School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Prostitution and the state in Victoria, 1890-1914
    Arnot, Margaret ( 1986)
    The later decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries were marked by considerable change in Victorian society. Rapid urban expansion and industrialization were among the most profound of these developments. They resulted in increasing problems of urban over-crowding, poverty, sanitation and, despite the youth of the cities, decay. Those in power began to see these urban problems as being partly related to the nature of working-class life, so sought to control aspects of working-class culture to an unprecedented degree. During this period, legislation relating to liquor, tobacco, drugs, and gambling, for example, were brought into effect for the first time or became more intrusive. Street life was becoming increasingly regulated. In 1891, for example, amendments to the Victorian Police Offences Act made important changes to the social construction of anti-social behaviour and placed increased power in the hands of the police and legal institutions to control the behaviour of individuals in public places. As part of this development, soliciting prostitution was made an offence for the first time. Women, too, had become subversive. Feminists demanded the vote, increased educational opportunities and threatened the established power differential between the sexes. At the same time, legislation was being passed and medical practices were emerging which increasingly impinged upon women's bodies and upon the areas of women's traditional power - life itself and child life. Kerreen Reiger has traced the increasing attempts to professionalize and rationalize family life, resulting in greater intrusion into the lives of women in relation to childbirth and motherhood.' Increasing attempts to control prostitution in Australia date from this same period, and can be seen as part of these processes. It was from the 1860s that an edifice of laws was constructed. Firstly, legislators were concerned with how women were forced into prostitution (procuring), the relationships between women working in prostitution and their children, and the spread of venereal disease. Later, from the 1890s, there was a new spate of legislation related to soliciting, the ownership and management of brothels, procuring, and living on the earnings of prostitution. During the same period a centralized, bureaucratized police force, which was crucially involved in the increasing control of prostitution, was established in Victoria. The prison system, too, became more organized and intrusive. By the later part of this period the move toward greater state intrusion into the area of prostitution was clear; the years 1890 to 1914 have been chosen for detailed study. This period was marked at the beginning by important new amendments to the Police Offences and Crimes Acts in 1891 and at the end by the advent of the First World War, which created new contexts and problems. (From Introduction)
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    Labour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914
    Raymond, Melanie ( 1987-05)
    This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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    Shadows on the landscape: memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road
    Lewis, Julianne Elizabeth ( 1999)
    Victoria's commemorative landscape is made up of a series of natural and constructed features comprising roads, bridges, memorial sculptures, avenues of honour, coastal fortifications and military memorabilia, yet their memorializing function is largely unrecognized by the general population. Some of these memorials have been linked with the scenic landscape and have become privileged as tourist sites. Their original meanings, however, have been blurred by twentieth century progress. This thesis examines one component of Australia's memorial landscape, the Great Ocean Road in South West Victoria, and questions whether there is a parallel between the Western concept of a memorial landscape and the notions of spirituality in the land which are a primary component of the belief structure of indigenous peoples. This leads to an examination of the local geographical landscape in relation to Aboriginal massacre sites, and a questioning of the congruence between such sites and the now memorialized battlefields of World War 1. Chapter One deals with the history of the Great Ocean Road and traces its development and construction from 1916 to 1932. Chapter Two examines the place of the Great Ocean Road in the overall scheme of post World War 1 memorialization, and questions why its original function has been so little recognized by the community. Chapter Three looks at the complex relationships between the physical and spiritual elements of the land as perceived by Aboriginal culture, investigates the Aboriginal massacre sites within close proximity to the Great Ocean Road, and questions why no memorials have been raised to Aborigines who died defending their land. The theoretical base of the thesis is supported by the notion that landscape is socially and culturally determined, and that place can be invested with spiritual potency. Finally, it is argued that for a place to retain its spiritual strength, regardless of the culture, the spiritual content must be recognized, ritualized and constantly refreshed within the culture.
