School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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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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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.
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ItemThe natural history of Melbourne - a reconstruction( 2005)This thesis is an attempt to reconstruct the physical environment of the Port Phillip area as it was at the time of first European arrival, ie. c.1800. At the time it was first encountered by Europeans, in 1803, the land around Port Phillip Bay supported a wide diversity of ecosystems. For millennia the area was the territory of Aboriginal clans belonging to two language groups, Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung. These peoples lived in spiritual union with the land, exploiting its abundant resources, and, through a range of practices, maintaining it in the form in which it had been created. The encroachment of Europeans onto clan estates, beginning in the 1830s, brought dramatic changes to this Aboriginal way of life, and also to the local landscapes themselves. The thesis propounded here is that the natural history of the area was a major influence on the occupation and use of the area by humans, and that to understand the particulars of that natural history is to have an insight into the human history. The bulk of the study is therefore a reconstruction of that natural history, which is offered as the physical context of human action in the area. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemIntersections of conflict: policing and criminalising Melbourne’s traffic, 1890-1930( 2005-07)Every single person on earth is a road-user; and, although an integral part of our society, the management of traffic is a low priority for most. Authorities constantly work to lessen the tension between the free-flow of traffic and traffic safety. Consequently, the management of traffic and its subsequent problems has consumed more time, money and resources than any other item on the public agenda. Between 1890 and 1930, urban road-traffic in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, as in other world cities, underwent a revolution as speeds increased 500%. The motor-vehicle exacerbated existing traffic problems with increased trips and vehicle numbers. Authorities separated the various road users with road demarcations, and placed upon the Victoria Police the responsibility of managing the heterogeneous and complex traffic mix. By the close of the 1920s, all the components—policing, case and statute law, and the physical infrastructure—of the contemporary traffic management system were firmly in place. Introducing motor-transport into a centuries old road network designed for much slower modes of transport, was similar to putting high speed trains, capable of hundreds of kilometres an hour, onto conventional tracks. The marriage of old systems and new technology required a plethora of controls, procedures and safeguards to attain an acceptable level of traffic deaths. Nonetheless, no matter how many modifications, it persisted as a hybrid system. It could not be made to work efficiently.
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ItemMax Crawford: necessity and freedom( 2002)This thesis is a study of Max Crawford as an intellectual and historian from the years 1927 to 1962. Its argument is that Crawford's consistent stance of liberalism in political and academic life propelled him towards a position which, in the climate of the years preceding the Second World War and the Cold War, seemed radical, but in the wake of public criticism he later withdrew from direct engagement in public intellectual life. There are three prevailing themes. The first addresses the political denial that dominated Crawford's retrospective autobiographical writing. Crawford insisted that his family was not political, and that he followed the family tradition in keeping his conscience free of political commitments. The thesis will argue that this was not evident in his family background, nor in his own activity. The ideology that he espoused in the History School, and afterwards was at pains to deny, was politically active and advocated the liberal values of freedom and morality. The thesis will explore how he was drawn to progressive causes and lent his academic authority to them, only to retreat when he encountered fierce criticism. It is my contention that Crawford finally adopted a stance of independence from all engagement because of the enduring legacy of the Cold War and the controversy surrounding his decision to write to the Bulletin ostensibly to expose an alleged Communist plot. The second theme of the thesis is the place of academic freedom in Australian universities. The thesis will argue that it was often tenuous and never completely accepted by administrators, politicians or the press, which expected universities to avoid controversy. The public and political expectations of an Australian intellectual created self-censorship and wavering commitment. These themes will be analysed in the context of Crawford’s experiences and his transformation from a highly conspicuous, progressive and engaged liberal to a more traditional and reticent one. The thesis will explore how his life and historical approach were subject to the pressures of public life. Finally, the thesis will investigate the intellectual style of Max Crawford. His approach to the theory and method of history exercised a strong influence on the discipline, as it assumed a central position in Australia's intellectual culture. The History School that Crawford created was celebrated for its scholarship and its students achieved important positions in other universities and public life. The thesis will examine the life of the Department, its influence, the approach to history and its legacy, which has been retrospectively celebrated and dismissed.