School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemVagrancy and the Victorians: the social construction of the vagrant in Melbourne, 1880-1907( 1990)In Melbourne between 1880 and 1907, the construction and propagation of a vagrant stereotype and its manifestation in law, constituted an important means of controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups who were perceived to be socially undesirable or economically burdensome.
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ItemThe itinerary of our days: the historical experience of the street in Melbourne, 1837-1923( 1993)By the 1920s, the automobile had radically altered the social experience of Melbourne’s streets, and an apparent demise of social vibrancy together with the marginalising of traditional street culture have been attributed to its impact on the function and use of public space. The increased regulation of public street life, as enforced particularly by municipal authority, can however be related to broader motives dating back to the city’s earliest days. The planning of the colonial grid in 1837 established a physical and symbolic template for social organisation, and developing spatial hierarchies characterised the street as a social zone. Aided by technological developments, the interface between the footpath and the carriageway gradually became more distinguished, the space of the footpath being allocated not simply in terms of circulatory function, but on the basis of moral, gendered, and aesthetic interpretations. A range of street facilities and municipal ordinances combatted a variety of nuisance definitions, effectively enhancing the physical and sanitary experience of the urban setting, but at the same time creating more rigid surveillance over public social behaviour. The function of the street as economic space for the itinerant hawker and fixed-stand vendor was regulated in the face of growing concerns not only about circulatory congestion, but about class respectability, noise, race, litter, and municipal self-image. The street as the setting for urban public ritual was by the 1920s limited on the grounds of both congestion and cultural homogeneity, where once a diverse range of social groups actually and symbolically claimed the space of the streets for public display. The street is seen as an increasingly regulated urban form, a setting for complex negotiations over public social behaviour and the instrument of a detailed regulatory apparatus demanding conformity to particular conceptions of class, aesthetics, etiquette, convenience, nuisance, race and gender. While nostalgic images of nineteenth-century street life often edit out its negative aspects, the legacy of the first century of municipal authority over public urban domain has been the limitation of the very social diversity which may be an antidote to more contemporary urban ills.
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ItemLaw and the new left: a history of the Fitzroy Legal Service, 1972-1994( 1995)When Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) opened in December 1972 as the first non-Aboriginal community legal centre in Australia, Its volunteer workers posed a radical critique of the legal system and of the legal profession. They depicted both to be intricately involved in the oppression of Australians on low incomes. In a bid to combat this oppression, FLS developed two broad objectives: to provide free and accessible legal assistance, and to operate as a medium of social change. The adoption and pursuit of these at times contradictory aims amounted to an attempt by FLS volunteers to marry the politics of the New Left to the workings of the law. The adoption of these aims also meant that FLS would be involved, at a very practical level, in the debate concerning the relationship between the law and social change in Australia. In the years after its formation, the radical critique once posed by FLS dissipated. This occurred primarily because the State, n the form of the Whitlam Government moved to accommodate the most persuasive criticisms that FLS workers had of the legal system. The Whitlam Government’s creation of a new legal aid system in 1973, the high profile taken by FLS workers in debates about legal aid and the fact that FLS received government funding were all crucial to FLS’s increasingly accepted status as a part albeit an unusual one of the legal profession. Notwithstanding this acceptance, FLS workers have continued to pursue the organisation's two original aims. As a result of this FLS has continued to draw clients and workers to the Service, while at the same time it has continued to operate as an effective social critic.