School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemTerra nullius : Lacanian ethics and Australian fictions of origin( 2005)The fiction of terra nullius, that Australia was 'no-one's land' at the time of British colonisation, was confirmed in law in 1971. At precisely this moment it had begun to fail as the ballast of white Australian identity and the fulcrum of race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Where white Australia had historically produced a gap, an empty centre from which the white Australian subject could emerge, fully formed, there was now a presence. The emergence of the Aboriginal subject into this empty space inaugurated the anxiety of white Australia that has characterised the period from the 1970s to the present. During these decades of anxiety, the story of this nation's origin-the story of 'settlement'-has retained its pivotal part in the inscription and reinscription of national meanings. Each of the three novels analysed in the thesis is a fictional account of the story of 'settlement published during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of all the contemporary Australian fiction written about 'settlement' and the race relations conducted in its midst, these texts have been chosen because each is emblematic of a particular national fantasy, and, as is argued in this thesis, a particular orientation, to the tale it tells. The structure of each fantasy-of the frontier, of captivity, of the explorer and of the Great Australian Emptiness- offers particular opportunities for the refantasisation of that national story. The thesis asks how each novel is oriented towards the national aim of not failing to reproduce a satisfactory repetition of the story of national origin and the inevitable failure of that project. All of these questions are framed by an overarching one: what is an ethics of interpretation? The thesis offers a Lacanian response. Interpretation, for Lacan, is apophantic; it points to something, or lets it be seen. It points beyond meaning to structure; it alms to show an orientation not to a 'topic' but to a place. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers an ethics of interpretation that includes and accounts for that which exceeds or escapes meaning, and it does this without rendering that excess irrelevant. That something remains constitutive yet enigmatic, making interpretation, in turn, not merely the recovery and rendering of meaning but also a process which seeks to understand the function of this enigmatic structural term. Through its theory of repetition and the pleasures that repetition holds, Lacanian theory offers an approach to analysing the pleasures for the non-Indigenous Australian reader in hearing again the fictions of the nation's founding. It now seems possible for a white Australian encountering any such retelling to ask how our pleasure is taken, and to see the intransigence of our national story, its incapacity to respond to its many challengers, as a particular mode of enjoyment that is too pleasurable to renounce. A Lacanian ethics of interpretation opens up the question: what are the possibilities of re-orientating ourselves in our relation to our founding story such that we did not simply repeat what gives us pleasure?
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ItemScience by correspondence : Ferdinand Mueller and botany in nineteenth century Australia( 2005)Ferdinand Mueller first used correspondence to undertake projects in botany while working as an apprentice pharmacist in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1840s. In so doing he had before him the examples of illustrious scientific travellers like Darwin and Humboldt who collected data on their own and with help of others on a grand scale. Mueller made his own journey of exploration to Australia in 1847, but after being appointed first Government Botanist in the colony of Victoria in 1853, and first Director of the Melbourne Botanic Garden in 1857, he did not return to Europe. This meant that he was somewhat less reliant than Darwin or Humboldt on correspondence to build up a network of collectors, most of whom were based in Australia, but much more reliant on correspondence to communicate with colleagues, most of whom were based in Europe. One of Mueller's first large data-collecting projects in Australia was a flora, based in phytography, and a second was the introduction of alien plants, based mainly in economic botany, but also concerning phytogeography and acclimatisation. A decade after his arrival in Australia, Mueller was still less well-equipped to write a flora than his most obvious colleagues at the Kew Botanic Garden in England, but he did not have far to catch up. He also managed to build up a network of contacts who sent him alien plants on a large scale, especially compared to another Australian botanic garden director, Richard Schornburgk. Nevertheless, disagreements between these colleagues, especially about identifying and delimiting species, marred the progress of their co-operation. The Kew botanists ended up asking one of their own group, George Bentham, to write the flora of Australia. In addition, Mueller and Schomburgk were both unsuccessful in diversifying the plants grown in local agricultural and horticultural industries. Despite these disappointments, in phytography Mueller went on to publish descriptions of thousands of new Australian species, and to promulgate his own version of the natural system of classification in a series of censuses and iconographs. He also issued a much reprinted volume on economic botany called Select extratropical plants, and developed insights about the relationship between culture and nature that can be regarded as among the first contributions to environmental science. For these and other achievements he was regarded as one of Australia's foremost scientists in the nineteenth century, but he felt that his reliance on correspondence contributed to his work being less well-appreciated overseas. He was able to gain international notice and honours for his achievements but he felt that to do so he was obliged to push his work more insistently than colleagues who could meet each other in person.
