School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item"Most humble homes": slum landlords, tenants, and the Melbourne City Council's health administration, 1888-1918( 1987-07)The thesis examines the relationship between public health and questions of housing and poverty, in Melbourne, 1888- 1918. It is concerned with the way that with certain groups of people - local council workers, tenants of houses referred to as ‘slums’, and the owners of those houses - represented their experiences. And it seeks to place those representations in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century concern about the ‘housing problems’. It compares the public rhetoric of the housing reformers and politicians with letters written to the Melbourne City Council by landlords and tenants, and in doing so seeks to show that there were a whole range of housing ‘problems’ not addressed by the public discourse. The first half of the work seeks to place the housing issue into a late nineteenth-century context, and concentrates on public and official discourse. First it considers the City itself, and examines dominant myths about wealth and poverty in 'boom' Melbourne. It argues that these myths shaped contemporary discussion of and responses to housing questions. It then suggests that housing was to a great extent a public health issue for contemporaries, and therefore proceeds to examine the nature of public health administration in the city, both at a central and at a local level. The emergence of housing as a discrete issue in public health discourse is also considered. The thesis then seeks briefly to examine the concept of the 'slum' and to relate it to Melbourne's inner city rental housing market. It then considers in more detail two inner city wards renown for their 'slum' housing. Finally it considers the housing debates which gathered momentum in Melbourne between 1910-1913 and which culminated in the appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the housing of the people of the metropolis. It also considers the results of that inquiry. The second half of the work, using an ethnographic and cultural approach looks at slum tenants, landlords and council-workers in an attempt to explore how they perceived their worlds. The correspondence files of the Melbourne City Council are extensively used to consider how these people represented housing issues. Tenants' descriptions of their houses, their concepts of health and disease, their relationships with their landlords and the Council workers, their descriptions of the housing market, and their sense of community and neighbourhood networks are all considered. In turn the thesis considers landlords' representations of their financial positions, and their relationships with Council officials and tenants. Finally, the daily work of the Melbourne City Council's health workers is re-examined in the context of the evidence given before the Royal Housing Commission by the Chairman of the Council's Health Committee, Alderman William Burton.
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ItemA reasonable share in the beauty of the Earth: William Morris's culture of nature( 1998)This thesis explores what William Morris meant when he called for a 'reasonable share in the beauty of the earth' for all. Taking its cue from discussion of Morris's work in the 1980s and 1990s, it concentrates on the ways in which this statement represents a particular aggregation and formulation of ideas about nature. It challenges contemporary analyses that value Morris's work only in light of subsequent events—that uncritically celebrate the 'eco-centric' or 'green' Morris-and argues that it is necessary to explore nineteenth-century contexts for Morris's work. Thus it fills a gap in the understanding of Morris's concept of nature by exploring its historical circumstance: its roots and development, assimilations and transformations. It argues that Morris considered the only way to a full and lasting appreciation of nature, and a 'reasonable share in the beauty of the earth' for all, was through a very anthropocentric concern for humanity.
