School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonising Yolngu defence : Arnhem Land in the Second World War and transnational uses of indigenous people in the Second World War(University of Melbourne, 2008)The thesis examines the involvement in World War II of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, in the context of colonialism in the Northern Territory, and with comparative attention to the war experiences of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. and the Native American Navajo. Yolngu participated in the war through various avenues, including the provision of labour for white Australian war initiatives. Most notably Yolngu served as auxiliaries to non-indigenous military units such as the North Australia Observer Unit, and they also participated in the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was exclusively Aboriginal apart from its leadership. Rather than representing widespread white Australian appreciation of Yolngu skills or recognition of Yolngu equality, the military employment of Yolngu continued structures of ideas and practices inherent in settler colonialism in the north. The military authorities, with government endorsement, organised Yolngu to utilise their skills in defence of the colonial project that was of itself simultaneously robbing Yolngu of their land and rights. Yolngu had their own motivations to work alongside white military, and for the most part participated willingly. Analysis of oral testimony points to their courageous efforts and, unlike the non-indigenous documents, positions Yolngu as central actors in Arnhem Land during the war. Comparative analysis of other colonised indigenous peoples' involvement in World War ll�Pacific Islanders in similar units in Papua and New Guinea, and Navajo Codetalkers in the United States�highlights the existence of common colonial practices that existed transnationally, alongside indigenous peoples' own sense of agency. This study re-centres indigenous people in war narratives while demonstrating at the same time how governments' reliance on indigenous skills and labour in times of crisis did not represent a fundamental change in relations, although for white authorities there were, eventually, unanticipated outcomes from the war for indigenous peoples.
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ItemMorality of politicians in a democracy( 2008)This thesis argues that one way of understanding the morality of politicians is from the perspective of their role morality, which is derived from their representative role in a democracy. The thesis argues that politicians' role morality is to advocate for their constituents in a way that upholds democratic values and the institutional arrangements required to give effect to democratic values. The thesis sets out the values underlying a democracy and argues that the traditional view of the nature of representation, as either a delegate and/or a trustee, does not provide an adequate understanding of the role of the representative. The delegate and/or trustee model assumes some form of `contactual' arrangement between representative and citizen whereas representation in a democracy is more like an ongoing relationship where citizens continue to exercise their sovereignty through an active interrelationship with their representatives. This way of viewing the role of the democratic representative places a greater responsibility on the political representatives to see their role as facilitating citizens' self government through an open, deliberative process in the Parliament. It is difficult to determine how well politicians uphold democratic values because of the competitive views as to how democratic values ought to be translated into institutional form. In order to see how well politicians are fulfilling their role morality of upholding democratic values, some other sort of criteria are required which may help in making such assessments and which do not rely on partisan views. Two sets of criteria are developed - one set is derived from the deliberative nature of representation and the other set is embedded in the idea of institutional accountability. These sets of criteria are applied in three different stories in order to assess the action of politicians but also to point to areas for practical reform which may support politicians to fulfil their role morality.
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ItemMediating risks : investigating the emergence of court ADR through the risk society paradigm( 2007)In the US, England and Australia alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been increasingly employed as integral component in the handling and disposal of garden-variety civil cases. This thesis examines the quality and character of changes brought about through the uptake and continued use of ADR in the courts, a configuration that I refer to as Court ADR, in non-family law cases. Ulrich Beck's risk society paradigm provides the theoretical lens through which those changes in the courts are to be understood. In short, Beck claims that institutions and individuals' relationships to those institutions are transforming in contemporary societies, a transformation that is organised by and around risk. According to Beck, these transformations, while partial and incomplete, describe how the fundamental structures that generate and maintain society redound and confront their very foundations, a process that Beck refers to as reflexive modernisation. Moreover, individuals' relationships with institutions are caught up with such transformations. Beck describes this through his concepts of individualisation, whereby individuals are increasingly invited to make decisions regarding particular risks, which are simultaneously enabled and constrained by expert systems. I argue that these two central risk society conceptualisations - reflexive modernisation and individualisation - provide an informed theoretical framework for understanding those transformations in certain US, English and Australian courts as they relate to Court ADR. With the institutional emergence of Court ADR, and the growth of court-sponsored mediation in particular, the rationale underlying its development and continued use can be understood through the risk society paradigm. In terms of reflexive modernisation, the process of producing legal goods as they take shape in a judgement has and continues to produce negative side-effects, including expense, delay, undue complexity and limited accessibility to the courts themselves. One result is the emergence of Court ADR, which provides new procedures to structurally address many of those negative side-effects generated when legal goods are produced through processed that are oriented around adversarial adjudication. The emergence of Court ADR evidences the qualities and characteristics of individualisation insofar as litigants are invited into new decision-making spaces, inclusive of court-sponsored choices over whether arbitration or mediation might be more appropriate to handle and dispose of the case, as well as the attendant decisions once mediation, arbitration or other alternative processes are selected. Moreover, while litigants' entry into these spaces is enabled by legal actors and systems, they are simultaneously constrained. In short, Beck's risk society paradigm provides clarity with respect to how those alternative practices themselves have been legalised when used to handle and dispose of garden variety civil cases in the US, English and Australian courts.
