School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemCollection, collation & creation: girls and their material culture Victoria, 1870-1910( 2018)The thesis broadly explores the lives of girls who resided in the colony/state of Victoria, Australia between 1870 and 1910. A largely understudied and underappreciated area of historical study, the thesis takes a broad scope. Three case studies- urban girls’ collection of dolls, rural girls’ collation of scrapbooks, and Indigenous Victorian girls’ creation of fibrecraft- illustrate that tangible material culture can serve as evidence for intangible and marginalised histories. It overarchingly contended that girls, in any historical period, can express agency and resilience, individuality and creativity, through their material culture. In interacting with their day-to-day, seemingly mundane things, girls challenged, however subtly, repressive societal ideals that attempted to circumscribe their identities and their lives.
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ItemBeyond boycotts: Melbourne's response to Japanese aggression in China, 1937-1939( 2018)University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) History Thesis.
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ItemCreating space to listen: museums, participation and intercultural dialogue( 2018)This thesis examines the emergence, practice, and social meaning of intercultural dialogue as participatory programming in museums. While intercultural dialogue takes many forms in museums, the thesis focuses on projects that invite participants to create digital content in response to one another on topics related to identity, cultural diversity, and racism. The thesis presents a central case study of a contemporary anti-racist museum project – ‘Talking Difference’ – produced by the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, which facilitated, documented, and presented dialogue between participants. It draws on the personal experience of the author as a previous staff member on Talking Difference, as well as written and visual documentation, interviews with project staff, and analysis of content produced. Engaging with the field of museum studies, the thesis argues that dialogue projects like Talking Difference have come to prominence as museums adapt their traditional governmental role to contemporary societies where engagement with institutions is characterised by reflexivity and participation. Given this, the thesis argues that participatory programs should challenge the idea that museums can provide neutral forums for dialogue. Instead, dialogic museum practice may be more transformative if museums embrace their role of promoting social justice as third parties in the dialogue they facilitate. This entails not only encouraging participants to produce affecting personal accounts but also facilitating engagement with the complex social and historical contexts within which these accounts emerge. To this end, museums should prioritise listening, and facilitate the negotiation of conflicting perspectives in addition to providing platforms for their co-presentation. In acknowledgement of the field of practices within which such work takes place, the thesis argues that these interventions should be part of a broader suite of efforts to decolonise museum practice.
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ItemAt the intersection of heritage preservation, urban transformation, and everyday life in the twentieth-century Australian city( 2018)This thesis offers a fresh global urban history of the Australian city, its heritage places, and the preservationists who shaped those places. During the twentieth century, Australian urban preservationists – such as architects and planners, boosters and policymakers, heritage consultants and regulators, and activists and everyday people – valued and sought to safeguard many kinds of urban places, comprising buildings, streets, precincts and suburbs and invoking communities, histories, memories and stories. From at least the 1900s, alongside shifts in Europe, North America and elsewhere, the leading impulses for preserving urban heritage – erasure, boosterist, historical, visual and reformist – forming identity and community – resonated in Australia’s modernising cities. During the postwar period (1940s–60s), particularly in the rapidly growing capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, the pursuit of modern urbanism meant city-shapers tended to erase existing environments. Urban Australians still embraced their heritage places, and preservationists furthered the urban heritage processes that drove the 1960s–80s transnational ‘heroic period of conservation’ and the Australian heritage movement. A watershed was the Whitlam Government’s Inquiry into the National Estate (1973–74), which produced an Australian conception for heritage as progressive, democratic, interventionist and integrated. Heritage regimes and their principles and practices were refigured, but contrary to the activists’ demands, preservation never triumphed over other urban priorities. In the 1980s–90s, nevertheless, preservation was strikingly integrated into CBDs and suburbs and their social processes and built forms. Employing rich social history sources and drawing on the insights of urban and heritage studies, this thesis argues that across the twentieth-century Australian city, urban and heritage processes were co-constitutive, relational and entangled. In this study, heritage preservation becomes an integral urban historical process with the potential to enhance cities, places and urban life.
