School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 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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ItemThe Chinese in Australia 1930-45: beyond a history of racism( 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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ItemStudies in the relations between Indian and Australian colonies in the nineteenth century( 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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ItemThe remaking of youth: a study of juvenile convicts and orphan immigrants in colonial Australia( 1987)One aspect of the development of modern western society upon which liberal democracy has always been self-congratulatory is the ongoing reforms made in the care and treatment of criminal, destitute and neglected youth. Almost every decade since the late eighteenth century has brought with it new, more 'enlightened' juvenile penal and welfare policies. As a corollary, the policies of preceding decades have been disowned, shunned and condemned. This has been the pattern of 'progress'. Progress has always rested on the invocation of an essential dissimilarity between 'then' and 'now'. The past is thus used only to serve as a distant and sometimes shocking backdrop to the enlightened present. If there is one general characteristic of the bulk of work done to date on the history of childhood and youth in western societies, and indeed on the more general history of penal and welfare reform, it is that it celebrates this notion of progress. The past is examined merely in order to assure us of our present state of advance. And so the past, in all its complexity, is not really examined at all. (From Introduction)