School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium by Gaius Julius Solinus: A Roman Geography for a Changing World( 2022)The Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium is a collection of wondrous facts from various areas of natural science presented within the geographical framework of a description of the known world. Little is known of its author Gaius Julius Solinus, possibly a grammaticus who lived between the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century AD. Despite being today largely neglected within the field of Latin literature, the text played a significant role in the transmission of classical geographical and scientific knowledge to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Since the publication of Theodor Mommsen’s critical edition of the text in the late 19th century, studies on Solinus’ work have largely focused on philological issues concerning the author’s sources and the authenticity of the second redaction of the text. Such approach stemmed from the general view that the text was a mere epitome of its main source, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and has not offered a comprehensive assessment as to why and for whom the Collectanea was written. This thesis aims to fill this gap in the research and to answer the question of what the ultimate purpose of this text was. Specifically, the following aspects of the issue are investigated: the cultural, social, and historical reasons that prompted Solinus’ reorganisation of Pliny’s knowledge; the world view that emerges from the prominent space reserved to Rome within the text; and the role of mirabilia, and in particular animal paradoxography, in providing the author with the epistemological support to the world order that his text upholds. The methodology here adopted follows a text-based approach, by analysing those passages of the Collectanea in which Solinus’ tone, choice of words, and deviation from source material can be read as indicative of his authorial autonomy, and thus the reflection of a clear political project. This thesis concludes that a date of composition at the reign of Constantine I (or at least between the end of the third and the first few decades of the fourth century) is consistent with the author’s need to reaffirm the cultural primacy of the city of Rome, at a time in which it was losing its political relevance. It also suggests that the view of Nature that emerges from Solinus’ use of animal paradoxography (and mirabilia in general) is indicative of a ‘deterministic’ Weltanschauung, and is used as the moral justification of a providentially arranged world order with Rome at its centre. This thesis ultimately argues that Solinus’ Collectanea should be read independently from its sources, and that its importance lies in its being one of the most significant reflections of the cultural eclecticism of its time.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Hummingbird’s Atlas: Mapping Guaraní Resistance in the Atlantic Rainforest during the Emergence of Capitalism (1500–1768)( 2022)This thesis maps the resistance of Guarani peoples to colonisation in the Atlantic Rainforest of South America during the emergence of capitalism, from 1500 to 1768. As such, it addresses a gap in the existing literature, where the resistance of stateless Indigenous groups has not been sufficiently acknowledged in both environmental histories of the Atlantic Rainforest and global histories of capitalism. The dissertation’s research method draws on archival sources, alongside interviews with contemporary Guarani writers, to make maps and other infographics visualising and analysing this history. In the sixteenth century, Guarani resistance strategies impeded the creation of a silver route through the inland Atlantic Rainforest. The failure of the Spanish to overcome this decentralised resistance network contrasts with the rapid Spanish defeat of the nearby Inca Empire. Coupled with the subsequent Guarani struggle against the yerba mate commodity frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these actions obstructed capital accumulation in Paraguay, hindering local deforestation and ensuring the survival of autonomous Guarani populations. Simultaneously, in the coastal Atlantic Rainforest, appropriated Guarani labour played an important role in the restoration of Portugal’s Atlantic Empire and the opening of the Brazilian gold commodity frontier. The subsequent flow of gold from Brazil to England assisted the development of British capitalism in the eighteenth century. Consequently, the thesis argues that this appropriation of Guarani labour and knowledge should be acknowledged as a contributing factor in the global emergence of capitalism. But this process did not end with a complete victory for the forces of capitalist integration, with Guarani peoples continuing this political struggle to the present day, ensuring that the teko, the Guarani way of life, endures.
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ItemNo Masters But Ourselves: Black Reconstruction in the Deep South City( 2022)The destruction of slavery brought about dramatic opportunities and challenges for formerly enslaved Black Southerners, many of whom migrated to Southern cities in search of safety and freedom following the Civil War. During Reconstruction, the Deep South city offered economic, social and political opportunities that rural life could not, and it was in the city that Black Southerners were able to assert themselves in public and private spaces. These assertions of Black power and Black identity varied from seemingly minor interactions on the sidewalk, in the workplace or at school, to street celebrations, protests, strikes and pitched battles. Through an examination of Black daily life and the constant threat of white violence during this period, this thesis demonstrates how Black Southerners asserted radical ideas of Black power and freedom in the city space. Despite the relative freedom that urban life offered, white racial violence and brutality remained a constant – making the achievements of Black men, women and children in this period all the more extraordinary. It is through these – often temporary – achievements, that one can see the radical potential of Black Reconstruction to revise the foundations and future of the American republic, to an extent that was not then and has not now been fully realized.
