School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Dress in Australia: The materiality of a colonial society in the making
    Jocic, Laura Elizabeth ( 2023-08)
    The study of surviving items of dress offers a vital material source for historians that is commonly ignored. Dress sits at the intersections between necessity and self-representation, the assertion of social standing and cultural, economic and technological aspects of society. Yet writings on dress in the Australian colonial context have largely overlooked the extant items, focusing instead on images and text. “Dress in Australia: the materiality of a colonial society in the making” takes a material culture approach to the history of colonial era dress from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the late-nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the early years of colonisation and development of colonial society in the years up to the early-1870s. The research methodology, which uses the study of a selection of garments in public and private collections which are known to have been either made or worn in Australia, places surviving items of dress and their materiality to the fore in discussions of European colonisation and Australian settler culture. The close examination of surviving items of dress, coupled with contextual interpretation of objects based on archival research using letters, journals and correspondence, as well as visual material, demonstrates how such an approach enables historical interpretations that would not have been possible from a narrower methodological base. Through the detailed analysis and contextual interpretation of objects, this thesis shows how their materiality prompts new directions and expanded ways of thinking about the significance of dress within a rapidly changing settler society.
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    Same-sex marriage in Australia and the transformation of an institution, c. 1930-2017
    Denton, Maxwell William ( 2023-05)
    This thesis explores the history of same-sex marriage in Australia between 1930 and the introduction of marriage equality in 2017. It examines the performance of religious and non-religious same-sex commitment ceremonies and weddings, and advocacy for relationship recognition. This thesis draws on a diverse range of archival sources to argue that there was a prominent and sustained interest in same-sex marriage in Australia and internationally since the emergence of modern lesbian and gay politics in the 1970s. It can be traced even earlier, with same-sex weddings forming an important part of pre-liberation Australian camp cultures. This interest in same-sex marriage was dispersed and haphazard, forwarded by same-sex couples, lesbian and gay Christians and other figures in public sexual politics. Yet it forms an important part of the history of sexual and social change in the twentieth century. The history of relationship recognition reform and activism in Australia was unique but was also shaped by global trends and flows of people and information. Ritual and ceremony played an important role in the development of new sexual identities and the conceptualisation of same-sex relationships, furthering the social acceptance of homosexuality in Australia. This thesis represents one of the first considerations of same-sex marriage as a historical phenomenon in Australia and historicises recent debates over marriage equality. The complicated and contested history of same-sex marriage prior to legalisation reveals much about how sexual politics has evolved in Australia, and how the institution of marriage itself has transformed over the twentieth century.
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    Nineteenth-Century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation
    Davis, Nicole Jacqueline ( 2022)
    This thesis explores the social and spatial histories of Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades from their beginning in Melbourne in 1853, with an emphasis on their first half century of development. It explores the retail, leisure and business activities they hosted and the lived experiences of the people who worked and played in these spaces. The thesis explores their current place in the Australian urban imagination and how the historic representation of the arcades shapes our present-day understanding and perceptions of these buildings. The thesis examines how the arcade form was idealised in print and visual culture to represent particular notions of civilisation, progress, modernity, and cosmopolitanism in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth-century. Undertaking close analysis of a wide range of sources, it works to challenge and disrupt nostalgic perspectives that developed during this period and that continue to influence our perception in the present day. It argues that the histories of the arcades in Australia (as elsewhere) are far more nuanced than has previously been understood. Rather than rarefied sites of leisure and pleasure for the middle classes, they were sites where Australians from all walks of life played, worked and experienced the diversity of urban life and what urban life had to offer. The thesis aims to break down dichotomies of metropole and periphery that often characterise Australian urban spaces in juxtaposition to the metropoles of Britain, Europe or North America. To do this, it locates the Australian arcades within a transnational context, seeing them as nodes within global networks of exchange: of ideas, people, and things. Further, it explores the arcades not only of the coastal capitals but also considers those constructed in regional areas with a view to broadening our understanding of what it meant to be urban in this period in Australia.
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    Remembering the counterculture: Melbourne’s inner-urban alternative communities of the 1960s and 1970s
    Mckew, Molly Alana ( 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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    Marginalised subjects, meaningless naturalizations: the tiers of Australian citizenship
    Snoek, Kartia ( 2019)
    From 1901 until 1966 federal legislation in Australia discriminated against people considered by legislators and the judiciary to be ‘aboriginal’ to Australia, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands affecting their social, legal, political and cultural rights. The first of these acts deemed that any Commonwealth contract for the carriage of Australian mail could only be made with companies that employed solely white workers; later acts provided for ‘bounties’ to be paid on goods grown and manufactured by that same workforce. Legislation enacted by the Commonwealth deported thousands of Pacific Island labourers, prevented immigrants considered not to be ‘white’ from entering or immigrating to Australia and denied naturalization certificates to those already resident. Aboriginal people from Australia, and residents considered ‘aboriginal’ to Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands were denied the right to vote and access social welfare. This thesis outlines how these pieces of federal legislation were fundamental to the white Australia policy, working to strengthen and extend the policy beyond immigration and border control to a system of racial privilege and control. It argues that this legislation, alongside government policies, resulted in a tiered system of citizenship under which those considered ‘white’ and male could gain access to all social and legal privileges, while Australian Aboriginal people and those born in, or considered ‘aboriginal’ to Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and sometimes also New Zealand could not. This thesis examines how federal legislation specifically (as opposed to state legislation) created these tiers of citizenship, through legislation privileging the white, male worker, legislation deporting Pacific Island labourers, legislation and policies preventing people from Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands from migrating to and settling in Australia and legislation which curbed access to social, political and economic rights for people considered ‘aboriginal’ to Australia, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and sometimes also New Zealand. It also explores the gradual dismantling of Australia’s tiered system of citizenship and how Aboriginal Australians and residents from Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands responded to, and were slowly able to climb the citizenship ladder.