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ItemIf ever time was: the social and scientific perception of time in England and France in the 1830's( 1984)This work examines the relationship between perceptions of time in social and scientific texts in England and France in the 1830's. I stipulate that 'social' texts include productions in political economy, history, education, and popular culture; ‘scientific’ texts include work in geology, astronomy, physics and natural theology. My conclusion is that a single perception of time spanned 'establishment' social and scientific texts in both England and France at this period, where 'establishment' is defined as adherence to the current social order. This single perception was opposed by an inverse perception located in 'radical' texts, where 'radical' is defined as expressed desire for subversion of current social order. The perception of time I ascribe to establishment texts is an oppositional structuring of 'single universal time'. Single universal time can be taken as the perception that 'time' is a series of points along a line, that the same 'line' can be used to order historical, natural, and psychological events (it is single), and that different observers will agree on the ordering of events (it is universal). In Part 1, I shall try to loosen up the reader's intuitive idea of time, which is probably not so different from this one. Having done this I introduce the two main themes of my history: the oppositional structuring of this time, and the quest for/denial of origins that modulates this structure. Finally, I introduce the methodological tools that I employ, which tools are largely semiological. In Part 2, I compare the social time of establishment science with the natural time of radical science; and conclude that one can be seen as a mirror image of the other. What I mean by this is that both subscribe to a 'single universal time', but that the first frames it in oppositional terms that permit the perpetuation of class society, where the latter pictures this time as a unified force breaking down barriers. The social time and the natural time referred to are so precisely inversions one of the other that they seem to speak to each other. I argue that this 'unexpected' connection between social and scientific time is a feature of the appropriation by science of the social terrain previously the domain of religion. I shall maintain that there are sufficient structural similarities between the social time of 'establishment' science and the natural time of 'radical' science to see both as speaking to a discourse about the nature of the 'political economy'. In Part 3, I shall look first at the natural time of establishment science, and show how it, too, can be fitted into this analysis. I have separated this section off, because the argument is for internal reasons more complex and therefore a familiarity with the tools I use will be helpful. In the second section I shall try to show how a natural time generated out of 'political economy' and operating ideologically can also frame real exploration. I argue that the same features that invest the natural time of establishment science with its ideological message allow it to serve as an exploration of the real world. The apparent contradiction between 'social' ideology and 'natural' enquiry is, I maintain, dissolved at the level of 'political economy', the latter being defined as the point of intersection between nature and society.
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ItemWithout natural protectors: histories of deserted and destitute colonial women in Victoria 1850-1865( 1995)This thesis combines a social history of deserted wives with a cultural history of wife desertion. It does so within a particular historical moment, the Victorian gold-rush era, when there was much attention given to wife desertion as a pressing social problem. The study covers the years between 1850, the eve of gold discovery in Victoria, and the mid-1860s, by which time the acute social disturbances associated with the gold rushes had subsided, and the state had enacted its first major piece of welfare legislation, the 1864 Neglected and Criminal Children's Act. The central argument of this thesis is that, in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria, there developed a radical disjunction between the material needs of deserted wives and the cultural need to resolve the tensions and erase the contradictions invoked by their presence. This influenced both the forms of assistance available to deserted wives and the ways in which others imagined the amelioration of their condition. The first section of the thesis explores how deserted wives and their children emerged as the principal category of the colonial poor in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Although deserted wives are the main subjects of the thesis, they were not the only colonial women solely responsible for their dependent children. I also consider widows and single women with children, who shared the need to provide support for their families. The second part of the thesis is a detailed examination of the survival strategies undertaken by impoverished deserted wives, widows and single women with children. It draws on the traditions of social and welfare history and explores the opportunities for agency that existed in colonial women's interactions with private charitable societies and institutions. The thesis also challenges some of these historiographical traditions, which are focused on the dominance of private charitable effort, by undertaking a close analysis of the relationships between poor white women and officers of the state. A study of the operation of the Deserted Wives and Children Act and of the broader interactions between magistrates, police and destitute supplicants at the court house highlights the complex and ambiguous association between women and the state. In the third section of the thesis, entitled 'The Politics of Welfare', I move beyond daily survival strategies to examine how these interactions led to the formation of authorities on welfare matters in the colony and created public comment on wife desertion. Although widows and single women with children also faced problems in providing for their families, their fate, unlike that of deserted wives, did not capture the public imagination. Middle-class reformers and charity groups highlighted the prevalence of family desertion in ways that revealed as much about their own social and cultural anxieties as they did about the problems faced by deserted wives. The section examines the place of deserted wives in the rhetoric of two reform movements: the campaign for industrial schools, which culminated in the passing of the Neglected and Criminal Children's Act, and the land reform movement. Deserted wives were powerful cultural symbols of the dislocations of gold discovery, and of urban poverty, that reformers appropriated and used for their own ends.