School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe transformation of Australian military heroism during the First World War( 2019)This thesis examines how Australian heroism was defined and represented during the First World War. I present an in-depth analysis of two sets of primary sources: Victoria Cross (VC) medal citations and Australian wartime newspapers. Victoria Cross citations are official British military descriptions of battlefield acts that have earned a serviceman the VC medal and therefore offer a window into how British and dominion commanders awarded and prescribed heroism. My analysis of all British and dominion VC citations, from the institution of the medal in 1856 to the end of the First World War in November 1918, show that the type of act that was primarily awarded the VC changed in late 1916 and early 1917. While most VCs were awarded for acts of saving life before this point, this changed to an emphasis on acts of killing. Statistics compiled from VC citations also show that Australians were exceptional in the way they were awarded the medal during the conflict, receiving proportionally more awards for killing and fewer for life saving than any other British or dominion nation. Analysis of major Australian newspapers’ representations of military heroism during the war reveals a similar trend. Australian newspapers primarily represented stretcher-bearers and wounded men as the heroes of Gallipoli in reports throughout 1915, yet from the entry of Australian forces into the Western Front in 1916, newspaper representations of heroism focused far more on men who killed the enemy. This thesis offers an original contribution to the literature by showing how and why pre-war ideals of heroism transformed in Australia during the course of the First World War. It specifically identifies the dominant model of Australian heroism that existed in 1914, and traces how it was displaced by new ideals of heroism considered more necessary and apt for the conditions of the Western Front. In identifying the shifting ideals that were officially recognised and widely represented as epitomising the highest forms of military valour, this thesis is the first to examine the nature of Australian hegemonic heroism during the First World War. In analysing the dominant heroic model in Australia during the First World War and showing how and why this model transformed over the course of the conflict, this study presents new insights into the nature of heroism and masculinity in wartime Australia.
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ItemThrough Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia( 2019)Natural disasters are a significant feature of the Australian environment. In a country with a rich history of immigration, it is therefore surprising that historians have not yet examined the specific challenges faced by immigrants within this hazardous environment. This thesis examines migrants’ memories and experiences of bushfires and floods in Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and regional case studies, this thesis explores the entanglement of migration and natural disaster in Australia and in the lives of migrants. Oral history interviews with migrants who have experienced bushfires in Victoria or floods in Maitland, New South Wales, are at the heart of this study. This thesis contributes to scholarship in three distinct fields—migration and environmental history, and disaster studies—and brings them together through an examination of migrants’ memories of bushfires and floods in Australia. Although traumatic experiences, displacement, and a changed and challenged sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment are common themes of both migrants and survivors of fire and flood, rarely have the similarities between these experiences been noted. This thesis is not a history of natural disasters in Australia, nor a retelling of a history of immigration to Australia, but an exploration of experiences of ‘double displacement’. This thesis argues that migrants’ recollections reveal how their burgeoning sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment was challenged by natural disasters. It highlights how their experience of ‘double displacement’ contributed to a new sense of home and belonging in a natural disaster-prone country.
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ItemThe Influence of the friendly society movement in Victoria, 1835-1920( 2019)ABSTRACT Entrepreneurial individuals who migrated seeking adventure, wealth and opportunity initially stimulated friendly societies in Victoria. As seen through the development of friendly societies in Victoria, this thesis examines the migration of an English nineteenth-century culture of self-help. Friendly societies may be described as mutually operated, community-based, benefit societies that encouraged financial prudence and social conviviality within the umbrella of recognised institutions that lent social respectability to their members. The benefits initially obtained were sickness benefit payments, funeral benefits and ultimately medical benefits – all at a time when no State social security systems existed. Contemporaneously, they were social institutions wherein members attended regular meetings for social interaction and the friendship of like-minded individuals. Members were highly visible in community activities from the smallest bush community picnics to attendances at Royal visits. Membership provided a social cache and well as financial peace of mind, both important features of nineteenth-century Victorian society. This is the first scholarly work on the friendly society movement in Victoria, a significant location for the establishment of such societies in Australia. The thesis reveals for the first time that members came from all strata of occupations, from labourers to High Court Judges – a finding that challenges conventional wisdom about the class composition of friendly societies. Finally, the extent of their presence in all aspects of society, from philanthropic to military, and rural to urban, is revealed through their activities and influence in their communities. Their physical legacy has diminished as buildings were demolished or re-purposed, but it remains visible in some prominent structures in major Victorian cities. A final legacy is the Victorian community’s on-going financial use of private health insurance cover. This financial prudence has its roots in the friendly society movement. Theirs is largely an invisible history but one deserving of being told.
