School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.
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ItemIn their own words: locating generations of women in an Australian family, 1846 to 1990( 2010)This thesis examines selected texts across several generations in one middle-class Australian family to retrieve histories of so-called ordinary women whose lives are often invisible in mainstream history. The women’s life experiences that spanned geographically the Queensland outback to the city of Melbourne, were interspersed with interludes in Paris and England in the late 1880s, and Egypt and Salonica in the First World War. Relying on fragmentary sources including personal letters, photographs, daily work diaries, household accounts, postcards and other ephemera, and earlier family historians’ compilations, the thesis captures the complex web of relationships sustained through personal tragedies, deep affections and intermittent hostilities. The significance of women’s central place within the family emerges clearly while revealing the workings of class, gender and race. Despite the particular nature of these generational stories, nevertheless five case studies indicate how certain middle-class women experienced wider social changes on a remote cattle station in the Queensland bush, in hospital nursing in towns and cities, as expatriate colonials performing Australian identities at times of national emergence and within family life in a prestigious Melbourne suburb. The narratives of these individual women demonstrate intriguing aspects of the changing lives of Australian women played out the level of intimate everyday life.