Public Forum: Darwin’s impact on the arts in Australia

6pm, Monday 9th February

Melbourne Convention Centre
(Corner of Spencer and Flinders Streets)
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Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had significant and productive implications for artists and the arts in Australia. This panel seeks to explore the impact of Darwin on the arts in Melbourne and Hobart by considering artists whose work embodies the influence of Darwinian ideas.

Ted Gott examines French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet’s Gorilla carrying off a woman (1887) exploring the heated controversy around evolution that this statuette sparked in Melbourne. Gorilla carrying off a woman is a case-study of the role and place of an art work, its production and reception, in the context of 19th century scientific and cultural debates on evolutionary thinking.

Jeanette Hoorn reconsiders Tom Robert’s famous Aboriginal Head, Charlie Turner (1892) in light of contemporary 19th century debates in Melbourne on the role and display of emotion sparked by Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 and reprinted in 1890. Hoorn examines Robert’s social and professional circle in Melbourne, pointing out that a significant number of Darwin’s correspondents for the book lived in Victoria drawing connections between contemporary debates about the emotions, and Roberts portrait of Turner.

Amelia Scurry examines Tasmanian artist Louisa Anne Meredith’s involvement with Darwinian ideas of the evolution of the beautiful and strange. Repositioning Meredith as an artist actively engaged with the scientific community in Hobart in the late nineteenth-century, she highlights the involvement of 19th century women illustrators in contemporary scientific contexts.