The panoramic narrative and the production of historical consciousness: this is Australia
Creators: name: Whitehouse, Denise
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: This paper takes a cross-disciplinary approach drawing on developments in Australian historical and cultural studies to investigate the role of design in the production of national cultures and more specifically the construction of colonising histories. It argues that in modern settler nations such as Australia, graphic design has had a significant role in the shaping of the public imagination of nationhood. As the opening ceremony of 2000 Sydney Olympic Games illustrated the panoramic narrative has become a central trope of celebrations of nationhood: the continuous flow of historically familiar visual icons through a technologically orchestrated time, space, place continuum providing the public with one emotional hit after the other. This paper investigates the historical involvement of the graphic designer in constructing the visual vocabulary and communication strategies of the modern panoramic narrative and its origins in 1930s when business and government turned to modern design to bring aesthetic and psychological edge to the promotion and selling of Australia. Culturally sophisticated designers, including Gert Sellheim and Douglas Annand, were employed to produce tourist posters, trade exhibitions, publications and public murals that visualised Australia’s rapid evolution from the pre-history time zone of its indigenous people and the arrival of the first fleet into a modern nation of the future. Experimenting with modern technologies and aesthetics – photo-mechanical reproduction, abstraction, montage and primitivism – these designers shaped a visual language, a set of archetypal colours, forms and images and a visual rhetoric, which told instantaneously recognisable ‘This is Australia stories’. This visual imagination, as the Olympic Games showed, still informs Australia's discourse of memory and identity, that is its historical consciousness or as Meaghan Morris phrases it its 'national image-space'. In establishing the panoramic narrative as a favoured device for celebrating and selling the nation the designers gave visual and emotional form to the colonising narratives of possession and dispossession that underpinned the Federal Government’s Assimilation Policy, otherwise known as the white Australia policy. Their narratives of the birth of nation fostered white Australians' economic, emotional and spiritual bonds with the land at the expense of the indigenous population who were depicted as a vanishing race. Furthermore, the almost unconsciousness ideology of social Darwinism that underpinned their thinking, encouraged the designers to 'protect' the visual culture of the Australian Aboriginal from 'extinction' by converting it into graphic signifiers of an ancient historical past, while also appropriating it to create an authentically Australian style of modern primitivism. In thus constructing visual history, memories and identity for white Australia, the designers unintentionally helped to obscure and destroy the identity and memories of indigenous Australians and contributed to the process of colonisation. This paper concludes that there is a need for critical design histories that look beyond the construction of economic and national identities, taste and material culture to the legacy of design's involvement in the construction of history and the process of colonisation, which in this instance involved the shaping a utopian visual history for white Australians which obscured and denied their violent treatment of indigenous Australians.