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    Childhood, war and memory: experiences of Bosnian child refugees in Australia
    Green, Sarah Rebecca ( 2019)
    This thesis explores the impact of war and displacement on children who moved to Australia during and after the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It takes as its starting point the knowledge that the Bosnian war - like all wars - has predominantly been studied from the viewpoint of adults and suggests that new understandings about the experiences of war-time refugees are generated by looking at the war and its aftermath through the lens of childhood. I argue that there was a historically-specific understanding of children, childhood and children’s rights within the context of the Bosnian war and in the wake of the near-universal ratification of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ten Bosnian former child refugees participated in oral history interviews for this thesis and their narratives are analysed alongside complementary archival material. In telling the stories of these children, the experiences of their families and contemporaries are also illuminated. In addition to the oral history interviews, this thesis draws on institutional archives, museum objects, and media analysis to provide a comprehensive historical examination of how Bosnian children experienced the war and how they remember it in diaspora. The first half of the thesis looks at how Bosnian children's war experiences were portrayed at the time – including through international media; how their needs were decided and addressed by international aid organisations; and how they are represented in the scholarly literature. The second half of the thesis turns its attentions towards how they are remembered in the present day. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates how writing through the lens of childhood generates new understandings of the Bosnian war.
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    Colonial soundscapes: a cultural history of sound recording in Australia, 1880–1930
    Reese, Henry Peter ( 2019)
    ‘Colonial Soundscapes’ is the first systematic cultural history of the early phonograph and gramophone in Australian settler society. Drawing on recent work in sound studies and the history of sound, the ‘talking machine’ is conceived as part of the soundscape of colonial modernity in colonial and Federal Australia. I argue that national environmental/place attachment and modern listening practices developed together, with anthropological thought, popular culture, commercial life, intellectual elite discourse and everyday life providing the key sites for transformation. This thesis reads the materials of the early sound recording industry in light of recent conceptual emphases on the importance of sound in cultural life. Archival research into the history of sound recording was conducted at the EMI Archives Trust and Thomas Alva Edison Papers, Rutgers University, among others. I also draw heavily on the papers of several foundational anthropological recordists, chiefly Baldwin Spencer, Alfred Cort Haddon and E. Harold Davies. Extensive research into the trade and popular phonographic press also provides a corpus of material through which it is possible to recover the meaning of recorded sound in everyday Australian life in its first generations. I conceive of the early phonograph and gramophone in terms of an ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ of sound in a settler society. These concepts are proposed as a mechanism for accounting for the raft of cultural responses provoked by early sound recording. An ‘economy’ of sound encompasses the economic, archival and scientific modes of apprehending the changed relationship between sound and source. The economic and business structures that underpinned the rise of a national recording industry in Australia fall under this rubric, as do attempts by salvage anthropologists to taxonomically fix and locate the speech and musics of Indigenous peoples, believed to be endangered by the onset of colonial modernity. Drawing on the concept of the soundscape, as modified by significant scholarship in the history of sound in recent years, an ‘ecology’ of sound focuses on the poetic, vernacular and emplaced repsonses to recorded sound that pervaded early Australian cultures of listening.
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    Doctors down under: European medical migrants in Victoria (Australia), 1930-60
    Mody, Fallon ( 2018)
    The middle of the twentieth-century saw an unprecedented mass relocation of medical practitioners – through forced migration, military service, and as economic migrants. Between 1930-60, over three thousand medical migrants – that is, overseas-trained medical graduates – are known to have arrived in Australia. Their arrival was transformative as they challenged longstanding Australian legislative structures, and came to occupy critical gaps in local medical manpower. However, medical migrants in Australia are understudied. My research begins to redress what historians have called the ‘conspicuous silence’ or ‘collective amnesia’ that characterises nation-centric medical histories, where medical migrants are largely invisible. Through a series of case studies, underpinned by a prosopographic database documenting over two hundred ‘European medical migrants’, I examine the resettlement and professional lives of two broad groups registered in the state of Victoria between 1930-60: British and Irish medical migrants (the privileged invisible) and continental European medical migrants (the marginalised ‘aliens’). Each case study can stand alone, and addresses an identified gap in the historiography. However, taken together, these case studies enable a more nuanced reflection of the differences and intersections between groups of medical migrants that historians have tacitly held as being too disparate to study collectively. Key outcomes of this research include the recovery and contextualisation of the ‘special types of labour’ medical migrants undertook; the impact of gender in the process; and the agency displayed by more marginalised groups of medical migrants.
