School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    An imaginary economy : gambling, commodity, meaning
    Livingstone, Charles Henry ( 2005)
    This thesis draws on the example of the contemporary phenomenon of electronic gaming machine (EGM) use in the Australian state of Victoria in order to construct an argument in the mode of social theory, relating the psyche's demand for meaning to the nature of consumption in contemporary capitalism. The thesis argues that EGM consumption may be viewed as an example of commodification of the 'interiority' of the subject. Two paths are utilised. The first is a theoretically oriented discussion of the necessity impelling humans to the generation of meaning, and the manner in which this meaning is created. This discussion also encompasses the importance of signification and processes of institution for the maintenance of heteronomous society, and the pseudo-mastery of social institutions. It involves a discussion of the creation of the social individual as consuming individual. The second path is a discussion of empirical material (including official data and the accounts of gamblers) which is used to generate an argument about the socio-economic processes maintaining heteronomous society, and the development of an ethic of life focussed on intensified forms of capitalist consumption. Arguments drawn from Nietzsche, Weber, Castoriadis and others are utilised to illustrate the fragmentation of the originary monad, required for successful creation of the social subject, and how this process of socialisation draws and must draw on processes of meaning creation and signification to create a social relationship formed between society and the psyche, via the concatenation of the social and radical imaginaries. The centrality of the significations of commodity and money is utilised to argue that consumption of EGMs is an exemplary example of contemporary consumption, the consumption of interiority, in which consumption has become a duty and an ethic, providing apparent access to a much desired state where monadic unity is apparently available, at a price.
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    Democracy at work in a gambling state? : a testing case for Habermas's proceduralism
    Berry, Elizabeth ( 2001)
    Jurgen Habermas's proceduralism is represented as a dynamic discursive model appropriate for normative analysis of complex modern constitutional democracies.^1 This discourse theoretical approach to the relationship between law and democracy focuses on the interplay between informal public sphere activity, and the formal deliberative processes, and legislative output. William Rehg has noted that the argument is "pitched at a very abstract level",^2 but has also referred to the fact that in Between Facts and Norms Habermas also "descends to the level of the real democratic procedure. ... "3 The, less formal level of Habermas's proceduralism has been further articulated in discussions and articles. The concern of this thesis has been to test this less formal level of Habermas's procedural model, and to reach some conclusion regarding the capacity for this theory to provide explanatory and/or critical insights into the social practices of a modern constitutional democracy. The less formal level of Habermas's procedural model has been tested against the background of gambling public sphere activity and gambling related legislative processes in the State of Victoria in different time periods. The conclusion has been reached that, while this test has revealed some problems for empirical analysis, and some limitations regarding the analysis of modern capitalist societies, the investigation undertaken here does, nevertheless, provide critical and explanatory insights into the way democracy works in a specific historical context. This is to certify that - (i) the thesis comprises only my original work except where indicated in the preface, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is 30,000 words in length, exclusive of endnotes, appendices and bibliography.
