CV

Ross Gibson was Centenary Professor of Creative & Cultural Research at the University of Canberra.  He worked collaboratively on books, films, artworks and strategic-planning exercises, and he supervised postgraduate students in similar pursuits  

During the early 2000s he was Creative Director for the establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square in Melbourne.  Prior to that, while working at the University of Technology in Sydney, he was a Senior Consultant Producer during the development and inaugural years of the Museum of Sydney.  Over the past two decades he has also held Professorial posts at UTS and the University of Sydney.

Recent works include: the books 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), Changescapes (2015), Memoryscopes (2015), The Criminal Re-Register (2017), reDACT (2019), plus the ABC Radio National feature Green Love (2016), and the public artwork Bluster Town, commissioned for Wynyard railway station by Transport NSW.

A fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, he served on the Boards of Directors for several public agencies and was a member of the foresighting team for the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He was a regular Panel Chair for the Hong Kong Council for the Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications.  

SUMMARY  NARRATIVE  VERSION

Born   27 Nov 1956

BA First Class Hons (Uni. of Qld, 1977)

Postgraduate Diploma of Film Studies (Polytechnic of Central London, 1981) 

AKC: Philosophy and Theology (King's College, London, 1981) 

PhD (King's College, London, 1982).

FAHA (Fellow of the Academy of Humanities, Australia)

Ross Gibson was a writer and researcher who also made films and multi-media environments.  His main interests were contemporary arts,  communication and the history of environmental consciousness in colonial cultures, particularly in Australia and the Pacific.  His work spans several media and disciplines.  

Over the past twenty-five years, Gibson has written regularly for Filmnews, Art & Text, Art-Network, Cultural Studies Review, Meanjin, Photofile and Oxygen.  In 1983 he was a founding co-editor and publisher of On The Beach, an influential magazine of cultural analysis that was published quarterly for several years with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts.  

Connecting his varied cultural and pedagogical activities, writing was the consistent thread through Gibson’s career.  His first monograph, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia (1984) was described in the National Times  as "the best book since Serle's From the Deserts Prophets Come, in [its] richly rewarding overview of the changing literary perceptions of Australia"; and Clement Semmler suggested that the chapter on the images of Aborigines "should be compulsory reading for all Australians from adolescence on".  

A subsequent collection of essays, described by McKenzie Wark in The Australian as "rare and exquisite", was issued as his second book: South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (1992).  The publication has prompted responses such as Graeme Turner's assessment that "Gibson writes like no other Australian cultural critic … the range of knowledge deployed in dealing with his subject makes his writing distinctive and exciting."  

His next book, The Bond Store Tales, was a work of historical fictions and documentary fragments arranged in montage-form.  It was published by the Museum of Sydney in 1996.  

Also in 1996 he edited and contributed a chapter to a book of scholarly essays, Exchanges: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific, described by the UTS Review as "some of the most lucidly written, intelligent, scholarly essays” issued in recent years.    

His next book, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), was named one of the ‘books of the year’ in the The Age (7-12-02) and Australian Bookseller & Publisher (February 2003) and was shortlisted for the 2003 Nettie Palmer Award for Non-Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2004 Adelaide Festival Literary Awards. 

In recent years Gibson has published the photographic novel The Summer Exercises (2009) and 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), a study in cultural poetics responding to language notebooks compiled during the first four years of the Australian colonisation, 1788 to 1791.  He has also co-edited an anthology for MIT Press, on Voice: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media (2010).  Many of his most influential essays have been anthologised in Changescapes (UWAP,2015) and Memoryscopes (UWAP 20015).

In addition to conventional publishing Gibson used several other modes for communicating his research as effectively as possible.  For example, in 2003 Gibson curated two major exhibitions spanning eight months at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.  He also edited the major catalogue Remembrance + The Moving Image, which was published in conjunction with these exhibitions.

In the early 1980s Gibson became involved in filmmaking, as a founding member of the Sydney Super-8 Film Group and as a co-organiser of the Third Sydney Super-8 Film Festival.  In 1985 he and producer John Cruthers made Camera Natura.  This film on the history of white Australian landscape has won several national and international awards and has been acquired for public and private collections in Asia, the United States, Europe and Australia.  It was described in the American Historical Review as a "breakthrough film … and a window into the future with vastly expanded concepts of scholarly 'publication'."  

