School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonising Yolngu defence : Arnhem Land in the Second World War and transnational uses of indigenous people in the Second World War(University of Melbourne, 2008)The thesis examines the involvement in World War II of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, in the context of colonialism in the Northern Territory, and with comparative attention to the war experiences of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. and the Native American Navajo. Yolngu participated in the war through various avenues, including the provision of labour for white Australian war initiatives. Most notably Yolngu served as auxiliaries to non-indigenous military units such as the North Australia Observer Unit, and they also participated in the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was exclusively Aboriginal apart from its leadership. Rather than representing widespread white Australian appreciation of Yolngu skills or recognition of Yolngu equality, the military employment of Yolngu continued structures of ideas and practices inherent in settler colonialism in the north. The military authorities, with government endorsement, organised Yolngu to utilise their skills in defence of the colonial project that was of itself simultaneously robbing Yolngu of their land and rights. Yolngu had their own motivations to work alongside white military, and for the most part participated willingly. Analysis of oral testimony points to their courageous efforts and, unlike the non-indigenous documents, positions Yolngu as central actors in Arnhem Land during the war. Comparative analysis of other colonised indigenous peoples' involvement in World War ll�Pacific Islanders in similar units in Papua and New Guinea, and Navajo Codetalkers in the United States�highlights the existence of common colonial practices that existed transnationally, alongside indigenous peoples' own sense of agency. This study re-centres indigenous people in war narratives while demonstrating at the same time how governments' reliance on indigenous skills and labour in times of crisis did not represent a fundamental change in relations, although for white authorities there were, eventually, unanticipated outcomes from the war for indigenous peoples.
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ItemMorality of politicians in a democracy( 2008)This thesis argues that one way of understanding the morality of politicians is from the perspective of their role morality, which is derived from their representative role in a democracy. The thesis argues that politicians' role morality is to advocate for their constituents in a way that upholds democratic values and the institutional arrangements required to give effect to democratic values. The thesis sets out the values underlying a democracy and argues that the traditional view of the nature of representation, as either a delegate and/or a trustee, does not provide an adequate understanding of the role of the representative. The delegate and/or trustee model assumes some form of `contactual' arrangement between representative and citizen whereas representation in a democracy is more like an ongoing relationship where citizens continue to exercise their sovereignty through an active interrelationship with their representatives. This way of viewing the role of the democratic representative places a greater responsibility on the political representatives to see their role as facilitating citizens' self government through an open, deliberative process in the Parliament. It is difficult to determine how well politicians uphold democratic values because of the competitive views as to how democratic values ought to be translated into institutional form. In order to see how well politicians are fulfilling their role morality of upholding democratic values, some other sort of criteria are required which may help in making such assessments and which do not rely on partisan views. Two sets of criteria are developed - one set is derived from the deliberative nature of representation and the other set is embedded in the idea of institutional accountability. These sets of criteria are applied in three different stories in order to assess the action of politicians but also to point to areas for practical reform which may support politicians to fulfil their role morality.
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ItemMediating risks : investigating the emergence of court ADR through the risk society paradigm( 2007)In the US, England and Australia alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been increasingly employed as integral component in the handling and disposal of garden-variety civil cases. This thesis examines the quality and character of changes brought about through the uptake and continued use of ADR in the courts, a configuration that I refer to as Court ADR, in non-family law cases. Ulrich Beck's risk society paradigm provides the theoretical lens through which those changes in the courts are to be understood. In short, Beck claims that institutions and individuals' relationships to those institutions are transforming in contemporary societies, a transformation that is organised by and around risk. According to Beck, these transformations, while partial and incomplete, describe how the fundamental structures that generate and maintain society redound and confront their very foundations, a process that Beck refers to as reflexive modernisation. Moreover, individuals' relationships with institutions are caught up with such transformations. Beck describes this through his concepts of individualisation, whereby individuals are increasingly invited to make decisions regarding particular risks, which are simultaneously enabled and constrained by expert systems. I argue that these two central risk society conceptualisations - reflexive modernisation and individualisation - provide an informed theoretical framework for understanding those transformations in certain US, English and Australian courts as they relate to Court ADR. With the institutional emergence of Court ADR, and the growth of court-sponsored mediation in particular, the rationale underlying its development and continued use can be understood through the risk society paradigm. In terms of reflexive modernisation, the process of producing legal goods as they take shape in a judgement has and continues to produce negative side-effects, including expense, delay, undue complexity and limited accessibility to the courts themselves. One result is the emergence of Court ADR, which provides new procedures to structurally address many of those negative side-effects generated when legal goods are produced through processed that are oriented around adversarial adjudication. The emergence of Court ADR evidences the qualities and characteristics of individualisation insofar as litigants are invited into new decision-making spaces, inclusive of court-sponsored choices over whether arbitration or mediation might be more appropriate to handle and dispose of the case, as well as the attendant decisions once mediation, arbitration or other alternative processes are selected. Moreover, while litigants' entry into these spaces is enabled by legal actors and systems, they are simultaneously constrained. In short, Beck's risk society paradigm provides clarity with respect to how those alternative practices themselves have been legalised when used to handle and dispose of garden variety civil cases in the US, English and Australian courts.