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ItemCollection, collation & creation: girls and their material culture Victoria, 1870-1910( 2018)The thesis broadly explores the lives of girls who resided in the colony/state of Victoria, Australia between 1870 and 1910. A largely understudied and underappreciated area of historical study, the thesis takes a broad scope. Three case studies- urban girls’ collection of dolls, rural girls’ collation of scrapbooks, and Indigenous Victorian girls’ creation of fibrecraft- illustrate that tangible material culture can serve as evidence for intangible and marginalised histories. It overarchingly contended that girls, in any historical period, can express agency and resilience, individuality and creativity, through their material culture. In interacting with their day-to-day, seemingly mundane things, girls challenged, however subtly, repressive societal ideals that attempted to circumscribe their identities and their lives.
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ItemThe voice of Methodism: temperance policy in Victoria, Australia 1902-1977( 2018)This thesis seeks to examine the influence of the Methodist Church in Victoria, Australia, on public policy in the twentieth century using the issue of Temperance as a case study. Methodists had a tradition of social activism dating back to their eighteenth-century founder John Wesley. While the Church took up many causes, Temperance had become its signature concern. The secular Temperance movement in Victoria, Australia was unable to bring about significant reform so Methodist activists became the prime instigators of change and secured changes to licensing in 1906. Methodists adopted a policy of ‘unswerving hostility’ to alcohol but, unable to adapt to social change in the following years, their influence slowly diminished. It was finally eclipsed in 1965 following a Royal Commission on Hotel Trading Hours. The Church, split between those clinging to traditional values and those seeking a better way to engage the community to their point of view, lost its reforming voice.
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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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ItemAn imaginary economy : gambling, commodity, meaning( 2005)This thesis draws on the example of the contemporary phenomenon of electronic gaming machine (EGM) use in the Australian state of Victoria in order to construct an argument in the mode of social theory, relating the psyche's demand for meaning to the nature of consumption in contemporary capitalism. The thesis argues that EGM consumption may be viewed as an example of commodification of the 'interiority' of the subject. Two paths are utilised. The first is a theoretically oriented discussion of the necessity impelling humans to the generation of meaning, and the manner in which this meaning is created. This discussion also encompasses the importance of signification and processes of institution for the maintenance of heteronomous society, and the pseudo-mastery of social institutions. It involves a discussion of the creation of the social individual as consuming individual. The second path is a discussion of empirical material (including official data and the accounts of gamblers) which is used to generate an argument about the socio-economic processes maintaining heteronomous society, and the development of an ethic of life focussed on intensified forms of capitalist consumption. Arguments drawn from Nietzsche, Weber, Castoriadis and others are utilised to illustrate the fragmentation of the originary monad, required for successful creation of the social subject, and how this process of socialisation draws and must draw on processes of meaning creation and signification to create a social relationship formed between society and the psyche, via the concatenation of the social and radical imaginaries. The centrality of the significations of commodity and money is utilised to argue that consumption of EGMs is an exemplary example of contemporary consumption, the consumption of interiority, in which consumption has become a duty and an ethic, providing apparent access to a much desired state where monadic unity is apparently available, at a price.
