School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemSpectacular! Spectacular!: Cole's book arcade, Melbourne: 1863 to 1927( 2008)This thesis will investigate Cole's Book Arcade, which operated in Melbourne's Bourke Street from 1863 to 1927. Cole's Book Arcade provides a case study with which to interpret social and cultural practices occurring in the context of Melbourne's retail and entertainment environment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cole's Book Arcade was a product of its time and location. The thesis argues that the Arcade is an example of how Melbourne's citizens experienced modernity and leisure in the city during this historic period. It is necessary to define the boundaries of this case study. The thesis will also employ the definitions and practicalities of public history to examine the place of the Cole's Book Arcade story within The changing face of Victoria exhibition at the State Library of Victoria. The notions of cultural landscape, modernity, leisure, the New-World city, urban history and material culture will be employed to consider the significance of the entertainment and entrepreneurial environment of Cole's Book Arcade. Since the early settlement of colonial Melbourne, Bourke Street had been a popular destination for city dwellers to find entertainment. By the late nineteenth-century, modern cultural landscapes were emerging within New World cities. E.W. Cole was an entrepreneur who tapped into the commercial interests of a general public who embraced the popular leisure activities with shopping as their focus. This case study of Cole's Book Arcade will provide the historical record with greater knowledge of the personalities and places responsible for motivating these processes and outcomes.
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ItemPicturing politics: cartoons of Melbourne's Labour Press, 1890-1919( 2008)This thesis undertakes a comprehensive survey of the cartoons published in Melbourne's labour press from 1890 to 1919. Through an examination of the picturing of labour politics, this thesis points to the role of social recognition and collective identification in the formation of the political labour movement. It is argued that the key icons of the Worker and Mr Fat embodied an esteemed identity, a labour collective self, which subsumed different forms of labour movement politics and presented a number of claims for rights and social recognition. In addition, these icons relied on contemporary standards of masculinity to give respectability to labour's new form of politics. The criticisms made in the cartoons of the commercial press are examined. These criticisms help show how the idea of the public was employed in the legitimisation of the labour politics. The representations of politicians are also explored. Conservative politicians were shown as hopelessly mired in their own particularity. In comparison with depictions of the generic Worker, the cartoons were ambivalent in their representations of labour movement politicians and the Labor Party. The cartoons also tapped directly into the historically contingent and varied discourses of race and nation. The nation was always defined by its working-class characteristics and labour's enemies were shown as inimical to genuine Australian values. While the cartoons rarely treated race as a subject, they did employ it as a tool in presenting other issues, in particular class and political enemies. There was a consistent pattern of depicting enemies—the Fatman, or conservative politicians—as less than white. Finally, allegorical women were far more commonly depicted than actual women. By consistently using the female form to represent things other than women, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge women in their own right, the labour movement cartoons failed to recognise women as a valid subject of politics. It is argued that this points to a misrecognition at the heart of labour politics.
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ItemTeaching imagination( 2009)This thesis is about the teaching imagination. By this term I refer to three things. First, the teaching imagination is how teachers define and practice imagination in their classrooms. Second, it is the imagination that teachers themselves use as they teach. And thirdly, it is the imagination I am taught to identify and enact for doing social science research. The thesis is based upon participant-observation research conducted in grade four (and some composite grade three/four) classrooms in primary schools in Melbourne, a city in the Australian state of Victoria. The research took me to five schools of different types: independent (or fee-paying); government (or state); Steiner (or Waldorf); special (for low IQ students); and Catholic. These five classrooms provide a range, not a sample: they suggest some ways of doing imagination. I do not claim a necessary link between school type and practices of imagination. In addition I conducted semi-structured interviews with each classroom’s teacher and asked that children do two tasks (to draw and to write about ‘a time you used your imagination’). From this research I write a thesis in two sections. In the first I work to re-imagine certain concepts central to studies of education and imagination. These include curriculum, classrooms, and ways of theorizing and defining imagination. In this section I develop a key theoretical idea: that the most recent Victorian curriculum is, and social science should be, governed by what I call a logic of realization. Key to this idea is that knowers must always be understood as participants in, not only observers of, the world. In the second section I write accounts of five case studies, each learning from a different classroom teacher about one way to understand and practice imagination. We meet imagination as creative transformation; imagination as thinking into other perspectives; imagination as representation; imagination as the ability to relate oneself to the people and materials one is surrounded by; and imagination as making connections and separations in thought. In each of these chapters I work to re-enact that imagination in my own writing. Using the concept of the ‘relational teacher’, one who flexibly responds to changing student needs and interests, I suggest that some of these imaginations are more suitable to a logic of realization than others.
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ItemGibraltar of the south: defending Victoria: an analysis of colonial defence in Victoria, Australia, 1851-1901( 2009)During the nineteenth century, defence was a major issue in Victoria and Australia, as indeed it was in other British colonies and the United Kingdom. Considerable pressure was brought to bear by London on the self-governing colonies to help provide for their own defence against internal unrest and also possible invasions or incursions by nations such as France, Russia and the United States. From 1851 until defence was handed over to the new Australian Commonwealth at Federation in 1901, the Victorian colonial government spent considerable energy and money fortifying parts of Port Phillip Bay and the western coastline as well as developing the first colonial navy within the British Empire. Citizens were invited to form volunteer corps in their local areas as a second tier of defence behind the Imperial troops stationed in Victoria. When the garrison of Imperial troops was withdrawn in 1870, these units of amateur citizen soldiers formed the basis of the colony’s defence force. Following years of indecision, ineptitude and ad hoc defence planning that had left the colony virtually defenceless, in 1883 Victoria finally adopted a professional approach to defending the colony. The new scheme of defence allowed for a complete re-organisation of not only the colony’s existing naval and military forces, but also the command structure and supporting services. For the first time an integrated defence scheme was established that co-ordinated the fixed defences (forts, batteries minefields) with the land and naval forces. Other original and unique aspects of the scheme included the appointment of the first Minister of Defence in the Australian colonies and the first colonial Council of Defence to oversee the joint defence program. All of this was achieved under the guidance of Imperial advisors who sought to integrate the colony’s defences into the wider Imperial context. This thesis seeks to analyse Victoria’s colonial defence scheme on a number of levels – firstly, the nature of the final defence scheme that was finally adopted in 1883 after years of vacillation, secondly, the effectiveness of the scheme in defending Victoria, thirdly, how the scheme linked to the greater Australasian and Imperial defence, and finally the political, economic, social and technological factors that shaped defence in Victoria during the second half of the nineteenth century.