School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemGroups in Victorian politics, 1889-1894( 1963-12)To most Australian historians, the political history of Victoria during the final decades of the nineteenth century is a closed book. Except for the considerable attention bestowed on the labor party, which was after all of minor importance in Victoria until the early years of this century, few historians indeed have ventured to comment even briefly on this colony’s political life.
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ItemThe society of capital: an interpretation of the New Deal 1932-40( 1986)“Epimenides did not practice divination about the future; only about the obscurities of the past”. With this statement Aristotle gives us a rare glimpse onto the earliest origins of historical thought. The possibility of ‘divining the past’, which must sound quaint to modern ears, was quite familiar to Greek authors. Indeed, they believed that Historis was the daughter of the blind prophet Teiresias – almost as if to lay stress on the relation between present and future and its dependence on the past. Epimenides is said to have used his knowledge of the past to purify the souls of his contemporaries and allow them to act freely in future. This essay also is an exercise in historical interpretation: it is a divination of the past. The work of interpretation can only inform the actions of human beings; it cannot hope to determine them like any Philosophia Perennis. But interpretation is vital to those who wish history to remain a crucible of political action rather than to become a receptacle of sterile antiquities. The well known study by Theda Skocpol on the New Deal, among others, shows that it is possible even for a thesis of similar length to ours, wholly based on published sources, to make original contributions to this topic. Such studies are all the more defensible when applied to those periods that have been investigated in great detail and for which there is ample documentation. The New Deal – that is the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency that runs from 1932 to 1940 – has received much attention from historians, and theories have abounded as to its real significance. Their concern is understandable: the New Deal was a pioneering political response, however improvised and tentative, to the catastrophic economic crisis of the 1930s that swept away the old capitalist order with its self-regulating market and negative State. For the first time in its history, the government of the United States sought to regulate the capitalist economy, deploying for the purpose a vast array of administrative agencies that transformed it into a powerful centralized State. The problem with nearly all existing accounts of the period is that they run faithfully along the conceptual course set by capitalist relation of production – a fact not confined to the more apologetic works that highlight the ‘positive’ reforms of the ‘Roosevelt Revolution’, but extending to those New Left accounts that accuse the New Dealers of not going far enough. (From Introduction)
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ItemThe Queensland Labour governments, 1915-1929( 1954)This thesis is a study of the first long period of Queensland Labour Governments. It does not attempt, except in brief outline, to review the work of the Governments as a whole. Its purpose is much narrower: to explain why by 1929 Queensland Labour had become so “stale” that it lost even the electoral support of sections of its traditional supporters. It suggests that this may have been due primarily to inability to maintain the distinctive Labour character and the aggressive social-reformism of the earlier years, and that light is thrown on the reasons for this inability by three episodes — failure to secure a London loan i 1920, controversy from 1922 to 1926 over the demand for legislative action to increase the basic wage and shorten the working week, and the railway lockout of 1927. Parts III-V, the main body of the thesis, are devoted to an examination of these episodes and their significance. Parts I and II are by way of introduction. Part IV attempts to relate this Queensland experience to some general problems of social-democracy.
