School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBeyond the pale of the law : refugees and the myth of human rights(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemLand of camps: the ephemeral settlement of Australia( 2010)This thesis enlarges the history of Australian settlement. I submit that when tents are foregrounded in the historical landscape we are obliged to re-imagine the material and social circumstances as well as the cultural evolution that accompanied the highly uncertain process of colonisation. Combining both chronological and thematic approaches, a number of key historical events are analysed and structured into a narrative of camping. I show that the absence of tents from existing histories (except as ‘colour’) is a consequence of historians’ favouring received ideas of civilisation, progress, and permanence. The corollary to this has been a de-emphasis of the dependence of settlers on temporary habitation. A re-balancing of the narrative requires a concept of ‘ephemeral settlement’ to define the recurring periods between arrival and permanent occupation. The camp emerges as a site of contact, possibility, and new beginnings. From the first English camp at Sydney Cove there began throughout the colonies a cycle of periods of dependence on tents and other temporary structures. Living outdoors exposed settlers to their new natural environment and reshaped domestic and social experience. Pastoralists took up a nomadic existence living under tarpaulins or in versions of Aboriginal bark shelters (gunyahs). The widespread use of gunyahs suggests a largely unrecognised cross-cultural sharing of knowledge arising from unavoidable common circumstances. Camping out became an accepted part of colonial travel and quickly became recognised as a quintessential ‘Australian’ experience. On journeys of exploration the camp was the point of orientation and camping itineraries preceded maps as guides to the overlanders who pushed out the frontiers. The gold rushes introduced a long period of unsettlement in which a large proportion of the population was camped out, and it was this social condition that underwrote the political character of the goldfields. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the translation of workers’ camps, especially those of shearers, into union camps laid the basis for the most militant and utopian period of labour history. Yet the bush did not belong to the workers alone and the persistent enthusiasm of middle-class urban dwellers to go camping-the so-called ‘city bushmen’-challenges the widely held view that the ‘Bush’ was an inauthentic projection on the part of city intellectuals. A study of imagery of camping in both literature and art shows how camping became positively embedded in the minds of Australians and came to have symbolic meaning. The family holiday camping that emerged in the 1890s resonated-and resonates still-with associations particular to the history of the ephemeral settlement of Australia.
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ItemThe Age and the young Menzies: a chapter in Victorian liberalism( 2010)The Melbourne Age was Robert Menzies' favourite newspaper. This thesis investigates the early years of Menzies' political career, when his relationship with The Age and its senior personnel was established. It is a comparative study of two liberalisms: that of the principal creator of the Liberal Party of Australia, and of a newspaper famous for its liberal affiliations. The Age had been closely identified with the Liberal politician Alfred Deakin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Geoffrey Syme became its proprietor in 1908, The Age pursued a programmatic agenda based in the dominant liberal ideology of the day, social liberalism, which stood for responsible citizenship and State intervention. The paper was influenced by both Deakinism and its New Liberal equivalent in Britain, whose political representatives were Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. When Menzies emerged on the Victorian political stage in the mid-twenties, The Age still stood for ideals and institutions which had been influential in the first decade of nationhood: New Protection, the conciliation and arbitration system, responsible trade unionism, accountable government, and social meliorism. The early chapters of the thesis explore the paper's political outlook, focusing on its vigorous campaign against the conservative ascendancy in non-Labor politics. That the newspaper remained a coherent exemplar of New Liberal orthodoxy from 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War is one of the study's main findings. To Syme, the young Menzies represented a talented new generation of Liberal reformer. The Age vigorously supported his election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1928, and his subsequent move to the Assembly. Despite the paper's hopes for him, Menzies' liberal-conservative tendencies were soon strongly to the fore. During the Depression, he aggressively opposed the introduction of unemployment insurance. When Menzies joined economists and primary producers in attacking the regime of tariff protection that was central to The Age's Deakinite identity, the relationship between the newspaper and the politician reached a low watermark. These episodes are explored in detail. The second half of the thesis focuses on Menzies's ideological make-up. It identifies him as a post-Deakinite whose personal politics were a contradictory mixture of older and newer streams of liberalism, and whose personal style was a mixture of pragmatism tinged with a consciousness of the legacy of Deakinite idealism. The phrase 'blended liberalism' usefully describes Menzies' political makeup by the late thirties. Three major influences on his political ideology are identified: the Victorian Liberal tradition; the Law, which was his first and, he said, best loved calling; and his family's Presbyterian faith. The thesis also explores Menzies' friendship with the British Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, a devout Anglican whose constructive social vision influenced Menzies. The final chapter of the thesis is a case study of the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act (1938), a regime of compulsory contributory social insurance which was based on the British model and included elements of Lloyd George's original bill and of Baldwin's extended scheme. Both Menzies and The Age supported the Australian measure. The thesis discusses how their shared campaign for national insurance brought them back into close relationship, yet how their ideological rationales for national insurance were significantly different.
