School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia( 2003)This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.
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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
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ItemDeparting from their sphere: Australian women and science, 1880-1960( 2003)This thesis charts, predominantly elite, white women's engagement with science in Australia over a relatively long period, in a way which has been attempted for few other countries. Noting women's relatively strong visibility in many scientific arenas prior to the 1940s, it argues that, despite the widespread coding of science as masculine, their experiences cannot be explained through simple exclusionary models or notions of hegemonic gender discourses and spheres. Beginning in the nineteenth century, elite women showed a surprising, strong, enthusiasm for scientific education and employment. By the early twentieth century, women comprised a significant proportion of the local scientific community and made substantial contributions in this critical phrase of the development of the field in Australia. In the broader cultural arena, such women were prominent promoters of the scientific cause within social reform movements. It is suggested that a specific set of circumstances was required for the masculine image of science to be fully reflected in the gendered structure and composition of the Australian scientific community. It was only in the years after World War II, as scientific education and employment expanded enormously, that men were attracted to the field in large numbers and women's participation decreased. It was only then that the masculine image of science came to be more completely reflected in gender composition of the scientific community. Patterns set in place in period were enduring and many are still evident today. Apart from simply documenting uncharted territory, it also seeks to suggest new approaches which might be fruitful. It offers a new interpretation of elite women's engagement in 'traditionally' masculine spheres, in Australia and other western countries, by focusing on the relative privileges they enjoyed. Indeed, it will be suggested that studies of 'women in science' reveal as much about the, sometimes significant, disruptions to the discursive construction of science as masculine as they do about any disjunction between the feminine and the scientific. The experiences of Australian women in science reveal that positive subcultures supportive of women's scientific engagements could coexist quite easily with discourses positing a close alignment between science and masculinity. The ideological construction of science as a masculine domain did not necessarily represent or create the experiences of all women in all times and places.
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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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ItemFraming Fitzroy: contesting and (de)constructing place and identity in a Melbourne suburb( 2002)This thesis examines the ways in which Melbourne's 'worst suburb', Fitzroy, was constructed, both physically and culturally, from the Great Depression of the 1930s until the gentrification of the suburb in the early 1970s. The thesis argues that an array of institutions, extending from social welfare and slum reform groups to the media and a variety of policing agencies, relentlessly constructed Fitzroy as the site of social evil in Melbourne. It examines the variety of texts, both written and visual, that were utilised to construct a singular and negative representation of Fitzroy that legitimated particular forms of intervention. The thesis critiques and contests this representation through an analysis of the lives of those who lived in Fitzroy in the period covered by this thesis and by using a variety of original sources, including the testimonies of those who lived and worked in Fitzroy. It is a central argument of this thesis that Fitzroy was a place of complexity, vitality and cultural value for those who lived there.
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ItemThe role of Australia's cultural council 1945-1995( 2000)This thesis examines the concept of a cultural council as it was expressed in Australian public debate over the fifty years between 1945 and 1995. It aims to draw out the discrepancy between the concept of such a council- its potential contribution and relation to Australian political, social and cultural development - and the form in which the council has been institutionalised as the Australia Council. The thesis was written in a context of increasing government interest in cultural policy, and increasingly pro-active policies. This resulted in a recognised need for more research into the relationship between cultural activities and public policy, which has become an issue of interest within the disciplines of cultural studies, economics, history and political science. The Australia Council has been one focus of such interest. Research has concentrated on its administration, its funding priorities and, more recently, the extent to which it has reflected government cultural policy objectives. Yet such research has tended to neglect the extent to which the function of the Council has reflected and interpreted broader social and political concerns. Throughout the period examined in this thesis, understandings of a cultural council's appropriate responsibilities have included a wide range of social, cultural and political concerns experienced as a consequence of post-war development. The council has provided an important, but often overlooked, axis around which public recognition of and debate about such concerns has occurred. Its function has thus been 'cultural' not just in the sense of providing funds for artists and arts organisations, but in providing a focus for public debate. There are two key implications of these findings. Firstly, behind the institution of the Australia Council lies a more complex history than previous policy studies might suggest, a history that reveals a unique aspect of common social concerns and ideals over the post-war period and that might make a significant contribution to broader studies of Australian history. Secondly, the contribution of the council to public debate - rather than to cultural development in the more narrow sense of arts development - might usefully be considered in future political or administrative assessments of the cultural council's worth.
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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.