School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemRemembering the counterculture: Melbourne’s inner-urban alternative communities of the 1960s and 1970s( 2019)In the 1960s and 1970s, a counterculture emerged in Melbourne’s inner-urban suburbs, part of progressive cultural and political shifts that were occurring in Western democracies worldwide. This counterculture sought to enact political and social change through experimenting with the fabric of everyday life in the inner-urban space. They did this in the ways in which they ate, socialised, lived, related to money, work, the community around them, and lived – often in shared or communal housing. The ways in which they lived, loved, related to the community around them, and found social and personal fulfilment was tied up with a countercultural politics. My thesis argues that these inner-urban counterculturalists embodied a progressive politics which articulated and enacted a profoundly personal criticism of post-war conservatism.
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ItemThe Influence of the friendly society movement in Victoria, 1835-1920( 2019)ABSTRACT Entrepreneurial individuals who migrated seeking adventure, wealth and opportunity initially stimulated friendly societies in Victoria. As seen through the development of friendly societies in Victoria, this thesis examines the migration of an English nineteenth-century culture of self-help. Friendly societies may be described as mutually operated, community-based, benefit societies that encouraged financial prudence and social conviviality within the umbrella of recognised institutions that lent social respectability to their members. The benefits initially obtained were sickness benefit payments, funeral benefits and ultimately medical benefits – all at a time when no State social security systems existed. Contemporaneously, they were social institutions wherein members attended regular meetings for social interaction and the friendship of like-minded individuals. Members were highly visible in community activities from the smallest bush community picnics to attendances at Royal visits. Membership provided a social cache and well as financial peace of mind, both important features of nineteenth-century Victorian society. This is the first scholarly work on the friendly society movement in Victoria, a significant location for the establishment of such societies in Australia. The thesis reveals for the first time that members came from all strata of occupations, from labourers to High Court Judges – a finding that challenges conventional wisdom about the class composition of friendly societies. Finally, the extent of their presence in all aspects of society, from philanthropic to military, and rural to urban, is revealed through their activities and influence in their communities. Their physical legacy has diminished as buildings were demolished or re-purposed, but it remains visible in some prominent structures in major Victorian cities. A final legacy is the Victorian community’s on-going financial use of private health insurance cover. This financial prudence has its roots in the friendly society movement. Theirs is largely an invisible history but one deserving of being told.
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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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ItemAt the intersection of heritage preservation, urban transformation, and everyday life in the twentieth-century Australian city( 2018)This thesis offers a fresh global urban history of the Australian city, its heritage places, and the preservationists who shaped those places. During the twentieth century, Australian urban preservationists – such as architects and planners, boosters and policymakers, heritage consultants and regulators, and activists and everyday people – valued and sought to safeguard many kinds of urban places, comprising buildings, streets, precincts and suburbs and invoking communities, histories, memories and stories. From at least the 1900s, alongside shifts in Europe, North America and elsewhere, the leading impulses for preserving urban heritage – erasure, boosterist, historical, visual and reformist – forming identity and community – resonated in Australia’s modernising cities. During the postwar period (1940s–60s), particularly in the rapidly growing capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, the pursuit of modern urbanism meant city-shapers tended to erase existing environments. Urban Australians still embraced their heritage places, and preservationists furthered the urban heritage processes that drove the 1960s–80s transnational ‘heroic period of conservation’ and the Australian heritage movement. A watershed was the Whitlam Government’s Inquiry into the National Estate (1973–74), which produced an Australian conception for heritage as progressive, democratic, interventionist and integrated. Heritage regimes and their principles and practices were refigured, but contrary to the activists’ demands, preservation never triumphed over other urban priorities. In the 1980s–90s, nevertheless, preservation was strikingly integrated into CBDs and suburbs and their social processes and built forms. Employing rich social history sources and drawing on the insights of urban and heritage studies, this thesis argues that across the twentieth-century Australian city, urban and heritage processes were co-constitutive, relational and entangled. In this study, heritage preservation becomes an integral urban historical process with the potential to enhance cities, places and urban life.
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ItemI was a good-time Charlie: social dance and Chinese community life in Sydney and Melbourne, 1850s-1970s( 2016)A vibrant calendar of balls and dances has long been at the heart of Chinese-Australian community life. It was at these dances that community members most powerfully experimented with and articulated what it meant to be a Chinese Australian across dimensions of race, gender and class. This thesis traces the history of Chinese community life through various social events in Sydney and Melbourne over a period spanning roughly 120 years, using dance as a prism through which to offer new insights into the interplay of the material and the emotional in the lives of young Chinese Australians. It will do so first by examining the historical contexts which shaped the early motivations of Chinese Australians who participated in dance, determined the avenues through which they socialised collectively, influenced outsiders’ perceptions of Chinese community life, and lent social and political meanings to Chinese community activities. Subsequently, this thesis turns its focus to selected dances and Chinese community events which took place in Sydney and Melbourne, restoring to the centre of study events which have often been dismissed as peripheral to main theatres of historical action. In doing so, it illuminates the social, political and emotional ends which these events served and which in turn fuelled the strength of Chinese community social life in the period under study. It also provides insight into the experiences of Chinese-Australian youth, particularly Australian-born Chinese adolescent women, who were often vital participants, organisers and ambassadors within their communities. By demonstrating the varying and complex investments Chinese Australians made in their communities through their participation in these dances, this thesis challenges earlier scholarly assumptions that Chinese community life ebbed in vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. Towards these aims, this thesis draws upon a wide range of archived documentary and oral history sources, as well as numerous private documents, photographs, memoirs and correspondence to recover otherwise inaccessible aspects of Chinese-Australian social history.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 2015)Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.
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ItemChorus boys and tight-waisted young men: an exploration of Melbourne's camp subculture during the interwar period: 1919-1939( 2015)This thesis explores the male homosexual subculture of Melbourne between the two world wars. Both the societal structures and institutions which sought to curb or prosecute homosexual men (the law, the church, the medical profession and social attitudes), and the lived experience of the subculture, including meeting places, subcultural identifiers, and social groups will be examined. The manner in which the subculture developed and changed over the twenty year period will be explored.
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ItemA culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia( 2003)This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.
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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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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.