School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 34
-
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.
-
ItemA culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia( 2003)This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.
-
ItemGay print media’s golden era: Australian magazines and newspapers 1970-2000( 2015)The late 20th century was a golden era for Australian gay print media: more than five million copies annually of gay and lesbian publications were printed at its peak, with revenues of nearly eight million dollars a year. Yet there was not even a leaflet before 1969 because homosexuals then did not dare to publish in the climate of active oppression. Growing liberal attitudes within sections of broader society, and, at a practical level, reform of censorship laws made gay publishing possible. The remarkable growth of this industry stands as testimony to the dramatic change in mainstream society’s attitudes towards homosexuality, and changes within the gay community itself, during the final decades of last century. From 1970 to 2000 nearly 100 significant magazines and newspapers were produced around the country. Publishers used print media to advance gay movement aims, despite pursuing a variety of visions and goals for how they saw a better world for gay and lesbian people. Their publications allowed discussion of what it meant to be gay or lesbian in Australia; provided an arena to present positive viewpoints regarding homosexuality that countered dominant mainstream attitudes; and brought people together through personal classifieds and information about bars and other community activities. In order to sustain their businesses, publishers took commercial opportunities presented to them. And they needed to expand their operation to attract readers and advertisers. This offered economic viability to the publications, and allowed publishers to sustain a reliable workforce and improve their product. All publishers were forced to deal with the business side of their operation, which often caused tension between their initial goals for a better world and the need to run the business. A key resolution of this tension came through adopting the promotion and defence of community as a primary political project. This allowed publishers to freely develop synergies with advertisers that helped build and develop community infrastructure, such as venues, festivals, and small businesses. Expansion of the sector magnified the impact of this synergy on the community’s growth. It allowed movement ideas and information on community activities to reach and influence a much wider audience, and the day-to-day pursuit of business activity, in particular advertising revenue and distribution outlets led to a myriad of direct relationships with mainstream society that challenged prejudice and helped normalise homosexuality.
-
ItemPhotography for history’s sake: the Military History and Information Section in the Middle East 1941-1942( 2014)This thesis explores the creation, objectives and operation of the Military History and Information Section (MH&IS) in the Middle East from August 1941 to mid-1942. It compares the MH&IS to equivalent official war photographic organisations in Britain and the United States, and considers the photographic results of the MH&IS in the Middle East. The concept of historical record photography held by its leader, John Treloar, is evaluated according to a set of themes.
-
ItemSustaining the resistance: the role of Australian activist organisations in resisting the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, 1975 - 1991( 2014)This thesis focuses on the activities of Melbourne based activist groups ACFOA and AETA as representative aid and solidarity organisations as defined in transnational activist literature. It explores their early activities, and how they responded to changing circumstances through the 1970s and 1980s inside the territory, within Australia, and internationally. It will show how activist efforts evolved from solidarity to advocacy, from expressions of outrage to considered framing of issues, and how a nexus between the two organisations developed that facilitated them playing complementary and effective roles in sustaining the idea of continued resistance within Australian politics, media, and international civil society. It does not attempt to chart the entire history of the organisations, or that of the independence struggle. Instead, through ACFOA and AETA it seeks to provide the first account of specific Australian activism in the under-explored period of 1975 - 1991. (From introduction)
-
ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
-
ItemAn imperial partnership: the marriage of Henry and Alice Northcote( 2011)This thesis examines the lives of two Victorian era aristocrats, Henry (Harry) Stafford Northcote and Alice Stephen Northcote, who married in 1873, and in 1900 began an eight-year career in colonial government. It reviews in particular their negotiation of the system of imperial power that they represented, first in Bombay (1900-1903) and then in Australia (1904-1908). The combination of attention to biographical specificities and the various social and political contexts of the Northcotes' engagements allows the details of their lives to illuminate issues of wider historical significance. The study encompasses two different biographical challenges: interpreting the various correspondences that make up the main source of information about Harry; and discovering Alice despite a paucity of primary source material. Harry, scion of a minor aristocratic