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ItemUnstable compromise: the Russian penal system between imperial law and colonial expediency, 1845-1913( 2010)This thesis re-examines the existing Eurocentric and state-oriented narratives of Russian penal history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that Russian penal development did not proceed from the centre outwards but was shaped by two colliding currents, one arising from the imperial core and the other from the colonial periphery. The vast heterogeneity of the empire worked against the efforts of the imperial government to standardise Russian penal institutions and practices. As a result, the Russian penal system emerged as an unstable compromise between imperial law and colonial expediency. Katorga, or penal punishment by forced labour, was at the heart of this compromise. On the one hand, katorga's expedient qualities made it indispensable for the imperial government. Transporting convicts to the colonial periphery where local authorities employed them as they saw fit was a cheaper and easier option than implementing comprehensive penal reform. On the other hand, when the imperial core started to expand to include Siberia, katorga's irregularities became a liability. Yet the government failed to bring katorga back into the realm of law by 1905 when a severe penal crisis caused by the first Russian Revolution made expediency, not law, the guiding principle of the penal system throughout the empire. Extreme overcrowding, infectious disease and prison violence destroyed the boundaries between imperial penal institutions, making the penal system homogenous but unlawful. The First World War exacerbated this trend even further, making emergency institutions such as forced labour a standard feature of the wartime penal landscape. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they eventually placed forced labour at the core of the Soviet penal system, pushing the idea of expediency to the limit.
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ItemHeterodoxy and contemporary Chinese protestantism: the case of Eastern Lightning( 2010)This dissertation examines new religious movements that are loosely related to Protestantism and have emerged in China in the past thirty years. In particular, it introduces the largest and most notorious of these movements. Eastern Lightning (dongfang shandian) emerged from Henan province in the early 1990s, and teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth in the form of a Chinese woman to judge humankind and end the present age. It has predominantly attracted women in poor rural areas of northern China, who have been overlooked amidst the nation's rapid social and economic transformation. This dissertation shows that Eastern Lightning combines elements of both tradition and innovation with respect to doctrine, recruitment techniques and symbols, indicating that Protestantism has become a cultural resource from which Chinese religious movements now draw. The dissertation also investigates the responses of Chinese government organs to Protestant-related new religious movements. The government has banned them and targeted them in its campaign against Falun Gong and "evil cults" (xiejiao). In so doing, it has redeployed familiar ways of labeling heterodoxy, tailoring them to fit the Protestant context. However, its efforts to suppress Eastern Lightning have met with only limited success. They have also led Eastern Lightning to intensify its own rhetoric against the Chinese Communist Party, and to employ radical recruitment practices. Chinese Protestants, too, have engaged in vociferous condemnation of new religious movements and attempted to educate their own members against them. This dissertation explores the ways in which different religious factions defend their own doctrinal correctness and attack that of others. Orthodoxy is central to the identities and discourses of all of these groups. Yet while Protestants are united in their condemnation of new religious movements, nuances in their responses reflect their own varying relationships with the state. Hence, this study uncovers the dynamic, complex and fraught interactions between an array of political and religious actors.
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ItemTough as buggery: traditional Australian circus, community and belonging( 2010)This thesis is a cultural study of traditional family-operated Australian circuses. Traditional circuses have been active in Australia since the 1830s, and are possibly our last actively nomadic settler community. Drawing on archival research, extensive oral history interviews and ethnographic participant observation, this thesis examines the meaning of belonging and community for this group of people. It argues that belonging is an active process, not predicated on geographic place, and the key signifier for circus people is the daily ‘performance’ of their history, culture and identity. This discussion of community and belonging is framed within notions of ‘performativity’, in recognition of both the profession of circus performance, and the performative nature of circus life. Circus people are consummate performers, and the line between their professional and private lives, public and private ‘performances’, characters and identities are often deeply blurred. This thesis argues that the repeated remembrance and performance of circus history is the root of belonging, giving circus people a deep understanding of their cultural ‘place’ in the broader narrative of Australia. It examines how circus performs itself for the public gaze through the vehicle of the circus show, and how this forges a sense of belonging through shared understanding, action, and physical commitment. It interrogates how the ‘performance’ of private circus culture creates a sense of 'home' regardless of place; how the public's construction or a mythic circus, disconnected from the daily reality of circus life, denigrates the traditional circus whilst simultaneously carving a ‘place’ for it in the social imagination; and how circus people perform their own personal circus mythology, embodying core cultural beliefs. Finally this thesis examines the construction and performance of public and private circus identities, arguing they are integrally linked to circus history and culture, deeply connected to community, and central to the circus sense of belonging. This thesis features the voices, memories, insights and images of the research participants. Circus is a non-literate culture, and too often circus voices are mediated for public consumption. Although this thesis must also mediate, it endeavours to reflect the interviewees' sometimes contradictory, often humorous expression of their life experiences, to give the reader insight into circus people's perceptions of their culture, alongside theoretical reflection and analysis. Traditional circus life is, and always has been, ‘tough as buggery’, and circus people have developed a unique humour, irony, and 'toughness' to deal with the demands of this life. This thesis travels beneath the highly polished and hardened exterior of traditional circus life, to understand the unique nature of circus culture, community and belonging.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.
