Janine Burke

Background

Janine Burke was born on March 2, 1952, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is the daughter of Brian Burke and Joyce Kelly.

Education

Janine Burke received a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Melbourne University in 1974, a Master of Arts from La Trobe University, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Deakin University.

Career

Janine Burke worked closely with the George Paton Gallery directors Kiffy Carter and Meredith Rogers on the touring exhibition Australian Women Artists 100 Years in 1975 which she curated and about which she subsequently published a book, Australian Women Artists 1840-1940 in 1990. The resulting book remains a standard text in Australian art. Her book Australian women artists 1840-1940 (1980) was the first history of Australian women artists. Also in the 1970s, Burke co-founded the Victorian Women's Art Movement and Lip, the feminist arts journal. From 1977-1982, she was the foundation art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts.

In 1984, she lived in Tuscany and later returned to Melbourne to become a full-time writer of fiction. While a trustee of Heide Museum of Modern Art, she wrote books and curated exhibitions on the Heide modernist circle including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1994), Joy Hester (revised and republished 2001), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004). Janine published The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006) and in 2014 curated Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing for the Freud Museum London.

More recently, her practice has focused on nature. Her book and curatorial projects have included Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing (2009) Nest: The Art of Birds (2012) and the exhibition Human/Animal/Artist: Art Inspired by Animals (2014). Her photographs are held in the collections of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Australia Research Library. Currently, she is writing a cultural history of trees. Janine Burke is also an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne.

Achievements

• Janine Burke won the 1986 Victorian Premier's Award. She was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, Company of Images, in 1990, for Miles Franklin Award in 1990, for Queensland Premier's Award for Non-Fiction Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker in 2003, for NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-fiction The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection in 2007. She has been the recipient of residencies and grants including an Australia Council for the Arts Established Writers Grant of 2014.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Nest: The Art of Birds

    (Part natural history, part folklore, part exploration of ...)

    2012
  • The Sphinx on the Table

    (To create a portrait of Freud the art collector, Janine B...)

    2006
  • Personal View: Photographs 1978-1986

    (In 2004, Janine Burke was looking for a photograph she'd ...)

    2010
  • The Deadly Doll

    (Caroline's family inherited a mysterious, old-fashioned d...)

    1997
  • The Gods of Freud 2006
  • The Heart Garden 2004
  • Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker 2002
  • Our Lady of Apollo Bay 2001
  • Joy Hester 1981

Membership

• 

  Greenpeace

• 

  Amnesty International

Personality

Living in Carlton in the 70s, Janine Burke was part of a milieu that generated the women's art movement, feminist exhibitions, radical journals, experimental galleries, and provocative art.

In 1978, she bought a second-hand Pentax to document her work. Burke's recent book, Personal View: Photographs 1978-1988, published by Monash University Publishing is a personal memoir featuring her own photographs which she took in the 1970's and 1980's.

Janine Burke is an amateur naturalist and nature lover.

Interests

• photography

Connections

Father:

Brian Burke

Mother:

Joyce Kelly

colleague:

Meredith Rogers

Janine Burke worked closely with the George Paton Gallery director Meredith Rogers on the touring exhibition Australian Women Artists 100 Years in 1975.

colleague:

Kiffy Carter

Kiffy Carter, maiden name Rubbo, was a dynamic and unique force in Australian art in the 1970s. It was under her leadership that the George Paton Gallery, at the University of Melbourne, become known as a vital, nationally recognized center for contemporary art. Janine Burke worked closely with the George Paton Gallery director Kiffy Carter on the touring exhibition Australian Women Artists 100 Years in 1975.