School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemSocial and scientific factors in the development of Melbourne's early water supply( 1981)The research towards this thesis commenced in 1978 during a period of sabbatical leave from Melbourne State College. I would like to thank the College Council for the opportunity to consult material at the British Library and the Wellcome Institute, London. In my often fruitless searches for material I have been grateful for the knowledge and goodwill of many librarians and archivists. I would like to particularly acknowledge the assistance of Mr. R. Price, Wellcome Institute, London; Miss A. Tovell, Australian Medical Association library, Melbourne; Miss W. Johns, Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Library; and the reference staff of the La Tribe Library and the Victorian Public Records Office. My supervisor Miss D. Dyason introduced me to the history of public health. Her expertise and wide knowledge were utilised extensively throughout this project. I will always be grateful to Ingrid Barker for her ability to translate my endless rough drafts and marginal notes into a typed manuscript. Finally, I wish to dedicate this thesis to my wife, Dawn, who more than anyone else encouraged me to continue my part-time studies and finally complete this research.
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ItemMcCrea, a matter of paradigms( 1980)
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ItemI was a good-time Charlie: social dance and Chinese community life in Sydney and Melbourne, 1850s-1970s( 2016)A vibrant calendar of balls and dances has long been at the heart of Chinese-Australian community life. It was at these dances that community members most powerfully experimented with and articulated what it meant to be a Chinese Australian across dimensions of race, gender and class. This thesis traces the history of Chinese community life through various social events in Sydney and Melbourne over a period spanning roughly 120 years, using dance as a prism through which to offer new insights into the interplay of the material and the emotional in the lives of young Chinese Australians. It will do so first by examining the historical contexts which shaped the early motivations of Chinese Australians who participated in dance, determined the avenues through which they socialised collectively, influenced outsiders’ perceptions of Chinese community life, and lent social and political meanings to Chinese community activities. Subsequently, this thesis turns its focus to selected dances and Chinese community events which took place in Sydney and Melbourne, restoring to the centre of study events which have often been dismissed as peripheral to main theatres of historical action. In doing so, it illuminates the social, political and emotional ends which these events served and which in turn fuelled the strength of Chinese community social life in the period under study. It also provides insight into the experiences of Chinese-Australian youth, particularly Australian-born Chinese adolescent women, who were often vital participants, organisers and ambassadors within their communities. By demonstrating the varying and complex investments Chinese Australians made in their communities through their participation in these dances, this thesis challenges earlier scholarly assumptions that Chinese community life ebbed in vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. Towards these aims, this thesis draws upon a wide range of archived documentary and oral history sources, as well as numerous private documents, photographs, memoirs and correspondence to recover otherwise inaccessible aspects of Chinese-Australian social history.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 2015)Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.
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ItemAnthropocentric utilitarian progressivism?: a case study of popular attitudes, scientific knowledge and dominant belief systems influencing industrial and domestic pollution of the Merri Creek, 1835-1915( 2004)This thesis investigates the industrial and domestic pollution of the Merri Creek in Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs under European settlement, paying particular attention to the noxious trades and sewage disposal practices of the Victorian era, and locating this discussion within the broader context of other water resource issues in Australia during this period. My study centres on the intensification of the pollution problem following the population boom of the gold rush period; the corresponding increase in public discontent with the state of the Merri, culminating in a series of letters to local newspapers; and the nature and efficacy of individual and collective responses to these complaints. I place alongside the specific progression of the creek’s pollution problem a discussion of social and economic conditions, as well as aspects of the prevailing mental climate, which allowed and even promoted settler abuses of water and water resources.
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ItemChorus boys and tight-waisted young men: an exploration of Melbourne's camp subculture during the interwar period: 1919-1939( 2015)This thesis explores the male homosexual subculture of Melbourne between the two world wars. Both the societal structures and institutions which sought to curb or prosecute homosexual men (the law, the church, the medical profession and social attitudes), and the lived experience of the subculture, including meeting places, subcultural identifiers, and social groups will be examined. The manner in which the subculture developed and changed over the twenty year period will be explored.
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ItemThe performance of war: experiences in the city of Melbourne 1914-1918( 2015)The First World War (1914-1918) had complicated implications for the people in the city of Melbourne. The conflict has predominantly been described as Australia's first national engagement or awakening, yet this thesis argues that, the ways in which the majority of people on the home-front experienced the conflict was in the contexts of their local communities, and for many, in their city. In participating in the conflict, the people of Melbourne performed varying roles in the war within different emotional communities. Performative methodologies will be used to explore how messages were manifested in the control of public spaces in the city, in displays of authority, and in expressions of citizenship and gender.
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ItemA dangerous incline: the Victorian Laundry Association and the Chinese Employment Bills of 1903 - 1907( 2013)Late in the evening on the 5th of June 1902, a group of white laundrymen from the Victorian Laundry Association (hereafter VLA) walked the streets of Melbourne investigating the working habits of local Chinese laundrymen. Dissatisfied with the performance of factory inspectors tasked with upholding the provisions of the 1896 Factories Act, the men had taken it upon themselves to keep Chinese workers in order, forming a ‘Flying Gang’ akin to Banjo Paterson’s evocation of railway maintenance workers. Prowling the deserted streets of Prahran and Windsor, the three men visited Chinese laundries in the area without warning, hoping to secure evidence of work being undertaken outside of legal hours. (From Introduction)
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ItemA culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia( 2003)This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.