School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Chinese in Victoria: a longterm survey( 1993)The thesis is divided into three parts. Part One is headed by a fairly broad historiographic review into past works on the Chinese in Australia. This is followed by a brief introduction to the historical and cultural background of the immigrants and the character of their migration. An examination of the passive and proudly in different responses of the Chinese to Victorian anti-Chinese legislation concludes this section. The stress of this final chapter is on the overall lack of influence of the White Australian Policy on the behaviour of the Chinese. Part Two examines the sojourning sentiments of the Chinese and how they affected the sex and age distribution of the population, their choice and method of work, their accommodation and quality of life. Part Three begins by contrasting the impact of science and technology on Australia and China and the focus will be on China’s peripheral position in the industrial world. The insecurity of the Chinese in the industrialising environment of Australia will be considered. This will be contrasted by the more accommodating cultural milieu of Southeast Asia and the important thread of Chinese culture and traditions throughout the region’s history. The importance of the ‘modified’ or ‘mixed’ version of the family business in assisting the rise of the Chinese in the Southeast Asian region will be discussed. The final part of the thesis will suggest that the decline of the Victorian Chinese in the four occupations of alluvial mining, furniture-making, market-gardening and laundering was significantly affected by an inflexible attitude to technology. It is argued that the Chinese did not apply science and advanced equipment when it was prudent to do so. The conclusion will summarise the main argument and suggest its relevance for the modern overseas Chinese communities.
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ItemMigration, work and community: Italian speakers in the Walhalla gold mining district 1865-1915( 2005-12)This thesis studies migration, work and community among Italian speakers in the Walhalla (situated in Victoria, Australia) gold mining district between 1865 and 1915, and analyzes the outcomes for those who either lived here for a time (as ‘sojourners’ in conventional historical parlance) or settled permanently in the district. It proposes to look way from the ‘big picture’ historical approach to Italian settlement in Australia, with its focus upon the large migrant communities in the capital cities, and instead examines the finer texture of small places and particular lives. The thesis offers a reconstructed history of Walhalla’s Italian community that challenges the prevailing emphasis of the district’s Anglo-centric history by using seemingly small and ‘insignificant’ events in order to develop broader themes which test and re-define ‘big picture’ history. In doing so, the thesis seeks to push the boundaries of understanding about what early Italians may have made of their lives, in terms of the experiences of specific individuals and family groups. Firstly, the thesis questions the adequacy of contemporary understanding of what it means ‘to migrate’, and its use in historical analysis. It employs the Walhalla study in order to re-assess and re-apply the term ‘migration’ so as to provide a broader and better understanding of its meaning to Italians in a nineteenth century context. Has the word ‘migration’ changed over time, or has its use oversimplified and formularized a complex and diverse process in time, place and belonging? Is there a useful place for re-applying the term in a more constructive and inclusive way? Secondly, the thesis re-examines and reconsiders the concepts of ‘migrant’, ‘sojourner’ and ‘work/migrant cluster’ and their application in our historiography. In particular, it focuses on the role of sojourners and their place within the migration process. A distinction between ‘migrant’ and ‘sojourner’ can only be drawn artificially and with hindsight and the use of these expressions in conventional historiography is unhelpful. Their application is problematic as strategies put into place prior to emigration could shift after arrival and the decision to settle permanently could be an imperceptible process made on an individual basis over time. Thirdly, the thesis evaluates Charles Price’s well-accepted theory that migrant settlements often developed in certain Australian districts because pioneer migrants were involved in the same type of work which, in turn, led to the ‘accidental’ development of migrant communities. Should Price’s theory be re-formulated to address the possibility that early migrant settlements may have been more complex than previously understood, and that there were many facets contributing to the evolution of a migrant community not exclusively attributable to one occupational group? Fourthly, the thesis reviews and examines the concept of ‘community’, its construction and what it may have meant to an early settler society and Italians within it. It explores the possibility that our national history may have been more inclusive, fluid and open ended than previously understood and that to completely separate, or isolate, different national or ethnic groups may be an incorrect modelling of early Victorian settlements. The thesis questions whether a broader theory should be applied to challenge the idea of a dominant British versus a non-British position towards the construction of ‘community’. By re-constructing an Italian community, the thesis teases out the dynamics at work within the Italian migrant settlement and its interaction and dialogue with Walhalla’s wider society. My thesis emphasizes the relevance of micro-studies of this nature and its findings need to be extended by studies of other minority groups in other small places. Their accumulated implications should influence the broader historical understanding of the national and international patterns of Italian immigrant settlement in Australia and other New World countries.