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ItemInstability in governments and parties in Victoria in the 1920s( 1975)While many books and theses have been written about Federal politics, in the 1920s, and about Federal political figures, nothing substantial has yet been written about the Victorian Politics in the same period. Federal politics, as happened repeatedly in the events of the 1920s, have overshadowed the State in the historiography of the period also. The consequence for the researcher is a complete dearth of secondary material. In the absence of any specific historical account of Victoria in the 1920s, secondary source material amounts to: brief references in the fast chronological gallop of a Centennial History; the early years of a biography of a politician who made his mark in Federal politics; or the analysis, usually statistical, of a political scientist who seeks rather to generalise about the Australian scene as a whole. Unfortunately, the same concentration on Federal politics also affects the survival of manuscript material. Very few of the Victorian politicians or their associates have left private papers. The papers of H.W.S. Lawson, Premier 1918-24, were burnt by his son when he died in 1952. The very few who have left papers seem to have retained letters of sympathy or congratulation to the exclusion of much else. This was certainly the case with Sir William McPherson, M.L.A. 1913-1930, and Premier 1928-29. Thus, to gain clues about the behind-the-scenes negotiations and events of the period has been extremely difficult. The complete disappearance of all the official papers of the Nationalist Party compounds the difficulty, the more because they were less inclined than the Country Party or the Labor Party to air their internal dealings in public. The papers of F.W. Eggleston and J. Hume Cook, in the National Library, Canberra, proved invaluable for the period 1917-1924, in the Nationalist Party, but there are no similar sources for the second half of the decade. This shortage of manuscript material has entailed a concentration on newspapers and parliamentary material. The events of Victorian politics, since Federation, but particularly since 1914, have been shrouded in obscurity. My first task was the essential one of finding out what actually happened. For events in the Country Party, B.D. Graham’s “The Formation of the Australian Country Parties” was invaluable. In the absence of any work at all on the Victorian Nationalist Party, I have had to trace the emergence of the Victorian Party in the 1901-17 period and before, as well as its behaviour in the decade of the 1920s. This has meant, in this thesis, a much longer account of the role of the Nationalist Party, than of the Country Party – not because the Nationalist Party was necessarily more important in the political instability of the period, but simply because so much less has previously been know about it. (From Introduction)
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ItemG.E. Morrison: political adviser to Yuan Shih-kái, President of the Republic of China, 1912-1916( 1975)Foreign advisers in China in the twentieth century were no new phenomenon. Ever since the West had made contact with China, certain men, often motivated by a sense of superiority and willingness to share their knowledge and expertise, saw that China stood totally isolated from the Western experience and appeared in their eyes to be backward, degenerate, weak and greatly in need of their particular assistance and guidance. As Jonathan Spence has clearly pointed out, though the sorts of foreign advisers who went to China differed considerably, most developed an emotional connection with China and, despite a lack of encouragement or even opposition, continued long in the service of the Chinese in an endeavour to raise the standards to that country to those of the Western world. George Ernest Morrison was certainly no exception as Cyril Pearl has to some extent shown in his examination of Morrison’s diaries and correspondence, Morrison was a particularly adventurous man, a person of tremendous energy and vitality, continually cognisant of China’s backwardness and the state she could, with his advice and assistance achieve. Indeed, he sustained a particularly vivid and coloured vision for the future of China. The advantage in opening out the study of Morrison in this period is twofold. In the first instance, Morrison has left to the historian a large amount of material, a collection which began with his personal diary as a schoolboy in Australia. Slicing into his papers for this period allows us to develop a reliable picture of the values, attitude and expectations of the Westerners towards China and Chinese officials, and in turn some conception of the attitude the Chinese took towards their foreign employees and Westerners in China as a whole. These attitudes very much mirror the outstanding differences between the still traditionalistic Eastern monolith and the progressive Western juggernaut. The other reason for studying Morrison is that through him we may come to a better understanding of the reasons for the failure of Yuan Shih-k’ai to build upon the 1911 revolution and to make the Chinese quasi-western political experiment a success. The established tradition of scholarship largely bulks in opposition to Yuan Shih-k’ai; he was not involved in the revolution of 1911 and the expulsion of the Manchu regime from China. Yet, once elected President of the new Republic, Yuan ousted the original revolutionaries from their place in the Republic and began to lay a careful scheme to secure himself and his descendants the next monarchy in China’s long established dynastic history. A point strongly emphasised in the traitor theory is the scheming of Yuan as, from 1913 on, he openly eliminated all political opposition to his rule. As a close contemporary of Yuan Shih-k’ai, we may see through the medium of Morrison just how Morrison personally and Westerners in China generally reacted to Yuan’s personal form of power politics.