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    Damaged goods : hepatitis C and the politics of the Victorian Blood exchange
    Klugman, Matthew ( 2000)
    In February 1990, the Victorian Blood Transfusion Service (VIC BTS) became one of the first transfusion services in the world, to implement testing for the newly isolated hepatitis C virus. In this thesis, I trace the development of hepatitis C policy by the Victorian Transfusion Service. Policy development was complicated by the known indeterminacy of some hepatitis C test results, as well as the Service's desire to avoid a further AIDS-like crisis. In particular, the Service had to decide how to minimise the risk of hepatitis C infection to recipients, and what to do with the donors and recipients infected with the hepatitis C virus. In making these decisions, the VIC BTS was reshaping its relationship with donors and recipients, and this re-configuring of the relationships of Victorian blood exchange through the development of hepatitis C policy, is an underlying theme of this thesis. From its inception in 1929, the Victorian Service maintained a donor-oriented culture in which the health of donors and recipients was always a key priority. For Service staff, the voluntary gifts of donors made blood-banking a special enterprise, informing a 'moral economy' whereby the Service felt obligated to meet the needs of both donors and recipients. However, with the advent of the AIDS crisis in 1980s, the confidence of donors (and the public) in the safety of the Victorian blood supply fell, and some recipients, allegedly infected with HIV, initiated litigation against the Service's parent body, the Australian Red Cross Society. In response, the Victorian Service came to distrust the gift of blood, controlling and managing its risks by way of practices designed to assess other ordinary commodities. Blood came to be treated by the Service, and the Federal Government, not so much as a gift, but as an ambiguous commodity. The development of hepatitis C policy produced a growing tension between the Transfusion Service's longstanding 'moral economy', and its new, pharmaceutically informed, risk-assessment practices. On the one hand, the Service was very risk-averse in its policy development, implementing testing with great swiftness, and deferring all donors with indeterminate test results. Even when the Service later became aware that some of these donors had probably never been infected with hepatitis C, its desire to maintain as safe a blood supply as possible, necessitated the continuing deferral of all donors with indeterminate results. On the other hand, the Service felt obligated to provide the best care and treatment feasible for potentially infected donors. With few government resources available for the management of hepatitis C, the Victorian Service devoted great time and energy to ensure deferred donors could be confident in the interpretation of their test results, and would receive expert care and treatment if necessary. The tension between the special ethical nature of Victorian blood exchange, and the management of blood as a dubious commodity, came to a head in the development of lookback policy. The Victorian Service felt a clinically-informed, 'moral obligation' to 'look back' and locate individual recipients who may have been infected by blood transfusions contaminated with hepatitis C. However, others viewed hepatitis C lookback from a more distanced, population perspective, arguing that it was a technical issue to be resolved through a cost-assessment analysis. Such an analysis showed hepatitis C lookback would be inefficient and expensive as a public health intervention. Although major hepatitis C lookback programs were eventually supported at a national level, the `correct' way of developing Victorian transfusion policy remains open to debate. What is clear, however, is that future policy development by the Victorian Service will continue to reflect, and to reshape, its relationships with donors and recipients.
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    From commission to community: a history of salinity management in the Goulburn Valley, 1886-2007
    Howes, Hilary Susan ( 2007)
    This thesis investigates the evolution of government and public roles in salinity management within the Goulburn Valley, an important agricultural region of north-central Victoria. I argue that approaches to salinity management in the Goulburn Valley have altered over time to reflect variations in the connection between government and local communities. From 1905, the Victorian Government (as represented through its administrative body for water resources, the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC)) was led by a combination of developmentalist ideology and financial caution to install throughout north-central Victoria the fatal combination of extensive irrigation systems without adequate drainage. Despite early evidence of salinity problems resulting from their actions, the SRWSC did not experience a serious challenge to its institutionalised pattern of top-down advice and authority until the 1970s, when proposals for large-scale evaporative disposal schemes for salinity management met with angry responses from the farming community. Following an examination of community responses to two of the most controversial of these, the Lake Tyrrell and Mineral Reserve Basins salinity management schemes, I re-evaluate the subsequent Girgarre salinity control project in its historical context as a turning-point in government attitudes to community consultation. Through a close analysis of key policy documents, I then show how salinity management in the Goulburn Valley has developed since Girgarre to incorporate increasing levels of community participation, and proceed to examine the Australian Landcare movement as an effective, though flawed, system for community-based natural resource management. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the Goulburn Valley’s current situation, and emphasises very strongly the need for genuine community participation to ensure effective salinity management.
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    Spectacular! Spectacular!: Cole's book arcade, Melbourne: 1863 to 1927
    Rhodes, Jane Elise ( 2008)
    This thesis will investigate Cole's Book Arcade, which operated in Melbourne's Bourke Street from 1863 to 1927. Cole's Book Arcade provides a case study with which to interpret social and cultural practices occurring in the context of Melbourne's retail and entertainment environment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cole's Book Arcade was a product of its time and location. The thesis argues that the Arcade is an example of how Melbourne's citizens experienced modernity and leisure in the city during this historic period. It is necessary to define the boundaries of this case study. The thesis will also employ the definitions and practicalities of public history to examine the place of the Cole's Book Arcade story within The changing face of Victoria exhibition at the State Library of Victoria. The notions of cultural landscape, modernity, leisure, the New-World city, urban history and material culture will be employed to consider the significance of the entertainment and entrepreneurial environment of Cole's Book Arcade. Since the early settlement of colonial Melbourne, Bourke Street had been a popular destination for city dwellers to find entertainment. By the late nineteenth-century, modern cultural landscapes were emerging within New World cities. E.W. Cole was an entrepreneur who tapped into the commercial interests of a general public who embraced the popular leisure activities with shopping as their focus. This case study of Cole's Book Arcade will provide the historical record with greater knowledge of the personalities and places responsible for motivating these processes and outcomes.
