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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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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ItemThe emergence of a bayside suburb: Sandringham, Victoria c. 1850-1900( 1971-03)The past neglect of the Australian city by historians is frequently the subject of lament. The neglect can be highlighted by noting that not only has the impact of the city been generally avoided in Australian historiography despite its overarching importance but also by the fact that Melbourne and Sydney still lack biographies. By contrast, major British and United States cities have had substantial treatment. Therefore, in the circumstance of very considerable gaps in Australian urban historiography, there is probably little need to justify a research topic which tackles the emergence of Sandringham, a Melbourne suburb in the late 19th century. Apart from the narrow and local purpose of providing a means by which local residents can further identify themselves with their community, a suburb history can provide a case study in urbanization which can be of relevance to the whole field of urban history and more specifically, it can enrich the written history of the city of which it is part.
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 1987-05)This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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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.
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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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ItemIn her gift: activism and altruism in Australian women's philanthropy 1880-2005( 2008)This thesis examines the experiences of Australian women philanthropists who donated money to social causes and public institutions in the decades from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a colonial society where wealth generation and its disposal was essentially the province of men, a small but significant number of women who were wives and daughters of men of substance found themselves in a position to use family resources for their own chosen philanthropic ends. They did so in a context of colonial women's activism through women's associations, and derived motivation from their religious faith. Australian women's philanthropy drew upon British and American traditions. The remarkable wealth generation of the industrialising United States underwrote philanthropic women's very considerable donations, deployed with a moral authority that was fostered by evangelical Protestantism. Likewise, in Britain, evangelical work was supplemented by funding from elite wealthy women who could access familial fortunes. Australian women's philanthropy was distinctive because, despite the country's comparatively modest prosperity, the energetic and pragmatic association of women around philanthropic causes, often with a religious imperative, emboldened women of independent means to become exceptional givers. In the first half of the twentieth century, possibilities for women's active involvement in philanthropy expanded. Women in Australia gained political citizenship for federal elections in 1902, and by 1908, had been awarded political rights in each state. The 'new woman citizen' was able to assume a stronger profile in the workforce, in the professions and in business; social change that was mirrored in the activism of women philanthropists. Rapid economic growth after World War Two, and a developing national consciousness of the importance of philanthropic endeavours saw the backgrounds of women philanthropists diversify, just as a new women's movement arose to challenge and reshape women's public roles. There are undeniable continuities in women's philanthropy from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in direct giving and fundraising, in commitment to women's causes, and in the influence of religion. Nevertheless, by 2005, women were sustaining an unprecedented and outstanding presence, not only as individual philanthropists, but in the highest levels of decision-making in an arena increasingly referred to as the 'third sector' of the economy. They have assumed a central role in the growing number of Australian philanthropic foundations and in the shaping of policies on funding for social change. Moreover there are clear signs that the influence of women in philanthropy, as in other public spheres including mainstream politics, will amplify in future. In investigating the development of women's philanthropy in Australia, with a focus on those who had money within their gift, this thesis profiles over fifty women with specific reference to Mrs Anne Bon, Janet Lady Clarke, Mrs Ivy Brookes, Dr Una Porter, Ms Barbara Blackman, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, and Ms Jill Reichstein.
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ItemA history of the Australian paper making industry 1818-1951( 1953)The most outstanding feature of the Australian paper industry is the rapid expansion which has taken place since 1936. Before the First World War, Australia’s population totalled about 4,000,000. By 1939 the population had risen to about 7,000,000. This increase in population, coupled with a rise in the per capita consumption of paper and boards, led to a considerably enlarged domestic market. At the same time new fields for the use of paper and board opened up, particularly in the packaging field. (From introduction)