School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Labour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914
    Raymond, Melanie ( 1987-05)
    This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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    Studies in the relations between Indian and Australian colonies in the nineteenth century
    Johnson, Richard ( 1987?)
    Geoffrey Blainey's reference to India in The Tyranny of Distance initiated my interest in researching the relationship between India and Australia in the nineteenth century. While Blainey made several references to India in the early development of colonial Australia, other historians have not developed that issue. I started my research with Blainey’s lead that there were some years in the nineteenth century when Australia seemed to be a satellite of India as well as a colony of England and that cargoes from Bengal fed and equipped the colony and also gave it a hangover. It seemed so obvious that the two 'neighbouring' British colonies have contact with each other and as Blainey pointed out, Australia was so far from England, and communication between the two was so irregular, that Sydney slowly drifted into Asia's net of commerce. (From introduction)
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    Magic and science: aspects of Australian business management, advertising and retailing, 1918-40
    Spierings, John ( 1989)
    This thesis is concerned with four dominant themes: - the rise of a new managerial formation and associated ideology during the inter-war period, which provided an important base for the spread of managerial skill and power in later decades. - the reconstruction by managers of workers as consumers during the inter-war period. Structural and ideological changes in industrial managements, especially in the fields of advertising, media and retailing were important in promoting a particular ethic of consumption. - the role of empirical social sciences, especially economics and legitimating managerial psychology, aspirations in and technology and in fuelling the reconstruction of social and cultural life. - the influence of ideas and developed in America on businessmen, their practice thoughts. values first Australian and their thoughts.
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    The remaking of youth: a study of juvenile convicts and orphan immigrants in colonial Australia
    Humphery, Kim ( 1987)
    One aspect of the development of modern western society upon which liberal democracy has always been self-congratulatory is the ongoing reforms made in the care and treatment of criminal, destitute and neglected youth. Almost every decade since the late eighteenth century has brought with it new, more 'enlightened' juvenile penal and welfare policies. As a corollary, the policies of preceding decades have been disowned, shunned and condemned. This has been the pattern of 'progress'. Progress has always rested on the invocation of an essential dissimilarity between 'then' and 'now'. The past is thus used only to serve as a distant and sometimes shocking backdrop to the enlightened present. If there is one general characteristic of the bulk of work done to date on the history of childhood and youth in western societies, and indeed on the more general history of penal and welfare reform, it is that it celebrates this notion of progress. The past is examined merely in order to assure us of our present state of advance. And so the past, in all its complexity, is not really examined at all. (From Introduction)