School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBeyond the aetiology debate: the “great LSD scandal” at Newhaven Private Hospital & the social foundations of mental health legislation in Victoria, Australia( 2017)This research presents a case for the extension of existing analyses of Australian psychiatric scandals beyond the conclusion that such events are an inherent feature of the profession by virtue of its failure to resolve the aetiology debate. A mid-century impasse in the aetiology debate – the continuous shifting over time of professional commitment between organic and environmental aetiologies of mental illness – has been identified as the catalyst for the emergence of the therapeutic paradigm of eclecticism that fostered the deep sleep therapy and ‘Therapeutic Community’ programs that were central to Australia’s two infamous psychiatric scandals at Chelmsford and Townsville, respectively. While these two affairs were enduring the scrutiny of commissions of inquiry, the recommendations of which translated to the legislative reform of mental health services in the states of New South Wales and Queensland, a third such scandal was unfolding at Newhaven Private Hospital in Victoria involving the “injudicious use” of therapeutic LSD. By the late 1980s and early 90s, a number of former “patients” of Newhaven emerged claiming that they had never suffered any mental illness and that the LSD they had received had not been administered for therapeutic purposes but rather as a recruitment tool for a fringe religious sect known as The Family that had commandeered the hospital and the loyalty of a number of its staff. What constituted the scandal at Newhaven, however, was the fact that these activities continued unchallenged despite the implementation of statutory regulations – the Poisons (Hallucinogenic Drugs) Regulations 1967 – designed specifically to protect against the abuse of therapeutic hallucinogens. Having avoided any formal inquiry of its own, the Newhaven case represented not only a compelling narrative history opportunity, but also a test of the robustness of the prevailing argument that such scandals emerge as a consequence of the profession’s failure to achieve consensus on the aetiology of mental illness against the implication that inadequate legislation facilitated the abuse. Using the case of Newhaven as a working example, this research analyses the historical mental health legislation of Victoria and parliamentary debates to construct a legislative history of the aetiology debate and confirm its role in the emergence of psychiatric scandal, arguing that the Poisons (Hallucinogenic Drugs) Regulations 1967, and indeed mental health policy more broadly, were in fact products of the debate. Furthermore, it demonstrates how, far from being insulated within the profession of psychiatry, the debate itself was informed by wider prevailing social, cultural, political and economic trends. The abuse of therapeutic LSD unfolded under permissive regulations which reflected the permissive nature of broader mental health policy embodied in the Mental Hygiene Acts and their signature initiative of deinstitutionalisation. This permissiveness was a symptom of the underlying atmosphere of eclecticism that characterised mid-century psychiatry in Victoria as it sought to accommodate simultaneously the biological and social bases for the eugenic and community-based measures, respectively, that developed in response to the co-emergent social forces of the ‘mental hygiene’ and ‘anti-psychiatry’ movements.
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ItemThe Age and the young Menzies: a chapter in Victorian liberalism( 2010)The Melbourne Age was Robert Menzies' favourite newspaper. This thesis investigates the early years of Menzies' political career, when his relationship with The Age and its senior personnel was established. It is a comparative study of two liberalisms: that of the principal creator of the Liberal Party of Australia, and of a newspaper famous for its liberal affiliations. The Age had been closely identified with the Liberal politician Alfred Deakin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Geoffrey Syme became its proprietor in 1908, The Age pursued a programmatic agenda based in the dominant liberal ideology of the day, social liberalism, which stood for responsible citizenship and State intervention. The paper was influenced by both Deakinism and its New Liberal equivalent in Britain, whose political representatives were Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. When Menzies emerged on the Victorian political stage in the mid-twenties, The Age still stood for ideals and institutions which had been influential in the first decade of nationhood: New Protection, the conciliation and arbitration system, responsible trade unionism, accountable government, and social meliorism. The early chapters of the thesis explore the paper's political outlook, focusing on its vigorous campaign against the conservative ascendancy in non-Labor politics. That the newspaper remained a coherent exemplar of New Liberal orthodoxy from 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War is one of the study's main findings. To Syme, the young Menzies represented a talented new generation of Liberal reformer. The Age vigorously supported his election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1928, and his subsequent move to the Assembly. Despite the paper's hopes for him, Menzies' liberal-conservative tendencies were soon strongly to the fore. During the Depression, he aggressively opposed the introduction of unemployment insurance. When Menzies joined economists and primary producers in attacking the regime of tariff protection that was central to The Age's Deakinite identity, the relationship between the newspaper and the politician reached a low watermark. These episodes are explored in detail. The second half of the thesis focuses on Menzies's ideological make-up. It identifies him as a post-Deakinite whose personal politics were a contradictory mixture of older and newer streams of liberalism, and whose personal style was a mixture of pragmatism tinged with a consciousness of the legacy of Deakinite idealism. The phrase 'blended liberalism' usefully describes Menzies' political makeup by the late thirties. Three major influences on his political ideology are identified: the Victorian Liberal tradition; the Law, which was his first and, he said, best loved calling; and his family's Presbyterian faith. The thesis also explores Menzies' friendship with the British Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, a devout Anglican whose constructive social vision influenced Menzies. The final chapter of the thesis is a case study of the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act (1938), a regime of compulsory contributory social insurance which was based on the British model and included elements of Lloyd George's original bill and of Baldwin's extended scheme. Both Menzies and The Age supported the Australian measure. The thesis discusses how their shared campaign for national insurance brought them back into close relationship, yet how their ideological rationales for national insurance were significantly different.
