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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ItemMarginalised subjects, meaningless naturalizations: the tiers of Australian citizenship( 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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ItemChildhood, war and memory: experiences of Bosnian child refugees in Australia( 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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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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ItemDoctors down under: European medical migrants in Victoria (Australia), 1930-60( 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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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.
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ItemUncomfortable histories: learning with contested and confronting history in Australian museums( 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.
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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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ItemFrom Achilles to Anzac: classical receptions in the Australian Anzac narrative( 2016)The Anzac narrative lies at the heart of Australian national identity and this thesis demonstrates how its authors have drawn upon classical narratives to attain and maintain this position. Since the first Australian soldiers landed on Gallipoli’s beaches at dawn on 25 April 1915, allusions to the classical world have been drawn upon to compose the Anzac narrative. The proximity of Gallipoli to the presumed site of the legendary Trojan War (on the other side of the Dardanelles) ignited the imaginations of soldiers, journalists, historians, poets, novelists, artists and politicians. From the outset, Anzac soldiers were likened to ancient Greek warrior heroes and the Gallipoli campaign was compared with the mythical Trojan War. After the Great War ended, large-scale commemoration of those killed in service to their nation commenced in Australia. The idealised image of the Anzac soldier based on the ancient warrior heroes from mythical narratives endured during this period, but was coupled with ideologies from fifthcentury BCE Hellenic democracies, which venerated those soldiers who died in service to their state in order that their deeds be remembered for evermore. Anzac commemoration, like the commemoration of ancient Greek citizen-soldiers, was focussed on equal recognition for all those who died, and memorialised the dead in such a way that their sacrifices inspired the surviving citizens to dedicate themselves to the improvement of their community for future generations. Integral to the coupling of ancient Greek and Anzac commemorative practices was the Australian War Correspondent and Official Historian, C.E.W. Bean. Bean was classically educated and drew on his knowledge of the past to create a detailed record of wartime events as a legacy for the Australian people of the time, and also those of the future. To provide context, the thesis commences with a survey of classical reception in Australia prior to the Great War. It then traces the many ways the classics were drawn upon to compose the Anzac narrative. During the war, journalistic, literary, historical and personal narratives focussed on the strength and beauty of the Anzac soldier, and comparisons to the heroes of ancient Greek mythology were common. After the war, commemorative efforts dwelt on the magnitude of sacrifice, emphasising that building a prosperous Australian future would ensure that these losses incurred would not be in vain. To do this, democratic commemorative practices and funerary rituals of fifthcentury ancient Greek states were employed in Australian commemorative efforts. These established a strong link between Anzac commemoration and ancient Greek ancestor hero cults. After the Second World War, the Anzac narrative dwindled before being revived in the 1980s, in part, by Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, which transformed the imperialist Anzac narrative into a nationalist story of Australian maturity and independence for a new generation of Australians in need of a distinct national identity. The classics have been written into the very foundations of the Anzac narrative and function to elide space and time, connecting the Australian people to Europe and the Western tradition. Associating Anzac deeds with the classical tradition positioned Australia as a descendant of great civilisations and has ultimately shaped a cult of Anzac reminiscent of ancient Greek ancestor hero cults.
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ItemA voice for animals: the creation, contention & consequences of the modern Australian animal movement, 1970-2015( 2015)During the unrest and upheaval of the 1970s and at a time when social movements were struggling for liberation and justice, a fresh wave of animal activism emerged in Australia. From the rearing of pigs and poultry in intensive farms, the slaughter of Australian sheep and cattle in the Middle East and South East Asia, the use of animals in research, the shooting of native waterbirds, to the consumption of meat, across Australia the modern animal movement consistently contested the politics and culture of how animals were used and exploited. Engaging with diverse approaches to studying social movements, exploring previously unexamined archives, and through interviews with current and former leading activists, this thesis offers the first major historical study of the creation, contention, and consequences of animal activism in modern Australian history. Through an account of the ideas of animal rights and by analysing other dynamics and processes, this thesis tells the story of how ordinary people were inspired to take action and create the modern animal movement. By exploring the development and performance of a wide variety of protest methods, such as lobbying, direct action, civil disobedience, open rescue, undercover investigations, and lifestyle activism, this thesis reveals the often innovative and provocative ways in which activists made their claims and challenged the status quo. In doing so, this thesis also examines a set of complex and conflicting outcomes, for the animal movement affected the political agenda, policy, industry, media and communication, and the very fabric of society. Over time, activists influenced and pluralised Australian politics, society, and culture, although not necessarily in the ways they desired. Ultimately, through narrating and analysing the modern animal movement, this thesis reveals how and why ordinary people engaged in politics and activism, and uncovers the extent and limits of the changes they stimulated.