2025 Miegunyah Student Project Awards

2025 Award Outcomes

Deep Listening the rapids of so-called "Dights Falls" (Emergency): Colonialism, Terraforming and Pollution

Alex Williams

Faculty of Fine Arts and Music | Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours)

For the Miegunyah Award, I chose the work Dights Mills - on the Yarra by Joseph Masters (1856). This drawing depicts a romanticisation of colonial life, promoting notions on industry, progress and pioneering, while the destruction and displacement of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, traditional custodians of the Land we now call Collingwood.

My research methods for this project included site visits to Dights Falls and the surrounding areas, photo documentation, field recordings, long sessions in the reading room digging through Russell Grimwades’ Rare Books collection, and reflexive poetry, prose and songwriting. I observed extensive amounts of pollution, spurred on by the Yarra River Keeper’s report on expanded polystyrene, critically contextualized through Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism. I have been digging through sand, combing the riverbanks, identifying and mapping remnants of industry, while practicing Deep Listening on stolen land.

This research has been fruitful and is directly informing both my Honours research, and preparation for post-graduate studies.

From Civility to Surveillance: The Cultivation and Contestation of Colonial Values in Naarm’s Fitzroy Gardens

Georgie Hoadley

Faculty of Science | Graduate Diploma of Urban Horticulture

Like European public parks, Naarm’s Victorian-era gardens were established due to concerns regarding public health and social cohesion in a rapidly industrialising city. Unlike Europe’s public parks, however, they served the additional purpose of reimagining the colonial outpost as one being built on the morals of European, middle-class civility. Documenting the "progress" of the city’s expansion, Charles Nettleton’s 1875 photographs of Fitzroy Gardens give a secluded view into the leafier side of “Melbourne’s” colonial project.

Since Nettleton’s photos, ideas around appropriate park activities have laxed and the fences along Fitzroy Gardens paths removed; simultaneously, vegetation has been thinned as calls for greater surveillance in the name of public safety has increased. Tension between changing park use, heritage management, and shifting societal values has engaged the visitors, vegetation, monuments, and structures of Fitzroy Gardens, as they grapple with the restrictive colonial narratives embedded in the park.

Fragile Orientations

Elena Stefanos & Diego Satkofsky

Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning | Master of Architecture

This project began with the painting of Williamstown Timeball Tower, bequeathed to the Grimwade Collection by Russell and Mab. Architecture, technology, and infrastructure have a prominent role in the Collection, all of which sought to fabricate a sense of national tradition and highlight the so-called “civilising" effects of the colony. In seeking to optimise and legitimise European systems of timekeeping and navigation in an Australian context, the Timeball Tower stood proudly as a cultural artefact, and emblem of colonial authority. This became our site of interest, leading us to further sites of investigation that function amongst greater networks of 'control'.

Through our research we find that time or navigation, which we take to be object measures, are never in fact neutral agents and are often wielded as spatial apparatus to exert colonial power. These powers, although seemingly stable, are haunted by their own fragility. Within this fragility, glitches emerge, cosplaying as agents against the order of the colony.

Lono to Liberation: The Makini Mask Through Time

Kieran Benn

Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences | Doctor of Medicine

Samantha Eala

Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences | Master of Public Health

The Makini mask has carried many meanings throughout Hawaiian history. First tied to the god Lono and the Makahiki season, it embodied abundance, protection, and collective well-being. With Western contact in the late eighteenth century, it was recast through European eyes, often mislabelled as a warrior mask in Captain Cook’s accounts. The suppression of Hawaiian religion in 1819 ended its ritual use, and much cultural knowledge was lost. Yet in the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1960s-1980s, the mask resurfaced alongside broader efforts to restore language, art, and spiritual life. Today, it continues to appear in struggles for land and sovereignty, a reminder of both cultural survival and resistance. Tracing its journey shows how reclaiming cultural symbols like the Makini mask strengthens identity, resilience, and the health of Native Hawaiian communities.

Gariwerd/Grampians

Anna Myers-Lyons

Faculty of Arts | Bachelor of Arts major in Ancient World Studies

Juliet Day

Faculty of Arts | Master of Art Curatorship

Russell Grimwade’s interest in the Australian landscape, native flora, and early discussions of sustainability permeate the Grimwade Collection. Our research project aims to tie this theme to the underexamined depictions of Dunkeld and the wider Grampians (Gariwerd) region, which inform a selection of landscape works in the collection. Throughout site visits to the subjects of Eugene Von Guérard and Duncan Cooper’s original works, we seek to replicate Russell’s fervent documentation, display, and discussion of flora into the contemporary, whilst reflecting on colonial positionality, and contemporary environmental issues.

Unquiet Voices: A serial speculative fiction that hears marginal voices in the archive

Angela Mckenna & Ethan Patrick

Faculty of Arts | Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)

Unquiet Voices is a serialised speculative fiction narrative set in far future Melbourne, which incorporates specific items from the Grimwade Collection, such as the drawings and lithographs of S.T. Gill and William Strutt, and the photography of Charles Nettleton.

It’s the year 3321. Augmented Archives and Museum System Operatives (AAMSOs) have recently discovered a cache of artefacts sometime in the 21st century.  What starts as simply another job of cataloguing archival material for our two AAMSO employees and protagonists, Roger and Eli, becomes a process of self-discovery and reflection, as they question who decides what is preserved or just how many voices/stories were lost because they were deemed unworthy of being heard?

We position archival research practices as interventions for social justice, and we draw on wider research material and ideas from both affirmative posthumanism and disability theory.

The Grimwades’ Fine China: The Grimwade Collection and Australian Interactions with Colonised Asia

Clarissa Sothy

Faculty of Arts | Bachelor of Arts major in History and Economics

The Grimwade Collection houses several-dozen artefacts of Chinese origin, mostly small figurines, and household utensils made from luxury materials such as porcelain and jade. Despite the frequency of their presence in a collection curated with personal and historical significance in mind, these artefacts have gone largely unremarked in scholarship surrounding the collection. By examining the ways in which the Grimwades interacted with Asian goods, people, and societies, this research project highlights the role of the Grimwade Collection and its Chinese-made artefacts in contextualising early 20th century white Australia’s relationship with colonial Asia, by reflecting on Orientalist notions of Asia as a “pageant” made for Western consumption, the positionality of Asian people in white-dominated settler-colonial Australian society, and the alienation of Asian cultural heritage from Asian people through colonialism.