School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemMigration, work and community: Italian speakers in the Walhalla gold mining district 1865-1915( 2005-12)This thesis studies migration, work and community among Italian speakers in the Walhalla (situated in Victoria, Australia) gold mining district between 1865 and 1915, and analyzes the outcomes for those who either lived here for a time (as ‘sojourners’ in conventional historical parlance) or settled permanently in the district. It proposes to look way from the ‘big picture’ historical approach to Italian settlement in Australia, with its focus upon the large migrant communities in the capital cities, and instead examines the finer texture of small places and particular lives. The thesis offers a reconstructed history of Walhalla’s Italian community that challenges the prevailing emphasis of the district’s Anglo-centric history by using seemingly small and ‘insignificant’ events in order to develop broader themes which test and re-define ‘big picture’ history. In doing so, the thesis seeks to push the boundaries of understanding about what early Italians may have made of their lives, in terms of the experiences of specific individuals and family groups. Firstly, the thesis questions the adequacy of contemporary understanding of what it means ‘to migrate’, and its use in historical analysis. It employs the Walhalla study in order to re-assess and re-apply the term ‘migration’ so as to provide a broader and better understanding of its meaning to Italians in a nineteenth century context. Has the word ‘migration’ changed over time, or has its use oversimplified and formularized a complex and diverse process in time, place and belonging? Is there a useful place for re-applying the term in a more constructive and inclusive way? Secondly, the thesis re-examines and reconsiders the concepts of ‘migrant’, ‘sojourner’ and ‘work/migrant cluster’ and their application in our historiography. In particular, it focuses on the role of sojourners and their place within the migration process. A distinction between ‘migrant’ and ‘sojourner’ can only be drawn artificially and with hindsight and the use of these expressions in conventional historiography is unhelpful. Their application is problematic as strategies put into place prior to emigration could shift after arrival and the decision to settle permanently could be an imperceptible process made on an individual basis over time. Thirdly, the thesis evaluates Charles Price’s well-accepted theory that migrant settlements often developed in certain Australian districts because pioneer migrants were involved in the same type of work which, in turn, led to the ‘accidental’ development of migrant communities. Should Price’s theory be re-formulated to address the possibility that early migrant settlements may have been more complex than previously understood, and that there were many facets contributing to the evolution of a migrant community not exclusively attributable to one occupational group? Fourthly, the thesis reviews and examines the concept of ‘community’, its construction and what it may have meant to an early settler society and Italians within it. It explores the possibility that our national history may have been more inclusive, fluid and open ended than previously understood and that to completely separate, or isolate, different national or ethnic groups may be an incorrect modelling of early Victorian settlements. The thesis questions whether a broader theory should be applied to challenge the idea of a dominant British versus a non-British position towards the construction of ‘community’. By re-constructing an Italian community, the thesis teases out the dynamics at work within the Italian migrant settlement and its interaction and dialogue with Walhalla’s wider society. My thesis emphasizes the relevance of micro-studies of this nature and its findings need to be extended by studies of other minority groups in other small places. Their accumulated implications should influence the broader historical understanding of the national and international patterns of Italian immigrant settlement in Australia and other New World countries.
