School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA hidden history: the Chinese on the Mount Alexander diggings, central Victoria, 1851-1901( 2005)This thesis interrogates the history of the Chinese on the Mount Alexander gold diggings. Viewing the diggings as a cultural landscape, it argues that goldfields Chinese were more than simple sojourners. It reframes their place in local and national histories as 'settlers' rather than 'sojourners'. In so doing the thesis contends that Chinese-European relations on the goldfields were more complex than orthodox historical interpretations have acknowledged, and that the Chinese were active parties in the international mid-nineteenth century gold seeking phenomenon. A key aim of this thesis is to locate the Chinese gold seekers within the polity of a dynamic expanding imperial British society on the periphery of the settled world. It also considers the enduring Chinese role, albeit on a smaller scale, in these Pacific Rim neo-European settler societies after the gold rushes as the goldfields communities consolidated themselves from the 1860s onwards. While it is true that many returned to China either voluntarily or as a result of state pressure, the initial objective was to examine the continuing history of the goldfields generation of Chinese and their descendants in Australia. That history continued well beyond Federation into the twentieth century. The raison d'etre of this thesis is to challenge the historical neglect of the role of the Chinese in diggings society. This thesis has three complementary themes. The first examines the need to refine the concept of sojourner, and add to it the concept of Chinese 'settler' experience. The second is to portray the Chinese as socially active, politically engaged participants in goldfields life society and the third is to contextualise the experience the Castlemaine Chinese in broader national and international histories of the gold seeking era.
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ItemImperial game: a history of hunting, society, exotic species and the environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901( 2004)Hunting was a popular and prestigious pastime in Britain and her colonies during the nineteenth century - indeed, during that period, the word 'sport' was used to mean hunting. The Hunt was valued as a form of social and cultural display, and its practice was tightly bound to the Victorian Imperialism, and to the British class system. It was as a result of its cultural connotations that the Hunt arrived in New Zealand and Victoria. The Hunts that developed in these two colonies provide an interesting comparison: while the colonies were very similar in settler culture, they differed enormously in their natural environments. However, the natural environments of New Zealand and Victoria were not conducive to the types of sport seen in Britain, in India, and in Africa. Both New Zealand and Victoria lacked the large, prestigious game animals that Imperial Britons had come to associate with the colonies. What sport was available was judged to be inadequate - the European settlers of New Zealand and Victoria brought with them cultural assumptions about the types of animal worth pursuing (for example, foxes, deer, grouse, pheasants, trout, salmon, and elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, antelopes, lions, tigers and bears) and the Antipodean colonies could not supply them. Other prey species were killed but, lacking cultural significance, they were not considered satisfactory 'sport'. As a result, the wild environments of both New Zealand and Victoria were modified to accord with settler notions of appropriate prey. Both places were settler colonies, and so the animals introduced to provide game were generally those of the British Isles. Once suitable prey became available settlers energetically reproduced culturally familiar hunting forms in the Antipodes, often participating in culturally familiar, but personally unknown, forms of the Hunt for the first time in their new homes. The colonies allowed many settlers to make new claims to authority, and to try to create a more egalitarian society, and these aspirations were both expressed through the Hunt. Settlers used symbolic game species to express cultural relationships with each other, and with their new, colonial landscapes. In a colonial context culturally important animal species were used to express belonging, and possession. This thesis examines the cultural phenomenon of 'the Hunt' in the Antipodes, and its embodiment in symbolic species of animal.
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Item'A handful of interesting and exemplary people from a country called Wales': identity and culture maintenance: the Welsh in Ballarat and Sebastopol in the second half of the nineteenth century( 2000)The colony of Victoria, in the decades following the discovery of gold in the early 1850s, provides an attractive setting for an analysis of a Welsh immigrant community and the resilience of its cultural identity. Welsh-born immigrants in Victoria, besides the transitory populations of the seaport towns, were found in significant numbers only in a relatively few urban areas which emerged with the development of the gold mining industry. Most notable amongst these were the city of Ballarat and the adjacent township of Sebastopol. The nature of the Welsh immigrant community in this area will be addressed with regard to its linguistic ethos, religious and cultural institutions and activities not usually associated with Welsh migrants. The ability of the Welsh to retain their cultural integrity in whatever form was closely linked to a variety of factors. Settlement patterns, economic specialisation and .mobility, religious schisms, exogamy and the conscious desire of many Welsh immigrants to cast off their old world cultural shackles, will be considered in relation to the continuation, modification and decline of a discernible Welsh ethnolinguistic community. The study also focuses on those responsible for defining Welsh identity and propagating Welsh social and cultural mores in colonial Victoria, analyses the components of that identity and establishes the extent to which the mass of the Welsh-born population conformed. The sometimes paradoxical loyalty to Wales and Britain, and attempts to establish a purely Welsh settlement, as they related to a continued sense of Welsh identity, are also considered. This thesis provides an analysis of the Welsh immigrant community in the Ballarat/Sebastopol area during the second half of the nineteenth century. The study explores all aspects of the Welsh immigrant experience, and, in addition to qualitative evidence, employs quantitative analysis at micro-level. By viewing all Welsh immigrants in one particular area over a set period of time a clearer picture is obtained regarding the true nature of the community and the ways in which it changed.