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    The Chinese in Australia 1930-45: beyond a history of racism
    Rankine, Wendy Margaret ( 1995)
    The present thesis is a contribution to the history of the Chinese in Australia. In it, I have endeavoured to look at the relations between European and Chinese settlers in Australia from a perspective other than that of racism. Discrimination against the Chinese was common in all settler societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the basis of archival documentation and in conjunction with contemporary sources, I would suggest that a different history can be told in regard to Australian Chinese. To look at the history of the Chinese in Australia in light of the immigration policy alone ignores other aspects of Australian-Chinese history, aspects which concern the daily lives of those Chinese who lived and worked in Australia as Australian citizens. With due regard to Federal political policies implicated at a bureaucratic level, the actual experiences and achievements of Australian Chinese still indicate that they fared better than most authors on the subject would have us believe. ..... In presenting the results of my research, I do not mean to belittle the experience of racism suffered by people of Chinese ancestry in Australia. This experience has been well documented and is, moreover, still being endured. My point is merely that racism was not the sum total of the Chinese experiences of Australian society. As a recent collection of essays shows, the time has come to write about other aspects of Australia's Chinese history. In this thesis I have documented the attitudes and efforts of the Chinese Nationals and Australian Chinese in Australia during the war years. Their efforts, combined with the Australian Chinese communities' supportive role and the increased wartime interactions with other Australians contributed during this period to establishing a greater understanding between the different communities in Australian society. (From introduction)
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    Making the deserts bloom: attitudes towards water and nature in the Victorian irrigation debate, 1880-1890
    Sinclair, Paul Geoffrey ( 1994)
    In 1836 Major Thomas Mitchell and his gaggle of supply carts, Europeans and Aboriginal interpreters camped on a river and named it Moonlight Creek. Those who followed after Mitchell called the town that grew up near Moonlight Creek “Kerang”, which was supposedly the local Koori word for moonlight. Locals now tell visitors Kerang means “moon over water.” Kerang lies north of Bendigo and south east of Swan Hill. It is part of the area known as northern Victoria. In the past it has been called the northern plains or regarded as part of Australia Felix. The major characteristic of this area is its dependence on water. Water was a major preoccupation of Major Mitchell, as it has been for all those who followed him. Water had both symbolic and practical applications. It has been used as a symbol which unified the experience of European settlers with those who followed them. In part this association can be explained by the ancient European image of the river as a symbol of endurance and of “changeless change”. A river seems to be continually changing between historical, linear time and future cyclical time, between a definite spatial context, and one which is continuous. At Swan Hill, residents have built a monument to their pioneers surrounded by a pool of water. The monument offers clues to the complex relationship between water and society, and attempts to impose a dominant meaning on this relationship. The monument stands at the entrance of Swan Hill’s major tourist attraction, the Pioneer Settlement, a recreation of a nineteenth century pioneer town where local residents in period costume sell boiled lollies and horse rides to tourists. (From Introduction)
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    Studies in the relations between Indian and Australian colonies in the nineteenth century
    Johnson, Richard ( 1987?)
    Geoffrey Blainey's reference to India in The Tyranny of Distance initiated my interest in researching the relationship between India and Australia in the nineteenth century. While Blainey made several references to India in the early development of colonial Australia, other historians have not developed that issue. I started my research with Blainey’s lead that there were some years in the nineteenth century when Australia seemed to be a satellite of India as well as a colony of England and that cargoes from Bengal fed and equipped the colony and also gave it a hangover. It seemed so obvious that the two 'neighbouring' British colonies have contact with each other and as Blainey pointed out, Australia was so far from England, and communication between the two was so irregular, that Sydney slowly drifted into Asia's net of commerce. (From introduction)
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    Vexed and volatile bodies: the drama of possession and exorcism in late Elizabethan England: the John Darrell cases
    O'Callaghan, Deirdre ( 1998)
    This thesis focuses on the drama of the possessed body in the ritual of exorcism in late Elizabethan England. It examines the various ways in which the devil manifests itself in the bodies of male and female demoniacs. It shows how cultural, religious and popular beliefs seep into the bodily performance of these demoniacs. The symptoms displayed by the demoniacs, such as uncontrolled rages, loss of appetite, hysterical screaming and crying, and clairvoyancy are read in a gendered way. The "vexed" bodies writhing in pain and experiencing volatile emotions are examined for the nature of their bodily performance. They create a theatrical dynamic which gives the devil a very real presence, in which he makes spectacular entrances and exits from the bodily orifices of the demoniacs. The thesis examines these issues through the public exorcisms performed by the Protestant exorcist, John Darrell, between 1586 and 1598 in England. The approach has been to adopt an unfolding narrative which emphasises the drama and public spectacle in each case The cases which are examined in separate chapters include the exorcism of Katherine Wright, a seventeen-year-old girl from Derbyshire, the thirteen-year-old Thomas Darling from Burton on Trent, a mass possession of 7 members of one family in Lancashire and William Somers, a twenty-year-old male who was exorcised publicly in Nottingham in 1598. The rituals or exorcism performed by Darrell are shown to have a changing script. The exorcist adapts this script according to the age and gender of the demoniac and the cultural expectations of masculinity and femininity. Through the script of exorcism, the exorcist maps cultural beliefs onto the body of the demoniac and this results in different behavior by males and females. The demoniacs themselves sometimes also take an active role in the ritual as they confute the exorcist's logic, orchestrate their own bodily performances or direct their audiences, which sometimes swelled to a crowd of 500 people, to acts of praying and singing. The scripting of male and female demoniacs in the various accounts of the Darrell cases, is also examined for the way supernatural symptoms of possession are interpreted as specific to the gender of the demoniac. Female demoniacs are described for the most part as weak and uncontrolled. The two thirty-year-old demoniacs in the Lancashire case, Jane Ashton and Margaret Bynom for instance, are shown to suffer supernatural symptoms which attack and disable the body. Male demoniacs like Thomas Darling, on the other hand, who preached and at times even adopted the commanding voice of the exorcist, are more often represented as morally strong, their fits structured in a teleological fashion. Male demoniacs seem more able to slough off their uncontrolled rages and to resume their normal bodily and intellectual composure than female demoniacs. This is despite the intensity of the male demoniac's fits, which in the case of William Somers reportedly "consumed all partes of him". In this way the "vexed" and volatile body of the possessed demoniac in these rituals of exorcism offers the modern reader a particular insight into the manner in which religious and popular belief in late Elizabethan England needs to be understood with respect to the functioning of gender.
