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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Item‘Women Through the Years’: Oral History, Identity and 'Little Singapore Stories'( 2022)In the decades following Singapore’s 1965 independence, the ubiquitous ‘Singapore Story’ was developed as a common history of national identity to be shared by Singapore’s diverse inhabitants. Introduced into the national curriculum in 1997, the Singapore Story created an orthodox depiction of the nation’s past that prioritised political and military events and emphasised male experiences and contributions. Running parallel to its development were alternate histories that problematised this dominant narrative and emphasised people’s history. As some historians have criticised, however, these people’s histories frequently explored Singapore’s ethnic groups in isolation. This thesis considers how a collective existence of pre-1965 Singaporeans might be constructed, disrupted and retrospectively recalled. It primarily engages with the oral testimony of women recorded within the Oral History Centre’s project ‘Women through the Years: economic and family lives.’ The interviewees were born between 1897 and 1937 and interviewed between the 1980s and the early 2000s. This collection of so-called “little Singapore stories” demonstrates how class, race, language and religion could intersect within colonial spaces and create fluid and multifaceted identities as expressed by the interviewees. This thesis explores the construction of Singaporean identity from two temporal perspectives: the colonial Singapore in which the interview’s events took place and the post-independence Singapore in which the interviews were conducted. It argues the ‘Women through the Years’ collection indicates how memory is continually reconstructed and inflected with new meaning to legitimise current perspectives and identity.
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Item“More than an engineering project”: How the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop shaped a modern city( 2022)From 1970 to 1983, the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop Authority (MURLA) oversaw the construction of three central city underground stations linked to Melbourne’s nineteenth-century suburban railway network. Melbourne’s City Loop was built in a global moment where the modernising potential of underground railway systems was promoted as a response to the challenges of economic instability and renewal of inner urban fabrics. In the Australian context, it was a significant financial and cultural investment in public transport, in a city dominated physically and socially by the private motor car, and during a period of considerable uncertainty about the future of inner urban spaces. Literatures of urban infrastructure in this period have focused primarily on political, economic and institutional narratives, with limited reference to social and cultural histories of technology and urban environment. This thesis argues that the City Loop was the product of a dialectic between the cultural significations of urban change and the physical transformation of urban spaces. It draws on the records of MURLA and popular media sources to examine how the Loop became a locus for discourses of modernity, through its advertising campaigns, the experiences and impacts of worker deaths, and finally in the physical spaces it contributed to the city of Melbourne. These findings contribute to the broader fields of Australian and international urban history by demonstrating how urban infrastructure is both influenced by and influences cultures of city life. The findings offer further opportunities for research into the role of underground railway projects in shaping twentieth century cities.
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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.