School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBroken promises: Aboriginal education in south-eastern Australia, 1837-1937( 2008)This thesis is a comparative study of the education of Aboriginal children from 1837-1937 in the colonies (later states) of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, which together form the south-eastern, and most heavily settled, portion of the Australian continent. It explores early missionary education, the consolidation of colonial authorities' control over schools and the shift to government-run education and training for Aboriginal children of mixed-descent in particular, as part of wider ‘assimilation’ programs. It also pays attention to Aboriginal responses to, protests about, and demands for education throughout this period of rapid change. The thesis demonstrates that missionary, colonial and government attempts to educate Aboriginal people in the south-east constituted an attempt to transform Aboriginal people's subjectivity to suit various aims: for conversion to Christianity, for colonial control, or for training for ‘useful’ purposes. The thesis argues, however, that these attempts constituted a ‘broken promise’ to Aboriginal people. The promise was, that once educated, Aboriginal people might join and participate in colonial society. Instead, they were relegated to its economic and geographical fringes, dispossessed as settlers spread across their land and accorded only liminal positions in the settler-colonies and later, states of the Australian Commonwealth. Temporally, this thesis is bound by two government reports which were influential in the development of colonial and state governance of Aboriginal people. The first is the 1837 British Parliament's Select Committee on Aborigines: British Settlements report; the second, published exactly one hundred years later, is the Australian intergovernmental Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of State Aboriginal Authorities of 1937. The thesis also makes use of extensive missionary and government archival material from the south-east. As the first multi-state Aboriginal education history, this thesis offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-Aboriginal relations in Australia as well as interrogating the reasons for the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Aboriginal welfare policy. It places this study within a broader transimperial and transnational framework of colonialism, empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, demonstrating that the education of Aboriginal children was not a single project with a single aim. Rather, it constituted a multitude of approaches, sometimes disparate, formed in response to a broad rubric of colonisation and empire as well as local specificities and situations. In doing this, the thesis engages with the significant methodological challenge of historicising post-contact Aboriginal education, an aspect of the colonial project which was, for Aboriginal people in the south-east, both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously.
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ItemCollecting cultures for God: German Moravian missionaries and the British colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848-1908( 2007)The thesis focuses on six decades of German Moravian involvement in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, from the Moravian Church’s decision to send missionaries to the colony (then the Port Phillip District of New South Wales) in 1848, to the closure of the last Moravian mission in Victoria in 1908. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, which was known as the Brüdergemeine or Brüder-Unität in German, were heirs to a particular spiritual and cultural heritage, and brought to the colony a long and distinctive experience of evangelical missions. Their outreach was grounded in an emphasis on a lifelong commitment to conversion, and a special concern to bring Protestant Christianity and western ways of living and relating to peoples who appeared specially resistant to other denominational mission practices. Moravians prioritised humble living alongside their converts and sustained abroad as at home a distinct separation of church and state. They began their first mission station in Australia at Lake Boga in the north-west of Victoria with high hopes of sustaining their customary faith practices, and continued to work in distinctive ways in their expanding labours in the south-east of the colony. The Moravians were, however, ‘strangers in a strange land’, and it would prove to be not only their own pragmatic response to indigenous Victorians that shaped the fortunes of their mission. The Germans shaped their mission methods and goals to the demands of the governing authorities – not simply of distant British colonial officials, but, as the British swiftly granted a degree of self-government to the colonists, increasingly to a series of colonists’ regimes with their particular policies on the management of indigenous survivors. The mission objectives of German Moravians coincided in many ways with those of many humanitarian colonizers. They believed like other humanitarians that Aborigines were equal in the eyes of God, and that Christianity offered Aborigines the one true path to assuming their full humanity. Not only did the wider colonial community, however, sustain other narratives about Aborigines that dismayed the Germans, but colonial governments had other concerns – above all, saving money through swift assimilation of Aborigines into white society. Over a sixty-year period the Moravians found themselves transformed from evangelisers of indigenous people to keepers of institutions for a state government with little desire to continue funding indigenous affairs. Aborigines who did not leave the stations to make a life elsewhere found themselves subjected to mission surveillance and compulsion – a far cry from the original goals, and the continuing practices elsewhere in the world, of the respected Moravian Church.
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ItemA history of Framlingham and Lake Condah aboriginal stations, 1860-1918( 1980)From Introduction: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the implementation of Victorian Government Aboriginal policy in the Western District of Victoria in the period after 1860. In 1860 the Victorian Government adopted a policy of drawing the remnants of the Aboriginal population on to reserves, where, under the control of superintendents, they were to be protected and hopefully civilised and christianised. The Central Board to watch over the interests of the Aborigines was established to implement the new policy. The Western District is a significant area of study in that approximately a third of the Victorian Aboriginal population was located there and two of the colony's six Aboriginal stations were established in the District; one at Lake Condah, the other at Framlingham.