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ItemImmram Brain: a labyrinthine journey through early Irish performative testimony, ideology and ritual( 2010)This thesis argues that the rhetorical function and certain performative, ritual actionals that exist in Immram Brain point to it as a uniquely Irish, antique form of pre-baptismal instruction. It also argues that the tale’s central character, in Ben (‘the Woman’), is a polysemic Christian entity of profound import. By combining historical methodology with recent advances in narratological studies and the cognitive sciences, I begin by developing a systematic and historical method for reading an anonymous text, its characters, imagery, and in particular, its performance actionals. Most importantly, it is a method of identifying an author and audience as a specific and single unit of narrative participants — rather than particular individuals — which opens the text to a new and far more accurate, nuanced and textured analysis. This in turn leads to a deeper and more profound understanding of the ideologies inscribed in these texts, and the implications of the social, religious, and political phenomena they betray, than was previously available. By identifying the specific group of narrative participants of Immram Brain, I am able to reveal how the eighth-century author of the tale and its later, tenth-century Christian compiler used ancient rhetorical praxis and a vocabulary, syntax and symbolism taken from secular Irish sources to argue for and communicate profound Christian ideas and concepts of neophytic and salvific import. I also demonstrate that the ideological assumptions that are inscribed in the tale as baptismal. From this, a connection is then drawn between the apparently dissentient stratification of conceptual metaphors and particular performance actionals characteristic of the text — which are analysed in detail — and medieval practices in the execution of baptism and the celebration of the Paschal rite. In addition, the role and identity of the Woman suddenly appears in sharp relief and Her feminine authority is identified as that of the Church and the Virgin Mary. Later in the thesis, it is argued that the fundamental model for the tale is the Song of Songs as it is interpreted by Gregory the Great, Apponius and Chrysostom. That is, from the point of view of its baptismal implications. As such, the Woman of IB is also identified with the Bride of the Song and by extending the metaphor, the initiate souls of Bran’s male troop represent Her female companions. By the end of the thesis, Immram Brain rises out of the mist of its medieval past as a watershed text in the intellectual history of Ireland and in the broader context of Marian studies.
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ItemIn their own words: locating generations of women in an Australian family, 1846 to 1990( 2010)This thesis examines selected texts across several generations in one middle-class Australian family to retrieve histories of so-called ordinary women whose lives are often invisible in mainstream history. The women’s life experiences that spanned geographically the Queensland outback to the city of Melbourne, were interspersed with interludes in Paris and England in the late 1880s, and Egypt and Salonica in the First World War. Relying on fragmentary sources including personal letters, photographs, daily work diaries, household accounts, postcards and other ephemera, and earlier family historians’ compilations, the thesis captures the complex web of relationships sustained through personal tragedies, deep affections and intermittent hostilities. The significance of women’s central place within the family emerges clearly while revealing the workings of class, gender and race. Despite the particular nature of these generational stories, nevertheless five case studies indicate how certain middle-class women experienced wider social changes on a remote cattle station in the Queensland bush, in hospital nursing in towns and cities, as expatriate colonials performing Australian identities at times of national emergence and within family life in a prestigious Melbourne suburb. The narratives of these individual women demonstrate intriguing aspects of the changing lives of Australian women played out the level of intimate everyday life.
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ItemFoundational issues in the theory of meaning: Brandom's inferentialism( 2010)This work investigates Brandom's inferentialist programme from the standpoint of foundational questions concerning the nature and limits of semantic theory. Brandom's account of subsentential expressions is first examined, for the purpose of determining whether it can provide a systematically recursive treatment of the semantic structure of sentences, as an alternative to the Fregean tradition. The syntactic and inferential aspects of his account are explored, and detailed attention is given to the adequacy of his distinction between primary and secondary substitution-semantic occurrences of subsentential expressions. Having concluded that Brandom's account of subsentential expressions is resistant to objections raised against it, a broader inquiry is then undertaken, guided by questions arising from Dummett's distinction between modest and full-blooded theories of meaning. McDowell's interpretation of this distinction is endorsed. It is argued, furthermore, that McDowell is justified in regarding Dummett's verificationist project as an unsuccessful attempt to establish a full-blooded theory. Three alternative responses are then identified to McDowell's Wittgensteinian argument for modesty, one of which, it is maintained, is that pursued by Brandom. This approach treats normative concepts and vocabulary as foundational, while seeking to explain semantic content in terms of underlying non-semantic norms that have the potential to satisfy Dummett's requirement of full-bloodedness as construed by McDowell. Brandom's solution to the Wittgensteinian problem is then considered, and the capacity of his project to furnish a full-blooded theory of the kind envisaged by the aforementioned response to the Wittgensteinian paradox is investigated. A fundamental issue raised in the preceding analyses, namely whether Brandom's epistemology can provide an adequate account of how conceptual content and discursive practice are constrained by the empirical world, is then treated in relation to objections raised by McDowell against the viability of the inferentialist project. This discussion leads to further questions regarding the realist commitments underlying Brandom's position.