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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ItemGay print media’s golden era: Australian magazines and newspapers 1970-2000( 2015)The late 20th century was a golden era for Australian gay print media: more than five million copies annually of gay and lesbian publications were printed at its peak, with revenues of nearly eight million dollars a year. Yet there was not even a leaflet before 1969 because homosexuals then did not dare to publish in the climate of active oppression. Growing liberal attitudes within sections of broader society, and, at a practical level, reform of censorship laws made gay publishing possible. The remarkable growth of this industry stands as testimony to the dramatic change in mainstream society’s attitudes towards homosexuality, and changes within the gay community itself, during the final decades of last century. From 1970 to 2000 nearly 100 significant magazines and newspapers were produced around the country. Publishers used print media to advance gay movement aims, despite pursuing a variety of visions and goals for how they saw a better world for gay and lesbian people. Their publications allowed discussion of what it meant to be gay or lesbian in Australia; provided an arena to present positive viewpoints regarding homosexuality that countered dominant mainstream attitudes; and brought people together through personal classifieds and information about bars and other community activities. In order to sustain their businesses, publishers took commercial opportunities presented to them. And they needed to expand their operation to attract readers and advertisers. This offered economic viability to the publications, and allowed publishers to sustain a reliable workforce and improve their product. All publishers were forced to deal with the business side of their operation, which often caused tension between their initial goals for a better world and the need to run the business. A key resolution of this tension came through adopting the promotion and defence of community as a primary political project. This allowed publishers to freely develop synergies with advertisers that helped build and develop community infrastructure, such as venues, festivals, and small businesses. Expansion of the sector magnified the impact of this synergy on the community’s growth. It allowed movement ideas and information on community activities to reach and influence a much wider audience, and the day-to-day pursuit of business activity, in particular advertising revenue and distribution outlets led to a myriad of direct relationships with mainstream society that challenged prejudice and helped normalise homosexuality.
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ItemAn imperial partnership: the marriage of Henry and Alice Northcote( 2011)This thesis examines the lives of two Victorian era aristocrats, Henry (Harry) Stafford Northcote and Alice Stephen Northcote, who married in 1873, and in 1900 began an eight-year career in colonial government. It reviews in particular their negotiation of the system of imperial power that they represented, first in Bombay (1900-1903) and then in Australia (1904-1908). The combination of attention to biographical specificities and the various social and political contexts of the Northcotes' engagements allows the details of their lives to illuminate issues of wider historical significance. The study encompasses two different biographical challenges: interpreting the various correspondences that make up the main source of information about Harry; and discovering Alice despite a paucity of primary source material. Harry, scion of a minor aristocratic dynasty, first served in British politics what proved to be an apprenticeship for colonial service, while Alice, as the adopted daughter of a self-made millionaire, was a socially aspiring society hostess and little else. The couple experienced a dramatic life change at the end of the century: the means of resolving a painful predicament gave both Northcotes the opportunity to find personal renewal and professional fulfilment. They performed in the colonies with a measure of grace and humanity but, imbued as they were with the values of their era and class, Harry and Alice delivered what the British Empire required; they never questioned the ethos or mode of delivery. What the Empire required was always and everywhere the political, economic and social domination of others, particularly those of cultural and racial difference, for the ultimate benefit of the Mother Country and British colonials. In India Harry and Alice made separate but related efforts to impose Western standards of sanitation and medicine. Harry's administration was principally concerned with providing immediate relief for catastrophic famine, and the implementation of Western methods of dealing with epidemics of plague and smallpox. Alice's work involved raising revenue for the Dufferin Fund, a charitable venture characteristic of Victorian era philanthropy: a combination of culturally specific assistance and control. Harry's job description changed when he became governor general of the newly federated Australia. He moved from autocratic rule in a colony of extraction to performing a leading role in a constitutional monarchy in an increasingly self-governing settler society. Harry fulfilled both jobs with judgement and diplomacy, and in Australia he steered the ship of state through turbulent political waters. Alice, having found her metier as governor's "incorporated" wife, and having discovered considerable organisational skill, master-minded the First Australian Exhibition of Women's Work in 1907, an event designed to support fragile federation. On the couple's return to England Harry was active in the campaigns to prevent reform of the House of Lords and female suffrage, indicating that his conservative political views had not changed. Harry died in 1911 and Alice lived out a long widowhood until 1934, creating no new persona, but engaging in activities informed by Harry's legacy.