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    Homefront hostilities: the first world war and domestic violence in Victoria
    NELSON, ELIZABETH ( 2004)
    This thesis examines the influence of the First World War on domestic violence in Victoria, Australia. A reading of court cases, newspaper reports, official records and oral testimonies reveals a connection between the war and individuals' violent behaviour within marriage, apparent during the war and in the decade following the cessation of hostilities. This connection explains what appears to be an increased incidence of domestic violence in the immediate aftermath of the war. A link between veterans' war trauma and domestic violence - frequently assumed in the historiography - existed, but this was just one aspect of the war's impact on domestic violence and did not account for all cases of returned-soldier wife abuse. The war contributed to both veterans' and civilian men's wife abuse by idealising male aggression and by provoking a range of experiences that personally disempowered men. Against the masculine ideal of the fearless Anzac, many men's self-esteem diminished. Failure to enlist, failure to fight, and failure to cope with horrifying memories of battle were some of the ways in which men fell short of their own and society's expectations of manliness. Male insecurity was further exacerbated by women's increased self-assertions. The war afforded many women greater social and economic autonomy, a situation which made wives' separation from violent husbands more viable. The war was influential, too, in shaping social responses to domestic violence. The new masculine hierarchy of wartime affected judicial determination of who was, and who was not, accountable for acts of violence. Official leniency towards returned-soldier perpetrators was noticeable both during and after the war, and in the post-war years such leniency also extended to civilian defendants. While the outbreak of war sparked renewed enthusiasm for male chivalry towards women, this ideal disappeared rapidly after 1918. ln a context of male antagonism towards women's apparent advancement, a new male ambivalence towards wife abuse emerged within the public realm. The notion of men as victims, rather than as brutal tyrants, informed much official reaction to actual cases of domestic violence. Greater official indifference to men's violence against their wives after the First World War was the result not only of men's fears of female encroachment on male privilege, but of a changing interpretation of the causes of domestic violence. The widespread phenomenon of shell shock in soldiers served to further the currency of psychological theories of human behaviour. In the post-war decade, the stereotype of the disturbed violent veteran both emerged from, and influenced, the proceedings of cases of domestic violence in Victorian courts. The idea that returned-soldier violence was a product of battle nerves weighed on cases of wife abuse, regardless of whether the facts of individual cases evinced such a connection. The violence of civilian men also increasingly came to be understood in a psychological framework during the 1920s. As the community's awareness of psychological factors burgeoned, the belief that domestic violence was an outcome of extraordinary stresses on ordinary men's minds began to prevail in the public sphere. Such an understanding helped to dismantle the dominant pre-war stereotype of the working-class 'wife-beater'.