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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.
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ItemA hidden history: the Chinese on the Mount Alexander diggings, central Victoria, 1851-1901( 2005)This thesis interrogates the history of the Chinese on the Mount Alexander gold diggings. Viewing the diggings as a cultural landscape, it argues that goldfields Chinese were more than simple sojourners. It reframes their place in local and national histories as 'settlers' rather than 'sojourners'. In so doing the thesis contends that Chinese-European relations on the goldfields were more complex than orthodox historical interpretations have acknowledged, and that the Chinese were active parties in the international mid-nineteenth century gold seeking phenomenon. A key aim of this thesis is to locate the Chinese gold seekers within the polity of a dynamic expanding imperial British society on the periphery of the settled world. It also considers the enduring Chinese role, albeit on a smaller scale, in these Pacific Rim neo-European settler societies after the gold rushes as the goldfields communities consolidated themselves from the 1860s onwards. While it is true that many returned to China either voluntarily or as a result of state pressure, the initial objective was to examine the continuing history of the goldfields generation of Chinese and their descendants in Australia. That history continued well beyond Federation into the twentieth century. The raison d'etre of this thesis is to challenge the historical neglect of the role of the Chinese in diggings society. This thesis has three complementary themes. The first examines the need to refine the concept of sojourner, and add to it the concept of Chinese 'settler' experience. The second is to portray the Chinese as socially active, politically engaged participants in goldfields life society and the third is to contextualise the experience the Castlemaine Chinese in broader national and international histories of the gold seeking era.
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ItemThe Australian Railways Union: railway management and railway work in Victoria 1920-1939( 1989)This thesis takes the Australian Railways Union as a focus for an examination of the Victorian Railways between the two World Wars. The development of the union is traced through the optimistic expectations of the early 1920s, the disillusionment which followed the union’s affiliation with the ALP and registration under the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, to the increasing polarisation of the union on political lines as the 1930s progressed. At the same time the union’s relations with, railway management are explored. The innovative management style of Harold Winthrop Clapp, whose term as Chief Railways Commissioner covered the two decades under discussion in this thesis, is examined and set in the context of developments elsewhere in Australia and overseas. The repercussions of Clapp’s administrative and technological changes in railway work are discussed throughout the thesis, and particular attention is paid to the relationship between such changes and job loss. The problems arising from lack of clarity over control of the Railways Department, which are also examined in a separate chapter, were common to other statutory authorities as well. The financial situation of the railways is discussed in relation to that of other Australian railways. The problem of transport regulation to prevent uneconomic competition between motor transport and railways, which received growing recognition during the period of this thesis, also receives special attention. During the Great Depression, the Victorian Railways Department and the ARU played a central role in the national arena. The railway basic wage case of 1930, which resulted in a ten per cent cut in wages, set a precedent for all major industries. The analysis of transcripts of this lengthy case has produced much which is of general significance for economic and labour history. In the final chapters of the thesis, the ARU is shown approaching the radicalism of the 1940s, when large scale industrial action was carried out under Communist leadership. The union in 1939, following two decades of activity as part of a federal railways union, and experience of arbitration and affiliation to the ALP, was very different from the union which had existed up until 1920 in Victoria, with its narrow sphere of activity bounded by ‘the railway fence’, and this thesis explores that transition.