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ItemImagining the 'Chinese Australian Community': A History of Community Organisations, 1970-2020( 2022)This study examines the concept of a unitary ‘Chinese Australian community’ through a comparative analysis of Chinese Australian community organisations and their responses to six major events or moments in recent history (1970-2020). These events and moments are: the end of the White Australia Policy and the beginning of multicultural Australia; the 1984 ‘Blainey debate’, the Tiananmen Massacre and Chinese Students’ campaign for permanent residency in Australia; the ‘Hanson debate’ and the rise of ‘Hansonism’, 1996-1998; the beginning of the so-called ‘Chinese century’; and the recent, on-going debate about the PRC’s influence in Australian politics and society. Over the course of this history, the study puts a special focus on community organisations’ assertions of belonging, (trans)national identity, and multicultural ideals. This study draws on the English- and Chinese-language materials created by more than 15 community organisations over this 1970-2020 period from around Australia. These materials were found in public and private collections across the country in physical and digital formats. Usage of these materials is complemented by ten oral history interviews conducted by the researcher with past and present community leaders in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. These interviews were conducted in English and on the condition of anonymity. This thesis suggests that a unitary, unified, or united Chinese Australian community is a recurring chimera in the socio-cultural space shared by Chinese Australians. Instead, community organisations adopted different positions on a spectrum of possible relationships to both their Australian and ancestral homes and political developments in either or both could compel unity or division among them. The intended result is a history that shows Chinese Australian community organisations practising a highly participatory style of multiculturalism over the decades, albeit with alterations to fit the ever dynamic and manifold imaginings of what constituted a ‘Chinese Australian community’.
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ItemTracing non-biomedical therapeutic knowledge: social-network lives in action( 2021)This thesis investigates the performance of non-biomedical therapeutic knowledge as situated knowledge on the internet. Non-biomedical therapeutic knowledge is defined as medical knowledge that exists in separation, but not isolation from, scientific biomedical knowledge. By tracing the social-network lives of non-biomedical therapeutic knowledge, the thesis examines the influences of digital technologies on the propagation of knowledge that exists in the margin of scientific knowledge, as well as the implications of this digitally-enabled propagation on non-biomedical cultural formations as living practices. Assemblages of mediated knowledge emerge as a result of encounters between digital technologies, non-biomedical knowledge, and the people who practice and receive non- biomedical therapies. From static texts to live-streaming videos, social-network enactments replicate existing social dynamics in the propagation of marginalised knowledges, provide channels for social support through casual and ephemeral interactions, transform human experiences with downtime in tending to the sick body, and, through facilitating in vivo conceptions of space, enable the persistence of these marginalised medical practices. In studying the resultant melange of digital artefacts left behind by their actors and the emergent social-network properties arising from their relations, this thesis uses a mix of quantitative computational and qualitative digital methods. Although each digital expression lends itself to particular analytical and methodological approaches, whose engagements produce conclusions of different epistemological standpoints, these conclusions nevertheless complement each other in the overall inquiry of assembling the social-network lives of non-biomedical knowledge. In choosing Vietnam as the local case, I offer a thorough examination of non- biomedical knowledge on the internet in context as a point of contrast, reference, or comparison for other sites and situations. Binding the empirical findings presented in this thesis together are themes of social-network accomplishments as contingency, the politics of in/visibility in social-network labour as patchwork, and the social-network emergence of multiple space-time.
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ItemGrowing Songs: Australian sound media for children from parlour music to podcasts.( 2022)This thesis provides the first cultural history of sound media produced for Australian children. It opens by exploring post-Federation parlour sheet music and the burgeoning mechanised media of radio and phonographs, with a concentration on the rising consumption of transnational entertainment that accelerated in post-World War II as Australian children’s sound media evolved into a distinctive genre. The study draws upon the disparate archival materials of sound media created for Australian children through archival recordings, sheet music, oral history testimonials, and examines music for children through the production and consumption of various sound media technologies, including radio, records, television, and digital podcast streaming. It examines a series of chronological case studies in children’s media from public broadcasting radio from the 1930s and the postwar success of Kindergarten of The Air, the early children’s record industry locally epitomised by the Children’s Record Guild of Australia and folk revivalist Glen Tomasetti in 1959, sound media integrated within the longstanding