School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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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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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.