School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA history of Churchill Island: settlement, land use and the making of a heritage site( 2015)This thesis utilises a public history approach to respond to the desires of the project’s public stakeholders to obtain a rigorous and detailed history of Churchill Island, and to examine its nature as a heritage site. It examines how Churchill Island has been variously imagined and used to make a permanent settler colonial space. In doing so it argues that the history of the island offers a rich example of the complexity of settlement in Victoria. An exploration of the intersections between the practices of community engagement, academia and history, the thesis responds to the challenges thrown up by the History Wars and the Churchill Island Project by making a history of settlement that is both academically critical and publicly accepted.
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ItemThe civilisation of Port Phillip( 2014)In understanding their place in the Port Phillip District, free settlers were pulled between the European legacy of the Enlightenment and the Australian experience of brutal encounters, in which those in power deployed violence against both Aboriginal people and convicts. Somewhere between these two sources of understanding lay the ideologies of Port Phillip’s free settlers. This thesis contends that a close examination of the colonial archive reveals the ideologies of Port Phillip’s free settlers. By identifying the specific intricacies of these settler ideologies, we can achieve a better understanding of the white settlement of the District. This thesis uses the lenses of rhetoric and violence to identify and understand free settler ideologies. It analyses settler statements about their role in the District using Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘mythologies’—statements of purported fact that mask ideological positions. Slavoj Žižek’s breakdown of violence into three separate forms helps conceptualise the realities of the early settlement period, and creates new and productive understandings about violence in the Australian colonies. The thesis applies these theoretical tools to a series of incidents and individuals of Port Phillip. It contends that these seemingly insignificant points of history actually reveal much about the early District, including imagined futures, ideological struggle, and intellectual debate. In different contexts, free settlers defined themselves against Aboriginal people, government officials, and convict-class labourers, and they also expressed their aspirations for the future of the District. Free settler rhetoric in the Port Phillip District established and maintained a settler polity in southeastern Australia whose influence continues to be felt today. Combining a re-reading of the colonial archive with new historiographical methods and an extensive review of the existing literature, this thesis upends conventional progress narratives, and in their place presents a truer picture of what free settlers termed the civilisation of Port Phillip.