School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
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’.
-
ItemAn age of certainty: three generations of Melbourne radicals, 1870-1988( 2001)This thesis traces the history of a Melbourne family, the Higgins-Palmer family, over three generations, focusing on the political formation and activities of six family members: H B Higgins, Nettie Palmer, Vance Palmer, Esmonde Higgins, Aileen Palmer and Helen Palmer. It seeks to locate them in the evolution of radical politics in Australia, and particularly in Melbourne, from the 1890s to the 1960s. The thesis begins with an examination of the career of H B Higgins in the context of the Victorian tradition of radical liberalism. It follows the development of H B Higgins's niece and nephew, Nettie Palmer (nee Higgins) and Esmonde Higgins, who both, in different ways and to different degrees, reacted against that tradition. Nettie's career before 1914 leads us to the rise and fall of the Victorian Socialist Party, Esmonde's postwar career to the formative years of the Australian communist party. The thesis then moves to the 1930s, when both Nettie Palmer and Esmonde Higgins have become disillusioned with their earlier beliefs but when Nettie's daughters, Aileen and Helen Palmer, have become active communists. The various family conflicts that arise from this are considered. In the 1950s Helen Palmer leaves the Communist Party, and Vance and Nettie Palmer and Esmonde Higgins move to the end of their careers, rediscovering in various ways the Melbourne radical and liberal tradition. The thesis tries within the space available to give as full a picture as possible of the lives and careers of six complex and highly articulate people, all of whom at various times played important roles in aspects of Australian political, intellectual and cultural history. Their literary careers are necessarily given only brief consideration, at risk of some distortion of their priorities in life. The focus is on the evolution of their political views, their political relationships with one another, and their involvements in the wider political life of 20th century Australia.
-
ItemThe road to Singapore: Australian defence and foreign policies 1919-1941( 2008)Nationalist historians have argued, variously, that Australia was betrayed by Britain in 1941-42 with the fall of Singapore, and plunged into crisis, or conversely, that the nation was 'armed and ready' for the much feared Japanese invasion. Arguing that neither proposition is true, this thesis establishes that Australia was not armed and ready even for a much feared large-scale Japanese invasion. Nor was the nation ready for the small-scale Japanese attacks which were more probable and which, under Imperial defence, were a local defence responsibility. This thesis explains why Australia was unprepared. It does this by exploring Australian understandings of Imperial defence, assessing Australian responses to international crises 1919-1939, evaluating criticisms of those responses, and analysing the nature of domestic politics. It concludes with a socioeconomic analysis of Australia's key elites - political, military, and industrial.(Open document for complete abstract)