School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 16
-
ItemThe myth of "One Nation" in multicultural Australia : an analysis of contemporary discourse and nationalism( 1999)The primary aim of this thesis is to examine discourses of multicultural politics in contemporary Australia and to analyze how these discourses impact upon the definition of national identity. Through an analysis of nations and nationalism, and the ways in which political discourse shapes these concepts, this thesis discusses how `one nation' discourse in Australia attempts to bind the nation together; at the same time the growing call to promote diversity and recognize difference unsettles the notion of being `one nation' and questions traditional, homogenous definitions of national unity. Drawing on the rhetoric of former Prime Minister Paul Keating, current Prime Minister John Howard, and MP Pauline Hanson, various perceptions of what it means for Australia to be 'one nation' are explored in this thesis. While each of these public figures conceive of national identity in different ways, each of them maintains that a shared, collective identity is possible. However, alternative definitions of difference destabilize this possibility, and suggest that the aim of national unity, as it has conventionally been defined, is inappropriate in a world where nations are becoming increasingly multicultural in nature. This thesis does not assert that nationalism as an ideology should be abandoned; indeed, this may not even be possible. However, nationalisms which seek to eradicate difference and sustain a homogenous culture are at odds with developing global trends. The active recognition and promotion of difference should be central to the contemporary nation-state, and political philosophy and rhetoric should reflect this. In furthering such a change, however, it is critical to understand that the recognition of difference furthers the state of permanent tension in which the nation finds itself. The promotion of a 'unity through sameness' framework will ultimately point to the reality of diversity, while a framework of 'unity through diversity' will ultimately recall nostalgic notions of a homogenous, collective community. A polarity of unity and separation emerges, and the two continually unsettle one another. In promoting a discourse of difference within the public sphere, the possibility for a 'detached we identity' emerges to allow a shared national identity that also allows individual and cultural differences to exist uneasily with one another.
-
ItemCompensatory justice and land claims by Australian aborigines( 1998)In this thesis, I delineate the general structure of the theory of Compensatory Justice. The various issues addressed in this work are resolved via the reflective equilibrium technique so closely associated with the work of John Rawls, though I do not proceed by way of an original position story. The scope of Compensatory Justice is defined such that compensation is a response only to certain sorts of harms, where harm is defined in terms of setbacks to interests. Compensable harms are distinguished from non-compensable harms; and I establish when a person can rightly be held liable to provide another's compensation, and how proper compensation is be determined in any given instance. In the course of resolving these general issues, a number of further issues are brought to light and settled, e.g. what should be done when there is no-one on whom liability can rightly be imposed for another's compensation. Numerous cases are considered which extend and test the conclusions reached about the precepts of Compensatory Justice. Once the delineation of the general structure is complete, the conclusions reached are applied to the issue of Australian Aborigines' land claims. Since those claims are, in essence, claims about the suffering of harm, they also may be claims about the suffering of compensable harm. Although determinations of compensable harm must be made on a case by case basis, in the expectation that at least some land claims made by Aborigines will involve compensable harms I consider some general issues which will be relevant to the determination of proper compensation for them. The major conclusions reached are: that compensable harm is harm which is not in a person's interest (i.e. which affords them a net loss in well-being); that the person who intentionally or negligently causes a given compensable harm can rightly be held liable for the compensation due to the harmed person, and that a person should not be chosen at random to bear such liability; that proper compensation counterbalances a harm by providing the harmed person with a relevant good equivalent to the extent of the harm they have suffered; that the only relevant compensatory good for Aborigines who have suffered harms in respect of land to which they have ties based on Traditional Law or long association will be the land which was the original object of their set back interest; and that where Aborigines have a prima facie valid entitlement to a given area of land qua compensation and that land is currently the object of another's equally prima facie valid entitlement, neither entitlement should be allowed to predominate if the two can coexist (in the event that the two cannot coexist, I determine ways of resolving the question of which entitlement should prevail).
-
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.
