School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemMy shtetl Shepparton : the Shepparton Jewish community 1913-1939(University of Melbourne, 1985)
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ItemAugustan Propaganda: A Discussion of its Origin and Nature(University of Melbourne, 1963)
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ItemVictoria's avenues of honour to the Great War lost to the landscape.(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemThe Melbourne Mechanics Institute 1839-1872(University of Melbourne, 1955)
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ItemDeath, devotion, and despair: examining women’s authorial contributions to the early modern English ars moriendi( 2017)This thesis examines women’s intervention into the English ars moriendi genre over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It focuses on three printed works: Rachel Speght’s 'Mortalities Memorandum, with a Dreame Prefixed' (1621), Alice Sutcliffe’s 'Meditations of Man's Mortalitie, Or, A Way to True Blessednesse' (1634), and Lady Frances Norton’s 'Memento Mori: or Mediations on Death' (1705). Expanding upon previous research in this field, this thesis provides the first comparative historical study of all three texts and their authors. It frames these printed works both as meditations on religious practice, and as carefully constructed responses to contemporary debates concerning religious expression, female authority in matters of devotion, learning, and authorship, and cultural standards of appropriate emotional expression.
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ItemThe Outer Circle Railway: Boroondara’s aspiration for a much-derided nineteenth-century railway( 2021)The Outer Circle Railway (OCR) was the last urban railway built in Melbourne in the nineteenth century. Historians subsequently described this ten-mile cross-radial railway as strange, notorious and a ‘white elephant’. This thesis corrects the largely negative characterisation of the OCR as a metaphor for government excess, political self-interest and the result of corrupt land boomers in the late 1880s. By examining the OCR's history forwards rather than in hindsight, this thesis argues that OCR was consistently supported and promoted by local communities, such as Boroondara, from the early 1870s. The thesis posits that the OCR was a logical aspiration given the economic incentives faced by Melbourne’s shires and their desire to influence the direction of economic development in their favour. This thesis describes the political and economic circumstances that led to an almost two-decade delay in the OCR's realisation, a delay ultimately fatal to the OCR’s viability with the onset of the catastrophic 1890s depression.
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ItemParadoxical Representations of Vietnamese Women in Propaganda: The Communist Party of Vietnam and Conflicting Visions of Women During the Vietnam War (1955-1975)( 2021)This thesis examines the paradoxical representations of Vietnamese women produced by the Vietnamese Communist Party (CPV) between 1955-1975. Through analysis of the changing representations of women, it questions the Party's commitment to gender equality. Furthermore, it challenges the assumption in previous scholarship that the Vietnam War was a period of increased rights and revolutionary change, and instead suggests that Vietnamese women were circumscribed by the persistence of Confucianism in CPV propaganda.
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ItemIn Black and White: The rise, fall and on-going consequences of a racial slur in Australian newspapers( 2019)In Australia, racism cannot be extricated from settler expropriation of indigenous labour. In this thesis, I trace this entanglement through the lens of a single word – ‘nigger’ – as it has appeared in Australian print media in reference to Aboriginal people and Papuans, from when the term gained currency in the 1860s until its dwindling nearly a century later. I argue that increasing use of ‘nigger’ represented a shift in the way settlers perceived these peoples. Settlers began to conceive of indigenous peoples less as primitive savages or land-occupying natives and more as an exploitable source of cheap labour. This occurred as part of a global process, as Europeans and especially Neo-Europeans consolidated and invested in a dichotomous discourse of race, increasingly figuring themselves as ‘white’ and those whose bodies and labour they exploited as ‘black’. While the use of the slur itself rose and fell, the hierarchical racial schemata of which it was the herald are yet to be dismantled.
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ItemRoman Slavery and Humanitarian Ideas( 2020)The Thesis evaluates humanitarian ideas in the ancient world around Roman slavery, including from proponents of Stoicism and early Christianity. The Thesis examines Seneca and Epictetus as Stoics and John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa as Christians. They are evaluated according to the principles of personhood, treatment and freedom to determine what extent they can be taken as humanitarian authors in the ancient context. They are also compared with each other to determine what lessons we can draw about slavery and humanitarianism in the ancient world.