School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemPresbyterian missionaries to the New Hebrides, 1848-1920: a study particularly of mission families( 1977-06)Between 1848 and 1920, sixty two ordained Presbyterian ministers drawn from Scotland, British North America, and the Australasian colonies were commissioned as missionaries to the New Hebrides. Though there was a considerable turnover, one half served less than ten years, a significant proportion, one third, served twenty years or more, and the average length of service was fourteen years. This thesis has as its subject the mission community established by these men, all but two of them married; a community in marginal contact with an alien culture, considered in comparison with their own culture to be degenerate. The mission community had as its fundamental purpose the regeneration of the heather through Christianisation. Attention will be given to the manner as well as the decisions of church government; to the family nature of the mission with particular emphasis on family concepts through a study of mission homes, wives and children; to the suffering endured and finally to quite obvious changes brought about in native life through the work of the mission community. As an introduction, this preface will outline the motivation of the missionaries, the geographical and cultural environment of the new Hebrides, as well as present a review of historical accounts and discussion of source materials available. Finally reasons for the time span chosen will be stated. It was argued by those Protestants, such as Moderate Calvinists, who believed in the doctrine of universal atonement, the South Seas had been discovered through the Providence of God. It could be argued that there was an obligation to take the Gospel to the perishing heathen.1 Scottish and British North American Presbyterian churches, divided even though they were, both Reformed and Free were persuaded by men such as John Geddie to support missions to the heathen, though there was still a significant opposition to such activity, often on the grounds of greater need at home than on specific doctrinal grounds. (For complete preface open document)
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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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Item'A handful of interesting and exemplary people from a country called Wales': identity and culture maintenance: the Welsh in Ballarat and Sebastopol in the second half of the nineteenth century( 2000)The colony of Victoria, in the decades following the discovery of gold in the early 1850s, provides an attractive setting for an analysis of a Welsh immigrant community and the resilience of its cultural identity. Welsh-born immigrants in Victoria, besides the transitory populations of the seaport towns, were found in significant numbers only in a relatively few urban areas which emerged with the development of the gold mining industry. Most notable amongst these were the city of Ballarat and the adjacent township of Sebastopol. The nature of the Welsh immigrant community in this area will be addressed with regard to its linguistic ethos, religious and cultural institutions and activities not usually associated with Welsh migrants. The ability of the Welsh to retain their cultural integrity in whatever form was closely linked to a variety of factors. Settlement patterns, economic specialisation and .mobility, religious schisms, exogamy and the conscious desire of many Welsh immigrants to cast off their old world cultural shackles, will be considered in relation to the continuation, modification and decline of a discernible Welsh ethnolinguistic community. The study also focuses on those responsible for defining Welsh identity and propagating Welsh social and cultural mores in colonial Victoria, analyses the components of that identity and establishes the extent to which the mass of the Welsh-born population conformed. The sometimes paradoxical loyalty to Wales and Britain, and attempts to establish a purely Welsh settlement, as they related to a continued sense of Welsh identity, are also considered. This thesis provides an analysis of the Welsh immigrant community in the Ballarat/Sebastopol area during the second half of the nineteenth century. The study explores all aspects of the Welsh immigrant experience, and, in addition to qualitative evidence, employs quantitative analysis at micro-level. By viewing all Welsh immigrants in one particular area over a set period of time a clearer picture is obtained regarding the true nature of the community and the ways in which it changed.
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ItemPrivate diseases in public discourse: venereal disease in Victorian society, culture and imagination( 1999)In this thesis I explore the construction of knowledge about venereal disease in Victorian Britain through many different texts and by many authors. I wish to examine how this knowledge was constituted through the disparate discourses of activists, politicians, and doctors, and was not to be found in one discourse, but in many. This knowledge was also mediated by issues of class, race and gender and these texts suggest the ways in which such cultural constructs cohere around the symbol of venereal disease. I have argued that the definition of the social and cultural meanings of venereal diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhoea, was not in the control of either the official public discourse of parliament or the medical profession. Both of these bodies contributed to the meanings which attached to venereal disease in this period, but they were only two of the actors in this epistemological process. Activists campaigning for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, social purity campaigners, feminist novelists, 'quack' doctors, socialists and pornographers, contributed to the social and cultural definitions of venereal disease. Concern over venereal disease was reawakened in the 1850s and 1860s, coinciding with the rise of interest in public health and public health legislation. Through the second half of the nineteenth century venereal disease was used by numerous groups with very different social, political, cultural and sexual concerns. The anti-Contagious Diseases Acts campaigners used venereal disease to talk about sexuality and morality publicly. The New Woman novelists of the 1880s and 18908, as well as a variety of social reformers mostly associated with the left, used venereal disease to question the existing patriarchal order and to voice concerns over issues of masculinity and male sexuality, marriage and women's political representation. In the 1890s and the early twentieth century venereal disease played a significant role in shaping fears over the degeneration of the British race and the future viability of the Empire. This thesis shows that the knowledge and discourse of and around venereal diseases in the nineteenth century was a contested terrain shaped by many diverse agencies.
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ItemDoing the India trip: myths and paradoxes of a travel culture( 1999)Doing the India Trip is a study of the Western travel culture in India since the influx of travellers in the late 1960s. This thesis explores the relationship between the reality of a diverse and changing India and the myths and continuities of the westerners' travel culture. It will be argued that this relationship produces dissonance, paradox and contradiction in the experiences and discourses of travellers. To show the continuities which constitute the travel culture I will compare some nineteenth century travelogues and travel guides with the alternative guidebooks of the last 25-30 years, with a particular emphasis on the changes and continuities in the content of the most successful of these, the Lonely Planet guides. The recent guidebooks will be shown to have developed both in relation to pre-existing guidebooks and in response to the emerging breed of travellers that drifted 'East' from the late 1960s. I will also demonstrate these continuities and changes in the travel culture through interviews conducted with a small group of travellers in Rajasthan in early 1998. A selection of travel writings from the sixties and seventies, and some snippets of travellers' gossip from the virtual world of travel at www.lonelyplanet.com.au have also been included where they elucidate these themes. The discourses of travellers' talk and travel guidebooks attempt to mediate the experience of India for travellers. But these discourses are unable to resolve the ambivalences - the dissonances, contradictions and paradoxes - that result from the juxtaposition of myth and reality. These moments of ambivalence and anxiety for the western traveller are suggestive of a counter-discourse that questions overdetermined myths about India and about travel there.
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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.