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ItemDemocracy at work in a gambling state? : a testing case for Habermas's proceduralism( 2001)Jurgen Habermas's proceduralism is represented as a dynamic discursive model appropriate for normative analysis of complex modern constitutional democracies.^1 This discourse theoretical approach to the relationship between law and democracy focuses on the interplay between informal public sphere activity, and the formal deliberative processes, and legislative output. William Rehg has noted that the argument is "pitched at a very abstract level",^2 but has also referred to the fact that in Between Facts and Norms Habermas also "descends to the level of the real democratic procedure. ... "3 The, less formal level of Habermas's proceduralism has been further articulated in discussions and articles. The concern of this thesis has been to test this less formal level of Habermas's procedural model, and to reach some conclusion regarding the capacity for this theory to provide explanatory and/or critical insights into the social practices of a modern constitutional democracy. The less formal level of Habermas's procedural model has been tested against the background of gambling public sphere activity and gambling related legislative processes in the State of Victoria in different time periods. The conclusion has been reached that, while this test has revealed some problems for empirical analysis, and some limitations regarding the analysis of modern capitalist societies, the investigation undertaken here does, nevertheless, provide critical and explanatory insights into the way democracy works in a specific historical context. This is to certify that - (i) the thesis comprises only my original work except where indicated in the preface, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is 30,000 words in length, exclusive of endnotes, appendices and bibliography.
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ItemDamaged goods : hepatitis C and the politics of the Victorian Blood exchange( 2000)In February 1990, the Victorian Blood Transfusion Service (VIC BTS) became one of the first transfusion services in the world, to implement testing for the newly isolated hepatitis C virus. In this thesis, I trace the development of hepatitis C policy by the Victorian Transfusion Service. Policy development was complicated by the known indeterminacy of some hepatitis C test results, as well as the Service's desire to avoid a further AIDS-like crisis. In particular, the Service had to decide how to minimise the risk of hepatitis C infection to recipients, and what to do with the donors and recipients infected with the hepatitis C virus. In making these decisions, the VIC BTS was reshaping its relationship with donors and recipients, and this re-configuring of the relationships of Victorian blood exchange through the development of hepatitis C policy, is an underlying theme of this thesis. From its inception in 1929, the Victorian Service maintained a donor-oriented culture in which the health of donors and recipients was always a key priority. For Service staff, the voluntary gifts of donors made blood-banking a special enterprise, informing a 'moral economy' whereby the Service felt obligated to meet the needs of both donors and recipients. However, with the advent of the AIDS crisis in 1980s, the confidence of donors (and the public) in the safety of the Victorian blood supply fell, and some recipients, allegedly infected with HIV, initiated litigation against the Service's parent body, the Australian Red Cross Society. In response, the Victorian Service came to distrust the gift of blood, controlling and managing its risks by way of practices designed to assess other ordinary commodities. Blood came to be treated by the Service, and the Federal Government, not so much as a gift, but as an ambiguous commodity. The development of hepatitis C policy produced a growing tension between the Transfusion Service's longstanding 'moral economy', and its new, pharmaceutically informed, risk-assessment practices. On the one hand, the Service was very risk-averse in its policy development, implementing testing with great swiftness, and deferring all donors with indeterminate test results. Even when the Service later became aware that some of these donors had probably never been infected with hepatitis C, its desire to maintain as safe a blood supply as possible, necessitated the continuing deferral of all donors with indeterminate results. On the other hand, the Service felt obligated to provide the best care and treatment feasible for potentially infected donors. With few government resources available for the management of hepatitis C, the Victorian Service devoted great time and energy to ensure deferred donors could be confident in the interpretation of their test results, and would receive expert care and treatment if necessary. The tension between the special ethical nature of Victorian blood exchange, and the management of blood as a dubious commodity, came to a head in the development of lookback policy. The Victorian Service felt a clinically-informed, 'moral obligation' to 'look back' and locate individual recipients who may have been infected by blood transfusions contaminated with hepatitis C. However, others viewed hepatitis C lookback from a more distanced, population perspective, arguing that it was a technical issue to be resolved through a cost-assessment analysis. Such an analysis showed hepatitis C lookback would be inefficient and expensive as a public health intervention. Although major hepatitis C lookback programs were eventually supported at a national level, the `correct' way of developing Victorian transfusion policy remains open to debate. What is clear, however, is that future policy development by the Victorian Service will continue to reflect, and to reshape, its relationships with donors and recipients.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 2015)Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.