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Item“A very unfortunate circumstance”: the colonial evolution of defining British sovereignty emanating from murdercases in New South Wales, 1790 –1836( 2005-11)Governor Arthur Phillip did not magically extend British sovereignty over the continent of Australia when he read his orders to the assembled convicts and members of the military in January 1788. To the international community, this act of declaratory sovereignty claimed Australia for Britain. Gaining practical legal authority over the indigenous population, however, took years and a number of court cases to obtain. The British established their sovereignty over the Australian Aborigines by integrating them into the British legal system. This legal incorporation eventuated in stages. Three important stages were: first in 1790, when the British attempted to punish Aborigines for the murder of white men, secondly in 1827, when the British tried to punish white settlers for the deaths of indigenes, and lastly in 1836 when the British decided to punish indigenes for murders committed amongst themselves. Previous colonial experience influenced British officials’ dealing with the indigenous population of Australia. Many of the colonisers who settled in Australia, Britain’s penultimate colony, had lived in other parts of the British Empire. This prior colonial experience shaped the views and outlooks of legal policy towards the Aborigines.
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ItemLike gefilte fish out of water: constructing Jewish femininity in Australia( 2005)This investigation into Jewish femininities in Australia explores Jewish female identity in Australia in light of dominant cultural constructions of Jewish women. Since the post-war period, the majority of images of Jewish women in Australia have been imported from the United States, mainly from television, and these representations of 'gendered ethnicity' are analysed within the context of broader debates about Australia and 'Americanisation', memory, history, and identity, using oral history as a counterpoint to these cultural constructions. The thesis is broadly divided into two parts. The first, `Representations', focuses on the representational or textual expressions of Australian Jewish femininity in the public sphere. Chapter One is a theoretical deconstruction of the cultural categories of Australian Jewish femininity. Chapter Two examines the history of the Australian Jewish community and the relative dearth of representations of Jewish femininity. Chapter Three contains a cultural analysis of American Jewish history and the social milieu from which the contemporary dominant global images of Jewish women emerge. Chapter Four examines the dominant representations of Jewish femininity on Australian television and explores the absence of local representations. This leads to Part Two, `Experiences', in which the focus shifts to the subjective impact of the discourses outlined in the first part of the thesis. Chapter Five links the representational analyses of the first half of the thesis to the oral history component of the remaining chapters. The remaining chapters are rooted in an oral history project conducted between 2000 and 2004. Chapter Six examines the role of the dominant stereotypes of Jewish women on three generations of Jewish women in Melbourne. Chapter Seven focuses on the role of Jewish men in the discourse of Jewish femininities. Chapter Eight compares the ways in which Jewish women in other diaspora communities (New York and London) absorb the dominant images in relation to Jewish women in Melbourne. The history of the development of these stereotypes and the different ways that these images have been negotiated by Jewish women themselves reveals much about the relationship between cultural paradigms and subjective identity. This thesis aims to deconstruct dominant mythologies of Jewish femininities through the examination of the intersection between textual representations and oral narratives.
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ItemSome aspects of the federal political career of Andrew Fisher( 2005)Andrew Fisher was prime minister of Australia three times. During his second ministry (1910-1913) he headed a government that was, until the 1940s, Australia's most reformist government. Fisher's second government controlled both Houses; it was the first effective Labor administration in the history of the Commonwealth. In the three years, 113 Acts were placed on the statute books changing the future pattern of the Commonwealth. Despite the volume of legislation and changes in the political life of Australia during his ministry, there is no definitive full-scale biographical published work on Andrew Fisher. There are only limited articles upon his federal political career. Until the 1960s most historians considered Fisher a bit-player, a second ranker whose main quality was his moderating influence upon the Caucus and Labor ministry. Few historians have discussed Fisher's role in the Dreadnought scare of 1909, nor the background to his attempts to change the Constitution in order to correct the considered deficiencies in the original drafting. This thesis will attempt to redress these omissions from historical scholarship. Firstly, it investigates Fisher's reaction to the Dreadnought scare in 1909 and the reasons for his refusal to agree to the financing of the Australian navy by overseas borrowing. It will consider the proposition that Andrew Fisher, while wanting an Australian Navy, was not prepared to go to foreign lenders for finance, believing that, overall, Australia was rich enough to pay for her defence without burdening future generations with debt. Secondly it enquires into his attempts in his second ministry of 1910-1913 to correct the Constitution, by referenda, in the areas of trade, commerce, and labour in order to be able to carry out the fighting platform of the Labor Party.