-
Item
-
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)
-
ItemContesting feminist spaces: immigrant and refugee women write history( 1999)Within the dominant History of Australian feminism, immigrant and refugee women are constructed as inherently non-feminist, uninterested in feminist activity, and unable to involve themselves in feminism because of a range of barriers such as their class or race oppression. Where their presence in feminist activism has been acknowledged, either their specificity as immigrant or refugee women is not taken into account, or they are relegated to a separate and marginalised sphere of political action. Moreover, immigrant and refugee women are located in the margins of Australian national identity, and of ‘Australian feminism’. As a corollary, anglo-Australian women are positioned firmly in the centre of Australian female national identity. Unlike immigrant and refugee women, anglo-Australian women have been represented as active agents and subjects of a nationalised (Australian) feminist History. Notwithstanding this absence and marginalisation from the established and well-recognised History of Australian feminism, and from the designation ‘Australian’, immigrant and refugee women have been active as feminists, and they have theorised their feminism in complex ways. This theorisation includes the problematisation of a nationalised identity. Two ‘case studies’ are presented to demonstrate and explore the activism of immigrant and refugee women, and the theoretical contentions of the thesis. First, the activism of immigrant and refugee women in the Victorian refuge movement is explored. The second case study analyses the involvement of immigrant and refugee women in the four Women and Labour Conferences, held around Australia since 1978. Through both case studies, the construction of Historical evidence is also explored. In this regard, the findings of these case studies raise a clear challenge to the current Historical narrative and they broaden current concepts of what constitutes feminist activism in Australia.
-
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.
-
ItemMagic and science: aspects of Australian business management, advertising and retailing, 1918-40( 1989)This thesis is concerned with four dominant themes: - the rise of a new managerial formation and associated ideology during the inter-war period, which provided an important base for the spread of managerial skill and power in later decades. - the reconstruction by managers of workers as consumers during the inter-war period. Structural and ideological changes in industrial managements, especially in the fields of advertising, media and retailing were important in promoting a particular ethic of consumption. - the role of empirical social sciences, especially economics and legitimating managerial psychology, aspirations in and technology and in fuelling the reconstruction of social and cultural life. - the influence of ideas and developed in America on businessmen, their practice thoughts. values first Australian and their thoughts.
-
ItemStrangers and citizens: the boundaries of Australian citizenship 1901-73( 1998)This thesis is concerned with immigration and naturalisation policies in Australia as constitutive of the boundaries of citizenship for people born outside the territorial jurisdiction of the Commonwealth, and the processes by which strangers traverse those boundaries. These policies comprise a moment at which the state at once includes and excludes people according to specified criteria that are applied to various human categories, constituting those categories and attaching meanings to them, and defining the character of the nation and citizenry. The location is one at which the state influences the composition of the population and formulates categories of desirability and undesirability, inclusion and exclusion, self and Other. An interpretative approach, based on theoretical and historical literature on citizenship and nationalism in the nation-state system, is explicated in Chapter 1. It provides a method of examining specific criteria of inclusion and exclusion embedded in Commonwealth policies within a wider context of the exigencies of state management of populations, and the operation of the inter-state system. Following a discussion of the legal and administrative aspects of Australian citizenship, and gender in the construction of the policies under examination in Chapter 2, the thesis addresses the most significant criteria evident in the boundaries of Australian citizenship in the period between Federation and the advent of multiculturalism; namely, race and ethnicity, allegiance and loyalty, and national vitality. Chapter 3 discusses a variety of discourses on human difference and capacity - race, nationality, ethnicity - each of which was intertwined in the construction of an Australian citizenry. The centrality of these concepts to Australian citizenship policies and nationalism throughout the period is indisputable; policy was shot through with these forms of categorisation, and they were always at the centre of deliberations over questions of belonging. Chapter 4 deals with two manifestations of matters of political behaviour and belief around the concept of allegiance. The first concerns the binding together of allegiance and nationality between the Great War and the mid- 1950s, and the policies flowing from that connection. The second refers to a variety of criteria which specified particular political beliefs and associations as disqualifications for immigration and naturalisation. Under the heading of 'Vitality', Chapter 5 contains sections on work and the geographical, moral and economic configuration of the population, and on health, disease, fitness and the vigour of the national citizenry. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a discussion of modes of incorporating strangers into the citizenry - principally assimilation and multiculturalism - and by developing some of the findings of the thesis.
-
ItemThe role and significance of bullocks and horses in the development of Eastern Australia 1788 to 1900( 1986)The central theme of this thesis is to demonstrate the vital importance of working bullocks and horses in the economic development of eastern Australia. It is argued that the roles and functions of bullocks and horses have been largely neglected in historical accounts of Australia and that in particular historians must revise the view that draught powered transport was always expensive, unreliable and limited. The development of the colonial economies depended heavily upon the successful application of draught power to a range of haulage and transport tasks in exploration, pastoralism, the exploitation of minerals, the development of large scale cereal production, farming, and the development of towns and cities. (From introduction in chapter 1)