Arts Collected Works - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableA place 'midway' between the old life and the new : a case study of the migrant hostel at Maribyrnong(University of Melbourne, 2013)This thesis presents a new case study of the Maribyrnong/Midway Migrant Hostel, which operated from 1949-88 at the site of the present Student Village owned by Victoria University. Maribyrnong Hostel also known as the Midway Migrant Centre was one of over forty Commonwealth migrant hostels created by the federal government from 1948 to provide temporary, on-arrival accommodation to government-assisted migrants and refugees. Maribyrnong Hostel operated from the beginning until the end of the program and a case study of this hostel affords us a detailed view of the wider hostel program and a chance to investigate the quality of government accommodation extended to newcomers over four decades of Australia's post-war migration history. Through extensive research, a new archive on hostels has been assembled. This thesis extends previous scholarship on hostels that has focused on the early 1950s. It also includes new knowledge and analysis of the government company, Commonwealth Hostels Limited (CIIL). CHL played an important role by providing services to newcomers at the hostels. Analysis of CI IL's operations, and also their personnel, indicates how and why different groups of migrants and refugees experienced similar issues with hostel food, tariffs and rules. Yet, while attuned to the similarities in the hostel experiences of many migrants and refugees, this thesis also presents analysis of the specific historical, social and economic contexts for the migration experiences of new arrivals at the hostel, primarily: the Displaced Persons who arrived in the immediate postwar period, British migrants in the 1950s and 1960s and Indochinese refugees resettled from the late 1970s into the 1980s. The key focus of this thesis is the history of the hostel, but the relationship between the hostel and detention centre is also considered. In recent years, former hostel sites at Maribyrnong and Villawood have been of interest to cultural commentators who have argued that the hostel represents an example of hospitality to migrants and refugees that is radically different to the detaining of asylum seekers in detention centres. This thesis argues that care, control and management were consistent themes throughout the history of Australia's hostel program. It offers a more nuanced understanding of the hostel's past and illustrates how this past experience of accommodating newly-arrived migrants and refugees cannot simply be characterized as `good' or `bad'. Comparisons between hostels and detention centres need to take into account the hostel's long and complex history of hospitality and hostility towards newcomers, which is presented in this updated history of Australia's migrant hostels.
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ItemSBS independent: productive diversity and counter-memory( 2013)This thesis explores SBS Independent (SBSi) (1994-2007) as a cultural institution characterised by productive diversity and counter-memory. It examines its cultural policy developments and uses a creative labour approach to demonstrate how the economic resource of productive diversity has conditioned new practices in management, production and distribution, in the Australian film and television industry. It also analyses content commissioned by SBSi and demonstrates how staff manoeuvred within this neo-liberal regime to generate new counter-memorial narrative representations, which continued to challenge white racial hegemony in Australia.
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ItemA viable abortion: emotional intelligibilities of choice in contemporary Australia, 1969-2008( 2013)This thesis examines representations and registers of abortion speech in Australia from 1969-2008. While ‘choice’ was exclusive to early pro-abortion campaigns it has, over time, achieved hegemonic status in both pro-choice and anti-abortion utterances. This thesis argues that the centrality of choice to all abortion discourse has not liberated women from compulsory motherhood. Rather, by virtue of the emotions that attach to choice, it has recuperated aborting women to the very maternal identity that deems abortion to be an illegitimate choice for pregnant women. Choice and emotion work together to (re)produce aborting women as deviant subjects.