School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    I was a good-time Charlie: social dance and Chinese community life in Sydney and Melbourne, 1850s-1970s
    Gassin, Grace Sarah Lee ( 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.