School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Sun Rising to the West: The Racialisation of Japan in the US during the Early 20th Century( 2023)'The Sun Rising to the West' traces how the United States understood Japan's rise from an insular nation into a powerful empire before the Second World War and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour which galvanised American understandings of the Japanese. This thesis specifically focuses on how Americans framed the Japanese as a race. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, this thesis shows how Japan's development into an industrialised and militarised nation forced both politicians and American anthropologists to reconsider the position of the Japanese with American conceptions of a racial hierarchy. Next, 'The Sun Rising to the West' explores a direct confrontation between American citizens and Japanese immigrants in California during the 'California Crisis', analysing how xenophobic attacks against the Japanese race were influenced by the growing power of Japan as a state. Finally, the thesis explores how African Americans reacted to Japan's proposal for a racial equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference, and how Black press understood Japan as a non-white power before the onset of the war. In doing so, 'The Sun Rising to the West' traces how significant race was to Americans in understanding the nation that would become their enemy.
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ItemMy shtetl Shepparton : the Shepparton Jewish community 1913-1939(University of Melbourne, 1985)
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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 Presence of Such Monsters: The Moral Arbitration of Sodomy Trials in Victoria's Colonial Press, 1859-1869( 2023)In the decade spanning 1859-1869, newspapers in colonial Victoria began telling lurid stories of sodomy trials and accusations. What provoked this shift from largely noting examples of this criminalised act, to engaging in extensive editorialising? "The Presence of Such Monsters" explores examples of nineteenth-century 'trial by media' as sites of moral arbitration intended, first and foremost, to establish and police the boundaries of the settler civic body: determining who could be reincorporated into respectable society, and who excised from it. Taking a case study approach to the trials of John Flannery, Dr. John Hulley, Ellen-John Wilson and Father Patrick Niall, it interrogates the significance of class in colonial formations of sexuality and gender.
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ItemEngage or balance? Competing visions for China in the George H. W. Bush administration’s national security strategy( 2023)This thesis examines the national security dimension of US China policy during the presidency of George H. W. Bush (1989-1993). In light of subsequent bilateral tensions, Bush’s controversial efforts to seek stable relations with Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the end of the Cold War warrant revisiting. Bush believed that Sino-American stability was necessary to resolve security issues such as non-proliferation. This served as the rationale for ‘engagement’ with Beijing, a policy continued by his successors. This thesis argues, however that segments of the intelligence and defence communities deviated from the president’s view after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In response to the display of US military supremacy over Iraqi forces in Kuwait, China quickly accelerated the modernisation of its own armed forces. With Russian support, it increased its power projection capabilities to a degree that shifted the regional balance of power to Taiwan’s detriment. With a surprising degree of foresight, intelligence analysts were already reporting on the potential implications of this new dynamic in early 1991. Possibly for electoral reasons, Bush acted on the advice of the Defence Department and reluctantly redressed the balance by rearming Taiwan’s air force in late 1992. By closely examining this period, this thesis sheds light on the origins of a persistent division in US national security strategy between those who believed in engaging Beijing and those who perceived Chinese military modernisation as a threat to regional stability.
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ItemSoft and Mechanical: Communicating theory and practice of puericulture through Giovanni Antonio Galli’s Supellex obstetricia( 2023)In 1746, Bolognese obstetrician Giovanni Antonio Galli commissioned the Suppellex obstetricia, a collection comprising approximately two hundred clay and wax models representing various conditions of pregnancy and childbirth. The collection was employed to teach midwives and surgeons in training at the School of Obstetrics in the University of Bologna, the first public school of obstetrics in Italy. This thesis examines the collection from a material culture perspective, arguing that the models convey powerful religious, philosophical and cultural ideas about the female body and the role of the midwife in eighteenth-century Italy. However, the thesis also considers the models as objects 'in motion,' arguing that their meanings and affective power changed as obstetrical discourses likewise changed towards the end of the eighteenth century. The final chapter therefore posits the value of a comparative approach in analysing eighteenth-century Italian obstetrical collections. By examining drastically different depictions of 'monstrous births' across obstetrical collections, the third chapter argues for the possibility of tracing changing medical and cultural discourses of the female body by analysing the material dimension of these objects.
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ItemSaturn and the Seeds of Evil: Spaceflight, Envirotechnical Thought, and Progress in 1960s and 1970s America( 2023)During the 1960s and the 1970s, inspired by a growing awareness of the effects unbridled technological progress was having on themselves and their environment, a politically disparate group of Americans searched for new relationships with technology, the environment, and the notion of national progress. “Saturn and the Seeds of Evil” explores the differing conceptions of technological progress that were projected on to spaceflight during this period of contestation over the course of America’s, and often the whole Earth’s, future. Some, including the patriotically minded editors of Life magazine and the chemical-industrialist Robert White-Stevens, turned to spaceflight as a glittering example of technological progress to convince doubters that the nation’s course was safe. Others, including pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, and alternative technology guru Stewart Brand, believed that space technology presented a path towards environmental salvation. “Saturn and the Seeds of Evil” uses three case studies to argue that at each stage of the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, spaceflight reinforced narratives of technological utopianism—the notion that technological progress is equivalent to societal progress—regardless of whether the visions of technological progress projected on to it were utopian or dystopian.
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ItemRuby Rich: A Transnational Jewish Australian Feminist( 2023)This thesis examines the life of Ruby Rich (1888-1988) - a leading figure in Australian and international feminist movements and a leading campaigner for women's rights. Alongside her feminist work, she was also a leader in the Australian Jewish community, internationally renowned pianist, peace campaigner and racial hygiene advocate. Rich lived in Australia, London, Paris, Berlin and Switzerland, and attended conferences in Palestine (later Israel), Turkey, Germany, Iran, Denmark, India, England and Italy. These trips imbued within her a cosmopolitan outlook, contributing to her social consciousness. Through a focussed study of key flashpoints in Rich’s life, this thesis analyzes Rich’s mobile life in tandem with her Jewishness in order to provide a nuanced cultural understanding of how Australian and international feminism intersected with a Jewish diasporic self. By connecting disparate sub-disciplines of history, this thesis reveals how Rich operated and positioned herself as an active transnational Jewish-Australian feminist.
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Item“A Great and Beautiful Force”: The Making of Political Identities Among Women Activists on the Far Left in Australia, mid-1930s to early 1950s( 2023)This thesis examines the political identities of women activitists in the Communist Party of Australia and affiliated organisations from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, focusing on the interventions of World War II. It suggests that political interactions between women within and beyond the far-left, women developed political identities shaped by gender and feminist issues, along with class. It explores their positioning in the domestic sphere, their political organisations, and the workplace, as spaces which were key to shaping female political identities, complicating suggestions that the time period of study, and the Communist Party throughout the 20th century, were lacking in women-focused activism. It utilises varied sources from the period, drawing on the Women's Sections of left-wing newspapers, feminist and Communist materials, and the novels of Communist women authors Katharine Susannah Prichard and Jean Devanny as sites of cultural framings of gender.