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ItemWithout natural protectors: histories of deserted and destitute colonial women in Victoria 1850-1865( 1995)This thesis combines a social history of deserted wives with a cultural history of wife desertion. It does so within a particular historical moment, the Victorian gold-rush era, when there was much attention given to wife desertion as a pressing social problem. The study covers the years between 1850, the eve of gold discovery in Victoria, and the mid-1860s, by which time the acute social disturbances associated with the gold rushes had subsided, and the state had enacted its first major piece of welfare legislation, the 1864 Neglected and Criminal Children's Act. The central argument of this thesis is that, in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria, there developed a radical disjunction between the material needs of deserted wives and the cultural need to resolve the tensions and erase the contradictions invoked by their presence. This influenced both the forms of assistance available to deserted wives and the ways in which others imagined the amelioration of their condition. The first section of the thesis explores how deserted wives and their children emerged as the principal category of the colonial poor in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Although deserted wives are the main subjects of the thesis, they were not the only colonial women solely responsible for their dependent children. I also consider widows and single women with children, who shared the need to provide support for their families. The second part of the thesis is a detailed examination of the survival strategies undertaken by impoverished deserted wives, widows and single women with children. It draws on the traditions of social and welfare history and explores the opportunities for agency that existed in colonial women's interactions with private charitable societies and institutions. The thesis also challenges some of these historiographical traditions, which are focused on the dominance of private charitable effort, by undertaking a close analysis of the relationships between poor white women and officers of the state. A study of the operation of the Deserted Wives and Children Act and of the broader interactions between magistrates, police and destitute supplicants at the court house highlights the complex and ambiguous association between women and the state. In the third section of the thesis, entitled 'The Politics of Welfare', I move beyond daily survival strategies to examine how these interactions led to the formation of authorities on welfare matters in the colony and created public comment on wife desertion. Although widows and single women with children also faced problems in providing for their families, their fate, unlike that of deserted wives, did not capture the public imagination. Middle-class reformers and charity groups highlighted the prevalence of family desertion in ways that revealed as much about their own social and cultural anxieties as they did about the problems faced by deserted wives. The section examines the place of deserted wives in the rhetoric of two reform movements: the campaign for industrial schools, which culminated in the passing of the Neglected and Criminal Children's Act, and the land reform movement. Deserted wives were powerful cultural symbols of the dislocations of gold discovery, and of urban poverty, that reformers appropriated and used for their own ends.
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ItemFraming Fitzroy: contesting and (de)constructing place and identity in a Melbourne suburb( 2002)This thesis examines the ways in which Melbourne's 'worst suburb', Fitzroy, was constructed, both physically and culturally, from the Great Depression of the 1930s until the gentrification of the suburb in the early 1970s. The thesis argues that an array of institutions, extending from social welfare and slum reform groups to the media and a variety of policing agencies, relentlessly constructed Fitzroy as the site of social evil in Melbourne. It examines the variety of texts, both written and visual, that were utilised to construct a singular and negative representation of Fitzroy that legitimated particular forms of intervention. The thesis critiques and contests this representation through an analysis of the lives of those who lived in Fitzroy in the period covered by this thesis and by using a variety of original sources, including the testimonies of those who lived and worked in Fitzroy. It is a central argument of this thesis that Fitzroy was a place of complexity, vitality and cultural value for those who lived there.
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ItemThe acceptable face of feminism: the National Council of Women of Victoria, 1902-18( 1988)This study focuses on the broad question of post-suffrage feminist activity in Melbourne. When contrasted with the political ferment and air of sexual confrontation which characterised women's struggle for the vote, the post-suffrage period has been seen to represent an acceptance by women of traditional sexual roles and gender stereotypes. Underlying this general view of the period, however, is a complex set of historical factors. It is argued here that the fate of first-wave feminism in Victoria can be more clearly understood through an analysis of the composition and activities of the most broadly-based women's organisation of the early twentieth century the National Council of Women of Victoria. Officially formed in 1902 and continuing today, the National Council of Women is an umbrella organisation for a large and diverse number of affiliated women's gro.ups. From its inception, the Council functioned as a political lobby group, attempting to influence local, state and federal government on issues affecting women, children "and humanity in general". In the early twentieth century, the Council had connections with most publicly active women's groups in Melbourne. These ranged from the most radically feminist of the suffrage societies to the most conservative, both politically and in terms of feminism, of upper:"'class philanthropic organisations. The size and scope of activity of the National Council of Women (hereafter NCW) make its historical significance clear. (From Introduction)
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ItemCharity and evangelisation: the Melbourne City Mission 1854-1914( 1986)It has become so commonly held as almost to be axiomatic among recent Australian historians, that the act of evangelising and giving charity to people, is essentially an act of control and discipline by powerful people in a society over those who have little power. This thesis, in making a detailed examination of the Melbourne City Mission from 1854 to 1914, along with a smaller study of the Elizabeth Fry Retreat in the late 1880s, offers a substantial challenge to any over-simple application of this concept. In addition, it provides a new assessment of the roles of women of all classes, as they are revealed in acts of charitable evangelism. The introduction establishes the state of historiography in Australia and to a lesser extent, overseas, in the field of evangelical and charity history. Chapters 1 and 2 make a general survey of the rise of evangelical charity in Great Britain and in Melbourne in the nineteenth century, and provide a detailed introduction to the City Mission movement, and the Melbourne City Mission in particular. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 offer a close investigation of the personnel involved in MCM work in Melbourne: the men and women who founded and administered the Mission, its missionaries, and its clients. Chapters 6 and 7 look at the MCM at work. Chapter 6 follows its history in the suburb of Collingwood as a succession of missionaries worked there, while Chapter 7 concentrates on the career of one missionary, William Hall in Prahran. Chapter 8 and 9 look particularly at prostitution and the lot of women who served gaol sentences. Chapter 8 describes and assesses the efforts of City Missionaries to help prostitutes in the 1870s. Chapter 9 looks at charitable responses in the 1880s, to women coming out of gaol, in the work of Sarah Swinborn and her institution, The Elizabeth Fry Retreat, and of a public charity, the Victorian Discharged Prisoners Aid Society. The conclusion offers revision of current ideas in many key aspects of charity history.