School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item'Alien Hordes': A cultural history of non-native birds in Australia( 2024-03)From 1788, settlers introduced a host of organisms to the Australian continent. They did so largely deliberately, with high hopes, and often viewed these species with immense fondness. Yet now many of these species are labelled ‘invasive’ and killed at will. This about-turn requires explanation. This thesis traces settler Australians’ changing attitudes towards nonnative wildlife from the late 1820s to the present. Taking a longitudinal approach and focusing in particular on wild birds, it describes how the language, imagery and sentiments surrounding non-native wildlife changed over this period, as well as accounting for why these changes occurred. I closely read public texts – books, lectures, pamphlets, parliamentary debates and, above all, articles from periodicals – in order to uncover the suppressed colonial and racial anxieties underlying seemingly rational and scientific discussion of avifauna. I use species such as the house sparrow, the red-whiskered bulbul and the common myna as case studies to challenge established narratives about the rise and fall of the acclimatisation movement in Australia and to explain why the settler public’s hostility towards and anxiety about non-native wildlife grew so dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Much has been written about non-native wildlife in Australia, but little of this is adequately historicised; almost all of it is highly scientistic, taking for granted the current (and much contested) orthodoxy of ‘anekeitaxonomy’, that is, the classification and judgement of species by their geographical origin. Although the great reversal in attitudes may appear to be justified by ‘improving’ ecological knowledge, I argue that it is best understood in the context of settler colonialism as a system that generates ideas about who and what belongs to the land. As settlers’ understanding of their own belonging in the continent has changed, this has influenced their perceptions of and attachments to wild animals, native and non-native alike. Ultimately, this is not a story of empirical fact but one of culture, values and how these have changed over the course of Australia’s colonial history.
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ItemSettling the mind: psychiatry and the colonial project in Australia( 2012)Set in Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Settling the Mind tells the story of three Sydney psychiatrists who sought to understand the relationship between race, nativity and madness: Frederic Norton Manning, Chisholm Ross and John Bostock. Their influential (albeit limited) contributions to comparative psychiatry centred on insanity in Aboriginal people, immigrants and native-born settlers. Drawing on asylum case records, official government reports, scientific studies and medical literature from the period, this thesis argues that the doctors’ interpretations of mental disease in ‘others’ were, in the main, reflections of their own concerns and self-image. Manning, Ross and Bostock’s preoccupations with notions of progress and degeneration, belonging and maladjustment, and superiority and inferiority so shaped their findings and distorted their conclusions that the patients upon whom their studies were based all but disappeared from view. Through a deep analysis of the doctors’ writings, this thesis tentatively recovers traces of these patients. Settling the Mind also, however, takes a much wider view, charting the spread of medical knowledge about madness in ‘other’ peoples across borders and between nations from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In so doing, it not only illuminates Manning, Ross and Bostock’s scholarly inheritance, but also sheds light on two persistent and seemingly contradictory facets of the Western medical and scientific imagination: first, the theory that civilisation was a potent cause of insanity; and secondly, the association between madness and savagery. This thesis explores why madness was associated with savagery when it was supposedly caused by civilisation, and how mental disease was interpreted in peoples already defined as savage, and thus mad, by nature. It argues that from the late nineteenth century, comparative psychiatry destabilised the opposition between madness and reason, just as it reflected and informed emerging neurological and psychological theories about the nature of insanity itself.