School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Colonising Yolngu defence : Arnhem Land in the Second World War and transnational uses of indigenous people in the Second World War
    Riseman, Noah. (University of Melbourne, 2008)
    The thesis examines the involvement in World War II of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, in the context of colonialism in the Northern Territory, and with comparative attention to the war experiences of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. and the Native American Navajo. Yolngu participated in the war through various avenues, including the provision of labour for white Australian war initiatives. Most notably Yolngu served as auxiliaries to non-indigenous military units such as the North Australia Observer Unit, and they also participated in the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was exclusively Aboriginal apart from its leadership. Rather than representing widespread white Australian appreciation of Yolngu skills or recognition of Yolngu equality, the military employment of Yolngu continued structures of ideas and practices inherent in settler colonialism in the north. The military authorities, with government endorsement, organised Yolngu to utilise their skills in defence of the colonial project that was of itself simultaneously robbing Yolngu of their land and rights. Yolngu had their own motivations to work alongside white military, and for the most part participated willingly. Analysis of oral testimony points to their courageous efforts and, unlike the non-indigenous documents, positions Yolngu as central actors in Arnhem Land during the war. Comparative analysis of other colonised indigenous peoples' involvement in World War ll�Pacific Islanders in similar units in Papua and New Guinea, and Navajo Codetalkers in the United States�highlights the existence of common colonial practices that existed transnationally, alongside indigenous peoples' own sense of agency. This study re-centres indigenous people in war narratives while demonstrating at the same time how governments' reliance on indigenous skills and labour in times of crisis did not represent a fundamental change in relations, although for white authorities there were, eventually, unanticipated outcomes from the war for indigenous peoples.
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    A Question of Trust: Secrecy and Intelligence Accountability in Cold War Australia
    Davis, Melanie Elizabeth ( 2023-07)
    Intelligence oversight and transparency have traditionally been conceptualised as a zero-sum equation in which decreases in secrecy were believed to come at the cost of intelligence agency efficacy. This thesis challenges that view. While a certain level of secrecy is protective, this thesis will demonstrate that excessive secrecy and a lack of accountability surrounding intelligence services is ultimately destructive. Using the role, functions and public perceptions of ASIO in Cold War Australia as a case study, I will establish that secrecy negatively affected intelligence efficacy in this period in Australia in multiple ways. With little to no guidance or oversight from Government, ASIO’s products became increasingly irrelevant to policymakers, and both Government and opposition members would lose sight of ASIO’s capabilities, limitations and value to Australian society. With no external guidance and no requirement to be accountable for its actions, secrecy allowed ASIO staff to break the boundaries of their legal remit and become involved in overtly political and partisan affairs. Significantly, secrecy also contributed to reduced trust in intelligence agencies and their staff. ASIO was deeply embedded within the community it served and significantly affected by the attitudes, beliefs and actions of the broader public. When intelligence agencies such as ASIO lose the trust of those they are supposed to protect, the morale of existing staff plummets, the recruitment of quality staff is made more difficult, influence with government and opposition is weakened and government spending on intelligence is threatened. The very legitimacy of intelligence agencies as a necessary element of democratic government can – and did – come in question, and with it, the future of the organisations themselves. Secrecy did not ensure intelligence efficiency in Cold War Australia: by destroying trust in the agency and its legitimacy in the eyes of the Australian public, it eroded it.
