The ANU (Canberra) Friends of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens warmly invite you to an illustrated lecture by Kathleen Riley.

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In his 1912 poem ‘The Bush’, Bernard O’Dowd foresaw the future of Australia in terms of its equivalence to Greece in the classical era and as a scroll on which we were to write ‘mythologies our own and epics new.’ This illustrated talk looks at the ways in which Australian artists have appropriated themes and principles of design from Greek antiquity in order to shape, and comment on, the national identity. Among the topics discussed will be colonial architect Francis Greenway’s classical Georgian edifices; the Heidelberg School’s heroic portraits of the Australian bush; Sydney Long’s art-nouveau fantasies which placed Arcadian figures – satyrs, nymphs, and pipe-playing pans – in an identifiably Australian landscape; the earthier paganism of Norman and Lionel Lindsay, which was part of a post-WWI vision of an Antipodean Golden Age; and Sidney Nolan’s Gallipoli series, inspired by Homeric epic and Greek vase painting. As well as some visionary and iconic art, the talk will explore the darker aspects of ‘mythologizing’ the national identity.

Kathleen Riley is a former British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and now a freelance writer, theatre historian and critic. She is the author of Nigel Hawthorne on Stage (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004); The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles: Reasoning Madness (OUP, 2008); and The Astaires: Fred and Adele (OUP, US, 2012)--included in the Wall Street Journal’s Best Non-Fiction 2012 and recently optioned for a UK feature film. Current projects include a monograph exploring the ancient Greek concept of Nostos (homecoming) and an edited volume of essays on Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity.