School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonising Yolngu defence : Arnhem Land in the Second World War and transnational uses of indigenous people in the Second World War(University of Melbourne, 2008)The thesis examines the involvement in World War II of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, in the context of colonialism in the Northern Territory, and with comparative attention to the war experiences of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. and the Native American Navajo. Yolngu participated in the war through various avenues, including the provision of labour for white Australian war initiatives. Most notably Yolngu served as auxiliaries to non-indigenous military units such as the North Australia Observer Unit, and they also participated in the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was exclusively Aboriginal apart from its leadership. Rather than representing widespread white Australian appreciation of Yolngu skills or recognition of Yolngu equality, the military employment of Yolngu continued structures of ideas and practices inherent in settler colonialism in the north. The military authorities, with government endorsement, organised Yolngu to utilise their skills in defence of the colonial project that was of itself simultaneously robbing Yolngu of their land and rights. Yolngu had their own motivations to work alongside white military, and for the most part participated willingly. Analysis of oral testimony points to their courageous efforts and, unlike the non-indigenous documents, positions Yolngu as central actors in Arnhem Land during the war. Comparative analysis of other colonised indigenous peoples' involvement in World War ll�Pacific Islanders in similar units in Papua and New Guinea, and Navajo Codetalkers in the United States�highlights the existence of common colonial practices that existed transnationally, alongside indigenous peoples' own sense of agency. This study re-centres indigenous people in war narratives while demonstrating at the same time how governments' reliance on indigenous skills and labour in times of crisis did not represent a fundamental change in relations, although for white authorities there were, eventually, unanticipated outcomes from the war for indigenous peoples.
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ItemThrough Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia( 2019)Natural disasters are a significant feature of the Australian environment. In a country with a rich history of immigration, it is therefore surprising that historians have not yet examined the specific challenges faced by immigrants within this hazardous environment. This thesis examines migrants’ memories and experiences of bushfires and floods in Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and regional case studies, this thesis explores the entanglement of migration and natural disaster in Australia and in the lives of migrants. Oral history interviews with migrants who have experienced bushfires in Victoria or floods in Maitland, New South Wales, are at the heart of this study. This thesis contributes to scholarship in three distinct fields—migration and environmental history, and disaster studies—and brings them together through an examination of migrants’ memories of bushfires and floods in Australia. Although traumatic experiences, displacement, and a changed and challenged sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment are common themes of both migrants and survivors of fire and flood, rarely have the similarities between these experiences been noted. This thesis is not a history of natural disasters in Australia, nor a retelling of a history of immigration to Australia, but an exploration of experiences of ‘double displacement’. This thesis argues that migrants’ recollections reveal how their burgeoning sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment was challenged by natural disasters. It highlights how their experience of ‘double displacement’ contributed to a new sense of home and belonging in a natural disaster-prone country.
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ItemPrime Ministers: gender and power in Australian political history, 1902-1975( 2019)This thesis offers an historical examination of the relationship between gender, political authority and prime ministers in Australia from Federation to 1975. By analysing contestations of political legitimacy through embodied styles of manhood and the languages of gender, I aim to expand our understanding of national leadership and the changing or enduring connotations of political masculinities and femininities. Situating male leaders within historical debates about gender relations, class, race, citizenship and women’s political mobilisations allows us to recognise male political experience as historically constituted. Applying feminist analysis, gender theory and masculinities studies, this thesis explores how gender has marked the boundaries of the political in both political culture and history writing. Four central research questions run throughout the thesis: How have Australian prime ministers’ experiences and identifications as men shaped their sense of self, leadership, and relationships with others? What does paying attention to gender change about our understanding of national political processes, gender politics and the exercise of leadership? What political roles have prime ministers’ wives played and how have women’s attempts to enter parliament challenged or reinscribed gender relations in political institutions? How has the permeability of the public/private divide been used by men in Australian politics? To answer these questions, I employ gender as an historical category of analysis to examine the social and institutional mechanisms, discourses, and historical operations of power that have underpinned male domination of Australian federal politics. The study begins in 1902 when Australia became one of the first countries in the world to grant white women the right to vote and stand for federal elections, a potentially transformative moment for Australian gender relations. It finishes in 1975 after another moment of challenge with the end of the modernising Labor government. Broadly chronological and biographical in structure, the thesis is comprised of case studies of six key prime ministers who held office over this period: Alfred Deakin, William Hughes, Joseph Lyons, John Curtin, Robert Menzies, and Gough Whitlam. Through the use of primary sources and existing political historiography, the case studies reveal how manhood has been used as a cipher in shaping and remembering Australia’s political past. This thesis argues that politicians have performed their gender identities as part of contesting political legitimacy, making manhood a key tool for men’s negotiation of political relationships. Furthermore, the prime ministership both rested on and entrenched the sexual division of labour in Australian politics. From the mid-nineteenth century, white men drew on an increasing range of styles and discourses of political manhood to claim political authority. Such flexibility, within established bounds, upheld a naturalised link between men and power. Tracing the contested move from Victorian ideals of manliness to modern styles of political masculinities in Australian history reveals the uneven shift in gendered meanings and languages of political manhood and political femininity.
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ItemCreating space to listen: museums, participation and intercultural dialogue( 2018)This thesis examines the emergence, practice, and social meaning of intercultural dialogue as participatory programming in museums. While intercultural dialogue takes many forms in museums, the thesis focuses on projects that invite participants to create digital content in response to one another on topics related to identity, cultural diversity, and racism. The thesis presents a central case study of a contemporary anti-racist museum project – ‘Talking Difference’ – produced by the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, which facilitated, documented, and presented dialogue between participants. It draws on the personal experience of the author as a previous staff member on Talking Difference, as well as written and visual documentation, interviews with project staff, and analysis of content produced. Engaging with the field of museum studies, the thesis argues that dialogue projects like Talking Difference have come to prominence as museums adapt their traditional governmental role to contemporary societies where engagement with institutions is characterised by reflexivity and participation. Given this, the thesis argues that participatory programs should challenge the idea that museums can provide neutral forums for dialogue. Instead, dialogic museum practice may be more transformative if museums embrace their role of promoting social justice as third parties in the dialogue they facilitate. This entails not only encouraging participants to produce affecting personal accounts but also facilitating engagement with the complex social and historical contexts within which these accounts emerge. To this end, museums should prioritise listening, and facilitate the negotiation of conflicting perspectives in addition to providing platforms for their co-presentation. In acknowledgement of the field of practices within which such work takes place, the thesis argues that these interventions should be part of a broader suite of efforts to decolonise museum practice.
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ItemNostalgia and the warzone home: American and Australian veterans return to Việt Nam, 1981-2016( 2018)From 1981 to 2016, thousands of Australian and American veterans returned to Việt Nam. In this comparative oral history investigation, I examine why veterans returned and how they reacted to the people and places of Việt Nam—their former enemies, allies, and battlefields—as the war receded further into history and memory. Tracing veterans’ returns through economic, cultural, and political shifts in Việt Nam, Australia, and the US, I identify three distinct periods of return: contact, normalization, and commemoration. These periods reflect the changing meanings of “Vietnam” in Australia and the US and describe the relationship of veterans to the contemporary, peacetime space of Việt Nam. Very different narratives about the war informed Australian and American returns: Australians followed an Anzac tradition of battlefield pilgrimage, whereas for Americans the return constituted a radical, anti-war act. Despite these differences in timing and nationality of return, commonalities emerged among them: veterans returned out of nostalgia for a warzone home, responding to the “needs of the present” by turning back toward “Vietnam.” When veterans arrived in Việt Nam, they found that their warzone home was unrecognizable, replaced with unfamiliar places, politics, and people. Returnees faced conflicting challenges and rewards. Many reported that seeing Việt Nam at peace diluted their memories of war, and brought them a measure of relief. Yet this peacetime reality also disrupted their wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. Returnees navigated this challenge by drawing from the same wartime narratives that had informed their returns. Consequently, anti-war and Anzac memories shaped how returnees interpreted and interacted with peacetime Việt Nam as returnees recaptured their sense of belonging to the warzone home by relying on familiar stories about a suddenly unfamiliar place. Thus while the return experiences challenged returnees’ wartime memories, the return did not change their views so much as reinforce existing perspectives. Furthermore, while returning to Việt Nam helped many veterans to put “Vietnam” behind them, there was not total separation between war and country. As the numbers of returnees rose and expatriate-veteran enclaves emerged, the wartime narratives through which veterans navigated the return took on greater impact, collapsing time through space through nostalgic practices to relocate the warzone home.
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Item'That great country to which we must constantly look': Australia and the United States in the development of Australian Federation( 2018)This thesis is a transnational study of the development of Australian federation from 1890 to 1901. It provides a detailed analysis of the influences of and use of the United States in the debates in the Australian federation conventions, notably the Australasian Federation Conference, 1890, National Australasian Convention, 1891, and the Australasian Federation Convention in three sessions over 1897 and 1898. The use of the United States as a constitutional model for the framers of the Australian Constitution is widely acknowledged in histories of federation and in Australian-American studies. However, the manner in which the American example was used (particularly in debates on topics outside the questions of how to structure a federal parliament) and the attitudes expressed towards the United States at the federation conventions has not previously been explored in depth. The thesis looks broadly at the influences on and responses to the United States in this decade, including Australian responses to the Spanish-American War, and specifically at how the example of the United States was used during the convention debates. I argue that there was a strong level of interest in and awareness of the United States when developing the Australian Constitution, with federalists looking beyond the United States Constitution to consider American experience and history. In addition, this thesis explores the response to Australian federation in the United States. Using newspaper records from across the United States, it demonstrates the extent of American interest in the development of Australian federation, which was greater than previously realised, and the manner in which this was discussed. This thesis thus contributes to and links the body of work on the cultural and intellectual connections and influences between Australia and the United States, and the body of work on the history of federation in Australia.
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ItemSport and the Australian war effort during the First World War: concord and conflict( 2018)This thesis investigates sport and its relationship with the Australian war effort between 1914 and 1918. As a significant cultural element within Australian society since the settlement of European colonists, many envisioned sport as holding a higher purpose outside mere leisure or entertainment. With concerns surrounding national security emerging from 1900 onward, ideas surrounding the playing of sport as a preparation for warfare became common. The outbreak of war in 1914 oversaw the variable explosion of this connection between playing and battlefields. Through propaganda, recruitment, fund-rising, sporting competitions, education and gender relations, patriots sought to hone sports influence in order to aid in the defence of Empire. Australia therefore celebrated sport, for it encouraged its citizens to ‘Play the Greater Game!’ Yet sport possessed the ability to divide with as great a strength as it did to unite, becoming embroiled in the social turmoil that engulfed the nation after 1915. Bitter public debates surrounding the appropriateness of games and the eventual government intervention against sport in 1917 speak to this conflict. Even more than this, violent altercations between recruiters and war-weary crowds and the suspension of increasingly violent school games indicate the dangerous levels with which sport was fuelling social discord. With this division in mind, the nation also began to reconsider for the first time the place and role of sport in its society. When viewing these paralleling developments, we can decipher that sport had an altogether paradoxical and complicated relationship with Australia’s war. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to remind audiences that, in spite of what several contemporary governments and sporting codes tell us, the celebrated place of sport in our memory of the war is one to be questioned. By doing so, we can hopefully re-evaluate the manner in which we remember the Great War itself, not exclusively as a nation-making exercise, but perhaps as something far more complex.
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ItemVisual communications of Australian identity( 2016)This project explores the role visual communication plays in defining the concept of the Australian nation. The project explores a number of key themes and events around which the topic of Australian national identity adheres. Visual artefacts associated with these themes and events have been investigated for their role in shaping understandings of Australian nationhood and for evidence of values and attitudes expressed in other media. This project relates to the fields of design history, branding and Australian studies. Although the research centers on Australia the issues examined will be applicable to the consideration of branding and communication that includes elements of national identity in any national setting.
