School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemCountryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920 – 1997( 2021)This thesis explores the cultural and political history of Australian rural women between 1920 and 1997. Using a diverse range of archival collections this research finds that for rural women cultural constructions of idealised rural womanhood had real impacts on their lived experiences and political fortunes. By tracing shifting constructions of this ideal, this thesis explores a history of Australian rural womanhood, and in turn, centres rural women in Australian political and cultural history. For rural women, an expectation that they should embody the cultural ideals of rural Australia — hardiness, diligence, conservatism and unpretentiousness — was mediated through contemporary ideas of what constituted conforming femininity. This thesis describes this dynamic as countryminded conforming femininity. In this respect, this research is taking a feminist approach to political historian Don Aitkin’s characterisation of the Country Party as driven by an ideology of countrymindedness. This thesis uses countryminded conforming femininity as a lens through which cultural constructions of rural womanhood may be critically interrogated, and changes in these constructions may be traced. This thesis represents the first consideration of Australian rural womanhood as a category across time that is both culturally constructed and central to Australian political and cultural life, drawing together histories of rural women’s experience, representations and activism. It theorises what ideals of Australian rural womanhood have meant across the twentieth century and finds that they have had an under-considered role in Australian political life, and on constructions of Australian national identity.
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ItemPhenomenologies of the lived body : Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty and Marcel on embodiment( 2005)On the topic of embodiment, the phenomenological tradition in philosophy departs significantly from the standpoint of the dominant philosophical tradition. Rather than approaching embodiment through the framework of the 'mind/body problem', its method is to adopt the subject's point of view and ask what the phenomenon of embodiment is like for the subject experiencing it - for instance, what is it like to be a body? And what is it like to have one? Sometimes this query is formulated as 'what is it correct to say about' the role of the body in personhood - for instance, is it more correct to use the word 'have' or the word 'be' to express my relationship to my body? However, the inquiry is not principally a linguistic one: it is an inquiry into our experience of embodiment, in its relation to other things in the world and to consciousness. It is the phenomenologists' acknowledgement of the subject-inquirer's point of view on embodiment that renders their approach a particularly appropriate one for this topic. Accordingly, in this study I have chosen to investigate the theories of phenomenological philosophers. This research project thus consists of a comparative study of four phenomenological philosophers on the topic of embodiment (the body-person relationship): Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gabriel Marcel. In addition, I look at some remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later writings makes about the language of embodiment, and investigate how the issues raised there may condition the conclusions drawn from these phenomenological studies of the body. I also investigate how feminist critiques of phenomenology may affect our examination of issues of embodiment and prompt us to further investigate the nature of embodiment. In response, I argue that the 'lived body' schema is compatible with more specific accounts of embodiment and that the phenomenologists are aware of and cautious about their use and interpretation of the language of embodiment.
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ItemTerra nullius : Lacanian ethics and Australian fictions of origin( 2005)The fiction of terra nullius, that Australia was 'no-one's land' at the time of British colonisation, was confirmed in law in 1971. At precisely this moment it had begun to fail as the ballast of white Australian identity and the fulcrum of race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Where white Australia had historically produced a gap, an empty centre from which the white Australian subject could emerge, fully formed, there was now a presence. The emergence of the Aboriginal subject into this empty space inaugurated the anxiety of white Australia that has characterised the period from the 1970s to the present. During these decades of anxiety, the story of this nation's origin-the story of 'settlement'-has retained its pivotal part in the inscription and reinscription of national meanings. Each of the three novels analysed in the thesis is a fictional account of the story of 'settlement published during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of all the contemporary Australian fiction written about 'settlement' and the race relations conducted in its midst, these texts have been chosen because each is emblematic of a particular national fantasy, and, as is argued in this thesis, a particular orientation, to the tale it tells. The structure of each fantasy-of the frontier, of captivity, of the explorer and of the Great Australian Emptiness- offers particular opportunities for the refantasisation of that national story. The thesis asks how each novel is oriented towards the national aim of not failing to reproduce a satisfactory repetition of the story of national origin and the inevitable failure of that project. All of these questions are framed by an overarching one: what is an ethics of interpretation? The thesis offers a Lacanian response. Interpretation, for Lacan, is apophantic; it points to something, or lets it be seen. It points beyond meaning to structure; it alms to show an orientation not to a 'topic' but to a place. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers an ethics of interpretation that includes and accounts for that which exceeds or escapes meaning, and it does this without rendering that excess irrelevant. That something remains constitutive yet enigmatic, making interpretation, in turn, not merely the recovery and rendering of meaning but also a process which seeks to understand the function of this enigmatic structural term. Through its theory of repetition and the pleasures that repetition holds, Lacanian theory offers an approach to analysing the pleasures for the non-Indigenous Australian reader in hearing again the fictions of the nation's founding. It now seems possible for a white Australian encountering any such retelling to ask how our pleasure is taken, and to see the intransigence of our national story, its incapacity to respond to its many challengers, as a particular mode of enjoyment that is too pleasurable to renounce. A Lacanian ethics of interpretation opens up the question: what are the possibilities of re-orientating ourselves in our relation to our founding story such that we did not simply repeat what gives us pleasure?
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ItemAn unreasonable profession : spiritualism and mediumship between the wars in Britain( 1996)In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Spiritualist claims that the dead survive in another world and communicate with the living became a subject of heated debate within English society. Originating in America in the eighteen-forties, Spiritualism found ready converts in England. By 1870, many periodicals were devoted to chronicling the activities of believers, while newspaper articles, church sermons and scientific reports issued a stream of diverse interpretations to a fascinated audience. Spiritualism has become a subject of lively historical interest in recent times, but most historians assume that it was a Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon, with little relevance in post World War I Britain. I began this study with similar assumptions, but as my research progressed, it became clear that the number of people who identified as Spiritualists grew in the interwar years and that Spiritualism was as controversial during this period as in the previous century. In sketching its passage and growth between the wars, I emphasise Spiritualism's ability to absorb and organise both modem and ancient tropes. As the movement continued to gain in popularity the debate over its meaning and possibilities for humankind grew apace. At the centre of these controversies stood the figure of the medium. The mediumistic persona was constructed inside and outside the Spiritualist movement as feminine. This project engages with issues of gender, subjectivity and power in relation to the development of the mediumistic identity. In doing so I stress the profound ambiguity of that identity. The medium, as represented through diverse narratives, appeared as both subject and object, the source of truth and lies, and the mother of life and death. It was always unclear whether she was psychically gifted or demented, or whether she intended to harm or heal. Confronted with opposing narratives, a coherent sense of "self' was not easily achieved by a medium. Ultimately, this study attempts to show that the mediumistic "self' was never a stable result of private conviction, but a deeply unstable and continually shifting production that developed within particular historical circumstances
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ItemHistory as science : Michael White and his contributions to cytogenetics and evolutionary theory( 1994)Michael White (1910-1983) was foundation professor of the Department of Genetics at the University of Melbourne and one of the world's leading cytogeneticists. He made fundamental contributions to general cytogenetics and evolutionary cytogenetics. In 1945 White published Animal Cytology and Evolution which integrated an enormous amount of previously disparate data on cytogenetics into an evolutionary framework. This book was praised by his colleagues as a primary contribution to the emerging Neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. Yet since then his status in the history of the evolutionary synthesis has become ambiguous. Some recent commentators omit him from their accounts. In this thesis it is argued that White's disappearance from history is not accidental but the result of a successful strategy by competing scientists to construct a version of evolutionary biology that legitimates their own discipline, research program and world view. This study takes the form of a biography but with an emphasis on the social and cultural context of science. A social constructivist conflict model has been employed, specifically Bourdieu's 'struggle for scientific authority' metaphor, as articulated by Sapp (1987). It is suggested that unless social factors are included in any account of the production of scientific knowledge then the analysis is incomplete. It is further claimed that the 'internal politics of science' can be an important determinant in scientific knowledge construction. Competition between scientists can be both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary. It will be shown that White was engaged in just such a struggle for scientific authority with several scientists and that this competition stimulated and informed his own research. A major theme of the thesis is that history itself is a resource which scientists can deploy in support of their knowledge claims and/or to enhance their own standing in the field. It is argued that White's place in the history of science has been determined (and is being re-determined) not only by the quantity and quality of his scientific work but also by the way this work had been interpreted (or ignored) by his colleagues and competitors. It is not simply a question of the 'factual' basis of the scientists' research but whether that work supports, or does not support, currently accepted views and whether or not it serves the social and technical interests of others within or outside the field. Scientific knowledge is thus both negotiated and constructed.