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    Working wood: the state, wood science and industry: Australia, 1918–1949
    Dadswell, Gordon Alexander ( 2021)
    This study identified the role of three national forest products laboratories and their relationship with other government agencies and specifically, to the Australian timber industry. The laboratories were established with several objectives, including to reduce the importation of timber, develop industry strategies for the use of Australian timbers, identify the properties of Australian woods and minimise problems for the timber industry. A further aim was to implement ‘national efficiency’ (discussed below). The work of the laboratories was based on a common theme: to encourage industries to understand that by using Australian timber, they would help both the nation and their businesses. A major objective of this thesis is to address the ‘doing’ of science in laboratories in conjunction with industry and government Archives from Australia and the United Kingdom were used. Not all of the archives had been opened which suggested that the thesis filled a gap in the history of the Australian wood science. Libraries were also used in Australia and the United Kingdom. A further methodology identified a ‘Triple helix’ between research, industry and government, which focused on collaboration between three organisations whose goals were to conduct research, to develop research outcomes and increase National efficiency. Archival material exposed the frequency of communications between the laboratories and the secondary timber industry. Six stories provided a broad perspective of the research conducted by the laboratories. Time frames of each chapters partially overlapped. The subjects connected across time, and provided depth to the thesis. Using the helix as the framework, the relationship between the laboratories, industry and the national science organisations was identified as collaboration, conflict, innovation, knowledge transfer and networking.
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    A History of Australia's Immigrant Doctors, 1838-2021: Colonial Beginnings, Contemporary Challenges
    Yeomans, Neville David ( 2022)
    Since colonisation in 1788, Australia has been populated by immigrants. Among them, for all this period, there have been practitioners of Western medicine who qualified overseas. This thesis is about them, now termed International Medical Graduates (IMGs). Starting in 1838, when the first colonial medical Acts were promulgated, it explores who those graduates were, from where they came, why they migrated at specific times in response to geopolitical and other events, how were they received and what were their experiences. Their history is integral to the history of medical practice and medical politics in Australia. It has not previously been examined across the longue durée researched here; the purpose has been to better understand the evolving and continuous process of medical immigration, rather than the fragments that constitute the current historiography. The methodology is quantitative and qualitative. First, a prosopography was constructed comprising all IMGs registered in each colony, state, and territory from 1838 to 1984, supplemented by data from a random sample of contemporary IMGs to bridge to the present. From this, the time course, profile of donor countries, and characteristics of successive waves of IMGs has been documented, then linked to causal historical events, including the changing and frequently obstructive medical legislation. Throughout the colonial period and the first half of the twentieth century, nearly all immigrant doctors had trained in Great Britain and Ireland, often motivated by difficulties establishing practice at home and attracted by opportunities in a new land, but with source countries restricted by the Medical Acts. Then, as Australia opened to migrants from the rest of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, so the spectrum of IMGs expanded immensely—approximately, but not completely matching that of the immigrant populations overall. Currently, about 30 percent of the Australian medical workforce was born and trained overseas. A second aim was to understand and learn from the experiences of living IMGs. For this, 87 oral histories were recorded—using criterion-referenced, random, and snowball sampling. Many were negotiating the pathways to medical registration, under the now national regulator, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). The thesis gives them a voice, and illustrates their difficulties and crises—sometimes at the hands of what seems to have been a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The other pathway for some has been to persuade a specialist college that their overseas qualification is comparable to that of the Australian college. Interviews with college and AHPRA representatives confirm the author’s impression that much has been done recently to improve the fairness of those processes; but the thesis also provides evidence in the oral histories of what appear to be historical and recent injustices. Australia owes much to its IMGs. The thesis allows us to learn from their history during almost two centuries. It concludes with recommendations for how we can still assure the paramount need to protect Australian patients, yet also improve the effectiveness and fairness of our current processes for registering and supporting those who received their medical training overseas.