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ItemPlaying the game: the experiences of migrant-background players in Australian rules football( 2013)This thesis explores the experiences of migrant-background players in Australian football. These players come from a variety of different backgrounds and playing eras and all have very different experiences of playing the game. Drawing on interviews, as well as biographies of well-known players and news reporting, this thesis explores their introduction to the game and the reason they developed an interest in football. It places their experiences within the Australian social and political context of changing attitudes towards migration and the expectations of assimilation held by many Australians during the period. It explores the challenges they faced as children participating in the game. It examines the racism they experienced upon reaching the elite level of the competition and the ways they dealt with it. Drawing upon masculinity theory, it argues that the racism that migrant-background players experienced was an everyday aspect of the game and reflected the existing social system of challenging and asserting toughness and ability to play the game. An examination of the experience of a small cohort of migrant-background players from Ireland provides insight into the support that clubs have and have not provided to players from different backgrounds. The thesis then examines the situation for newer migrant-background players in the game today, the nature of the AFL’s involvement in encouraging diversity in the game, and migrant-background groups that continue to be left out of football. It argues that the AFL and the football community can and should learn from the experiences of past migrant-background players in the game when developing formal programs for encouraging newer migrants in the game today, fulfilling its goal of promoting diversity in the game and in broader Australia society.
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ItemNations on the move: Burmese migration to Australia( 2013)This thesis is the first work to undertake a long-range historical examination of migration from Burma to Australia. Moving beyond the conventions of a traditional community migration history, it interrogates the intersections between the discourses of race and nation in both places, and explores how they impacted on the decisions of individuals and groups to emigrate from Burma, and their ability to settle in Australia. Throughout, what it means to be Burmese is critically examined. This is a term that often acts as a monolithic identity, eliding the complex ethnic, cultural and political allegiances that tie the people of Burma together, and which has been used uncritically in the small number of studies of this migration previously published. In interrogating the diverse histories, politics and migration journeys that lie behind the term Burmese, this thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of this community. Utilising government archival documents, parliamentary debates, Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia case files, media material, memoir and oral history interviews, the thesis examines both the political and the personal, highlighting that there are multiple modes of representing and therefore understanding this history. It largely focuses on two periods during which significant amounts of migration from Burma to Australia occurred: the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and the early 1990s to the present. It argues, however, that this pattern of migration was shaped significantly by the development of racially based national identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both places. The drive of central Burmese authorities, both civilian and military, to inculcate a restrictive form of national belonging around a pan-Burmese identity has been a key site of conflict in Burma since independence in 1948, and has contributed to a large-scale refugee situation that remains an issue in the present. Racially based understandings of Australian national identity, defined as white, prevented many people from Burma from migrating to Australia until the late 1960s. Despite the abolition of racially-based immigration restrictions and the adoption of multiculturalism in the 1970s, racially-based understandings of national identity continue to have traction within Australian political discourse, most recently in relation to refugee and asylum seeker policies. This is significant given that the majority of people from Burma to migrate to Australia have done so via the humanitarian stream. By critically examining the impact of identity politics in Burma and Australia on migrants from Burma of a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, and over long historical period, this thesis makes an important foundational contribution to the limited, but emerging, work on this topic.
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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.
