School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemStress and identity: Australian soldiers during the first World War( 1985)Historical treatment of Australian participation in the Great War has been profoundly influenced by the work of Dr. C.E.W. Bean (1880-1968), its principal, official historian. Much modern scholarship has been stimulated by his claims about the distinctive character of the Australian Imperial Force, its members and military performance, and the importance of their experience in the creation of a national consciousness. The Anzac legend which emerged from the Gallipoli campaign and its sequel has proved a popular issue amongst postwar Australian historians, some of whom have investigated the experience of ordinary Australian soldiers, drawing on their diaries and letters - sources which, Bean warned, need to be treated circumspectly. Bill Gammage's The Broken Years, now 10 years old, is the outstanding work in this field, but I have no doubt he wouldn't claim it was necessarily the last word in every respect. This thesis explores war experience further, concentrating on the detailed insights diaries and letters provide of the psychological impact of the war on Australian troops - especially the acute and chronic stress and on the ways in which their changing national consciousness and attachment to home were partly a product of this and also helped them endure. The diaries and letters in the La Trobe Library of 179 servicemen formed my main sources, but I have also read widely in such sources in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, to check their representativeness. In interpreting these diaries and letters, I have taken advantage of some seminal work by English military historians and of recent findings by American and English social psychologists and psychiatrists. (From Introduction)
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ItemMiddle class working women and the Chinese family in Hong Kong: a preliminary study( 1994)The persistent image of the uncontextualised 'Chinese woman' in much writing about China and the Chinese diaspora is one of unrelenting misery and subordination. It is an image that is associated with general accounts of institutional familial patterns of 'the traditional family' (see for example, Levy, 1949). These reductive descriptions of what must be a rich, complex tapestry of family interaction and individual motivations are heavily influenced by evidence from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in China (Johnston, 1983:242, note 1) - a period when women are often pictured as suffering the worst excesses of sexual subordination. The lives of women in particular are continually rewritten in a literature which portrays Chinese women as passive objects controlled by 'Confucianist' doctrines. (From Introduction)
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ItemThe Aboriginal response to white settlement in the Port Phillip district, 1835-1850( 1979)The nature of the Aboriginal response to Europeans in the first years of the settlement in the Port Phillip District has not been sufficiently investigated by historians. We know very little of the ways Aborigines perceived whites. This is not merely because few European contemporaries were interested to record the attitudes of blacks towards whites, but also because this lack of interest has been continued, and has influenced historians to direct study to other fields. Recently, however, works relating to interracial relations in other states have guided the search for understanding the past from the Aboriginal point of view - the 'other side of the frontier'. There are many issues and interests that have sparked this search, and probably the one most important motivation for this has been the ascendancy of black leaders who have offered their version of the past. Perhaps because of this, historical study has concentrated on interracial tensions in the early years of European-Aboriginal contact. However, in Victoria, the Aboriginal response to whites entailed peaceful adaptation and cultural resistance. Aborigines did not instantly recognize Europeans as enemies, and traditional foes were still hated and feared, far more than the newcomers. These traditional foes were Aborigines of hostile or unknown tribes. In this study, I have also been concerned to explain the dramatic population decline among the Aborigines in the years to 1850, as this, also, resulted from Aboriginal responses to whites. White settlement caused disease, depression, increased intertribal warfare, as well as interracial violence. Conflict between blacks and whites was only a minor factor in this depopulation, and it was not recognized as a cause by the Aborigines. According to them, intertribal hostility was the most immediate cause of death; but the white occupation of Victoria must be seen as the cause of the despair that led Aborigines to dispose of their newly-born children rather than raise families. Death, disease and infant mortality worked together to halve the Aboriginal population in the fifteen years to 1850; death and despair later led to the destruction of much of the Aboriginal cultural heritage and social cohesion. I have attempted to reconstruct the nature of Aboriginal population, society and culture at the time of first white settlement, in order to review the extent of change introduced by whites. Although the population dramatically changed in size and distribution, many of the social rules and religious beliefs of the Aborigines were maintained and some were possibly strengthened. This was a magnificent achievement given the pressure and degree of white influence. Most Aborigines peacefully rejected white values, maintaining their own beliefs, and changing only those aspects of their culture which did not intimidate their conceptions of the world. Few Aborigines adopted white values in the period to 1850, although in later years the reduced and disintegrated population came to accept many European principles, having lost many of their own. Whites were recognized as cultural enemies, and for the most part, white ways of thinking were rejected; but the Port Phillip District Aborigines did not regard whites as mortal enemies, for they were only hostile towards few whites, and directed their hatred towards those Aborigines who were strangers to them. For this reason, the Aboriginal resistance offered to whites was predominantly peaceful, a battle of the mind and not of the body.