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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ItemJames Connolly and the Irish Left (1916-1940)( [1987])James Connolly (1868-1916) is a major figure not only in Irish history but also on the broader canvas of international socialism. A man of many parts - militant labour organiser, socialist leader, military commander, newspaper editor, writer, political theorist - his life's work was dedicated to socialist revolution and as such provides a fascinating example, one might even say 'model', of a revolutionary life. The thesis examines Connolly's political theory and practice as it developed over the quarter-century of his active commitment to the 'cause' of socialist revolution and reconstruction, and then proceeds to an exploration of the extent to which Connolly's political legacy provided the Irish Left, during the years 1916-40, with an effective practical and theoretical instrument of revolutionary socialism. The thesis comprises two main sections and a short interlinking chapter. Part One is an interpretation of Connolly's political thought and practice and consists of seven chapters under the heading - 'The Women's Movement', 'Religion', 'Syndicalism' , 'Socialism and Nationalism', 'The Revolutionary Party', 'Violence' and 'Revolution'. The second section uses the same seven subject headings to analyse the Irish Left's understanding of and reaction to Connolly's political legacy. Connolly had little opportunity to indulge in abstract political theorising. The questions which concerned him related to the immediate problems and demands of effective labour organisation and revolutionary strategy, pressing problems which he encountered during his daily activities as a labour leader and dedicated revolutionary. Thus, although socialist fundamentals remained sacrosanct, Connolly was always willing to learn from experience and to grasp new opportunities whenever they arose. This of course meant that his political positions altered over time, and that his thoughts and writings on issues such as party organisation underwent considerable change over the years. The first section of the thesis charts and analyses those changes. A political figure of Connolly's stature was bound to exert some influence on the Irish Left in the years after his execution and the Part Three of the thesis is devoted to an exploration and assessment of the nature and extent of this impact. The general conclusion of the thesis is that while Connolly provided great inspiration to the Irish Left, his political analyses and revolutionary schemas were, in the main, inadequately understood and thus misinterpreted and misapplied. Connolly's political legacy was essentially one of opportunistic revolutionary adventurism. His legacy had revolutionary potential but it was not one which provided a systematic guide, in terms of either theoretical clarity or organisational structure, to the Irish Left.
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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’.
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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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ItemAccommodation and retreat: politics in Anglo-Dutch New York City, 1700-1760( 1982)This thesis began as a study of popular politics in pre-Revolutionary New York City. In the course of this inquiry into the antecedents of crowd activity in the revolutionary era, I discovered that in the first six decades of the eighteenth century popular political involvement in New York was minimal and sporadic. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of New York City politics in this period is the quiescence of the populace. Overt conflict involving large numbers of people is absent. Moreover, there is very little evidence of widespread involvement in election politics, and no evidence at all that the hegemony of the ruling elite was ever challenged from below. The focus of my analysis therefore shifted to a study of the social basis of New York’ s City's elite-dominated politics and also to the factors inhibiting the development of popular politics there. The hypothesis of my new enquiry was that if eighteenth century New York. City, unlike Boston, had a reputation for quiescence, even inertia, then that quiescence and inertia must have been essentially related to the social structure of the town. This was not an easy hypothesis to test, as few sources have survived to illuminate the nature of colonial New York City society. Nevertheless, an examination of those sources which are susceptible to quantitative analysis revealed something as yet undiscovered about the town: the Dutch townsfolk, most of whom were descendants of the original settlers of New Netherland, formed a cohesive and self-recognizing community until mid-century. This finding suggested another hypothesis: it was that if we can establish that the Dutch and Dutch-identified townsmen of New York City were less inclined than the English townsmen to become involved in adversary politics, then the persistence of the Dutch needs to be considered as an important factor inhibiting both the escalation of political conflict and the radicalization of the town's politics. Testing this hypothesis proved to be a difficult task. The first problem was to determine just who were Dutch or Dutch identified in eighteenth century New York City. The second was to ascertain whether the Dutch - as Dutch - played a role in the town's politics after 1700. This involved determining whether Dutch-identified townsmen had a distinctively different political orientation from the English. Positive proofs that they did are hard to come by, but negative evidence - such as their failure to organize at the polls - suggests strongly that the Dutch were indeed disinclined to become involved in the adversary politics at which the English and English identified excelled. In fact, the Dutch in eighteenth century New York City avoided or retreated from conflictual situations. The impact which this disinclination had on the evolution of New York City politics is examined in this thesis. More broadly, this thesis challenges the recently established paradigm of analysis emphasizing the modernity and increasingly democratic nature of eighteenth century New York City politics. The main problem with this model is that it creates the erroneous impression that in the six decades prior to the Stamp Act riots, New York politics moved relentlessly forward towards the Revolution and the modern era. Much of my analysis may seem negative. Much of it is. I am concerned to show that the evidence for an evolutionary view of colonial New York politics does not exist for New York City in the period 1700 to 1760. The history of the town in that period is rather the history of what did not occur. More particularly, it is the history of the non-evolution of a democratically-orientated or radical mode of politics.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.