School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemProstitution and the state in Victoria, 1890-1914( 1986)The later decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries were marked by considerable change in Victorian society. Rapid urban expansion and industrialization were among the most profound of these developments. They resulted in increasing problems of urban over-crowding, poverty, sanitation and, despite the youth of the cities, decay. Those in power began to see these urban problems as being partly related to the nature of working-class life, so sought to control aspects of working-class culture to an unprecedented degree. During this period, legislation relating to liquor, tobacco, drugs, and gambling, for example, were brought into effect for the first time or became more intrusive. Street life was becoming increasingly regulated. In 1891, for example, amendments to the Victorian Police Offences Act made important changes to the social construction of anti-social behaviour and placed increased power in the hands of the police and legal institutions to control the behaviour of individuals in public places. As part of this development, soliciting prostitution was made an offence for the first time. Women, too, had become subversive. Feminists demanded the vote, increased educational opportunities and threatened the established power differential between the sexes. At the same time, legislation was being passed and medical practices were emerging which increasingly impinged upon women's bodies and upon the areas of women's traditional power - life itself and child life. Kerreen Reiger has traced the increasing attempts to professionalize and rationalize family life, resulting in greater intrusion into the lives of women in relation to childbirth and motherhood.' Increasing attempts to control prostitution in Australia date from this same period, and can be seen as part of these processes. It was from the 1860s that an edifice of laws was constructed. Firstly, legislators were concerned with how women were forced into prostitution (procuring), the relationships between women working in prostitution and their children, and the spread of venereal disease. Later, from the 1890s, there was a new spate of legislation related to soliciting, the ownership and management of brothels, procuring, and living on the earnings of prostitution. During the same period a centralized, bureaucratized police force, which was crucially involved in the increasing control of prostitution, was established in Victoria. The prison system, too, became more organized and intrusive. By the later part of this period the move toward greater state intrusion into the area of prostitution was clear; the years 1890 to 1914 have been chosen for detailed study. This period was marked at the beginning by important new amendments to the Police Offences and Crimes Acts in 1891 and at the end by the advent of the First World War, which created new contexts and problems. (From Introduction)
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ItemAkrasia : a review( 1986)
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ItemThe Professional Engineers Cases : origins, conduct and outcomes( 1986)The forty-year lead-up to the commencement of the Professional Engineers Case in 1959, following the formation of the institution of Engineers, Australia, in 1919, was characterised by a continuous search for the status and reward appropriate to a profession. Engineers were predominantly in the employ of State governments, and the Commonwealth Government also grew in importance as a major employer. The dominant factor in the control of the profession therefore was governmental corporate patronage. Engineers were represented industrially by a large number of organisations, and their inadequate salaries were fixed within structures preserving relativities with other less qualified and non-professional occupations. Engineers were powerless to achieve enhancement of their salaries, and hence of their status, even though there was strong support from leading engineers throughout Australia. Through the imaginative determination of new leaders who emerged with the formation of the Association of Professional Engineers, Australia, in 1946, engineers were able to develop a new approach to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission for a fundamental evaluation of the work and the salary levels of engineering as a national employee profession. Despite fierce opposition mainly from the States, the situation of government corporate patronage was substantially modified by the achievement of Federal salary awards.
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ItemThe Chiltern Standard newspaper, 1859-1860: an expression of community life( 1986)This thesis is a study of a Victorian country newspaper, the Chiltern Standard during the period 1859-60. Using the Indigo-Chiltern goldfield (discovered in 1858) as a case study, it investigates how the life of the community was expressed through the pages of its local paper.
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ItemProtected and directed: medicalised childbirth in Victoria 1930-1960( 1986)Chapter I examines the public discourse about childbirth, both the views of the medical profession and the public, to establish the accord that existed between them and explore the question of why this might be so. Chapter II looks at the changing personnel and institutions involved in childbirth management, and the medical advances and developments that took place across the period. In the third chapter oral sources are used to explore the significance of these changes in shaping women's perceptions of the experience of childbirth. The final section of the thesis looks at the impact of the views of Grantly Dick-Read on the Safety Model, and sees the resultant changes produced in patients' experiences as breaking apart the shared interests of women and physicians with important implications for the future. (From introduction)
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ItemThe society of capital: an interpretation of the New Deal 1932-40( 1986)“Epimenides did not practice divination about the future; only about the obscurities of the past”. With this statement Aristotle gives us a rare glimpse onto the earliest origins of historical thought. The possibility of ‘divining the past’, which must sound quaint to modern ears, was quite familiar to Greek authors. Indeed, they believed that Historis was the daughter of the blind prophet Teiresias – almost as if to lay stress on the relation between present and future and its dependence on the past. Epimenides is said to have used his knowledge of the past to purify the souls of his contemporaries and allow them to act freely in future. This essay also is an exercise in historical interpretation: it is a divination of the past. The work of interpretation can only inform the actions of human beings; it cannot hope to determine them like any Philosophia Perennis. But interpretation is vital to those who wish history to remain a crucible of political action rather than to become a receptacle of sterile antiquities. The well known study by Theda Skocpol on the New Deal, among others, shows that it is possible even for a thesis of similar length to ours, wholly based on published sources, to make original contributions to this topic. Such studies are all the more defensible when applied to those periods that have been investigated in great detail and for which there is ample documentation. The New Deal – that is the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency that runs from 1932 to 1940 – has received much attention from historians, and theories have abounded as to its real significance. Their concern is understandable: the New Deal was a pioneering political response, however improvised and tentative, to the catastrophic economic crisis of the 1930s that swept away the old capitalist order with its self-regulating market and negative State. For the first time in its history, the government of the United States sought to regulate the capitalist economy, deploying for the purpose a vast array of administrative agencies that transformed it into a powerful centralized State. The problem with nearly all existing accounts of the period is that they run faithfully along the conceptual course set by capitalist relation of production – a fact not confined to the more apologetic works that highlight the ‘positive’ reforms of the ‘Roosevelt Revolution’, but extending to those New Left accounts that accuse the New Dealers of not going far enough. (From Introduction)