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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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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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ItemWith my needle: embroidery samplers in colonial Australia( 2008)This thesis examines a group of more than one hundred needlework samplers stitched in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century. It uses them as documents of social history to examine the lives of individual girls and women during that time, and to trace changing expectations of girls, especially in the later decades of the century. Although there are many individual stories that can illuminate certain aspects of Australian history such as migration, settlement, and death and mourning, these samplers are most useful as documents in the examination of girls' education and the social expectations transmitted through the education system. It addresses the contradiction between the sampler's continuing presence in girls' schooling and the increasing irrelevance of the skills embodied in it. The thesis argues that needlework samplers retained their place in girls' education well into the twentieth century because of their significance as symbols of feminine accomplishment. They were physical expressions of a definition of respectability that was based on the `feminine ideal' of the nineteenth century and allayed anxiety about girls' involvement in formal schooling.
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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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ItemChrist and the Cold War: an exploration of the political activism of the Reverends Frank Hartley, Alfred Dickie and Victor James, 1942-1972( 2007)This thesis argues that previous accounts have oversimplified the lives of the Reverends Alf Dickie, Frank Hartley and Victor James, three prominent, Melbourne-based peace activists during the Cold War. They have been seen as fellow-travellers or apologists for the communist-dominated peace movement, at the expense of any consideration of why they were drawn to such a role. A central aim is to demonstrate that a personally derived understanding of religious duty dominated the political activism of these three men. It begins by exploring how the early political and economic crises experienced by each individual shaped a conviction that radical, progressive politics were a true expression of faith. It goes on to show that such beliefs were at first unremarkable in post-war Australia. With the onset of the Cold War, however, opinion turned away from such optimism and left the three clergymen isolated and embattled. This thesis shows that the religious foundations for their political activism fostered a notion of prophetic duty, so that the political shift produced obduracy on their part. Their interpretation of duty left them no room for political compromise or negotiation. The ensuing conflict served to confirm a sense of righteousness born of suffering and to entrench further their dogmatic approach to political questions. It is suggested that Dickie, Hartley and James increasingly adopted a Manichaean interpretation, rooted in theology, of both international and domestic politics. This dualism significantly influenced their interpretation of Cold War crises, combatants and actors, and its ramifications are examined. By merging politics and theology, all three men came to ignore uncomfortable political facts. As well as exploring the disadvantages of their politico-theological rigidity, this thesis also acknowledges its benefits. Methodist and Presbyterian Church reactions to the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament, held in 1959, are examined and it is demonstrated that by this time the Churches had begun to return to a position of support for the activism of Dickie and Hartley. This change continued into the 1960s, and I show that at the time of Gough Whitlam's 1972 election victory, the political mood of the Churches and society in general returned to meet that of Dickie and Hartley (though not James), which had remained essentially consistent since the end of the Second World War.
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ItemBroken promises: Aboriginal education in south-eastern Australia, 1837-1937( 2008)This thesis is a comparative study of the education of Aboriginal children from 1837-1937 in the colonies (later states) of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, which together form the south-eastern, and most heavily settled, portion of the Australian continent. It explores early missionary education, the consolidation of colonial authorities' control over schools and the shift to government-run education and training for Aboriginal children of mixed-descent in particular, as part of wider ‘assimilation’ programs. It also pays attention to Aboriginal responses to, protests about, and demands for education throughout this period of rapid change. The thesis demonstrates that missionary, colonial and government attempts to educate Aboriginal people in the south-east constituted an attempt to transform Aboriginal people's subjectivity to suit various aims: for conversion to Christianity, for colonial control, or for training for ‘useful’ purposes. The thesis argues, however, that these attempts constituted a ‘broken promise’ to Aboriginal people. The promise was, that once educated, Aboriginal people might join and participate in colonial society. Instead, they were relegated to its economic and geographical fringes, dispossessed as settlers spread across their land and accorded only liminal positions in the settler-colonies and later, states of the Australian Commonwealth. Temporally, this thesis is bound by two government reports which were influential in the development of colonial and state governance of Aboriginal people. The first is the 1837 British Parliament's Select Committee on Aborigines: British Settlements report; the second, published exactly one hundred years later, is the Australian intergovernmental Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of State Aboriginal Authorities of 1937. The thesis also makes use of extensive missionary and government archival material from the south-east. As the first multi-state Aboriginal education history, this thesis offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-Aboriginal relations in Australia as well as interrogating the reasons for the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Aboriginal welfare policy. It places this study within a broader transimperial and transnational framework of colonialism, empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, demonstrating that the education of Aboriginal children was not a single project with a single aim. Rather, it constituted a multitude of approaches, sometimes disparate, formed in response to a broad rubric of colonisation and empire as well as local specificities and situations. In doing this, the thesis engages with the significant methodological challenge of historicising post-contact Aboriginal education, an aspect of the colonial project which was, for Aboriginal people in the south-east, both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously.