Parnassus of the South Pacific: Graeco-Roman influences in Australian Interwar visual culture (1919-39).

Between the two world wars, Australian artists developed a profound interest in the legacies of ancient Graeco-Roman art and incorporated its elements into their own artworks and important public commissions. Yet within academic studies, how ancient Graeco-Roman art and ideas were of influence upon Australian visual culture in the 1920s and thirties is largely underappreciated. This thesis aims to fill this absence in scholarship. It investigates the causes and uses of classical influences in Interwar Australian art as it appeared in three major subject areas: war memorials, pastoral landscapes, and the body as a mythological subject.