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ItemTough as buggery: traditional Australian circus, community and belonging( 2010)This thesis is a cultural study of traditional family-operated Australian circuses. Traditional circuses have been active in Australia since the 1830s, and are possibly our last actively nomadic settler community. Drawing on archival research, extensive oral history interviews and ethnographic participant observation, this thesis examines the meaning of belonging and community for this group of people. It argues that belonging is an active process, not predicated on geographic place, and the key signifier for circus people is the daily ‘performance’ of their history, culture and identity. This discussion of community and belonging is framed within notions of ‘performativity’, in recognition of both the profession of circus performance, and the performative nature of circus life. Circus people are consummate performers, and the line between their professional and private lives, public and private ‘performances’, characters and identities are often deeply blurred. This thesis argues that the repeated remembrance and performance of circus history is the root of belonging, giving circus people a deep understanding of their cultural ‘place’ in the broader narrative of Australia. It examines how circus performs itself for the public gaze through the vehicle of the circus show, and how this forges a sense of belonging through shared understanding, action, and physical commitment. It interrogates how the ‘performance’ of private circus culture creates a sense of 'home' regardless of place; how the public's construction or a mythic circus, disconnected from the daily reality of circus life, denigrates the traditional circus whilst simultaneously carving a ‘place’ for it in the social imagination; and how circus people perform their own personal circus mythology, embodying core cultural beliefs. Finally this thesis examines the construction and performance of public and private circus identities, arguing they are integrally linked to circus history and culture, deeply connected to community, and central to the circus sense of belonging. This thesis features the voices, memories, insights and images of the research participants. Circus is a non-literate culture, and too often circus voices are mediated for public consumption. Although this thesis must also mediate, it endeavours to reflect the interviewees' sometimes contradictory, often humorous expression of their life experiences, to give the reader insight into circus people's perceptions of their culture, alongside theoretical reflection and analysis. Traditional circus life is, and always has been, ‘tough as buggery’, and circus people have developed a unique humour, irony, and 'toughness' to deal with the demands of this life. This thesis travels beneath the highly polished and hardened exterior of traditional circus life, to understand the unique nature of circus culture, community and belonging.
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Item'In our lifetime': the gay and lesbian movement and Australian society, 1969-1978( [1998])The social standing of lesbians and gay men has been transformed dramatically in Australia in the past thirty years. From a group which was marginalised to the point of invisibility, vilified, and discriminated against, we have moved towards the social and political mainstream. Or rather, the mainstream has moved towards us. Laws, administrative and bureaucratic practices and professional and public opinion have all been recast. This thesis is concerned to explore the parameters of this transformation and to explain it. To do this, it relies upon recent developments in social movement theory which have focused attention upon the conditions within which social movements arise and the ways in which, having come into existence, they tap into, and transform, generally-available repertoires of action, organisation and thought. The resource-mobilising capacity of social movements where resources are to be understood very broadly - allows them to have a very much greater impact than the actions of individuals alone. The diversity of their activities and ideas allows them to operate very flexibly - to seize opportunities, appeal to a variety of audiences, engage in a very much wider range of actions, than can political parties, lobby groups and other more conventional forms of political activism. The gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s demonstrated all the characteristics of the social movements which have been studied and theorised internationally, though its historic context is, as I demonstrate in Part One, rather unique. The absence of any deeply-rooted or extensive public homophobia in the Australia of the 1950s is important, though it was only with the emergence of a new liberalism in the second half of the 1960s that homosexuality found voice. The rise of the movement in the radical climate of the 1970s gave it access to a variety of ideas, forms of action and means of organising, as well as a number of different audiences liberal and radical and counter-cultural. But it is important to recognise that, in mobilising against 'society', the movement was, in fact, mobilising against attitudes, practices and policies concentrated in a number of different sectors (or realms or arenas). The thesis, in order to capture this, focuses upon both the broad questions of movement-formation and transformation and upon a number of sectors on which it acted. In particular, I examine, as case-studies, the campaigns around the medical profession, the Anglican Church and the Victorian teachers' unions, examining the ways in which, in each of these sectors, specific tactics were deployed, specific goals sought and different outcomes achieved.