pinnacle of Australian early years television programs Play School, through to present day songwriters and performers of children’s music. Children’s music sound media is situated within the terms of an ‘ecology’ of entertainment practice by professional performers and songwriters and is explored through a critical ‘production culture’ lens. This ‘ecology’ encompasses the business realities of the music industry in conjunction with cultural trends to develop an overview of the changing relationship between children’s reception of entertainment sound media, and the increasingly prevalent scientific and therapeutic conceptions of childhood. The influence of therapeutic constructions is seen to have developed with the widespread rise of both a scientifically developmentalist approach to child rearing in tandem, and sometimes at odds, with psychodynamic influenced progressive child rearing practices. Three chapters reveal, through focused case studies, the individual achievements and creative approaches of contemporary children’s music performers, producers and songwriters with their specific aims and unique processes of communicating music through the evolution of sound media technology since postwar Australia. The analysis draws upon an extensive oral history archive, developed for this research, including interviews with contemporary industry practitioners and key children’s music artists Peter Combe, Don Spencer, Justine Clarke, Coco’s Lunch, The Wiggles and others. The development and diversity of Australian children’s music is also contextualised within a commercialised and transnational soundscape. By tracing shifting constructions of childhood and the developing reception of entertainment media designed for Australian children, this thesis explores the dynamic history of a genre of music that is neglectfully overlooked yet paradoxically both highly profitable and globally influential. It argues that Australia has made a significant contribution to the genre of children’s music, with a distinctive sound media that has been shaped not just by local circumstances but in dialogue with American, British and Canadian children’s and adult music traditions. From initial developments during the 1930s, Australian children’s music has been at the forefront of transnational sound media ingenuity that continues to represent a major media export and success on the global entertainment stage.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBarbarian Civility British Expatriates and the Transformation of the Maghreb in English Thought, 1660-1714( 2021)This thesis explores the role of British expatriates living in Ottoman Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, in a transformation of British-Maghrebi diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations in the later Stuart era. This period, 1660-1714, represented a distinct transitional period in which pragmatic cooperation, detailed knowledge, and material exchanges decreased the envy, enmity and ignorance of earlier periods of conflict, without resulting in the controlling Orientalist domination that characterised later periods. Drawing primarily on a large, little-studied collection of correspondence collected at the British consulate in Tunis, as well as English periodical news, State Papers Foreign, and numerous other government and official records, I highlight how expatriates acted as mediators in trade, diplomacy, and material culture, formed networks of influence and information, and transmitted their pragmatic, nuanced, well-informed views of the Maghreb to British audiences. My introduction presents a survey of relevant literature, sources, and historical context, followed by an outline of key theoretical interventions: the contested term ‘expatriate’ in historiographies of British-Maghrebi relations, the biblical-theological lens of ‘exile’ through which many expatriates viewed their more difficult or isolating experiences, and the concept of ‘equivalence’ in which expatriates and their correspondents viewed Maghrebi institutions, individuals and cultures as essentially equal in legitimacy, and sometimes superior in value, to European equivalents. In Part 1, by exploring the origins, expectations, and interpersonal relationships of British expatriates in the Maghreb, I argue that expatriates were governed fundamentally by self-interest, viewing the Maghreb as a site suitable for personal and professional advancement – not just for wealthy men, but for apprentices, women, and children as well. In Part 2, by examining expatriate material cultures and religious interactions, I show how they ably, often enthusiastically, embraced British, European and Maghrebi traditions without abandoning their essential loyalties to Britain, such that they could act as trusted mediators in negotiation, exchange, and information. In Part 3, I explore expatriates’ professional activities relating to networking, commercial diplomacy, and the Mediterranean corsairing economy, showing how they built robust and varied connections of trust such that they could exploit opportunities to enrich themselves and overcome opposition, in the process deliberately promoting peace and trade between Britain and the Maghreb. In Part 4, I show how expatriate views of the Maghreb and its people reached wider audiences in Britain, by two routes: first, the networks of information that brought expatriate testimony on Maghrebi news to British newspapers, and second, the creation, publication, and influence of The Present State of Algiers, a little-studied but significant longform text produced by a British consul. As a whole, my thesis highlights the significant influence of the actions and networks of British expatriates living in the Maghreb on improving British-Maghrebi relations and increasing public understanding of the Maghreb in British society.