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    Revisiting Anzac in the Wake of World War Two: Memory and Identity in the Post-War Period, 1945-1960
    Donohoe-Marques, Anton Tarrant ( 2021)
    This thesis explores how war remembrance—in the form of commemorative observance and the building of memorials—developed in Australia in the period that followed World War Two, from 1945 to 1960. It investigates three key questions. First, what was the nature of the interplay between post-World War Two memorialisation and commemoration and the remembrance traditions that had been established during World War One and the interwar period? Second, how was Australia’s post-World War Two remembrance shaped by the particular social, political, and economic circumstances of the period? And finally, what influence did the process and practice of post-World War Two remembrance have on changing conceptions of the Anzac legend and Australian national identity? In addressing these questions, this study contains five distinct case studies, each of which explores a different aspect of war remembrance between 1945 and 1960. These case studies examine the building of memorials, the efforts of veterans to enact remembrance projects, the observance of Anzac Day, the construction of cemeteries overseas, and interactions between Australian war remembrance and foreign diplomacy. In large part these case studies investigate the Australian state’s efforts to enact control over memorialisation and commemoration. However, the thesis also explores various responses to these projects, analysing how resistance from people outside of government, particularly from veterans of both world wars, was an integral part of how war remembrance in the period took shape. Between 1945 and 1960 there was significant change in the ways that Australians remembered war. During World War One and the interwar period, Australians commemorated the war by building around 1,500 memorials, erected in towns and cities across the country. It was also during World War One that Australians began to observe Anzac Day each year on 25 April. But with the advent of a second global conflict, a new range of perspectives, experiences, and memories were incorporated into this pre-existing culture of war remembrance. Forms of commemoration also reflected the shifting circumstances of Australian society. In the post-World War Two period, communities grew rapidly through migration, industrialisation, and economic expansion. It was also a time in which a new generation of veterans returned and reintegrated into society. Finally, Australia was forging a series of new international partnerships during this period. These social, political and economic changes influenced the way that Australians imagined themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of the Anzac legend. Post-World War Two remembrance was therefore distinguished by an enthusiasm for utilitarian memorials, by the inclusion of new veterans into the fold of war remembrance, and diplomatically, by the representation of new international relationships with the United States and other Pacific nations through commemoration and memorialisation.
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    Contentious Routes: Ireland Questions, Radical Political Articulations and Settler Ambivalence in (White) Australia, c. 1909 - 1923
    Yan, Jimmy H. ( 2021)
    This thesis is a transnational history of the ‘Ireland Question' in the imperial and ethico-political imaginary of radical and labour movements in (‘White’) Australia during the ‘Irish revolutionary period’, broadly conceived. It traces the contestation of 'Ireland' as a political signifier, with attention to its constitutive differences, transnational circuitries, utopian investments, relations of recognition and desire, and articulatory practices. Where previous studies of Irish nationalisms in Australia have deployed 'the nation' as a consensualist category of analysis, this study reinterprets the ‘Ireland Question’ in postnational terms as contentious and within routes. Combining attention to settler-colonial difference with the discursive articulation of political forms, it situates the 'Ireland Question' firstly in relation to the political as a signifier of settler ambivalence, and secondly to politics as a social movement. Drawing on archival research in Australia, Ireland and Britain, it analyses personal papers, letters, political periodicals, state surveillance records, political ephemera and pamphlets. Beyond the 'Ireland Question' in the imperial labour movement, this study affords serious attention to historical dimensions at the hybrid boundaries of ‘long-distance nationalism’ including political travel performances in Ireland, non-nationalist transnational political networks ranging from feminist to socialist connections, and non-Irish political identification with 'Ireland.' It proposes that this unstable play of meanings comprised a heterogeneity of political positions and networks whose convergence during the conjuncture of 1916-1921 was both contingent and politically contested: one that signified in excess of either Australian nationalist historical teleologies or a coherent 'transnational Irish revolution.'