In 1990 Gibson wrote and directed the feature film, Dead To The World, for Huzzah Productions in Sydney.  The film has been included (along with Camera Natura) in the MOMA (New York) collection of 100 films celebrating 100 years of cinema in Australia.  

In 1993 he completed an essay-film entitled WILD, inspired by the writings of Eric Rolls.  The film has been invited to many film festivals around the world, including the competitive finals at Hawaii, Seoul, Vermont, Bombay, Melbourne, Sydney and San Francisco, where it won the 1994 Golden Gate Award.

Also in 1993, ABC Radio National bought and produced a series of Gibson's dramatic monologues, entitled The Ancient Mariner Tales.  This presented the opportunity to begin working in a new range of media and institutions.  His collaboration with ABC Radio continued with the hour-long feature documentary Bad Roads (October 2003).  

Since 2007 he recorded regular, feature-length audio commentaries for the Director’s Suite series of DVDs published by Madman Entertainment.   

Extending this cross-disciplinary experimentation, Gibson spent several years as a consultant producer for the Museum of Sydney.  This involved conference-organisation, research, scriptwriting, film directing and the production of computer-generated sound and image programs.  The best-known result of this work is The Bond Store, a storytelling gallery with more than four hours of endlessly reconfigurable narrative stored on laser disc and aural CD.  The Bond Store was on uninterrupted display for seven years and has now been re-designed and re-commissioned as a permanent exhibition at the Museum.

During 1997 and 1998 Gibson was the Australia Council's inaugural Fellow in New Media.  Upon completing several research and production projects in this capacity, he accepted a four year contract as Creative Director for the establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne.  In this role he inaugurated the ACMI Collection and curatorial philosophies, worked intensively with the Lab Architecture Studio (project architects for Federation Square) during the design and building phase and continued to research, create and foster work in a range of media, particularly in interactive and immersive digital systems and networked IT.  He completed the ACMI project in early 2002.  

In 2000 – 2001 Gibson was the inaugural Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts.  From 2001 - 2003, whilst creative-directing the ACMI venture, he was also Adjunct Professor in Art Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.  In this role he contributed to the establishment of the I-Cinema Centre for research of the future of cinema in a digital context.  He was also Adjunct Professor with the School of Creative Arts at James Cook University in Townsville.

Gibson’s recent personal projects include the ‘dramatic database’, Life After Wartime (2004), the museum installations Crime Scene (1999 -- 2000) and Darkness Loiters (2001), the multimedia performance work LAW Live, an improvised-cinema project in collaboration with the music group The Necks, and the major immersive audiovisual installation BYSTANDER (2007) which has been exhibited at the Carriageworks and the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney.  These projects are a collaboration with Kate Richards.  Further interpreting the archive, Gibson’s novel The Summer Exercises was published by UWA Press and the NSW Historic Houses Trust in December 2008. 

From April 2002 Gibson was Research Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney (till mid-2008).   In this position he won competitive grants in cross-disciplinary research projects valued at more than AUD$3 million and led the University’s innovative research program in the ‘Emerging Field of New Media and Digital Culture’, a cross-faculty initiative brokering working relationships amongst staff and postgraduates from four different faculties.  He was Director of the University’s Research Strength in Contemporary Design Practices.  

After a six years (2008 - 2013) as Professor of Contemporary Arts at the University of Sydney, Gibson was Centenary Professor in Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. Since returning to the University sector in 2002, Gibson has been a Chief Investigator on eleven fully-funded Australian Research Council projects.  

Gibson has been on the Board of Directors for Screen NSW.  He was also Chair of the Board for the Information and Cultural Exchange in Western Sydney, as well as being a Board Member of Lucy Guerin Inc dance company in Melbourne.  He was an invited member of the ‘expert foresighting team’ for the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He was on the board of the Hawke Research Institute in Adelaide and was a member of the Cultural Advisory Group for the Australian Design Centre in Sydney.  He was also a member of the ABC’s specialist Arts Reference Panel.

Since 2005 Gibson was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.