ‘war imagined’.1 This ‘imagining’ is not synonymous with the creation of a falsehood; it merely emphasises that a view of war is socio-culturally situated. Competing views, as Hynes observed, are merely different versions of the same reality. This biography of Sir Henry Somer Gullett (1878-1940) explores the extent to which pre-war conceptions of a powerful Australia within a powerful Empire within a powerful Anglo-Saxondom shaped both his ‘imagining’ of the war and his subsequent contribution to the creation of a national identity that ‘transmuted the unpleasant particulars of modern combat into an epic model of national achievement’.2 For in one sense, though Gullett worked as a journalist, war correspondent, military historian, and politician, the roles did not define the man. He is better understood as an immigration propagandist who had very fixed ideas on how conditions in Australian had created a self-reliant, egalitarian society connected to the Empire by bonds of blood and culture. Though his career coincided with World War One and the opening months of World War Two, these momentous events wrought little impact on Gullett’s world view, let alone acted as catalysts. They legitimised a commitment to immigration which bordered on an obsession. To understand Gullett, one must ask how his views on immigration informed his imagining of the war rather than the reverse. Biography is a methodology well able to answer that question

Investigating the assessment practices within an Initial Teacher Education program in an Australian university: Staff perceptions and practices

Effective assessment design and subsequent assessment practices are essential for student success in the higher education sector. A plethora of research on assessment in higher education exists which tends to focus primarily on the student experience. This paper shares results from a 3 phased study that explored staff perceptions related to assessment practices in an undergraduate Initial Teacher Education program within an Australian metropolitan university. First, course learning objectives, activities and assessment items were mapped to identify the presence of constructive alignment. Second, staff were invited to complete a survey and a follow-up interview in relation to understanding of assessment knowledge and skills. Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning (2013) was used to analyse the qualitative data and findings suggest that staff are highly committed to quality assessment practices but often work in silos rather than teams. Additionally, a lack of professional development and learning was available at the school level, particularly for casual staff. Further research about assessment practices in higher education in relation to staff rather than student experience is warranted

When death gave way to glory: Philip Gibbs, RMS Titanic and the Western Front

The English journalist and author Philip Gibbs established many of the mythological conventions of the Titanic sinking – the luxury of a ship believed to be unsinkable; insufficient lifeboats; women and children first; the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’; the failure of a nearby ship to respond to distress signals; and the heroism of the doomed passengers. Gibbs’ language choices in reporting on the Titanic reflected late-Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to chivalry, heroism, masculinity and nationality. Later, as one of the most influential war correspondents working on the Western Front, he consistently drew on this same anachronistic rhetoric to describe mass industrialized warfare. In 1912, and across almost four years of war, Gibbs celebrated glory’s triumph over tragedy. In this confrontation with danger, stoic endurance and acceptance of martyrdom were proof that a person was both a man and a Briton

Forging Truths from Facts: Trauma, historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books

Though they can find themselves constrained by the imagined 'demands of children’s literature as sanitary, benign, and didactic' (Tribunella 102), children’s picture book authors and illustrators regularly attempt to engage with 'unimaginable, unspeakable, and un-representable horror' (Trezise 43). Whether it be in the form of genocide, war, persecution or displacement, they tend not to shy away from the atrocities of history when searching for subject matter. However, the balancing of the sanitary with the unimaginable demands a compromise. Authors and illustrators invariably soften, perhaps even distort the horror in their efforts to be morally instructive. In their creation of a 'parable of war' (MacCallum-Stewart 177) they explore the underlying humanist principles of the stories they tell, rather than historical perspectives. As a result, books such as the three Australian children's picture books analyzed in this article are often very successful in exploring broader issues of personal morality, but they make for dubious history. The critical and commercial success of works that adopt this approach suggests that the book buying public share this preference for morality tales over historical accuracy

A beautiful and devilish thing: children’s picture books and the 1914 Christmas Truce

For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the United Kingdom has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary construct of the war as a futile and meaningless conflict that destroyed a generation. This article will analyse four children’s picture books dealing with the Christmas Truce of 1914, which has become an historical touchstone for adherents of the literary imagining. Using methods grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), visual grammar, and art theory the authors explore how text and image combine to create moving and insightful morality tales that use the particularities of an historical event to communicate a vision of humanity rather than a work of historical scholarship