dynasty, first served in British politics what proved to be an apprenticeship for colonial service, while Alice, as the adopted daughter of a self-made millionaire, was a socially aspiring society hostess and little else. The couple experienced a dramatic life change at the end of the century: the means of resolving a painful predicament gave both Northcotes the opportunity to find personal renewal and professional fulfilment. They performed in the colonies with a measure of grace and humanity but, imbued as they were with the values of their era and class, Harry and Alice delivered what the British Empire required; they never questioned the ethos or mode of delivery. What the Empire required was always and everywhere the political, economic and social domination of others, particularly those of cultural and racial difference, for the ultimate benefit of the Mother Country and British colonials. In India Harry and Alice made separate but related efforts to impose Western standards of sanitation and medicine. Harry's administration was principally concerned with providing immediate relief for catastrophic famine, and the implementation of Western methods of dealing with epidemics of plague and smallpox. Alice's work involved raising revenue for the Dufferin Fund, a charitable venture characteristic of Victorian era philanthropy: a combination of culturally specific assistance and control. Harry's job description changed when he became governor general of the newly federated Australia. He moved from autocratic rule in a colony of extraction to performing a leading role in a constitutional monarchy in an increasingly self-governing settler society. Harry fulfilled both jobs with judgement and diplomacy, and in Australia he steered the ship of state through turbulent political waters. Alice, having found her metier as governor's "incorporated" wife, and having discovered considerable organisational skill, master-minded the First Australian Exhibition of Women's Work in 1907, an event designed to support fragile federation. On the couple's return to England Harry was active in the campaigns to prevent reform of the House of Lords and female suffrage, indicating that his conservative political views had not changed. Harry died in 1911 and Alice lived out a long widowhood until 1934, creating no new persona, but engaging in activities informed by Harry's legacy.
-
ItemWith my needle: embroidery samplers in colonial Australia( 2008)This thesis examines a group of more than one hundred needlework samplers stitched in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century. It uses them as documents of social history to examine the lives of individual girls and women during that time, and to trace changing expectations of girls, especially in the later decades of the century. Although there are many individual stories that can illuminate certain aspects of Australian history such as migration, settlement, and death and mourning, these samplers are most useful as documents in the examination of girls' education and the social expectations transmitted through the education system. It addresses the contradiction between the sampler's continuing presence in girls' schooling and the increasing irrelevance of the skills embodied in it. The thesis argues that needlework samplers retained their place in girls' education well into the twentieth century because of their significance as symbols of feminine accomplishment. They were physical expressions of a definition of respectability that was based on the `feminine ideal' of the nineteenth century and allayed anxiety about girls' involvement in formal schooling.
-
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.
-
ItemPlaying the game: the experiences of migrant-background players in Australian rules football( 2013)This thesis explores the experiences of migrant-background players in Australian football. These players come from a variety of different backgrounds and playing eras and all have very different experiences of playing the game. Drawing on interviews, as well as biographies of well-known players and news reporting, this thesis explores their introduction to the game and the reason they developed an interest in football. It places their experiences within the Australian social and political context of changing attitudes towards migration and the expectations of assimilation held by many Australians during the period. It explores the challenges they faced as children participating in the game. It examines the racism they experienced upon reaching the elite level of the competition and the ways they dealt with it. Drawing upon masculinity theory, it argues that the racism that migrant-background players experienced was an everyday aspect of the game and reflected the existing social system of challenging and asserting toughness and ability to play the game. An examination of the experience of a small cohort of migrant-background players from Ireland provides insight into the support that clubs have and have not provided to players from different backgrounds. The thesis then examines the situation for newer migrant-background players in the game today, the nature of the AFL’s involvement in encouraging diversity in the game, and migrant-background groups that continue to be left out of football. It argues that the AFL and the football community can and should learn from the experiences of past migrant-background players in the game when developing formal programs for encouraging newer migrants in the game today, fulfilling its goal of promoting diversity in the game and in broader Australia society.