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    Memory and Cooperation: Genocide recognition efforts among Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in twenty-first century Australia
    Kritikakos, Themistocles ( 2021)
    This thesis examines a unique period in the early twenty-first century when Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians in Australia cooperated to achieve genocide recognition. The Armenian genocide during the First World War (1915) has been commonly associated with genocide in the late Ottoman Empire. Whilst the Armenian genocide has gained international awareness, the persecution of Greeks and Assyrians in the late Ottoman Empire (1914-1923) remains largely unknown. This thesis brings to public attention the intergenerational memories of traumatic experiences of Greeks and Assyrians living in Australia for the first time. Using an oral history method, it investigates the place these memories have in families and communities in Australia. The Greeks and Assyrians, traditionally neglected in the genocide discourse on the late Ottoman Empire, sought recognition alongside the Armenians. There were challenges to establishing a common narrative of victimhood given the Armenians were active in recognition efforts since the 1960s, and the Greeks and Assyrians only became active in the 1990s. The success of Armenian recognition efforts influenced intercommunal dialogue and collaboration in the late twentieth century, which led to solidarity at the turn of the century. By referencing each other’s experiences, and negotiating memories, they developed a common understanding of the past as co-victims of genocide. Genocide recognition was achieved in the Parliament of South Australia (2009) and New South Wales (2013) with the aim of attaining national recognition from the Australian Federal Government. The recognition of their experiences could only be achieved by reimagining the Australian humanitarian response to their plight (1915-1930). The narratives of the three groups became an Australian issue and provided them with a sense of belonging. However, this challenged the shared history between Australia and Turkey surrounding Gallipoli. The Australian connection spearheaded the recognition efforts, and provided new perspectives on Australian history. Nevertheless, the Australian Federal Government is yet to recognise their plight as genocide. Although differences inform how each group remembers the past, remembrance has been negotiated among the three groups to represent a common experience of genocide.
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    A Quarrel with the German People? The Totalising Logic of Enmity, Narratives of Enmity and the “German Question” on the Australian Home Front During the Second World War
    Duan, Trent ( 2021)
    A significant aspect of wartime discourse is the construction, definition and redefinition of in-group and out-group identities which justify, rationalise and strengthen the support and unity behind a war effort. The totalising “logic” of contemporary visions of twentieth century peoples’ wars, and the horrific realities of such conflicts, facilitated the systematic demonisation, dehumanisation and condemnation of entire peoples and nations. Recent scholarship, however, has emphasised the need to account for unique contexts and political, cultural and moral choice when analysing enmity during the Second World War. Such factors rendered the totalisation of enmity during the conflict, and its concurrent “communitarisation” of identities, contextually contingent, conditional, and far from inevitable, notwithstanding the irrevocable momentum of the enmity process in totalising peoples’ wars. This thesis explores the logic of totalising enmity during the Second World War. It analyses Australian public discourse and contemporary framing of the German enemy between 1939 and 1945. It focuses on the dynamic of this logic by exploring the structures, forms and contested nature of various “narratives of enmity” relating to the “German Question” in the Australian context. Reduced to its core, the German Question summarises the polarising debates on the Allied home fronts as to whether the German nation and people, through their national character, history, culture and aims, expressed bellicose intent and complicity with the objectives, ideology and horrors of National Socialism and the Nazi regime. These questions, this thesis posits, heavily influenced wartime enmification and problematised Australian conceptions of the enemy, despite the unanimity of Australian support for a perceived just, defensive, “good” war against Nazism. Qualitative analysis, largely focusing on Australian print media – editorials, foreign correspondence cables, reports, the correspondence columns, published speeches, cartoons and images across a variety of newspapers, magazines, journals – and other published materials, reveals several ambiguous, contested and often contradictory enmity narratives relating to the German people and nation. This thesis demonstrates Australia’s complex response to the totalising logic of enmity. This thesis proposes that totalising narratives of enmity encompassing the German people were far more pronounced in Australian wartime discourse than previously accounted for in the historiography, and grew exponentially as the war progressed. Widely held distinctions between the German people and Nazism professed in the first months of the war evaporated as the war progressed in light of changing wartime contexts. This process, however, remained contested between 1939 and 1945, even though there was a widespread receptiveness to, and expression of, totalising enmity narratives by the end of the conflict. This thesis investigates the intersecting relationship between three major themes in Australian war discourse – totalising enmity, narratives of enmity and the German Question – to further historical understanding of Australian experiences and attitudes under the pressures of a totalising peoples’ war and situate these findings within the broader historiography of such conflicts.