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ItemTiered contact zones: a new engagement model for cultural materials conservation( 2021)Over recent decades, there has been increasing recognition of the need for conservators to engage and collaborate with the communities associated with the origin, ownership, and use of cultural objects. Such collaboration has developed more detailed knowledge and understanding than is possible through object investigation, research, and examination of constituent materials and manufacturing techniques. Two challenges arise, however: ensuring the engagement with community stakeholders is respectful and ethical, and planning and conducting stakeholder engagement in a way that is sensitive to issues of inclusion, authority, and power. Therefore, a key question in cultural material conservation is how those participating in conservation programs who have a common interest in conservation outcomes but come from vastly different backgrounds can best collaborate, share, and construct knowledge. This thesis explores the application of contact zone theory and, addressing the identified shortcomings of that theory, proposes a tiered contact zone model as a more practical means to engage with communities. The model is based on principles of respect, ethical behaviour, and collaborative decision-making and the practices of object-based investigations, object biographies, and actor network and communicative action theories. The thesis investigates how shared spaces for dialogue and exchange are created and analyses the opportunities and challenges that arise from structured contact. The proposed tiered contact zone model, developed from practice-led research, involves four stages of collaboration; firstly, an initial landing zone in which relationships are initiated and common goals identified; secondly, an early exploration zone that consists of the planning and articulation of roles and responsibilities, activities, and intended outcomes; thirdly, a collaboration zone in which confidence, trust, and partnerships are built; and, finally, a knowledge transfer zone in which mature collaboration and enhancement of knowledge are achieved. The tiered contact zone model is applied to two case study collections: the Middle Eastern Manuscript (MEM) Collection at the University of Melbourne, and the Returned and Services League (RSL) LifeCare War Museum in Narrabeen, New South Wales. This thesis identifies the similarities and differences between the application of the model utilising a multiple method qualitative approach of questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. Feedback recorded participants' sense of belonging and achievement when their knowledge contributed to the shared goals. When concerns of unequal collaboration or lack of engagement were identified, participants drew upon the tiered structure with its development of shared roles and goals to instigate conversations to address their issues. The case studies demonstrate that the tiered contact zone model is a powerful tool that can deliver significant mutual benefits to the conservator and cultural communities, enhance collection knowledge, and inform collaboration processes. The model is flexible and adaptable, allowing for progression and regression through the zones, changing participants, various levels of participation, and ongoing review of objectives and desired outcomes and processes, methodologies, and activities. The model has the potential to be applied to a wide variety of circumstances beyond the conservation of cultural material collections.
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ItemDragging History Through the Gutters War Comic Books, Civic Duty & American Popular Memory, 1952-1993( 2022)The Cold War era (1945-1991) coincided with both the emergence and height of war comic books in the United States. Despite significant social, political, and comic industry shifts during this period, war comics remained a consistent presence in American culture. In this thesis, I examine the reasons for war comics’ continued success despite periods during the Cold War when comics were censored for their excessive violence and when military-themed culture declined. I also examine the ways in which these comics’ memorialisation of war contributed to contemporary debates about national identity and civic duty. From the late 1960s, comic creators and readers increasingly debated key issues about war, civic responsibility, and public protest. During this period, I argue that war comics promoted a populist anti-statist rhetoric that maintained the heroic ideal of the American soldier while at the same time reflecting public distrust of government institutions. In contrast to past studies of American war comics that predominantly portray these media as a form of unofficial government propaganda, I contend that war comics offered a space to contest the traditional American war story and ideas about civic duty. In doing so, war comics opened opportunities for seemingly polarised groups in American society, including Vietnam veterans and draft resisters, to form and share new narratives about war that transcended the conservative-liberal political divide of the post-Vietnam War period.
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ItemRevisiting Anzac in the Wake of World War Two: Memory and Identity in the Post-War Period, 1945-1960( 2021)This thesis explores how war remembrance—in the form of commemorative observance and the building of memorials—developed in Australia in the period that followed World War Two, from 1945 to 1960. It investigates three key questions. First, what was the nature of the interplay between post-World War Two memorialisation and commemoration and the remembrance traditions that had been established during World War One and the interwar period? Second, how was Australia’s post-World War Two remembrance shaped by the particular social, political, and economic circumstances of the period? And finally, what influence did the process and practice of post-World War Two remembrance have on changing conceptions of the Anzac legend and Australian national identity? In addressing these questions, this study contains five distinct case studies, each of which explores a different aspect of war remembrance between 1945 and 1960. These case studies examine the building of memorials, the efforts of veterans to enact remembrance projects, the observance of Anzac Day, the construction of cemeteries overseas, and interactions between Australian war remembrance and foreign diplomacy. In large part these case studies investigate the Australian state’s efforts to enact control over memorialisation and commemoration. However, the thesis also explores various responses to these projects, analysing how resistance from people outside of government, particularly from veterans of both world wars, was an integral part of how war remembrance in the period took shape. Between 1945 and 1960 there was significant change in the ways that Australians remembered war. During World War One and the interwar period, Australians commemorated the war by building around 1,500 memorials, erected in towns and cities across the country. It was also during World War One that Australians began to observe Anzac Day each year on 25 April. But with the advent of a second global conflict, a new range of perspectives, experiences, and memories were incorporated into this pre-existing culture of war remembrance. Forms of commemoration also reflected the shifting circumstances of Australian society. In the post-World War Two period, communities grew rapidly through migration, industrialisation, and economic expansion. It was also a time in which a new generation of veterans returned and reintegrated into society. Finally, Australia was forging a series of new international partnerships during this period. These social, political and economic changes influenced the way that Australians imagined themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of the Anzac legend. Post-World War Two remembrance was therefore distinguished by an enthusiasm for utilitarian memorials, by the inclusion of new veterans into the fold of war remembrance, and diplomatically, by the representation of new international relationships with the United States and other Pacific nations through commemoration and memorialisation.