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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ItemVagrancy and the Victorians: the social construction of the vagrant in Melbourne, 1880-1907( 1990)In Melbourne between 1880 and 1907, the construction and propagation of a vagrant stereotype and its manifestation in law, constituted an important means of controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups who were perceived to be socially undesirable or economically burdensome.
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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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 role and significance of bullocks and horses in the development of Eastern Australia 1788 to 1900( 1986)The central theme of this thesis is to demonstrate the vital importance of working bullocks and horses in the economic development of eastern Australia. It is argued that the roles and functions of bullocks and horses have been largely neglected in historical accounts of Australia and that in particular historians must revise the view that draught powered transport was always expensive, unreliable and limited. The development of the colonial economies depended heavily upon the successful application of draught power to a range of haulage and transport tasks in exploration, pastoralism, the exploitation of minerals, the development of large scale cereal production, farming, and the development of towns and cities. (From introduction in chapter 1)
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ItemThe economic and political development of Victoria 1877-1881( 1951)Alfred Deakin wrote in a short (unpublished) memoir on the period surveyed in this thesis, “Whatever the relative importance or interest of the years 1875 – 1882 may be, it is certain that the tide of political life ran then much more fiercely than at any subsequent period.” It was to see why political life was so bitter and ran ‘so fiercely’ that this work was undertaken. Letter books and other MS material belonging to members of the Victorian Legislature in the period have been made available by several Victorian families and the access given to this material has been of great assistance to the writer. The division into sections – Part I Economic Development and its relation to Politics, Part II, Political Development – has been made necessary by the pioneering character of the work. Although the whole theme of the thesis centres in the complex interaction of economic and political development, the division was found necessary in order to deal more completely with topics on which there has been no detailed study.