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ItemTerra nullius : Lacanian ethics and Australian fictions of origin( 2005)The fiction of terra nullius, that Australia was 'no-one's land' at the time of British colonisation, was confirmed in law in 1971. At precisely this moment it had begun to fail as the ballast of white Australian identity and the fulcrum of race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Where white Australia had historically produced a gap, an empty centre from which the white Australian subject could emerge, fully formed, there was now a presence. The emergence of the Aboriginal subject into this empty space inaugurated the anxiety of white Australia that has characterised the period from the 1970s to the present. During these decades of anxiety, the story of this nation's origin-the story of 'settlement'-has retained its pivotal part in the inscription and reinscription of national meanings. Each of the three novels analysed in the thesis is a fictional account of the story of 'settlement published during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of all the contemporary Australian fiction written about 'settlement' and the race relations conducted in its midst, these texts have been chosen because each is emblematic of a particular national fantasy, and, as is argued in this thesis, a particular orientation, to the tale it tells. The structure of each fantasy-of the frontier, of captivity, of the explorer and of the Great Australian Emptiness- offers particular opportunities for the refantasisation of that national story. The thesis asks how each novel is oriented towards the national aim of not failing to reproduce a satisfactory repetition of the story of national origin and the inevitable failure of that project. All of these questions are framed by an overarching one: what is an ethics of interpretation? The thesis offers a Lacanian response. Interpretation, for Lacan, is apophantic; it points to something, or lets it be seen. It points beyond meaning to structure; it alms to show an orientation not to a 'topic' but to a place. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers an ethics of interpretation that includes and accounts for that which exceeds or escapes meaning, and it does this without rendering that excess irrelevant. That something remains constitutive yet enigmatic, making interpretation, in turn, not merely the recovery and rendering of meaning but also a process which seeks to understand the function of this enigmatic structural term. Through its theory of repetition and the pleasures that repetition holds, Lacanian theory offers an approach to analysing the pleasures for the non-Indigenous Australian reader in hearing again the fictions of the nation's founding. It now seems possible for a white Australian encountering any such retelling to ask how our pleasure is taken, and to see the intransigence of our national story, its incapacity to respond to its many challengers, as a particular mode of enjoyment that is too pleasurable to renounce. A Lacanian ethics of interpretation opens up the question: what are the possibilities of re-orientating ourselves in our relation to our founding story such that we did not simply repeat what gives us pleasure?
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ItemScience by correspondence : Ferdinand Mueller and botany in nineteenth century Australia( 2005)Ferdinand Mueller first used correspondence to undertake projects in botany while working as an apprentice pharmacist in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1840s. In so doing he had before him the examples of illustrious scientific travellers like Darwin and Humboldt who collected data on their own and with help of others on a grand scale. Mueller made his own journey of exploration to Australia in 1847, but after being appointed first Government Botanist in the colony of Victoria in 1853, and first Director of the Melbourne Botanic Garden in 1857, he did not return to Europe. This meant that he was somewhat less reliant than Darwin or Humboldt on correspondence to build up a network of collectors, most of whom were based in Australia, but much more reliant on correspondence to communicate with colleagues, most of whom were based in Europe. One of Mueller's first large data-collecting projects in Australia was a flora, based in phytography, and a second was the introduction of alien plants, based mainly in economic botany, but also concerning phytogeography and acclimatisation. A decade after his arrival in Australia, Mueller was still less well-equipped to write a flora than his most obvious colleagues at the Kew Botanic Garden in England, but he did not have far to catch up. He also managed to build up a network of contacts who sent him alien plants on a large scale, especially compared to another Australian botanic garden director, Richard Schornburgk. Nevertheless, disagreements between these colleagues, especially about identifying and delimiting species, marred the progress of their co-operation. The Kew botanists ended up asking one of their own group, George Bentham, to write the flora of Australia. In addition, Mueller and Schomburgk were both unsuccessful in diversifying the plants grown in local agricultural and horticultural industries. Despite these disappointments, in phytography Mueller went on to publish descriptions of thousands of new Australian species, and to promulgate his own version of the natural system of classification in a series of censuses and iconographs. He also issued a much reprinted volume on economic botany called Select extratropical plants, and developed insights about the relationship between culture and nature that can be regarded as among the first contributions to environmental science. For these and other achievements he was regarded as one of Australia's foremost scientists in the nineteenth century, but he felt that his reliance on correspondence contributed to his work being less well-appreciated overseas. He was able to gain international notice and honours for his achievements but he felt that to do so he was obliged to push his work more insistently than colleagues who could meet each other in person.
