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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Item“A Great and Beautiful Force”: The Making of Political Identities Among Women Activists on the Far Left in Australia, mid-1930s to early 1950s( 2023)This thesis examines the political identities of women activitists in the Communist Party of Australia and affiliated organisations from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, focusing on the interventions of World War II. It suggests that political interactions between women within and beyond the far-left, women developed political identities shaped by gender and feminist issues, along with class. It explores their positioning in the domestic sphere, their political organisations, and the workplace, as spaces which were key to shaping female political identities, complicating suggestions that the time period of study, and the Communist Party throughout the 20th century, were lacking in women-focused activism. It utilises varied sources from the period, drawing on the Women's Sections of left-wing newspapers, feminist and Communist materials, and the novels of Communist women authors Katharine Susannah Prichard and Jean Devanny as sites of cultural framings of gender.
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ItemIn Black and White: The rise, fall and on-going consequences of a racial slur in Australian newspapers( 2019)In Australia, racism cannot be extricated from settler expropriation of indigenous labour. In this thesis, I trace this entanglement through the lens of a single word – ‘nigger’ – as it has appeared in Australian print media in reference to Aboriginal people and Papuans, from when the term gained currency in the 1860s until its dwindling nearly a century later. I argue that increasing use of ‘nigger’ represented a shift in the way settlers perceived these peoples. Settlers began to conceive of indigenous peoples less as primitive savages or land-occupying natives and more as an exploitable source of cheap labour. This occurred as part of a global process, as Europeans and especially Neo-Europeans consolidated and invested in a dichotomous discourse of race, increasingly figuring themselves as ‘white’ and those whose bodies and labour they exploited as ‘black’. While the use of the slur itself rose and fell, the hierarchical racial schemata of which it was the herald are yet to be dismantled.
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ItemThey came to heal: Australia’s medical immigrants, 1960 to the present( 2018)This thesis examines the patterns of migration of international medical graduates (IMG) since 1960 and the processes used to decide who would be licensed to practice. It draws on several historiographical genres. Quantitative methods were used extensively to ascertain trends for which explanations based on political and social history could be sought. Complementing this larger picture, a collection of oral histories explores the social causes and consequences of migration, and the actualities of Australia’s licensing processes as experienced by individual immigrants The thesis fills a gap in historical research on the subject by compiling and analysing information previously reported only incompletely and in cross-sectional fashion during this period, juxtaposing it with examples that reveal the human impact of fluctuating official policies during this time. It will argue that Australia has unresolved problems when it comes to balancing the desire of immigrant doctors to practise in their new country with the expectations of the population for equitably distributed and high-quality health care.
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ItemDisappointments of the nation: war, disillusionment and narratives of decline in interwar Australia( 2015)This thesis investigates historiographical and literary representations of World War I in Australia. It noted that Australian historiography on the War in Australian cultural memory and representation focus primarily upon the 'martial nationalist' account of WW1 as a site of national birth, most famously articulated by C.E.W. Bean, and that Australian cultural historians argue that the common British tropes and myths of 'lost innocence', 'disillusionment' and nostalgia for an 'Edwardian Summer' associated with WW1, are not represented in Australian creative responses to the war in the interwar period. This thesis argues that there is a tradition of historical interpretation that regards WW1 as an event that frustrated national potential, rendered a formerly consensual society divided, and strangled the young nation's early promise. It furthermore pointed out that this attitude can be discerned in literature of the interwar period, and informed the writing of both the radical cultural nationalists, such as Vance Palmer, and the 'Vision school', such as Norman and Jack Lindsay. In the interwar period, both groups were moved by their sense of the loss and damage wreaked by the war upon Australia, to advocate a return to a nostalgically recalled pre-war past, a renaissance to recapture the innocence that had been lost in war, and a protectionist attitude in culture, that advocated Australia's return to its more self-contained pre-war state and a rejection of the modernising influences that followed in the wake of war. A paranoid nationalism thus emerges in both literary movements, indicating the existence of what Raymond Williams has called a 'structure of feeling' in interwar Australia, structured around nostalgia and disillusionment with the nation that emerged from WW1, that informs later historiography and popular history.
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ItemPhotography for history’s sake: the Military History and Information Section in the Middle East 1941-1942( 2014)This thesis explores the creation, objectives and operation of the Military History and Information Section (MH&IS) in the Middle East from August 1941 to mid-1942. It compares the MH&IS to equivalent official war photographic organisations in Britain and the United States, and considers the photographic results of the MH&IS in the Middle East. The concept of historical record photography held by its leader, John Treloar, is evaluated according to a set of themes.
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ItemThis is total War: re-exploring Australia's Second World War through the lens of total war( 2014)This thesis explores Australia's Second World War through the lens of total war. Using "ideal type" methodology, it aims to explore how total war was articulated, understood and implemented in a belligerent country that has previously been neglected by total war scholars.
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ItemA new deal for the territories?: The abolition of the indentured labour system in colonial Papua and New Guinea( 2014)On 15 October 1945, the Australian Minister for External Territories, Eddie Ward, announced the immediate cancellation of all indentured labour contracts in the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea. Almost all of the 32,000 Papuan and New Guineans under employment contracts put down their tools and returned to their villages.1 Massive post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts came to an immediate halt and expatriateowned plantations could no longer function. While the abruptness of Ward’s proclamation shocked supporters and opponents of the system, the proposal was by no means new. (From introduction)
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ItemSustaining the resistance: the role of Australian activist organisations in resisting the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, 1975 - 1991( 2014)This thesis focuses on the activities of Melbourne based activist groups ACFOA and AETA as representative aid and solidarity organisations as defined in transnational activist literature. It explores their early activities, and how they responded to changing circumstances through the 1970s and 1980s inside the territory, within Australia, and internationally. It will show how activist efforts evolved from solidarity to advocacy, from expressions of outrage to considered framing of issues, and how a nexus between the two organisations developed that facilitated them playing complementary and effective roles in sustaining the idea of continued resistance within Australian politics, media, and international civil society. It does not attempt to chart the entire history of the organisations, or that of the independence struggle. Instead, through ACFOA and AETA it seeks to provide the first account of specific Australian activism in the under-explored period of 1975 - 1991. (From introduction)
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ItemPauline, politics and psychoanalysis: theorising racism in Australia( 1999)This thesis uses a psychoanalytic approach to examine the phenomenon of the rise of the Pauline Hanson and the One Nation political party. Psychoanalysis, as the discipline concerned with developing an understanding of irrationality and the human emotions, is well-placed to tackle issues such as insecurity, resentment and racism. By reviewing the works of a number of psychoanalytic theorists, this thesis suggests ways that they may help us to understand the success of One Nation in Australia. Through this approach, I aim to bring new insights to the study of racism in contemporary Australia. The first part of this thesis consists of a survey of the contentions of six key psychoanalytic theorists. This analysis shows that psychoanalysis affords us an understanding of the subject as a complex being; attached to, and even constituted by, certain images and ideals. In the second section, I suggest ways in which psychoanalytic theory may assist us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. This analysis deals with only a few selected aspects of Hansonism, but to the extent that this can be seen as a synecdoche of the whole, it suggests that the attainment of a full understanding of racism and the human emotions is more complex and difficult task than we often acknowledge.