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    Evolution of a zoo: a history of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, 1857-1900
    De Courcy, Catherine ( 1990)
    The Melbourne Zoo in the late twentieth century is a popular venue which attracts up to one and a half million visitors per year. It has a large income gathered from entrance fees, Government contribution and private sponsorship. The gardens are most attractive, some of the enclosures are of the latest design, there is an active and innovative education program which reaches large numbers of school children every year, the breeding programs have achieved some measure of success, and the collection of animals is large and diverse. Yet there is something discomfiting about an institution which holds baboons in wire cages with concrete floors and tigers in an enclosure not much bigger than a tennis court. A history of the institution can shed light on why the Zoo now incorporates such features; more importantly it can assist the contemporary administration in planning a Zoo by identifying the historical legacies and evaluating their relevance for a twenty-first century audience.
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    The controversial campaigns: the role of the Australian Army in the South-West Pacific area, 1944-1945
    Hastings, Anthony Paul ( 1982)
    During the final year of the war in the Pacific, the Australian Army was confined to “mopping-up” by-passed Japanese forces in the New Guinea area and Borneo, left behind by the American advance through the Philippines and towards Japan. The Australian Army did not have any combat forces in any of the well known Pacific campaigns of 1944-45, such as, Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Nevertheless, mopping-up involved the Australians in many bloody clashes against the Japanese, who always fought with great tenacity, and by the end of the war the Australian Army had more troops in the field than at any other time. On the other hand, the Australian campaigns were, by the standard of that period of the war, on quite a small scale, and overall Australian casualties were fairly light.
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    The Victorian Land Act of 1862 revisited
    Ireland, John ( 1992)
    There is an extensive historiography of the Land Act of 1862, usually known as Duffy's Land Act, after the then Minister of Lands, Charles Gavan Duffy. However, this historiography is remarkable for the divergent views of the various writers as to the causes of the Act's failure to achieve its ostensible purposes. I have, therefore, undertaken a detailed study of the period October 1861 to June 1863 which, together with some later material, provides, I believe, a firmer basis for judging the motives and actions of the chief "players" in this little drama. These include, in particular, Duffy, John Dennistoun Wood, the Minister for Justice and my great-grandfather Richard Davies Ireland, the Attorney-Genera1. After reviewing the work of previous writers, which I do in the next four pages, four questions seem to me to arise and I have used these as a basis for an exploration of events and in establishing the degree of blame each of the above should properly share for the Act's failure. The first signs of failure were not long in appearing. Within a week of its coming into force on 10 September 1862 it had already become plain that, so far as its provisions for settling small farmers on the land were concerned, the Act was achieving the exact opposite of what it apparently set out to do. For while purporting to facilitate the development of agriculture, on small blocks owned by yeoman farmers, on an idealised European pattern, it was actually facilitating the permanent acquisition of broad acres for sheep grazing. This was particularly so in the Western District, parts of which, by their proximity to existing markets or ports, as well as their excellent soils, recommended themselves to contemporaries as potentially the most suitable agricultural land of all. This led the Geelong Advertiser to ask about the Act's operation in the area ‘Is Mr Duffy a rogue? Is he a fool? or is he a compound of both?’ (From Introduction)