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ItemMediating risks : investigating the emergence of court ADR through the risk society paradigm( 2007)In the US, England and Australia alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been increasingly employed as integral component in the handling and disposal of garden-variety civil cases. This thesis examines the quality and character of changes brought about through the uptake and continued use of ADR in the courts, a configuration that I refer to as Court ADR, in non-family law cases. Ulrich Beck's risk society paradigm provides the theoretical lens through which those changes in the courts are to be understood. In short, Beck claims that institutions and individuals' relationships to those institutions are transforming in contemporary societies, a transformation that is organised by and around risk. According to Beck, these transformations, while partial and incomplete, describe how the fundamental structures that generate and maintain society redound and confront their very foundations, a process that Beck refers to as reflexive modernisation. Moreover, individuals' relationships with institutions are caught up with such transformations. Beck describes this through his concepts of individualisation, whereby individuals are increasingly invited to make decisions regarding particular risks, which are simultaneously enabled and constrained by expert systems. I argue that these two central risk society conceptualisations - reflexive modernisation and individualisation - provide an informed theoretical framework for understanding those transformations in certain US, English and Australian courts as they relate to Court ADR. With the institutional emergence of Court ADR, and the growth of court-sponsored mediation in particular, the rationale underlying its development and continued use can be understood through the risk society paradigm. In terms of reflexive modernisation, the process of producing legal goods as they take shape in a judgement has and continues to produce negative side-effects, including expense, delay, undue complexity and limited accessibility to the courts themselves. One result is the emergence of Court ADR, which provides new procedures to structurally address many of those negative side-effects generated when legal goods are produced through processed that are oriented around adversarial adjudication. The emergence of Court ADR evidences the qualities and characteristics of individualisation insofar as litigants are invited into new decision-making spaces, inclusive of court-sponsored choices over whether arbitration or mediation might be more appropriate to handle and dispose of the case, as well as the attendant decisions once mediation, arbitration or other alternative processes are selected. Moreover, while litigants' entry into these spaces is enabled by legal actors and systems, they are simultaneously constrained. In short, Beck's risk society paradigm provides clarity with respect to how those alternative practices themselves have been legalised when used to handle and dispose of garden variety civil cases in the US, English and Australian courts.
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ItemTerra nullius : Lacanian ethics and Australian fictions of origin( 2005)The fiction of terra nullius, that Australia was 'no-one's land' at the time of British colonisation, was confirmed in law in 1971. At precisely this moment it had begun to fail as the ballast of white Australian identity and the fulcrum of race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Where white Australia had historically produced a gap, an empty centre from which the white Australian subject could emerge, fully formed, there was now a presence. The emergence of the Aboriginal subject into this empty space inaugurated the anxiety of white Australia that has characterised the period from the 1970s to the present. During these decades of anxiety, the story of this nation's origin-the story of 'settlement'-has retained its pivotal part in the inscription and reinscription of national meanings. Each of the three novels analysed in the thesis is a fictional account of the story of 'settlement published during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of all the contemporary Australian fiction written about 'settlement' and the race relations conducted in its midst, these texts have been chosen because each is emblematic of a particular national fantasy, and, as is argued in this thesis, a particular orientation, to the tale it tells. The structure of each fantasy-of the frontier, of captivity, of the explorer and of the Great Australian Emptiness- offers particular opportunities for the refantasisation of that national story. The thesis asks how each novel is oriented towards the national aim of not failing to reproduce a satisfactory repetition of the story of national origin and the inevitable failure of that project. All of these questions are framed by an overarching one: what is an ethics of interpretation? The thesis offers a Lacanian response. Interpretation, for Lacan, is apophantic; it points to something, or lets it be seen. It points beyond meaning to structure; it alms to show an orientation not to a 'topic' but to a place. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers an ethics of interpretation that includes and accounts for that which exceeds or escapes meaning, and it does this without rendering that excess irrelevant. That something remains constitutive yet enigmatic, making interpretation, in turn, not merely the recovery and rendering of meaning but also a process which seeks to understand the function of this enigmatic structural term. Through its theory of repetition and the pleasures that repetition holds, Lacanian theory offers an approach to analysing the pleasures for the non-Indigenous Australian reader in hearing again the fictions of the nation's founding. It now seems possible for a white Australian encountering any such retelling to ask how our pleasure is taken, and to see the intransigence of our national story, its incapacity to respond to its many challengers, as a particular mode of enjoyment that is too pleasurable to renounce. A Lacanian ethics of interpretation opens up the question: what are the possibilities of re-orientating ourselves in our relation to our founding story such that we did not simply repeat what gives us pleasure?