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ItemThe Age and the young Menzies: a chapter in Victorian liberalism( 2010)The Melbourne Age was Robert Menzies' favourite newspaper. This thesis investigates the early years of Menzies' political career, when his relationship with The Age and its senior personnel was established. It is a comparative study of two liberalisms: that of the principal creator of the Liberal Party of Australia, and of a newspaper famous for its liberal affiliations. The Age had been closely identified with the Liberal politician Alfred Deakin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Geoffrey Syme became its proprietor in 1908, The Age pursued a programmatic agenda based in the dominant liberal ideology of the day, social liberalism, which stood for responsible citizenship and State intervention. The paper was influenced by both Deakinism and its New Liberal equivalent in Britain, whose political representatives were Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. When Menzies emerged on the Victorian political stage in the mid-twenties, The Age still stood for ideals and institutions which had been influential in the first decade of nationhood: New Protection, the conciliation and arbitration system, responsible trade unionism, accountable government, and social meliorism. The early chapters of the thesis explore the paper's political outlook, focusing on its vigorous campaign against the conservative ascendancy in non-Labor politics. That the newspaper remained a coherent exemplar of New Liberal orthodoxy from 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War is one of the study's main findings. To Syme, the young Menzies represented a talented new generation of Liberal reformer. The Age vigorously supported his election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1928, and his subsequent move to the Assembly. Despite the paper's hopes for him, Menzies' liberal-conservative tendencies were soon strongly to the fore. During the Depression, he aggressively opposed the introduction of unemployment insurance. When Menzies joined economists and primary producers in attacking the regime of tariff protection that was central to The Age's Deakinite identity, the relationship between the newspaper and the politician reached a low watermark. These episodes are explored in detail. The second half of the thesis focuses on Menzies's ideological make-up. It identifies him as a post-Deakinite whose personal politics were a contradictory mixture of older and newer streams of liberalism, and whose personal style was a mixture of pragmatism tinged with a consciousness of the legacy of Deakinite idealism. The phrase 'blended liberalism' usefully describes Menzies' political makeup by the late thirties. Three major influences on his political ideology are identified: the Victorian Liberal tradition; the Law, which was his first and, he said, best loved calling; and his family's Presbyterian faith. The thesis also explores Menzies' friendship with the British Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, a devout Anglican whose constructive social vision influenced Menzies. The final chapter of the thesis is a case study of the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act (1938), a regime of compulsory contributory social insurance which was based on the British model and included elements of Lloyd George's original bill and of Baldwin's extended scheme. Both Menzies and The Age supported the Australian measure. The thesis discusses how their shared campaign for national insurance brought them back into close relationship, yet how their ideological rationales for national insurance were significantly different.
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ItemEmotional histories: contemporary Australian historical fictions( 2007)Historical fictions are everywhere and nowhere in contemporary Australian historical discourses. Whilst historical films and novels are ubiquitous in Australian cultural production, they are largely ignored by the historical profession. Although historians occasionally weigh into public debates about particular novels or films - and those surrounding Kate Grenville's The Secret River are a recent case in point - they rarely engage in sustained critical analysis of texts or genre on their own terms. Rather than continue this marginalisation, this thesis considers the historical representations of contemporary Australian historical fictions. Through a series of close readings, I examine what is happening to Australia's pasts within these texts. I argue that in their narratives, characterisations, landscapes and atmospheres, Australia's historical fictions represent the past with feeling - they tell "emotional histories". Accordingly, in the chapters of this thesis I chart the historical mobilisation of melancholy, grief, anger, guilt, hope and love that takes place within a number of historical films and novels released and published in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, this thesis seeks to interrogate the implications of the attachment - and detachment - of particular emotions to and from particular pasts in contemporary Australian historical discourses.
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ItemHeterodoxy and contemporary Chinese protestantism: the case of Eastern Lightning( 2010)This dissertation examines new religious movements that are loosely related to Protestantism and have emerged in China in the past thirty years. In particular, it introduces the largest and most notorious of these movements. Eastern Lightning (dongfang shandian) emerged from Henan province in the early 1990s, and teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth in the form of a Chinese woman to judge humankind and end the present age. It has predominantly attracted women in poor rural areas of northern China, who have been overlooked amidst the nation's rapid social and economic transformation. This dissertation shows that Eastern Lightning combines elements of both tradition and innovation with respect to doctrine, recruitment techniques and symbols, indicating that Protestantism has become a cultural resource from which Chinese religious movements now draw. The dissertation also investigates the responses of Chinese government organs to Protestant-related new religious movements. The government has banned them and targeted them in its campaign against Falun Gong and "evil cults" (xiejiao). In so doing, it has redeployed familiar ways of labeling heterodoxy, tailoring them to fit the Protestant context. However, its efforts to suppress Eastern Lightning have met with only limited success. They have also led Eastern Lightning to intensify its own rhetoric against the Chinese Communist Party, and to employ radical recruitment practices. Chinese Protestants, too, have engaged in vociferous condemnation of new religious movements and attempted to educate their own members against them. This dissertation explores the ways in which different religious factions defend their own doctrinal correctness and attack that of others. Orthodoxy is central to the identities and discourses of all of these groups. Yet while Protestants are united in their condemnation of new religious movements, nuances in their responses reflect their own varying relationships with the state. Hence, this study uncovers the dynamic, complex and fraught interactions between an array of political and religious actors.
