School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA history of Churchill Island: settlement, land use and the making of a heritage site( 2015)This thesis utilises a public history approach to respond to the desires of the project’s public stakeholders to obtain a rigorous and detailed history of Churchill Island, and to examine its nature as a heritage site. It examines how Churchill Island has been variously imagined and used to make a permanent settler colonial space. In doing so it argues that the history of the island offers a rich example of the complexity of settlement in Victoria. An exploration of the intersections between the practices of community engagement, academia and history, the thesis responds to the challenges thrown up by the History Wars and the Churchill Island Project by making a history of settlement that is both academically critical and publicly accepted.
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ItemThe civilisation of Port Phillip( 2014)In understanding their place in the Port Phillip District, free settlers were pulled between the European legacy of the Enlightenment and the Australian experience of brutal encounters, in which those in power deployed violence against both Aboriginal people and convicts. Somewhere between these two sources of understanding lay the ideologies of Port Phillip’s free settlers. This thesis contends that a close examination of the colonial archive reveals the ideologies of Port Phillip’s free settlers. By identifying the specific intricacies of these settler ideologies, we can achieve a better understanding of the white settlement of the District. This thesis uses the lenses of rhetoric and violence to identify and understand free settler ideologies. It analyses settler statements about their role in the District using Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘mythologies’—statements of purported fact that mask ideological positions. Slavoj Žižek’s breakdown of violence into three separate forms helps conceptualise the realities of the early settlement period, and creates new and productive understandings about violence in the Australian colonies. The thesis applies these theoretical tools to a series of incidents and individuals of Port Phillip. It contends that these seemingly insignificant points of history actually reveal much about the early District, including imagined futures, ideological struggle, and intellectual debate. In different contexts, free settlers defined themselves against Aboriginal people, government officials, and convict-class labourers, and they also expressed their aspirations for the future of the District. Free settler rhetoric in the Port Phillip District established and maintained a settler polity in southeastern Australia whose influence continues to be felt today. Combining a re-reading of the colonial archive with new historiographical methods and an extensive review of the existing literature, this thesis upends conventional progress narratives, and in their place presents a truer picture of what free settlers termed the civilisation of Port Phillip.
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ItemAcknowledge no frontier: the creation and demise of New Zealand's provinces, 1853-76( 2013)This thesis explores the creation and demise of New Zealand’s provincial system of government, active between 1853 and 1876. When founded, the provinces wielded considerable political power, yet twenty-two years later a bill for their abolition easily passed the central parliament. My thesis seeks to explain the origins and evolution of the provinces and why they were so readily abolished. Other British settler societies have maintained various forms of state or provincial governments, and New Zealand’s evolution to unitary statehood demands justification. Many competing explanations have been advanced, from the centralising consequences of warfare to forestry policy, financial insolvency to sheer geographic inevitability. I find that public works, particularly railways, underpinned abolition. Railways were the leading technology of the Victorian era and played a considerable role in reshaping society. This was as true in New Zealand as it was in Britain. Provincial governance was underpinned by two basic tasks: promotion of settlement in the young New Zealand colony by immigration and public works. The failure of the provinces to perform these tasks condemned them, and I demonstrate that previous explanations for abolition were either less significant than public works policy or, in the case of the provinces’ financial plight, were created to a considerable degree by it. Public works and the means of communication within New Zealand provide a continuous thread from the creation of the provinces to their abolition. The design of the provincial system was shaped by the peculiar needs and isolation of the late 1840s rather than by any ideological motivation for a permanent tier of government. Once the provinces were operational, their inability to satisfy settler needs and demands shaped a series of major events that culminated in abolition. The desire for railways, roads, harbour works, and other improvements caused dissatisfaction with the original six provinces from the late 1850s and the creation of new provinces to administer disaffected hinterlands. Reckless investment in railways led to a total prohibition on provincial borrowing in 1867, effectively halting public works development. When the central government took the lead with immigration and public works from 1870 and rapidly achieved success, the provinces were deprived of their key functions and abolition was inevitable.
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ItemColouring within the lines: settler colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station, 1888-1960s( 2010)This thesis presents the New South Wales Aboriginal station, Cummeragunja, as a complex site of exchange within a context of settler colonialism in south-east Australia, from its official commencement in 1888 through to the 1960s, by which time the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board had ceased to manage it and the Cummeragunja residents regained land previously leased to neighbouring farmers. Using a variety of sources, including oral testimonies, this thesis reveals the competing interests of residents, settler governments, scientific and religious organisations and members of nearby settler communities in the Cummeragunja station. While many in these non-Aboriginal groups sought fairness in their interactions with the Indigenous people of Cummeragunja, much of their behaviour reinforced Cummeragunja’s marginalisation. Importantly, this thesis also shows the unwavering attachment of this community’s members to their right to fair and equal treatment as they dealt with the members of these non-Aboriginal groups – managers, officials, settlers, scientists, missionaries and employers – in the daily rounds of school and religious observance, in waged and unwaged work, and in leisure pursuits. In doing so, the thesis enhances contemporary understanding of the Cummeragunja community’s determined claim to the station’s site and its defence of its rights over this seventy-five period, this latter defence most famously reflected in the 1939 walk-off across the Murray River into Victoria. It reveals Aboriginal people sustaining their sense of worth and dignity amidstsettler discrimination, as they sought the wider opportunities that settler society promised, while maintaining their commitment to their families, their community, their culture and their land: their heritage.