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ItemThe private face of patronage: the Howitts, artistic and intellectual philanthropists in early Melbourne Society( 2005)This thesis investigates a case of upper-middle class, private patronage in Melbourne, focusing on three decades between 1840 and 1870. Evidence points to the existence of a lively circle of intellectual and artistic activity around the Quaker family of Dr Godfrey Howitt and his wife, Phebe, from the Midlands who arrived at the Port Phillip District in 1840. The presentation of a group of fine, rare colonial water-colours and drawings to the National Gallery of Victoria by a direct Howitt descendant, Mrs James Evans in 1989, was the point of inspiration for this subject. Godfrey Howitt, one of the first experienced medical practitioners in the colony, had much in common with the Superintendent of Port Phillip. Their friendship gave the Howitts entrée into the uppermost social circles of the colony. Financially, the family prospered due to Howitt's professional practice which insulated them against economic downturns and provided a steady accumulation of wealth. While as a Quaker, Phebe Howitt had little background in the fine arts, she began to exercise patronage in support of her artist friends, most of who arrived with the gold rush in 1852. With it came Godfrey Howitt's elder brother, William, a famous English author. In London in 1850, William and Mary Howitt's daughter, the feminist painter and writer, Anna Mary, had become engaged to Edward La Trobe Bateman. A brilliant designer and cousin of Superintendent La Trobe, Bateman introduced the young, still struggling Pre-Raphaelite artists with whom he was closely associated, to the English Howitts. Arriving in Melbourne in 1852, William was followed shortly afterwards by Bateman and two artists, including the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, Thomas Woolner. The gold rush also attracted Eugene von Guérard, and Nicholas Chevalier in due course. In 1856, as a guest of the Howitts' on her first Victorian visit, Louisa Anne Meredith, writer, botanical artist and social commentator, was introduced to their artistic and literary circle. The Howitts' friendship with these artists thus took on a very different hue from the normal patterns of patronage. Beyond commissioning works of art from artists returning empty handed from the gold fields, Phebe Howitt supported them in other ways until suffering a catastrophic stroke towards the end of 1856. During that period, the founding of the new Victorian colony's cultural institutions became a source of official artistic commissions for the first time. Through friends in influential positions like Justice Redmond Barry and Godfrey Howitt, Bateman was employed in various design projects for new public buildings and gardens. With the purchase of Barragunda at Cape Schanck in 1860, Godfrey Howitt assumed a central role as patron. In making the house available to Bateman and his artist friends, he and his daughter, Edith Mary, repeated the unusual degree of patronage formerly exercised by Phebe Howitt before her illness. By 1869, Woolner, Bateman and Chevalier had departed the colony and from 1870, von Guérard was taken up with the National Gallery of Victoria. Although succeeding generations of the family maintained contact with all the artists in their circle, by Godfrey Howitt's death in 1873, the prime years of Howitt patronage had passed.
