School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemCommunicable Knowledge: Medical Communication, Professionalisation, and Medical Reform in Colonial Victoria, 1855-66( 2020)This thesis examines the process of medical professionalisation in colonial Victoria from 1855-66. During this eleven-year period the medical profession of colonial Victoria were able to create Australia’s first long lasting medical societies and medical journal, found the first medical school, and receive legislative support of their claims to exclusive knowledge of medicine. The next time an Australian colony would have these institutions created would not be for another 20 years. This thesis examines these developments through a framework of communication, primarily from the medical community itself. Communication was central to the process that resulted in the creation of the above listed institutions. Here communication is examined as the driving force behind the two processes of professionalisation: the internal, community creating and boundary forming aspect; and the external process through which the community gains external recognition of their claims. For Victorian practitioners during the period of this study the internal process drives the creation of the societies, the journal, and the medical school, whereas the external process is typified by the campaign for ‘Medical Reform’ that sees the community engage in agitation for legislative backing of their conception of medicine as science over other alternate medicines. Communication was not isolated within the colony. As such the place of the Victorian medical community as a node within transnational networks of knowledge exchange is examined. As Victoria was better integrated into these networks than its colonial neighbours, an examination of the involvement of said flow of information in the creation of professional communities is considered an important part of this analysis. Behind these processes of community creation, I trace a thread of disunity sparked by professional differences. Highly publicised arguments over differences in medical opinion play out in the colonial press. This comes to a head at the end of the period of study. Despite their focus on communication the medical community ignores the role their public conduct plays in this process. The end result is that, while they were able to create these lasting institutions, their public conduct saw the public’s opinion of them stay low through to the end of the century.
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ItemThrough Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia( 2019)Natural disasters are a significant feature of the Australian environment. In a country with a rich history of immigration, it is therefore surprising that historians have not yet examined the specific challenges faced by immigrants within this hazardous environment. This thesis examines migrants’ memories and experiences of bushfires and floods in Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and regional case studies, this thesis explores the entanglement of migration and natural disaster in Australia and in the lives of migrants. Oral history interviews with migrants who have experienced bushfires in Victoria or floods in Maitland, New South Wales, are at the heart of this study. This thesis contributes to scholarship in three distinct fields—migration and environmental history, and disaster studies—and brings them together through an examination of migrants’ memories of bushfires and floods in Australia. Although traumatic experiences, displacement, and a changed and challenged sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment are common themes of both migrants and survivors of fire and flood, rarely have the similarities between these experiences been noted. This thesis is not a history of natural disasters in Australia, nor a retelling of a history of immigration to Australia, but an exploration of experiences of ‘double displacement’. This thesis argues that migrants’ recollections reveal how their burgeoning sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment was challenged by natural disasters. It highlights how their experience of ‘double displacement’ contributed to a new sense of home and belonging in a natural disaster-prone country.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 2015)Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.
