School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemIn search of identity : engineering in Australia 1788-1988( 1988)This is the first historical study of the social organisation of engineering in Australia. Engineering education, professional associations, industrial relations, engineering populations and attitudes concerning occupational title, professional recognition and nature of employment are analysed as to their influence upon occupational control and identity. The shared values among engineers concerning occupational identity stem from these factors. The study is not concerned with the technological and resource management functions of engineers. In considering the first of the research questions: 'How has the occupational identity of engineers developed in Australia?', two further questions arise. The second question: 'What have been the influences of the professional associations, engineering education and industrial relations in the development of occupational identity for engineers in Australia?', gives rise to the major historical themes in the study. The analysis goes well beyond the history of engineering education and the engineering associations in addressing the third research question: 'What are the shared values of engineering concerning occupational control and professionalisation, especially in relation to occupational identity?' The study shows that Australian engineers have long been concerned about the identity of their occupation, and that they have developed mechanisms for occupational control that not only depend upon clarity of Identity, but also reinforce it. Early concern about use of 'engineer' by the non-qualified persons caused adoption of the descriptor professional engineer. Concerns about community recognition caused engineers to argue that their education and the importance of their work should attract the prestige accorded to other professions. Believing that they deserve to be ranked high among the professions, engineers sought a commensurate level of income. But engineers predominantly are not independent practitioners, they are employed in teams in organisations, and such concerns existed mainly within the context of employment, requiring the issues of corporate patronage and industrial relations to be addressed. There was little engineering in the Australian colonies until after the gold rushes of the 1850s. The study includes quantitative analyses of the growth of the Australian engineering population from 1850 to gauge of the influence of different modes of formation of engineers in the evolution of shared values. The antecedents of Australian engineering are traced to the beginnings of the occupation in Britain and North America. During the last half-century industrial relations became a major element in the occupational control and identity of Australian engineers, and this factor provides a contrast between the manner in which occupational control, is exercised in Britain and North America. The conclusions are that occupational control in Australia differs from that in Britain and North America, and that, in contrast with those countries, occupational identity has been strongly reinforced in Australia through industrial relations. However, trends indicate possible changes in the future social organisation of Australian engineering, with diminished strength in occupational control mechanisms.
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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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Item"The friendly games"?: The Melbourne Olympic Games in Australian culture 1946-1956( 1989)Melbourne is making a concerted bid to obtain the centenary 1996 Olympic Games. While much of its bid is occupied with explanations of the city’s ability to meet the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) requirements, it is underpinned by a common theme that the city possesses a unique quality of “Friendliness”. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemThe state of modern Greek language as spoken in Victoria( 1986)This thesis reports a sociolinguistic study, carried out between 1981 and 1984, of the state of the Modern Greek (MG) language in Australia, as spoken by native-speaking first-generation Greek immigrants in Victoria. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of those characteristics of the linguistic behaviour of these Greek Australians which can be attributed to the contact with English and to other environmental, social and linguistic influence. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemBonegilla Reception and Training Centre: 1947-1971( 1985-08)In 1945 the Australian Government created the Department of Immigration. Its purpose was the promotion of a solution to Australia’s limited natural population growth in the face of defence fears and of an Australian society which, using the voices of its politicians, was increasingly willing to depict itself as an isolated and threatened British outpost. The fears themselves revolved as much around the defence of a singularly British heritage in terms of political, social and economic institutions, as a purely geographical or military threat. While the “threat” was more often perceived as assuming an Asian or non-European identity, Australians also had a history of feeling socially insecure when confronted by “non-British groups” within their own shores; the extent of that insecurity varying according to more specific ethnic categorisations within the general “non-British” label (i.e. northern c.f. southern Europeans, western c.f. eastern Europeans). The significance of the post-war period is that within two years of the formation of an Immigration bureaucracy by a party which had traditionally been hostile to immigration, an immigration programme had also begun to be formulated which would eventually allow, encourage, and financially assist, the introduction of groups which, traditionally, were depicted as posing the very threat to Australian homogeneity which immigration had been posited as assuaging.
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 1987-05)This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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ItemThe light on the hill: the origins of the Australian welfare state, 1935-1945( 1983)This thesis explores the origins of a number of major welfare policy initiatives introduced between 1935 and 1945 by successive non-Labor and Labor governments. It addresses two major questions: “Are Labor governments to be understood only as unequivocally reformist and progressive governments?”; and “Are the welfare measures that established the Australian ‘welfare state’ after 1941 best characterized in terms of state-sponsored benevolence?” In order to answer these questions a further question has to be asked: “What were the pressures and the motives of key actors in this period which led to the introduction of those income support schemes which are still the foundation of the Australian ‘welfare state’?” A detailed research programme based on the Commonwealth Archives suggest that many of the long-standing and orthodox interpretations of both the Curtin Labor Government’s achievements and of the social character of the welfare state legislation, are in need of urgent revision. Far from being a novel or unique expression of Labor’s reforming mission, it is argued that the Labor Government’s construction of a “welfare state” arose out of political and fiscal considerations that had long exercised governments. It is also argued that many of the welfare measures, beginning with the National Insurance legislation of 1938, and which included Child Endowment in 1941 and the National Welfare proposals of 1943, were implicated in the strategies designed to resolve political and fiscal problems as much as they were concerned to introduce progressive social reforms. Indeed it is argued that even in the years up to 1945, there was explicit acknowledgement by key government advisors that welfare policy was necessarily subordinate to the higher demands of macro-economic and fiscal policy. The need to re-insert the Labor Government’s achievements back into their context is further indicated by the consideration given here to the character and the role of liberal ideologues. Particular stress is given to the development of liberal ideology in the inter-war years, and to the role of liberal intellectuals and social technicians, especially after 1939 when a small but influential number of Australian economists were recruited into the Australian public service. Committed to a moderate degree of social change, these men were placed after 1939 to pursue their vision of a reconstructed and refurbished Capitalism. Central to that vision was the goal of “high” or “full” employment. The subsequent codification of this goal as official Commonwealth Government policy after 1945 was to ensure that welfare policy remained secondary and subordinate to the Keynesian-inspired measure designed to secure full employment. The convergence between liberalism and the Labor Government after 1941 was a striking testament to the strength of inter-war liberalism, and its resolve to transcend the damaged years of mass unemployment. Equally, the unwillingness of the liberal reconstructionists to deal with the problem of state power in relation to the prerogatives of capital meant that the war time planners bequeathed an ambiguous legacy to the post war world. The health of Capitalism was accorded a primacy which the social values of equity and human welfare could never match.
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ItemStudies in the relations between Indian and Australian colonies in the nineteenth century( 1987?)Geoffrey Blainey's reference to India in The Tyranny of Distance initiated my interest in researching the relationship between India and Australia in the nineteenth century. While Blainey made several references to India in the early development of colonial Australia, other historians have not developed that issue. I started my research with Blainey’s lead that there were some years in the nineteenth century when Australia seemed to be a satellite of India as well as a colony of England and that cargoes from Bengal fed and equipped the colony and also gave it a hangover. It seemed so obvious that the two 'neighbouring' British colonies have contact with each other and as Blainey pointed out, Australia was so far from England, and communication between the two was so irregular, that Sydney slowly drifted into Asia's net of commerce. (From introduction)