School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemColonial soundscapes: a cultural history of sound recording in Australia, 1880–1930( 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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ItemSaving the last continent: environmentalists, celebrities and states in the campaign for a World Park Antarctica, 1978-1991( 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.