School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemSport and the Australian war effort during the First World War: concord and conflict( 2018)This thesis investigates sport and its relationship with the Australian war effort between 1914 and 1918. As a significant cultural element within Australian society since the settlement of European colonists, many envisioned sport as holding a higher purpose outside mere leisure or entertainment. With concerns surrounding national security emerging from 1900 onward, ideas surrounding the playing of sport as a preparation for warfare became common. The outbreak of war in 1914 oversaw the variable explosion of this connection between playing and battlefields. Through propaganda, recruitment, fund-rising, sporting competitions, education and gender relations, patriots sought to hone sports influence in order to aid in the defence of Empire. Australia therefore celebrated sport, for it encouraged its citizens to ‘Play the Greater Game!’ Yet sport possessed the ability to divide with as great a strength as it did to unite, becoming embroiled in the social turmoil that engulfed the nation after 1915. Bitter public debates surrounding the appropriateness of games and the eventual government intervention against sport in 1917 speak to this conflict. Even more than this, violent altercations between recruiters and war-weary crowds and the suspension of increasingly violent school games indicate the dangerous levels with which sport was fuelling social discord. With this division in mind, the nation also began to reconsider for the first time the place and role of sport in its society. When viewing these paralleling developments, we can decipher that sport had an altogether paradoxical and complicated relationship with Australia’s war. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to remind audiences that, in spite of what several contemporary governments and sporting codes tell us, the celebrated place of sport in our memory of the war is one to be questioned. By doing so, we can hopefully re-evaluate the manner in which we remember the Great War itself, not exclusively as a nation-making exercise, but perhaps as something far more complex.
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ItemThe performance of war: experiences in the city of Melbourne 1914-1918( 2015)The First World War (1914-1918) had complicated implications for the people in the city of Melbourne. The conflict has predominantly been described as Australia's first national engagement or awakening, yet this thesis argues that, the ways in which the majority of people on the home-front experienced the conflict was in the contexts of their local communities, and for many, in their city. In participating in the conflict, the people of Melbourne performed varying roles in the war within different emotional communities. Performative methodologies will be used to explore how messages were manifested in the control of public spaces in the city, in displays of authority, and in expressions of citizenship and gender.
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ItemThe domestic peril: the radical alien and the rise of corporate Americanism, 1912-1919( 2010)In the years preceding the First World War, corporate propaganda in the United States weighed in against the menace of the ‘radical alien,’ said to be a clear and present threat to American freedoms. This propaganda blamed strikes and other manifestations of class antagonism on unassimilated immigrants, who it claimed were, at best, vulnerable to peddlers of ‘un-American’ unionism, and, at worst, importers of the ‘alien’ ideologies upon which organised labour was said to be founded. This thesis argues that this propaganda was part of a conscious campaign of class warfare conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers and other representatives of Corporate America, who formed the vanguard of Corporate Americanism. Corporate Americanism, an ideology equating the self-interest of Corporate America with the interest of all, proclaimed as its operating principle that ‘those who are not for America are against it.’ In reaction to the Lawrence Strike of 1912, composed mostly of foreign-born workers and led by the hated Industrial Workers of the World, big business manipulated half-truths through propaganda to develop the mythology of the ‘radical alien,’ responding to the perceived peril with the movement to ‘Americanise’ the immigrant. Under the guise of providing lessons in English and Civics, this movement functioned to neutralise the threat of union militancy on the part of foreign-born workers by indoctrinating them in Corporate Americanist civic orthodoxies. The movement to Americanise the immigrant led to an experiment in Industrial Americanisation in Detroit in 1915, an experiment that sought to combine the indoctrination process of Americanisation with the benevolent paternalism of industrialists such as Henry Ford to provide a means of incorporating foreign-born workers into an industrial order in which they would be submissive pawns. With the onset of war the mythology of the ‘radical alien’ menace combined with war-fever to produce conditions in which the Americanisation movement would be accepted as state policy and the core principles of Corporate Americanism would come to be seen not as the self-interested ideology of a powerful lobby group, but rather as the desirable traits of citizens. Representing a significant shift towards corporate oligarchy, this thesis argues that these changes laid the foundations for the Red Scare of 1919-1920 as well as providing continued political cover for Corporate America’s campaign of class war.