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ItemContaining anxiety : a socio-analytic contribution to the study of organisational stress( 2003)The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety as it is experienced in group and organisational settings. A 1997 study commissioned by the ACTU found that workplace stress was becoming increasingly prevalent in Australia, with the three most stressful conditions at work being increased workload, organisational change and job insecurity. According to the literature, stress appears to be a highly complex phenomenon, involving a myriad of psychological and physical symptoms which impact at the individual and social level. The "causes" of stress appear to be similarly complex, with some research suggesting that the occurrence of stress is a function of individual predisposition. Other studies attribute the origin of stress to environmental factors, whilst still other approaches regard stress as he product of interactions between person and environment. Apart from difficulties involved in alleviating the effects of stress given such conflicting accounts of its aetiology, there are also different political implications depending upon which approach is given precedence. For example, employers tend to adopt "person-centred" explanation of job stress, at the expense of accounts which attribute stress to poor working conditions - a move which might be regarded as "blaming the victim". The thesis attempts to resolve the dilemma of whether anxiety/stress is an individual or social phenomenon by investigating the various assumptions about the constitution of the "subject of stress" which are implicit in existing approaches. By drawing on debates in broader social theory, I suggest that stress cannot be adequately theorised, or addressed in practice, without paying attention to the concept of "inter-subjectivity". Psychoanalytically-informed social theory, by virtue of its concept of the "unconscious", I argue, provides a model of the subject in which the rigid distinction between person and environment, made by existing approaches to stress, is problematised. A particular branch of psychoanalytic organisational theory, known as "socioanalysis", emphasises the centrality of anxiety to both the constitution of the subject and the establishment of organisational systems. As such, I contend that this theory provides a useful base from which to construct a model of organisational stress which avoids the person-environment dilemma encountered by existing approaches. I explore the implications of a model of this kind with reference to a case study of the Australian social security organisation Centrelink. The empirical material consists of interviews with Centrelink staff, a content analysis of Centrelink internal policy documents, and observations of a range of Centrelink work practices undertaken during my own tenure as a Centrelink employee. The case material is interpreted using a socio-analytic methodology to investigate the effects of change on the various individuals and groups who interact with Centrelink. By reflecting on the case study, I make predictions about Centrelink and its changing role in Australian society, and also develop suggestions for ways of addressing the negative effects of stress as it is experienced in Centrelink.
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ItemA holding situation : volunteering in the post-social order( 2001)The following is an empirical study of volunteers who work in a humanitarian capacity for a local volunteer-run programme called the Open Family Youth Bus. The study questions what motivates and sustains a commitment of this kind from the point of view of the people who engage in it, outlining the repertoire of meanings that volunteers draw on to make sense of their work. At the same time, it is an analysis of humanitarian volunteer work as a social phenomenon, a particular response to certain contemporary social problems, imbricated in current processes of structural change that redefine the responsibilities of everyday social subjects to address these problems. By exploring Open Family volunteers particular approach to helping others, this thesis interprets some of the complex configurations of inequality in the contemporary social imagination and illustrates the shape and scope of popular perceptions of "doing something" about it.
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ItemThe quest for certainty in population screening for cervical cancer( 2000)The thesis explores the management of the certainty/uncertainty tension in the context of cervical screening programs (CSPs). In the past, the discursive making of certainty by laboratories, health educators, and promoters, has elicited a broad public perception of a simple screening test provided as a public good in answer to a common need. However, the recent litigation 'watershed' has recast CSP technologies as problematic. The quest for solutions emerging from a desire both to 'get it right', and to avoid litigation, has produced technologies of control which among other things, perform transformed answers to the question 'How should we live?' The turn to litigation is interpreted as a transforming moment in the continually unfolding CSP trajectory. The complex conditions of the Pap test's emergence as simultaneously a problem and a solution, are located and de-composed to reveal a multiplicity of performers, performances, understandings, and interpretations within the CSP arena. Problems experienced with constitutive elements of the CSPs have arisen from a disjunction between practices, representations, expectations, and perceived outcomes of screening. Early and continuing messages about screening have failed in some cases to accord with lived experience. As the workings of the CSPs have been opened to public scrutiny in the courts and the media, old certainties have been displaced by doubt, perceptions of error, and calls for improvement. Moves to manage these revealed uncertainties have issued in newly articulated and defensive strategies for building resilience and securing continuity. Such moves to regain control and restore public confidence are manifested and embodied in the processes of accreditation, regulation, registration, quality management, and automated technologies, all of which contain the promise of better ways of going on. The opening up of the CSPs to critical scrutiny in the courts and media, has meant adapting to a different discursive milieu in which the languages of cost benefit analysis, technological advantage, TQM, and zero-error, are fused with legal constructions of morality, responsibility, and certainty to perform a significant rhetorical shift. In this altered moral milieu, there is a danger that the flexible and reflective attitude which encourages multiple, and different voices to be heard, may be overcome by the rigidities expressed and performed in an overzealous quest for certainty.
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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.
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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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