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    Factory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920
    Thornton, Danielle Labhaoise ( 2007)
    Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
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    A hidden history: the Chinese on the Mount Alexander diggings, central Victoria, 1851-1901
    Reeves, Keir James ( 2005)
    This thesis interrogates the history of the Chinese on the Mount Alexander gold diggings. Viewing the diggings as a cultural landscape, it argues that goldfields Chinese were more than simple sojourners. It reframes their place in local and national histories as 'settlers' rather than 'sojourners'. In so doing the thesis contends that Chinese-European relations on the goldfields were more complex than orthodox historical interpretations have acknowledged, and that the Chinese were active parties in the international mid-nineteenth century gold seeking phenomenon. A key aim of this thesis is to locate the Chinese gold seekers within the polity of a dynamic expanding imperial British society on the periphery of the settled world. It also considers the enduring Chinese role, albeit on a smaller scale, in these Pacific Rim neo-European settler societies after the gold rushes as the goldfields communities consolidated themselves from the 1860s onwards. While it is true that many returned to China either voluntarily or as a result of state pressure, the initial objective was to examine the continuing history of the goldfields generation of Chinese and their descendants in Australia. That history continued well beyond Federation into the twentieth century. The raison d'etre of this thesis is to challenge the historical neglect of the role of the Chinese in diggings society. This thesis has three complementary themes. The first examines the need to refine the concept of sojourner, and add to it the concept of Chinese 'settler' experience. The second is to portray the Chinese as socially active, politically engaged participants in goldfields life society and the third is to contextualise the experience the Castlemaine Chinese in broader national and international histories of the gold seeking era.
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    Imperial game: a history of hunting, society, exotic species and the environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901
    Brennan, Claire ( 2004)
    Hunting was a popular and prestigious pastime in Britain and her colonies during the nineteenth century - indeed, during that period, the word 'sport' was used to mean hunting. The Hunt was valued as a form of social and cultural display, and its practice was tightly bound to the Victorian Imperialism, and to the British class system. It was as a result of its cultural connotations that the Hunt arrived in New Zealand and Victoria. The Hunts that developed in these two colonies provide an interesting comparison: while the colonies were very similar in settler culture, they differed enormously in their natural environments. However, the natural environments of New Zealand and Victoria were not conducive to the types of sport seen in Britain, in India, and in Africa. Both New Zealand and Victoria lacked the large, prestigious game animals that Imperial Britons had come to associate with the colonies. What sport was available was judged to be inadequate - the European settlers of New Zealand and Victoria brought with them cultural assumptions about the types of animal worth pursuing (for example, foxes, deer, grouse, pheasants, trout, salmon, and elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, antelopes, lions, tigers and bears) and the Antipodean colonies could not supply them. Other prey species were killed but, lacking cultural significance, they were not considered satisfactory 'sport'. As a result, the wild environments of both New Zealand and Victoria were modified to accord with settler notions of appropriate prey. Both places were settler colonies, and so the animals introduced to provide game were generally those of the British Isles. Once suitable prey became available settlers energetically reproduced culturally familiar hunting forms in the Antipodes, often participating in culturally familiar, but personally unknown, forms of the Hunt for the first time in their new homes. The colonies allowed many settlers to make new claims to authority, and to try to create a more egalitarian society, and these aspirations were both expressed through the Hunt. Settlers used symbolic game species to express cultural relationships with each other, and with their new, colonial landscapes. In a colonial context culturally important animal species were used to express belonging, and possession. This thesis examines the cultural phenomenon of 'the Hunt' in the Antipodes, and its embodiment in symbolic species of animal.
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    Intersections of conflict: policing and criminalising Melbourne’s traffic, 1890-1930
    Clapton, E. Rick ( 2005-07)
    Every single person on earth is a road-user; and, although an integral part of our society, the management of traffic is a low priority for most. Authorities constantly work to lessen the tension between the free-flow of traffic and traffic safety. Consequently, the management of traffic and its subsequent problems has consumed more time, money and resources than any other item on the public agenda. Between 1890 and 1930, urban road-traffic in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, as in other world cities, underwent a revolution as speeds increased 500%. The motor-vehicle exacerbated existing traffic problems with increased trips and vehicle numbers. Authorities separated the various road users with road demarcations, and placed upon the Victoria Police the responsibility of managing the heterogeneous and complex traffic mix. By the close of the 1920s, all the components—policing, case and statute law, and the physical infrastructure—of the contemporary traffic management system were firmly in place. Introducing motor-transport into a centuries old road network designed for much slower modes of transport, was similar to putting high speed trains, capable of hundreds of kilometres an hour, onto conventional tracks. The marriage of old systems and new technology required a plethora of controls, procedures and safeguards to attain an acceptable level of traffic deaths. Nonetheless, no matter how many modifications, it persisted as a hybrid system. It could not be made to work efficiently.