School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDress in Australia: The materiality of a colonial society in the making( 2023-08)The study of surviving items of dress offers a vital material source for historians that is commonly ignored. Dress sits at the intersections between necessity and self-representation, the assertion of social standing and cultural, economic and technological aspects of society. Yet writings on dress in the Australian colonial context have largely overlooked the extant items, focusing instead on images and text. “Dress in Australia: the materiality of a colonial society in the making” takes a material culture approach to the history of colonial era dress from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the late-nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the early years of colonisation and development of colonial society in the years up to the early-1870s. The research methodology, which uses the study of a selection of garments in public and private collections which are known to have been either made or worn in Australia, places surviving items of dress and their materiality to the fore in discussions of European colonisation and Australian settler culture. The close examination of surviving items of dress, coupled with contextual interpretation of objects based on archival research using letters, journals and correspondence, as well as visual material, demonstrates how such an approach enables historical interpretations that would not have been possible from a narrower methodological base. Through the detailed analysis and contextual interpretation of objects, this thesis shows how their materiality prompts new directions and expanded ways of thinking about the significance of dress within a rapidly changing settler society.
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ItemGeorge Eliot as historian : the social and political background to Middlemarch( 1974)Since its first publication in 1871-2, George Eliot's Middlemarch, has been studied and re-studied by literary critics of all castes and in the course of their resulting assessments many extreme statements have been made about its factual and historical veracity. This thesis has attempted to modify and rationalize such statements by the use of historical rather than literary criteria and to balance extravagant assertions about Eliot's ability as historian and social observer. From an historical point of view, Middlemarch contains a wealth of material for the scholar to study, covering as it does the period of agitation leading up to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act and comprehending the whole stratum of provincial society at that time. For the purpose of this thesis, it was impossible to cover all of the diverse elements included in the novel and many aspects which could well have found a place have of necessity been omitted. Some of these are the phenomenon of the successful Businessman of Evangelical leanings embodied in Mr. Bulstrode, the concept of early nineteenth century philanthropy as developed through the characters of Dorothea, Mr. Brooke and Mr. Bulstrode and the suggestion of an element of "women's liberation" in the outspokenness of the elder Miss Brooke. The aim of this thesis has been to discover, by means of a comparison with contemporary materials, whether Middlemarch may with Justice be used by the historian as a piece of documentary evidence and, following on this, whether any novel may be used in this way.
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ItemSchopenhauer's will and the nature of human agency( 2001)Much of the criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy stems from his apparent inability to reconcile his metaphysical theory of the `World as Will' with his epistemological views. Schopenhauer's theory of representation involves the claim that knowledge is conditioned by the a priori forms which the knowing subject imposes on experience, implying that proper knowledge can be only of representations. In his metaphysical writings, Schopenhauer asserts that a direct awareness of ourselves experienced in self-consciousness enables us to discern the nature of the thing-in-itself, and identify it with will. The claim that `the thing-in-itself is will' breaches the unknowability thesis concerning things as they are in themselves. In this paper I suggest that the noumenal designation that Schopenhauer envisages for his concept of the will is inappropriate, and that an alternative characterisation of Schopenhauer's concept of the will better expresses his philosophical purpose. The crucial contention is that Schopenhauer misappropriates the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself and that he employs it in a manner distinctly different from Kant. Schopenhauer does not consider the thing-in-itself to be the causal ground of phenomena, and there are good grounds to suggest that, instead, he considers it to be 'the essence of all that is'. I' maintain that the main advantage of the view that Schopenhauer's concept of the will entails an 'essentialist' rather than noumenal designation, is its capacity to reconcile some aspects: of Schopenhauer's metaphysics with the demands of his theory of representation - and I utilise Young's characterisation of the Schopenhauerian 'will' as a metaphysical, yet non-noumenal essence of the phenomenal world, to demonstrate this claim. Thereafter I examine the significance of this interpretation of Schopenhauer's concept of the will to other parts of his philosophy: specifically, its influence on Schopenhauer's account of the self, his determinism and his conception of human agency. Finally, I present a standard criticism which can be raised against Schopenhauer's account of human agency, and submit a revised version of his account, which, I contend is capable of withstanding the standard criticism, whilst preserving most of Schopenhauer's important insights in this area.
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ItemSome foundations of science in Victoria in the decade after separation( 1990)The decade following separation from New South Wales must surely be considered one of the most dramatic in Victoria's history. In that short space of time Victoria was transformed from a small dependent colony into a bustling cosmopolitan self-governing community of enormous wealth, completely outstripping its neighbours in the process. There had been an influx of migrants of such magnitude that the civil authorities found it very difficult to keep up with the population explosion. It must at times have seemed to them to be an impossible task to provide food, housing, water, power, roads and transport, sewerage and other amenities adequate to cope with the increasing number of people pouring into the colony. Added to this were problems of civil insurrection, severe economic depression, major constitutional reforms, and great political instability. During this period, despite all the trials and difficulties they had to face, Victorians developed a real sense that they were the premier colony, that they could achieve. whatever they set out to accomplish. There was a great feeling of optimism and self-confidence.
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ItemMcCrea, a matter of paradigms( 1980)
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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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ItemA hidden history: the Chinese on the Mount Alexander diggings, central Victoria, 1851-1901( 2005)This thesis interrogates the history of the Chinese on the Mount Alexander gold diggings. Viewing the diggings as a cultural landscape, it argues that goldfields Chinese were more than simple sojourners. It reframes their place in local and national histories as 'settlers' rather than 'sojourners'. In so doing the thesis contends that Chinese-European relations on the goldfields were more complex than orthodox historical interpretations have acknowledged, and that the Chinese were active parties in the international mid-nineteenth century gold seeking phenomenon. A key aim of this thesis is to locate the Chinese gold seekers within the polity of a dynamic expanding imperial British society on the periphery of the settled world. It also considers the enduring Chinese role, albeit on a smaller scale, in these Pacific Rim neo-European settler societies after the gold rushes as the goldfields communities consolidated themselves from the 1860s onwards. While it is true that many returned to China either voluntarily or as a result of state pressure, the initial objective was to examine the continuing history of the goldfields generation of Chinese and their descendants in Australia. That history continued well beyond Federation into the twentieth century. The raison d'etre of this thesis is to challenge the historical neglect of the role of the Chinese in diggings society. This thesis has three complementary themes. The first examines the need to refine the concept of sojourner, and add to it the concept of Chinese 'settler' experience. The second is to portray the Chinese as socially active, politically engaged participants in goldfields life society and the third is to contextualise the experience the Castlemaine Chinese in broader national and international histories of the gold seeking era.