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    Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War: A Transnational History of Homosexual Aversion Therapy, 1948-1981
    Davison, Katherine Maeve ( 2020)
    Aversion therapy was a method of ‘treatment’ for sexual ‘deviation’ adopted by some psychiatrists and psychologists in the decades following the Second World War. There were several variations of the procedure, but most involved subjecting a patient to nausea or electric shocks while showing them erotically stimulating images in order to de- and re-condition their sexual behaviours. Aversion therapy enjoyed two short but intense waves of clinical experimentation, first in Czechoslovakia (1950-1962), and then in the British world, including Australia (1962-1975). The Sydney psychiatrist Dr Neil McConaghy, a self-declared ‘Marxist’ and himself bisexual, was directly inspired by the Czechoslovakian experiment led by Dr Kurt Freund and promoted the practice in Australia. McConaghy, Freund and some other practitioners of aversion therapy believed themselves to be sympathetic to sexual minorities, rejected the idea that sexual orientation could be changed and supported decriminalisation. How was this possible? The explanation is to be found in the specific context of its emergence: the geopolitical polarisation of the Cold War and a parallel theoretical polarisation within psychological medicine. A behaviourist paradigm based on the ideas of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov gained popularity in contradistinction to Freudian psychoanalytic theories favoured in the United States, and from 1949 was the unofficial doctrine of the Eastern Bloc. As homosexuality became a crucial area for expert research by intelligence and security organisations, technologies of detection and diagnosis turned to behaviourism through emotional observation, visual surveillance, psychometric testing and physiological measurement. In a therapeutic context, the Pavlovian framework was taken up in Western countries by practitioners who sought a more empirical and scientific – and therefore ‘humane’ – approach to clinical practice. Patients, however, did not view the procedure as ‘humane’. Nor did activists in the new social movements for gay and women’s liberation and in 1972 in Australia Neil McConaghy became their number one target. This thesis draws on intelligence documents, medical and psychiatric literature, gay print and radio media, oral history interviews, and a newly discovered archival collection: Neil McConaghy’s personal papers. My research charts shifting understandings of sexual orientation from endocrinological and psychoanalytic theories that were dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, to more emotional and behavioural theories in the post-war period. This shift was accompanied by the development of new technologies of detection and treatment which tied in with post-war modernity’s promotion of scientific and materially efficient machines and methods. My contention is that the influence of Pavlovian ideas in post-war therapeutic approaches to homosexuality can only be understood as part of the transnational Cold War circulation of sexological knowledge. By focusing on the movement of this knowledge from East to West, I hope to contribute to the project of ‘decentering Western sexualities’ (Mizlielinska & Kulpa, 2011) and to emerging scholarship charting the global histories of sexology.
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    Through Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia
    Evans, Gretel Frances Rose ( 2019)
    Natural disasters are a significant feature of the Australian environment. In a country with a rich history of immigration, it is therefore surprising that historians have not yet examined the specific challenges faced by immigrants within this hazardous environment. This thesis examines migrants’ memories and experiences of bushfires and floods in Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and regional case studies, this thesis explores the entanglement of migration and natural disaster in Australia and in the lives of migrants. Oral history interviews with migrants who have experienced bushfires in Victoria or floods in Maitland, New South Wales, are at the heart of this study. This thesis contributes to scholarship in three distinct fields—migration and environmental history, and disaster studies—and brings them together through an examination of migrants’ memories of bushfires and floods in Australia. Although traumatic experiences, displacement, and a changed and challenged sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment are common themes of both migrants and survivors of fire and flood, rarely have the similarities between these experiences been noted. This thesis is not a history of natural disasters in Australia, nor a retelling of a history of immigration to Australia, but an exploration of experiences of ‘double displacement’. This thesis argues that migrants’ recollections reveal how their burgeoning sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment was challenged by natural disasters. It highlights how their experience of ‘double displacement’ contributed to a new sense of home and belonging in a natural disaster-prone country.