School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Communicable Knowledge: Medical Communication, Professionalisation, and Medical Reform in Colonial Victoria, 1855-66
    Orrell, Christopher Edward Gerard ( 2020)
    This thesis examines the process of medical professionalisation in colonial Victoria from 1855-66. During this eleven-year period the medical profession of colonial Victoria were able to create Australia’s first long lasting medical societies and medical journal, found the first medical school, and receive legislative support of their claims to exclusive knowledge of medicine. The next time an Australian colony would have these institutions created would not be for another 20 years. This thesis examines these developments through a framework of communication, primarily from the medical community itself. Communication was central to the process that resulted in the creation of the above listed institutions. Here communication is examined as the driving force behind the two processes of professionalisation: the internal, community creating and boundary forming aspect; and the external process through which the community gains external recognition of their claims. For Victorian practitioners during the period of this study the internal process drives the creation of the societies, the journal, and the medical school, whereas the external process is typified by the campaign for ‘Medical Reform’ that sees the community engage in agitation for legislative backing of their conception of medicine as science over other alternate medicines. Communication was not isolated within the colony. As such the place of the Victorian medical community as a node within transnational networks of knowledge exchange is examined. As Victoria was better integrated into these networks than its colonial neighbours, an examination of the involvement of said flow of information in the creation of professional communities is considered an important part of this analysis. Behind these processes of community creation, I trace a thread of disunity sparked by professional differences. Highly publicised arguments over differences in medical opinion play out in the colonial press. This comes to a head at the end of the period of study. Despite their focus on communication the medical community ignores the role their public conduct plays in this process. The end result is that, while they were able to create these lasting institutions, their public conduct saw the public’s opinion of them stay low through to the end of the century.
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    Through Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia
    Evans, Gretel Frances Rose ( 2019)
    Natural disasters are a significant feature of the Australian environment. In a country with a rich history of immigration, it is therefore surprising that historians have not yet examined the specific challenges faced by immigrants within this hazardous environment. This thesis examines migrants’ memories and experiences of bushfires and floods in Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and regional case studies, this thesis explores the entanglement of migration and natural disaster in Australia and in the lives of migrants. Oral history interviews with migrants who have experienced bushfires in Victoria or floods in Maitland, New South Wales, are at the heart of this study. This thesis contributes to scholarship in three distinct fields—migration and environmental history, and disaster studies—and brings them together through an examination of migrants’ memories of bushfires and floods in Australia. Although traumatic experiences, displacement, and a changed and challenged sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment are common themes of both migrants and survivors of fire and flood, rarely have the similarities between these experiences been noted. This thesis is not a history of natural disasters in Australia, nor a retelling of a history of immigration to Australia, but an exploration of experiences of ‘double displacement’. This thesis argues that migrants’ recollections reveal how their burgeoning sense of home, community and attachment to place and environment was challenged by natural disasters. It highlights how their experience of ‘double displacement’ contributed to a new sense of home and belonging in a natural disaster-prone country.
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    A networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895
    Silberberg, Susan ( 2015)
    Current scholarship on empire considers those Britons engaged in processes of colonisation as culturally homogeneous, but this view negates their cultural complexity. From the first forays of the Port Phillip Association, Jewish settlers and investors have been attached to Melbourne. Although those settling in Melbourne were themselves predominantly British, they brought with them not only the networks of empire, but also the intersecting diasporas of European Jewry and the new and expanding English-speaking Jewish world. This thesis considers how the cosmopolitan outlook and wide networks of the Jewish community helped shape Melbourne.
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    Factory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920
    Thornton, Danielle Labhaoise ( 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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    The emergence of a bayside suburb: Sandringham, Victoria c. 1850-1900
    Gibb, Donald Menzies ( 1971-03)
    The past neglect of the Australian city by historians is frequently the subject of lament. The neglect can be highlighted by noting that not only has the impact of the city been generally avoided in Australian historiography despite its overarching importance but also by the fact that Melbourne and Sydney still lack biographies. By contrast, major British and United States cities have had substantial treatment. Therefore, in the circumstance of very considerable gaps in Australian urban historiography, there is probably little need to justify a research topic which tackles the emergence of Sandringham, a Melbourne suburb in the late 19th century. Apart from the narrow and local purpose of providing a means by which local residents can further identify themselves with their community, a suburb history can provide a case study in urbanization which can be of relevance to the whole field of urban history and more specifically, it can enrich the written history of the city of which it is part.
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    The state of modern Greek language as spoken in Victoria
    Tamis, Anastasios ( 1986)
    This thesis reports a sociolinguistic study, carried out between 1981 and 1984, of the state of the Modern Greek (MG) language in Australia, as spoken by native-speaking first-generation Greek immigrants in Victoria. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of those characteristics of the linguistic behaviour of these Greek Australians which can be attributed to the contact with English and to other environmental, social and linguistic influence. (For complete abstract open document)
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    The hospital south of the Yarra: a history to celebrate the centenary of Alfred Hospital Melbourne 1871-1971
    Mitchell, Ann M. ( 1972-02)
    Although this work was commissioned for the purpose of celebrating Alfred Hospital’s first one hundred years, I have made no effort to cover all of those years. I have set out: 1. To isolate the historical precedents for current hospital procedures and in particular to explore the relationship between Alfred Hospital and the State Government. This task was burdened by the scarcity of early hospital records and of research in related fields of charitable and social welfare - which emphasizes the value of rescuing the hospital’s fast vanishing past from oblivion. 2. By attention to human relationships (that constantly inconsistent element in all institutional affairs) to evoke those unique qualities which distinguish Alfred Hospital from other similar hospitals. 3. To convey what the Alfred meant to the greatest number of people associated with it. 4. To provide a useful source of reference.
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    Labour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914
    Raymond, Melanie ( 1987-05)
    This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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    The Victorian charity network in the 1890's
    Swain, Shurlee Lesley ( 1976-06)
    Poverty was widespread in Victorian society in the later nineteenth century, but the colony remained proud that it had not had to resort to a Poor Law in order to meet the needs of the less fortunate of its citizens. Instead, the relief of the destitute was the responsibility of a large number of voluntary charitable agencies, most financially dependent on the government to a greater or lesser extent, but totally under the control of those private citizens who chose and were able to make regular donations. (For complete precis open document)
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    E.H. Lascelles and the Victorian Mallee: a survey of settlement 1850-1905
    Wessels, Sheila Frances ( 1966)
    This survey deals with a portion of the Victorian Mal1ee, in the North-West of the state, stretching from Lake Corrong across to Lake Tyrrell. From 1883 to 1890 the area under wheat in Victoria remained stagnant at about 1,100,000 acres as the process of settling farmers on pastoral lands slowed down. The one area in Victoria where the wheatlands increased in the 1890's and 1900's was the Mallee. E. H. Lascelles was largely responsible for the rapid extension of wheat growing in the area during the 1890's. Geographical considerations play a large part in the Mallee story. The area is isolated, the Mallee growth distinctive and the rainfall light and unpredictable. This survey is an attempt to trace the interaction of man and this environment, with the necessary changes and adaptations which took place as the squatters gave way before the selectors. However because the Mallee covers such a large area - virtually all of the North-West corner of the state - it was impossible to survey the whole in such a short study. So E. H. Lascelles and the belt of country in which he was primarily interested formed a suitable and contained segment of the area, with concentration upon the sub-division schemes at Hopetoun and Tyrrell Downs.