School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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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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ItemContentious Routes: Ireland Questions, Radical Political Articulations and Settler Ambivalence in (White) Australia, c. 1909 - 1923( 2021)This thesis is a transnational history of the ‘Ireland Question' in the imperial and ethico-political imaginary of radical and labour movements in (‘White’) Australia during the ‘Irish revolutionary period’, broadly conceived. It traces the contestation of 'Ireland' as a political signifier, with attention to its constitutive differences, transnational circuitries, utopian investments, relations of recognition and desire, and articulatory practices. Where previous studies of Irish nationalisms in Australia have deployed 'the nation' as a consensualist category of analysis, this study reinterprets the ‘Ireland Question’ in postnational terms as contentious and within routes. Combining attention to settler-colonial difference with the discursive articulation of political forms, it situates the 'Ireland Question' firstly in relation to the political as a signifier of settler ambivalence, and secondly to politics as a social movement. Drawing on archival research in Australia, Ireland and Britain, it analyses personal papers, letters, political periodicals, state surveillance records, political ephemera and pamphlets. Beyond the 'Ireland Question' in the imperial labour movement, this study affords serious attention to historical dimensions at the hybrid boundaries of ‘long-distance nationalism’ including political travel performances in Ireland, non-nationalist transnational political networks ranging from feminist to socialist connections, and non-Irish political identification with 'Ireland.' It proposes that this unstable play of meanings comprised a heterogeneity of political positions and networks whose convergence during the conjuncture of 1916-1921 was both contingent and politically contested: one that signified in excess of either Australian nationalist historical teleologies or a coherent 'transnational Irish revolution.'
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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.
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ItemMaking the Australian male: the construction of manly middle-class youth in Australia, 1870-1920( 1999)In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Australia's middle classes were plagued by a variety of concerns for their society's security and well-being. Among the many answers proposed to these threats, control of the nation's young men was among the foremost. Through schooling, juvenile literature, youth groups and various government initiatives, increased efforts were made to ensure that Australia's young men would safeguard and advance their society. Ideals of manliness were promoted with increased vigour, and evolved in accordance with changes in perceived threats. Until the 1870s and 1880s, the primary fears influencing middle-class constructions of manliness were of descent into barbarism, irreligion and vulgarity in a land far removed from European civilisation. This decline was associated with excessive of masculine qualities at the expense of feminine religious and moral virtue. Efforts to control and define manliness thus focused on suppressing masculine hardihood in favour of an effeminate manliness marked by intellectualism, godliness and moral maturity. However, the increasing secularism of the late nineteenth century, growing pride in Australia, the impact of social Darwinism, and the perception of military threats to Australia and the British Empire made feminine ideals of manliness less desirable. Effeminate boys could not conquer the interior spaces of Australia, nor guard against racial decline, nor defend Australia from potential invaders. The ideal of manliness was thus gradually reworked to focus more on physical strength, courage, chivalry, patriotism, and military capability. Masculine qualities were lauded rather than suppressed. Feminine qualities were increasingly despised, and the model of manliness promoted in elite secondary schooling, juvenile literature, and youth groups in the early twentieth century was a vastly more masculine, anti-domestic and muscular construct than that which had predominated fifty years earlier.