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ItemAustralian new left politics, 1956-1972( 2009)A study of the Australian New Left might not immediately appear pertinent to contemporary society. Adherents of New Right economics have been, until recently, unshakable in their global ascendancy over the past three decades. From Russia to Tanzania, discourses of neo-liberalism have become so deeply entrenched in world politics and trade that they have been adopted by the transitional states of Eastern and Central Europe, along with other less developed countries in the international system, despite the fact that all have very different cultural histories and levels of economic development. There have been few exceptions, with one example Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. The discrediting during the global oil crisis of the mid-1970s of the post-WWII orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, social democracy and the Welfare State has played its role in this paradigm shift. More pertinent to the radical left may be that the legacy of Soviet Communism's 'terrors and errors' still looms large in the consciousness of socialist thought, provoking disagreement over what can be salvaged from the cadaver of Marxist theory. The increasing specialisation and integration of world marketplaces since the 1960s has also led to questions over whether the notion of a working class - so essential to Marx's utopian revolution - still exists at all. The rise of 'identity politics' and the relativism of postmodernist thought, seen as at the cutting edge of academic theory since the 1970s, have represented further challenges to those desiring to rebuff the entrenched global logic of consumer capitalism. Capitalism is the only 'meta-narrative' left uncontested by postmodernists, while other ideologies - such as Marxism, feminism and even the discipline of history - are criticised for their failure to adequately address the realities of difference within the groups (i.e. workers, women) that they focus upon. This thesis re-examines a time when the left commanded a degree of mainstream popularity; when hundreds of thousands of Australians took to the streets to protest against the government, and when, however briefly, Marxist sympathisers constituted respectable numbers in academic circles, to ascertain what lessons, if any, might be learnt for 'socialist humanist' campaigns today. The anti-globalisation campaigns of the past decade and recent concerns regarding climate change represent hope as starting points for contemporary mass radicalism. Recently, I travelled beside a thoughtful and articulate man in his late fifties who had been a student at the University of Western Australia during the early 1970s. He had been acutely aware of radicals at other campuses such as Monash at this time, and laughed dismissively that student activists were still saying the same things nowadays. While my travelling companion was amused that contemporary student radicals continue to subscribe to what he sees as archaic and refuted ideas and philosophies, I believe that this constancy is due to the fact that New Left criticism remains highly applicable today.
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemArab Paris: Arab lives and Arab identities in France 1801-1831( 2006)'Deux nations s'etaient confondues ... ' In 1821 Joseph Agoub wrote these words to a patron in an attempt to explain the “confusions” of a Franco-Arab life which he had lived for two decades in Marseille. Joseph, along with many hundreds of other Egyptians and Syrians, came to France in 1801 accompanying the French evacuation of Egypt. Two decades later, this heterogeneous population had formed a relatively cohesive community in Marseille, and many had moved on to Paris, the heart of France and French life. This thesis investigates the reasons for this unexplored emigration, analysing its roots in the impact of the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801. It follows the struggles for a common identity within a community divided by religious, regional and economic differences, as well as the complex negotiations with the wider society and the state. The thesis argues that the experience of Franco-Arab community in Marseille became, over three decades in Paris, a struggle to articulate an Arab identity within a cosmopolitan network of social, cultural and intellectual exchange. In the 1820s, this struggle reconnected with the Arab world in surprising ways, most notably through the establishment of the Ecole Egyptienne in Paris. This school brought Franco-Arab intellectuals such as Joseph Agoub and Joanny Pharaon into close connection with Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, a central figure in the nineteenth-century modernization of Egyptian institutions and Arabic thought. Their encounter made possible new ways of imagining an Arab identity beyond the limits of religious, national or social categories, long in advance of the Arabist movements later in the century. But this encounter also took place in a rapidly shrinking space of cosmopolitanism as new limits of national identity were articulated in France, which excluded “foreigners” from the national consensus. The hardening of identities was particularly severe in relation to those from outside the limits of Europe, whose identities were increasingly represented according to a more exclusivist racial segregation of “Man”. After 1830, these racial identities became the basis for legitimating the continued military occupation of Algiers, and extending French aggression in North Africa and elsewhere in the Arab world. This radical division between “French” and “Arab” made impossible the kind of Franco-Arab identity for which two generations had struggled, and left French Arabs with a stark choice: to join the “indigenes” and lose their status as French citizens, or to use their knowledge and experience in the service of French imperialism. The “Arab Paris” which Agoub had imagined was no longer possible, and passed unrecorded by history. This thesis seeks to re-imagine that lost dimension of French history in the early nineteenth century: a much earlier “Arab Paris” than the one we know today.
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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.