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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
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ItemThe state of modern Greek language as spoken in Victoria( 1986)This thesis reports a sociolinguistic study, carried out between 1981 and 1984, of the state of the Modern Greek (MG) language in Australia, as spoken by native-speaking first-generation Greek immigrants in Victoria. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of those characteristics of the linguistic behaviour of these Greek Australians which can be attributed to the contact with English and to other environmental, social and linguistic influence. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 1987-05)This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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ItemThe private face of patronage: the Howitts, artistic and intellectual philanthropists in early Melbourne Society( 2005)This thesis investigates a case of upper-middle class, private patronage in Melbourne, focusing on three decades between 1840 and 1870. Evidence points to the existence of a lively circle of intellectual and artistic activity around the Quaker family of Dr Godfrey Howitt and his wife, Phebe, from the Midlands who arrived at the Port Phillip District in 1840. The presentation of a group of fine, rare colonial water-colours and drawings to the National Gallery of Victoria by a direct Howitt descendant, Mrs James Evans in 1989, was the point of inspiration for this subject. Godfrey Howitt, one of the first experienced medical practitioners in the colony, had much in common with the Superintendent of Port Phillip. Their friendship gave the Howitts entrée into the uppermost social circles of the colony. Financially, the family prospered due to Howitt's professional practice which insulated them against economic downturns and provided a steady accumulation of wealth. While as a Quaker, Phebe Howitt had little background in the fine arts, she began to exercise patronage in support of her artist friends, most of who arrived with the gold rush in 1852. With it came Godfrey Howitt's elder brother, William, a famous English author. In London in 1850, William and Mary Howitt's daughter, the feminist painter and writer, Anna Mary, had become engaged to Edward La Trobe Bateman. A brilliant designer and cousin of Superintendent La Trobe, Bateman introduced the young, still struggling Pre-Raphaelite artists with whom he was closely associated, to the English Howitts. Arriving in Melbourne in 1852, William was followed shortly afterwards by Bateman and two artists, including the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, Thomas Woolner. The gold rush also attracted Eugene von Guérard, and Nicholas Chevalier in due course. In 1856, as a guest of the Howitts' on her first Victorian visit, Louisa Anne Meredith, writer, botanical artist and social commentator, was introduced to their artistic and literary circle. The Howitts' friendship with these artists thus took on a very different hue from the normal patterns of patronage. Beyond commissioning works of art from artists returning empty handed from the gold fields, Phebe Howitt supported them in other ways until suffering a catastrophic stroke towards the end of 1856. During that period, the founding of the new Victorian colony's cultural institutions became a source of official artistic commissions for the first time. Through friends in influential positions like Justice Redmond Barry and Godfrey Howitt, Bateman was employed in various design projects for new public buildings and gardens. With the purchase of Barragunda at Cape Schanck in 1860, Godfrey Howitt assumed a central role as patron. In making the house available to Bateman and his artist friends, he and his daughter, Edith Mary, repeated the unusual degree of patronage formerly exercised by Phebe Howitt before her illness. By 1869, Woolner, Bateman and Chevalier had departed the colony and from 1870, von Guérard was taken up with the National Gallery of Victoria. Although succeeding generations of the family maintained contact with all the artists in their circle, by Godfrey Howitt's death in 1873, the prime years of Howitt patronage had passed.
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Item"Strangers within the gates": Victorian governments and non-Europeans, 1880-1908( 1982)In 1901 the Commonwealth Parliament passed the first national law restricting the entry of non-Europeans into Australia - the Immigration Restriction Act. This Act, by enabling the testing of potentially "undesirable" immigrants with a passage of dictation in English or another European language, effectively set up a "White Australia" barrier to non-European immigration. But such a "Natal test" device had, in fact, been established several years earlier in several of the then un-joined Australian colonies; and, although 1901 is conveniently taken as the beginning of the "White Australia policy", in fact all Australian colonies had immigration measures specifically directed against one or more non-European groups on the Statute books by the 1880s. The national "White Australia" barrier erected in 1901 had its origins in colonial attitudes and measures, and it is with this aspect of Australian historical inquiry - the development of Government policies, attitudes and legislation against non-Europeans in a specific colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - that this thesis is concerned.
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ItemFraming Fitzroy: contesting and (de)constructing place and identity in a Melbourne suburb( 2002)This thesis examines the ways in which Melbourne's 'worst suburb', Fitzroy, was constructed, both physically and culturally, from the Great Depression of the 1930s until the gentrification of the suburb in the early 1970s. The thesis argues that an array of institutions, extending from social welfare and slum reform groups to the media and a variety of policing agencies, relentlessly constructed Fitzroy as the site of social evil in Melbourne. It examines the variety of texts, both written and visual, that were utilised to construct a singular and negative representation of Fitzroy that legitimated particular forms of intervention. The thesis critiques and contests this representation through an analysis of the lives of those who lived in Fitzroy in the period covered by this thesis and by using a variety of original sources, including the testimonies of those who lived and worked in Fitzroy. It is a central argument of this thesis that Fitzroy was a place of complexity, vitality and cultural value for those who lived there.