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ItemThe development of mining technology in Australia 1801-1945( 2005)From a small beginning at Newcastle in 1801 when convicts began mining coal exposed on the banks of the Hunter River, the mining industry has grown to be a large sector of the Australian economy, providing an export income of A$58 billion in 2004 (almost forty percent of total exports) as well as providing the raw materials for local industries. The changing technologies used to develop this industry are an important part of our development as a nation, but few historians have written about them. This thesis offers an interpretive framework for visualising the mining industry as an historically coherent entity and for understanding the technological innovations in mining over 200 years. It focuses on the period to 1945. In the first fifty years coal and copper were mined in New South Wales and silver lead and copper in South Australia. Machines were introduced in the 1830s when a British joint stock company took over the coal mine and the use of machines increased in the 1840s when companies financed locally or from Britain began developing silver lead and copper mines. Technologies already developed in the north of England, Scotland, Germany, Cornwall, and Wales were imported and miners from England, Scotland, Germany and Cornwall and smeltermen from Wales migrated to Australia. British mining law was followed without question. This situation was revolutionised when Edward Hargraves, and his partners, found alluvial gold in commercial amounts at Ophir, 150 kilometres west of Sydney, in 1851. Hargraves had experience in alluvial mining in California and he embarked on a skilful publicity campaign to start a rush on the Californian pattern. His aim was to claim a reward from the government in return for boosting the economy and preventing the resumption of transportation of convicts to New South Wales. In terms of modern management theory his place in history is not the charlatan and fraud that some historians have suggested but an entrepreneur who changed the course of mining in Australia. Unwittingly or not he forced a change from a semi-feudal British legal system dominated by large companies, and enabled the emergence of a more democratic system which permitted both individual and company mining. In the confusion of the first rushes the government allowed the individual miner to peg a small claim on which he could dig for gold on payment of a licence fee. This small change led to many innovations in mining law and mining technology Australia. Following the ideas of Joel Mokyr and Roger Burt these innovations are assessed as micro-innovations (successive small changes) or as macro-innovations (radical new concepts without clear precedents); but I extend the latter concept to include several important micro-innovations that combined into what amounts to a singular new concept. Early macro-innovations were wet deep lead mining and the concept of the no-liability company and later ones were dry crushing, roasting, and cyanide filtering of sulpho-telluride gold ores and differential flotation of the complex sulphide ores of lead, zinc and copper.
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ItemA critical history of writing on Australian contemporary art, 1960-1988( 2005)This thesis examines art critical writing on contemporary Australian art published between 1960 and 1988 through the lens of its engagement with its location, looking at how it directly or indirectly engaged with the issues arising from Australia's so-called peripheral position in relation to the would-be hegemonic centre. I propose that Australian art criticism is marked by writers' acceptances of the apparent explanatory necessity of constructing appropriate nationalist discourses, evident in different and succeeding types of nationalist agendas, each with links to external, non-artistic agendas of nation and politics. I will argue that the nationalist parameters and trajectory of Australian art writing were set by Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his book Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (1962) and that the history of Australian art writing from the 1960s onwards was marked by a succession of nationalist rather than artistic agendas formed, in turn, by changing experiences of the Cold War. Through this, I will begin to provide a critical framework that has not effectively existed so far, due to the binary terror of regionalism versus internationalism. Chapter One focuses on Bernard Smith and the late 1950s and early 1960s Australian intellectual context in which Australian Painting 1788-1960 was published. I will argue that, although it can be claimed that Australia was a postcolonial society, the most powerful political and social influence during the 1950s and 1960s was the Cold War and that this can be identified in Australian art criticism and Australian art. Chapter Two discusses art theorist, Donald Brook. Brook is of particular interest because he kept his art writing separate from his theories of social and political issues, focussing on contemporary art and artists. I argue that Brook's failure to engage with questions of nation and Australian identity directly ensured that he remained a respected but marginal figure in the history of Australian art writing. Chapter Three returns to the centre/periphery issue and examines the art writing of Patrick McCaughey and Terry Smith. Each of these writers dealt with the issue of the marginality of Australian art but neither writer questioned the validity of the centre/periphery model. Chapter Four examines six Australian art magazines that came into existence in the 1970s, a decade of high hopes and deep disillusionment. The chapter maps two shifts of emphasis in Australian art writing. First, the change from the previous preoccupation with provincialism to pluralist social issues such as feminism, and second, the resulting gravitation of individual writers into ideological alliances and/or administrative collectives that founded, ran and supported magazines that printed material that focused on (usually Australian) art in relation to specific social, cultural or political issues. Chapter Five concentrates on the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and Paul Taylor, its founder and editor. Taylor and his magazine were at the centre of a new Australian attempt to solve the provincialism problem and thus break free of the centre/periphery model.