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ItemI was a good-time Charlie: social dance and Chinese community life in Sydney and Melbourne, 1850s-1970s( 2016)A vibrant calendar of balls and dances has long been at the heart of Chinese-Australian community life. It was at these dances that community members most powerfully experimented with and articulated what it meant to be a Chinese Australian across dimensions of race, gender and class. This thesis traces the history of Chinese community life through various social events in Sydney and Melbourne over a period spanning roughly 120 years, using dance as a prism through which to offer new insights into the interplay of the material and the emotional in the lives of young Chinese Australians. It will do so first by examining the historical contexts which shaped the early motivations of Chinese Australians who participated in dance, determined the avenues through which they socialised collectively, influenced outsiders’ perceptions of Chinese community life, and lent social and political meanings to Chinese community activities. Subsequently, this thesis turns its focus to selected dances and Chinese community events which took place in Sydney and Melbourne, restoring to the centre of study events which have often been dismissed as peripheral to main theatres of historical action. In doing so, it illuminates the social, political and emotional ends which these events served and which in turn fuelled the strength of Chinese community social life in the period under study. It also provides insight into the experiences of Chinese-Australian youth, particularly Australian-born Chinese adolescent women, who were often vital participants, organisers and ambassadors within their communities. By demonstrating the varying and complex investments Chinese Australians made in their communities through their participation in these dances, this thesis challenges earlier scholarly assumptions that Chinese community life ebbed in vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. Towards these aims, this thesis draws upon a wide range of archived documentary and oral history sources, as well as numerous private documents, photographs, memoirs and correspondence to recover otherwise inaccessible aspects of Chinese-Australian social history.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 2015)Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.
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ItemChorus boys and tight-waisted young men: an exploration of Melbourne's camp subculture during the interwar period: 1919-1939( 2015)This thesis explores the male homosexual subculture of Melbourne between the two world wars. Both the societal structures and institutions which sought to curb or prosecute homosexual men (the law, the church, the medical profession and social attitudes), and the lived experience of the subculture, including meeting places, subcultural identifiers, and social groups will be examined. The manner in which the subculture developed and changed over the twenty year period will be explored.
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ItemThe performance of war: experiences in the city of Melbourne 1914-1918( 2015)The First World War (1914-1918) had complicated implications for the people in the city of Melbourne. The conflict has predominantly been described as Australia's first national engagement or awakening, yet this thesis argues that, the ways in which the majority of people on the home-front experienced the conflict was in the contexts of their local communities, and for many, in their city. In participating in the conflict, the people of Melbourne performed varying roles in the war within different emotional communities. Performative methodologies will be used to explore how messages were manifested in the control of public spaces in the city, in displays of authority, and in expressions of citizenship and gender.
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ItemA dangerous incline: the Victorian Laundry Association and the Chinese Employment Bills of 1903 - 1907( 2013)Late in the evening on the 5th of June 1902, a group of white laundrymen from the Victorian Laundry Association (hereafter VLA) walked the streets of Melbourne investigating the working habits of local Chinese laundrymen. Dissatisfied with the performance of factory inspectors tasked with upholding the provisions of the 1896 Factories Act, the men had taken it upon themselves to keep Chinese workers in order, forming a ‘Flying Gang’ akin to Banjo Paterson’s evocation of railway maintenance workers. Prowling the deserted streets of Prahran and Windsor, the three men visited Chinese laundries in the area without warning, hoping to secure evidence of work being undertaken outside of legal hours. (From Introduction)
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ItemTourist guidebooks and mapping the metropolis: leisure, recreation and public social space in late nineteenth-century Melbourne 1870-1910( 2014)This thesis explores the social and cultural landscape of late nineteenth-century Melbourne, focusing particularly on urban forms of recreation and leisure and how these pursuits reflected key societal wide values and characteristics.