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ItemFreemasonry and community in nineteenth-century Victoria( 1987)Freemasonry has had a controversial image ever since the first of the modern Grand Lodges of Freemasons appeared in London during the early years of the eighteenth century. The brotherhood's claim to be the guardian of the traditions of an ancient guild of stone masons has received wide credence, and their organization has been well respected in some quarters. Yet always it would seem there have been those who have scoffed at these freemasons' presumption and regarded their network of lodges as a purely social organization, the members of which have a taste for exotic ritual and costume. Over the years there have been many who have accused the fraternity of encouraging dissipation among young men, arguing that lodge meetings and formal banquets are often only an excuse for intemperance. Masons in general have been charged with not acting according to the high code of social conduct they profess to teach. It has been claimed they frequently do not keep their promises of assistance to fellow-masons in time of need. At various times and places the fraternity has been charged with using the oath of secrecy it extracts from candidates for admission to conceal orchestrated attempts to subvert religious or state institutions; some of their critics have seen them as a radical or subversive group, others as a reactionary body of men. At frequent intervals the opinion has been expressed that masons use their fraternal relationship for personal gain, and for this reason alone their networks are detrimental to the community in general. In defence of their organization, freemasons have argued that the philosophy which underpins their rituals will provide moral guidance to all those who sincerely seek it. They claim it can help men understand how to live in peace with each other and what action they can take to ensure their community progresses to a higher form of civilization. Masons believe that participation in masonic life can promote both spiritual and mental growth, as within a lodge men encounter an atmosphere which encourages them to develop their innate capacities. Masonry is said to lead them to be charitable and more tolerant of others religious beliefs, attentive to their family responsibilities and obedient to the laws of their community. A number of masons have proudly catalogued the aristocrats, men who have become leaders of nations through the ballot-box, or received public acclaim due to their outstanding achievement in economic, scientific or literary fields, who have become lodge members since the founding of the first of the modern Grand Lodges of Freemasons in London in 1717. The oaths of secrecy required from initiates have been defended on the grounds of their great antiquity, and their common usage by other fraternities and sororities to underline the special kind of bond created by acceptance as a member. Masons argue their oaths cannot be regarded as anti-social in intention, as masonry has been restricted to men of mature age, whom their peers have judged able to appreciate masonic wisdom as well as keep its secrets. Candidates must also be possessed of financial resources or skills which ensure that they are capable of supporting themselves and assisting all worthy causes. Within private lodges three 'craft degrees' may be conferred, that of apprentice, fellowcraft and master. However, a variety of so-called 'higher degrees' may be received by master masons who join a chapter or conclave. Masons are in broad agreement that the latter are peripheral to freemasonry. The master masons who are interested in exploring the meaning of a variety of esoteric rituals based on the practices of legendary bands of men for a higher degree have always been a small minority. Although chapters and conclaves are usually associated with one or more craft lodges, they do not have direct representation within Grand Lodge organizations, and in this thesis the use of the term 'masonry' normally refers to networks of craft lodges only. The rapid spread around the world of a network of independent Grand Lodges, whose private lodges usually extend a welcome to visiting master masons no matter in which region of the world they have received the right to that title, is a phenomena of historical interest. During the modern era, few social institutions can equal the Grand Lodges of freemasonry in longevity and geographic spread. These societies of adult males, which sometime have accepted women, were but one manifestation of a great revival of voluntary associationism which accompanied the translation of rural villagers into urban social classes. Trade Unions, Co-operatives, Friendly Societies and Grand Lodges had goals in common and seem to have drawn upon some of the same sources for their inspiration in Anglo-Saxon societies. Yet during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries each performed a distinctive role. Whereas the other associations offered their members defined pecuniary benefits, masonic lodges only offered to teach men a system of social ethics. As masonic lodges appeared to proffer what was already available from churches or educational establishments there was no obvious reason why masonry should attain the kind of world-wide popularity it did over the years.