School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item"Most humble homes": slum landlords, tenants, and the Melbourne City Council's health administration, 1888-1918( 1987-07)The thesis examines the relationship between public health and questions of housing and poverty, in Melbourne, 1888- 1918. It is concerned with the way that with certain groups of people - local council workers, tenants of houses referred to as ‘slums’, and the owners of those houses - represented their experiences. And it seeks to place those representations in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century concern about the ‘housing problems’. It compares the public rhetoric of the housing reformers and politicians with letters written to the Melbourne City Council by landlords and tenants, and in doing so seeks to show that there were a whole range of housing ‘problems’ not addressed by the public discourse. The first half of the work seeks to place the housing issue into a late nineteenth-century context, and concentrates on public and official discourse. First it considers the City itself, and examines dominant myths about wealth and poverty in 'boom' Melbourne. It argues that these myths shaped contemporary discussion of and responses to housing questions. It then suggests that housing was to a great extent a public health issue for contemporaries, and therefore proceeds to examine the nature of public health administration in the city, both at a central and at a local level. The emergence of housing as a discrete issue in public health discourse is also considered. The thesis then seeks briefly to examine the concept of the 'slum' and to relate it to Melbourne's inner city rental housing market. It then considers in more detail two inner city wards renown for their 'slum' housing. Finally it considers the housing debates which gathered momentum in Melbourne between 1910-1913 and which culminated in the appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the housing of the people of the metropolis. It also considers the results of that inquiry. The second half of the work, using an ethnographic and cultural approach looks at slum tenants, landlords and council-workers in an attempt to explore how they perceived their worlds. The correspondence files of the Melbourne City Council are extensively used to consider how these people represented housing issues. Tenants' descriptions of their houses, their concepts of health and disease, their relationships with their landlords and the Council workers, their descriptions of the housing market, and their sense of community and neighbourhood networks are all considered. In turn the thesis considers landlords' representations of their financial positions, and their relationships with Council officials and tenants. Finally, the daily work of the Melbourne City Council's health workers is re-examined in the context of the evidence given before the Royal Housing Commission by the Chairman of the Council's Health Committee, Alderman William Burton.
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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.