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ItemIntersections of conflict: policing and criminalising Melbourne’s traffic, 1890-1930( 2005-07)Every single person on earth is a road-user; and, although an integral part of our society, the management of traffic is a low priority for most. Authorities constantly work to lessen the tension between the free-flow of traffic and traffic safety. Consequently, the management of traffic and its subsequent problems has consumed more time, money and resources than any other item on the public agenda. Between 1890 and 1930, urban road-traffic in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, as in other world cities, underwent a revolution as speeds increased 500%. The motor-vehicle exacerbated existing traffic problems with increased trips and vehicle numbers. Authorities separated the various road users with road demarcations, and placed upon the Victoria Police the responsibility of managing the heterogeneous and complex traffic mix. By the close of the 1920s, all the components—policing, case and statute law, and the physical infrastructure—of the contemporary traffic management system were firmly in place. Introducing motor-transport into a centuries old road network designed for much slower modes of transport, was similar to putting high speed trains, capable of hundreds of kilometres an hour, onto conventional tracks. The marriage of old systems and new technology required a plethora of controls, procedures and safeguards to attain an acceptable level of traffic deaths. Nonetheless, no matter how many modifications, it persisted as a hybrid system. It could not be made to work efficiently.
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ItemVagrancy and the Victorians: the social construction of the vagrant in Melbourne, 1880-1907( 1990)In Melbourne between 1880 and 1907, the construction and propagation of a vagrant stereotype and its manifestation in law, constituted an important means of controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups who were perceived to be socially undesirable or economically burdensome.
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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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ItemStriking it rich: material culture and family stories from the Central Victorian goldfields( 2007)This thesis examines family and community experience on the central Victorian goldfields. Using a series of case studies, it creates narratives about particular and connected individuals who arrived in the goldmining communities of Creswick and Maldon during the 1850s and 1860s and who became longstanding residents in their respective townships. The stories begin with the material traces of these goldfields settlers. Houses, photographs, paintings and a trade union banner become touchstones for exploring goldfields history. These examples of material culture provide tangible connections to past lives; however, as historical resources they must be interpreted, if they are to inform our understandings of the past. Contextualization is the key. Combining public history approaches - such as material culture, vernacular architecture and cultural landscape study - with traditional social history methodologies, it becomes possible to embed objects in space and place and then link them to particular individuals. As a collection of historical narratives about the experiences of families, this thesis challenges prevailing characterizations of the goldfields as individualistic and masculine places. The case studies reveal a lost landscape of family settlement, and they demonstrate that family is an appropriate and useful frame for the study of goldfields history. Furthermore, they contribute to the interpretations of goldfields heritage as public history by suggesting a practical means by which lived experience can be made visible. Storytelling is a powerful tool for both the historian and heritage professional. This thesis offers a practical means of exploring not only the vibrant historical tapestry that is the central Victorian goldfields; it also serves as a test case of the manifold ways material culture and narrative interpretations can enrich community history.
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ItemShadows on the landscape: memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road( 1999)Victoria's commemorative landscape is made up of a series of natural and constructed features comprising roads, bridges, memorial sculptures, avenues of honour, coastal fortifications and military memorabilia, yet their memorializing function is largely unrecognized by the general population. Some of these memorials have been linked with the scenic landscape and have become privileged as tourist sites. Their original meanings, however, have been blurred by twentieth century progress. This thesis examines one component of Australia's memorial landscape, the Great Ocean Road in South West Victoria, and questions whether there is a parallel between the Western concept of a memorial landscape and the notions of spirituality in the land which are a primary component of the belief structure of indigenous peoples. This leads to an examination of the local geographical landscape in relation to Aboriginal massacre sites, and a questioning of the congruence between such sites and the now memorialized battlefields of World War 1. Chapter One deals with the history of the Great Ocean Road and traces its development and construction from 1916 to 1932. Chapter Two examines the place of the Great Ocean Road in the overall scheme of post World War 1 memorialization, and questions why its original function has been so little recognized by the community. Chapter Three looks at the complex relationships between the physical and spiritual elements of the land as perceived by Aboriginal culture, investigates the Aboriginal massacre sites within close proximity to the Great Ocean Road, and questions why no memorials have been raised to Aborigines who died defending their land. The theoretical base of the thesis is supported by the notion that landscape is socially and culturally determined, and that place can be invested with spiritual potency. Finally, it is argued that for a place to retain its spiritual strength, regardless of the culture, the spiritual content must be recognized, ritualized and constantly refreshed within the culture.