School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemChildhood, war and memory: experiences of Bosnian child refugees in Australia( 2019)This thesis explores the impact of war and displacement on children who moved to Australia during and after the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It takes as its starting point the knowledge that the Bosnian war - like all wars - has predominantly been studied from the viewpoint of adults and suggests that new understandings about the experiences of war-time refugees are generated by looking at the war and its aftermath through the lens of childhood. I argue that there was a historically-specific understanding of children, childhood and children’s rights within the context of the Bosnian war and in the wake of the near-universal ratification of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ten Bosnian former child refugees participated in oral history interviews for this thesis and their narratives are analysed alongside complementary archival material. In telling the stories of these children, the experiences of their families and contemporaries are also illuminated. In addition to the oral history interviews, this thesis draws on institutional archives, museum objects, and media analysis to provide a comprehensive historical examination of how Bosnian children experienced the war and how they remember it in diaspora. The first half of the thesis looks at how Bosnian children's war experiences were portrayed at the time – including through international media; how their needs were decided and addressed by international aid organisations; and how they are represented in the scholarly literature. The second half of the thesis turns its attentions towards how they are remembered in the present day. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates how writing through the lens of childhood generates new understandings of the Bosnian war.
-
ItemNostalgia and the warzone home: American and Australian veterans return to Việt Nam, 1981-2016( 2018)From 1981 to 2016, thousands of Australian and American veterans returned to Việt Nam. In this comparative oral history investigation, I examine why veterans returned and how they reacted to the people and places of Việt Nam—their former enemies, allies, and battlefields—as the war receded further into history and memory. Tracing veterans’ returns through economic, cultural, and political shifts in Việt Nam, Australia, and the US, I identify three distinct periods of return: contact, normalization, and commemoration. These periods reflect the changing meanings of “Vietnam” in Australia and the US and describe the relationship of veterans to the contemporary, peacetime space of Việt Nam. Very different narratives about the war informed Australian and American returns: Australians followed an Anzac tradition of battlefield pilgrimage, whereas for Americans the return constituted a radical, anti-war act. Despite these differences in timing and nationality of return, commonalities emerged among them: veterans returned out of nostalgia for a warzone home, responding to the “needs of the present” by turning back toward “Vietnam.” When veterans arrived in Việt Nam, they found that their warzone home was unrecognizable, replaced with unfamiliar places, politics, and people. Returnees faced conflicting challenges and rewards. Many reported that seeing Việt Nam at peace diluted their memories of war, and brought them a measure of relief. Yet this peacetime reality also disrupted their wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. Returnees navigated this challenge by drawing from the same wartime narratives that had informed their returns. Consequently, anti-war and Anzac memories shaped how returnees interpreted and interacted with peacetime Việt Nam as returnees recaptured their sense of belonging to the warzone home by relying on familiar stories about a suddenly unfamiliar place. Thus while the return experiences challenged returnees’ wartime memories, the return did not change their views so much as reinforce existing perspectives. Furthermore, while returning to Việt Nam helped many veterans to put “Vietnam” behind them, there was not total separation between war and country. As the numbers of returnees rose and expatriate-veteran enclaves emerged, the wartime narratives through which veterans navigated the return took on greater impact, collapsing time through space through nostalgic practices to relocate the warzone home.
-
ItemMovements and post-authoritarian mnemonics: populist narratives and the commemoration of People Power in contemporary Philippines( 2011)This thesis is a discursive analysis of the ways in which Filipinos commemorate and remember the bloodless People Power revolution of 1986 that overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in various “sites of memory,” I unpack the symbolic constellation I call the “People Power narrative” – a narrative that continues to define present day nationalism and post-authoritarian politics in the Philippines. This narrative, however, is by no means homogenous; it is constantly in flux, constructed by various groups representing different subject-positions. Moreover, as I will show, it is also inevitably tied up with the “National Democratic” revolution of the Communist Party of the Philippines, creating a “twinning” of two mnemonic frameworks. The work forms a diptych that moves from memories materialised in urban monuments to subaltern narratives in the context of an agrarian justice struggle. The first half examines hegemonic forms of the People Power narrative as constructed by the middle class and the elite Catholic Church in two monuments. Using these monuments, I argue that the mainstream narrative obscures lower class histories of resistance to the Marcos regime. The second half examines the People Power narrative in the context of the sugar plantation Hacienda Luisita in Central Luzon. I use Luisita to reveal what hegemonic versions of the People Power narrative obscure, while unearthing the simultaneous collapse of both the People Power narrative and the purported radical alternative of National Democracy.