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    Saving the last continent: environmentalists, celebrities and states in the campaign for a World Park Antarctica, 1978-1991
    Shortis, Emma Kate ( 2018)
    Between 1978 and 1991, the global environmental movement achieved an unparalleled success: overturning a decision to introduce mining in Antarctica and instead securing a comprehensive environmental protection agreement for the entire continent. This study explains how and why such a tremendous shift in international environmental politics was achieved. The indefinite mining ban and pre-emptive protection of the ‘last continent’ was largely the result of a decade-long campaign for a World Park Antarctica. A small group of environmental activists lobbied key political actors, engaged celebrity, and shaped public opinion. Those activists insisted that Antarctica was too fragile, too precious, and too important to open up to environmentally catastrophic mining. From 1978, the campaign for a World Park Antarctica engaged in direct action protests, conducted a secret campaign at the United Nations, and lobbied the negotiations over an Antarctic minerals regime. They connected this international campaign to local efforts across the world. In Australia, World Park campaigners spent a decade raising awareness and framing the national debate over Antarctica on their own terms. In France, they recruited the world-famous Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau to their cause. By the time the Antarctic Minerals Convention was adopted in 1988, the World Park campaign had laid the groundwork for an effective anti-ratification campaign. World Park activists succeeded in convincing the French, Australian and United States governments to withdraw support for the Minerals Convention and agree to the comprehensive environmental protection of the entire continent. The campaign’s ability to convince these governments to either pursue or acquiesce to environmental protection, and build a new international consensus, is a remarkable success story in the chequered history of global environmentalism and non-state activism more broadly. This thesis sits at the nexus of environmental, international and emotions history, helping to explain how and why emotional mobilisation and social movements work. Through a combination of long term strategy, effective lobbying, celebrity engagement, and emotionally resonant narrative, the World Park campaign succeeded in saving the ‘last continent’ from mining.
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    Uncomfortable histories: learning with contested and confronting history in Australian museums
    McKernan, Amy ( 2016)
    Today’s museums are charged with responsibilities far exceeding the straightforward display of interesting or unique objects; increasingly, they are expected to represent a wide range of stories, often focusing on bringing to light histories that – for various reasons – have previously been hidden or neglected. In Australia, the stories museums have told have been passionately debated for several decades, with considerable consternation meeting exhibitions deemed to over-emphasise the violence of colonisation or to present triumphalist narratives of Australian involvement in overseas wars. These are similar to debates that rage within academic history and school history education in this country. Previously silenced or ‘untold’ histories are often a source of collective shame and pain, and this thesis examines the representation of histories likely to provoke such discomfort in museum visitors. These contentious and confronting histories are difficult material for inclusion in museum displays at a time when appealing to diverse audiences is essential to survival. This thesis examines the potential for museums to support the learning of school-aged visitors, analysing the representation of ‘uncomfortable histories’ across three Australian museum institutions: the Australian War Memorial; Museum Victoria; and Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. It considers the question of which histories are seen as ‘difficult,’ contentious or confronting in these museums, and argues that histories of war and violence, discrimination and collective trauma are often connected to perceived responsibilities for museums in civics and citizenship education and/or education for social justice. The three museums are addressed in case studies that draw on archival research, interviews with museum staff, and analysis of museum exhibitions and education programs. This thesis conceptualises the museum as a heterotopia, a ‘space of difference’ where visitors can encounter an unfamiliar familiar – ‘visiting’ history in the present and viewing displays as a ‘separate’ reality, even while the museums themselves are located within the society they seek to represent as ‘other Within the museum, affect and emotion have become central to communicating and teaching the past, and this thesis analyses what Margaret Wetherell describes as ‘affective practices’ alongside an investigation of the implications of cultural memory and collective trauma in museum representations. This thesis argues that ‘uncomfortable histories’ carry significant potential to support history learning in museums, although this potential can be employed to vastly different ends. In some instances, discourses surrounding previously ‘untold’ stories are put to work to encourage a celebration of difference, endeavouring to lay the foundation for more socially just communities and to create space for multiple perspectives of the past and present. In other cases, histories of violence and trauma are employed to reinforce dominant narratives that silence and undermine conflicting perspectives and seek to present a more singular representation of Australian history. In all cases, contentious and confronting histories are used to provoke emotional responses and affective practices that promote particular understandings of the past. Each of the museums analysed faces considerable challenges in managing political and community pressures when representing these histories, but each demonstrated a commitment to representing the past with accuracy and authenticity. Ultimately, this thesis argues, in spite of the difficulties representing confronting history for diverse audiences, museums see considerable educative value in constructing encounters with the uncomfortable past.