School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemRuby Rich: A Transnational Jewish Australian Feminist( 2023)This thesis examines the life of Ruby Rich (1888-1988) - a leading figure in Australian and international feminist movements and a leading campaigner for women's rights. Alongside her feminist work, she was also a leader in the Australian Jewish community, internationally renowned pianist, peace campaigner and racial hygiene advocate. Rich lived in Australia, London, Paris, Berlin and Switzerland, and attended conferences in Palestine (later Israel), Turkey, Germany, Iran, Denmark, India, England and Italy. These trips imbued within her a cosmopolitan outlook, contributing to her social consciousness. Through a focussed study of key flashpoints in Rich’s life, this thesis analyzes Rich’s mobile life in tandem with her Jewishness in order to provide a nuanced cultural understanding of how Australian and international feminism intersected with a Jewish diasporic self. By connecting disparate sub-disciplines of history, this thesis reveals how Rich operated and positioned herself as an active transnational Jewish-Australian feminist.
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ItemCountryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920 – 1997( 2021)This thesis explores the cultural and political history of Australian rural women between 1920 and 1997. Using a diverse range of archival collections this research finds that for rural women cultural constructions of idealised rural womanhood had real impacts on their lived experiences and political fortunes. By tracing shifting constructions of this ideal, this thesis explores a history of Australian rural womanhood, and in turn, centres rural women in Australian political and cultural history. For rural women, an expectation that they should embody the cultural ideals of rural Australia — hardiness, diligence, conservatism and unpretentiousness — was mediated through contemporary ideas of what constituted conforming femininity. This thesis describes this dynamic as countryminded conforming femininity. In this respect, this research is taking a feminist approach to political historian Don Aitkin’s characterisation of the Country Party as driven by an ideology of countrymindedness. This thesis uses countryminded conforming femininity as a lens through which cultural constructions of rural womanhood may be critically interrogated, and changes in these constructions may be traced. This thesis represents the first consideration of Australian rural womanhood as a category across time that is both culturally constructed and central to Australian political and cultural life, drawing together histories of rural women’s experience, representations and activism. It theorises what ideals of Australian rural womanhood have meant across the twentieth century and finds that they have had an under-considered role in Australian political life, and on constructions of Australian national identity.
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ItemThe Age and the young Menzies: a chapter in Victorian liberalism( 2010)The Melbourne Age was Robert Menzies' favourite newspaper. This thesis investigates the early years of Menzies' political career, when his relationship with The Age and its senior personnel was established. It is a comparative study of two liberalisms: that of the principal creator of the Liberal Party of Australia, and of a newspaper famous for its liberal affiliations. The Age had been closely identified with the Liberal politician Alfred Deakin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Geoffrey Syme became its proprietor in 1908, The Age pursued a programmatic agenda based in the dominant liberal ideology of the day, social liberalism, which stood for responsible citizenship and State intervention. The paper was influenced by both Deakinism and its New Liberal equivalent in Britain, whose political representatives were Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. When Menzies emerged on the Victorian political stage in the mid-twenties, The Age still stood for ideals and institutions which had been influential in the first decade of nationhood: New Protection, the conciliation and arbitration system, responsible trade unionism, accountable government, and social meliorism. The early chapters of the thesis explore the paper's political outlook, focusing on its vigorous campaign against the conservative ascendancy in non-Labor politics. That the newspaper remained a coherent exemplar of New Liberal orthodoxy from 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War is one of the study's main findings. To Syme, the young Menzies represented a talented new generation of Liberal reformer. The Age vigorously supported his election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1928, and his subsequent move to the Assembly. Despite the paper's hopes for him, Menzies' liberal-conservative tendencies were soon strongly to the fore. During the Depression, he aggressively opposed the introduction of unemployment insurance. When Menzies joined economists and primary producers in attacking the regime of tariff protection that was central to The Age's Deakinite identity, the relationship between the newspaper and the politician reached a low watermark. These episodes are explored in detail. The second half of the thesis focuses on Menzies's ideological make-up. It identifies him as a post-Deakinite whose personal politics were a contradictory mixture of older and newer streams of liberalism, and whose personal style was a mixture of pragmatism tinged with a consciousness of the legacy of Deakinite idealism. The phrase 'blended liberalism' usefully describes Menzies' political makeup by the late thirties. Three major influences on his political ideology are identified: the Victorian Liberal tradition; the Law, which was his first and, he said, best loved calling; and his family's Presbyterian faith. The thesis also explores Menzies' friendship with the British Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, a devout Anglican whose constructive social vision influenced Menzies. The final chapter of the thesis is a case study of the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act (1938), a regime of compulsory contributory social insurance which was based on the British model and included elements of Lloyd George's original bill and of Baldwin's extended scheme. Both Menzies and The Age supported the Australian measure. The thesis discusses how their shared campaign for national insurance brought them back into close relationship, yet how their ideological rationales for national insurance were significantly different.
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ItemHeterodoxy and contemporary Chinese protestantism: the case of Eastern Lightning( 2010)This dissertation examines new religious movements that are loosely related to Protestantism and have emerged in China in the past thirty years. In particular, it introduces the largest and most notorious of these movements. Eastern Lightning (dongfang shandian) emerged from Henan province in the early 1990s, and teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth in the form of a Chinese woman to judge humankind and end the present age. It has predominantly attracted women in poor rural areas of northern China, who have been overlooked amidst the nation's rapid social and economic transformation. This dissertation shows that Eastern Lightning combines elements of both tradition and innovation with respect to doctrine, recruitment techniques and symbols, indicating that Protestantism has become a cultural resource from which Chinese religious movements now draw. The dissertation also investigates the responses of Chinese government organs to Protestant-related new religious movements. The government has banned them and targeted them in its campaign against Falun Gong and "evil cults" (xiejiao). In so doing, it has redeployed familiar ways of labeling heterodoxy, tailoring them to fit the Protestant context. However, its efforts to suppress Eastern Lightning have met with only limited success. They have also led Eastern Lightning to intensify its own rhetoric against the Chinese Communist Party, and to employ radical recruitment practices. Chinese Protestants, too, have engaged in vociferous condemnation of new religious movements and attempted to educate their own members against them. This dissertation explores the ways in which different religious factions defend their own doctrinal correctness and attack that of others. Orthodoxy is central to the identities and discourses of all of these groups. Yet while Protestants are united in their condemnation of new religious movements, nuances in their responses reflect their own varying relationships with the state. Hence, this study uncovers the dynamic, complex and fraught interactions between an array of political and religious actors.