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ItemHer self portrayed: Australian women's self-portraits between the wars 1918-1939( 2001-12)The subject of this dissertation is female self-portraiture in Australia of the interwar years, 1918 to 1939. The primary concern of this thesis is to consider self-portraiture as a conceptual process. Self-portrayal is understood as an act of cultural invention rather than an unmediated access to an essential core self. It is this invention and what is entailed in the process of self-imagining, rather than any formal analysis of the style, which is of greatest concern. The thesis examines the challenges faced by Australian interwar women in using an aesthetic convention designed to champion 'the artist' - a masculinist paradigm. The misogynist values encoded in traditional self-portrait iconography mediated the process of self-imagining form women. Thus, in seeking to portray the ‘self’, women were forced to devise strategies to deal with the exclusion integral to self-portrait traditions. It is the argument of this thesis that the exclusions formalised through self-portrait iconography provided a microcosm of the broader historical marginalisation of women in the 1920s and 1930s. Seen this way, Australian interwar female self-portraiture is a register of the wider struggle by women to work for equal pay, to accommodate new forms of femininity and to exercise their rights as citizens. the thesis presents historically based interpretations of works by women artists who worked in high, commercial and modernist art arenas. Such a diverse range allows for an inter-disciplinary approach in which Australian female self-portraiture will be examined from multiple perspectives – historical, philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytical, literary and cultural.
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ItemAustralian new left politics, 1956-1972( 2009)A study of the Australian New Left might not immediately appear pertinent to contemporary society. Adherents of New Right economics have been, until recently, unshakable in their global ascendancy over the past three decades. From Russia to Tanzania, discourses of neo-liberalism have become so deeply entrenched in world politics and trade that they have been adopted by the transitional states of Eastern and Central Europe, along with other less developed countries in the international system, despite the fact that all have very different cultural histories and levels of economic development. There have been few exceptions, with one example Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. The discrediting during the global oil crisis of the mid-1970s of the post-WWII orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, social democracy and the Welfare State has played its role in this paradigm shift. More pertinent to the radical left may be that the legacy of Soviet Communism's 'terrors and errors' still looms large in the consciousness of socialist thought, provoking disagreement over what can be salvaged from the cadaver of Marxist theory. The increasing specialisation and integration of world marketplaces since the 1960s has also led to questions over whether the notion of a working class - so essential to Marx's utopian revolution - still exists at all. The rise of 'identity politics' and the relativism of postmodernist thought, seen as at the cutting edge of academic theory since the 1970s, have represented further challenges to those desiring to rebuff the entrenched global logic of consumer capitalism. Capitalism is the only 'meta-narrative' left uncontested by postmodernists, while other ideologies - such as Marxism, feminism and even the discipline of history - are criticised for their failure to adequately address the realities of difference within the groups (i.e. workers, women) that they focus upon. This thesis re-examines a time when the left commanded a degree of mainstream popularity; when hundreds of thousands of Australians took to the streets to protest against the government, and when, however briefly, Marxist sympathisers constituted respectable numbers in academic circles, to ascertain what lessons, if any, might be learnt for 'socialist humanist' campaigns today. The anti-globalisation campaigns of the past decade and recent concerns regarding climate change represent hope as starting points for contemporary mass radicalism. Recently, I travelled beside a thoughtful and articulate man in his late fifties who had been a student at the University of Western Australia during the early 1970s. He had been acutely aware of radicals at other campuses such as Monash at this time, and laughed dismissively that student activists were still saying the same things nowadays. While my travelling companion was amused that contemporary student radicals continue to subscribe to what he sees as archaic and refuted ideas and philosophies, I believe that this constancy is due to the fact that New Left criticism remains highly applicable today.