School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemSurvival, camraderie and aspirations: the intimate lives of Chinese and Vietnamese women in Melbourne's 1990s textiles industry( 2019)This thesis examines the working subjectivities of female Chinese and Vietnamese textiles workers in 1990s Melbourne, with a particular focus on raced and gendered agencies. While traditional labour historians elucidate worker resistance through protest and trade union dynamics, such a framework does little to account for the 'hidden' agency of migrant workers who were outwardly circumspect and forbearing. Drawing extensively on oral history interviewing and diasporic memory, this thesis takes a ‘history from below’ approach and hones in on the intimate, personal dimensions of garment factory work that were central to the contestation of power. In doing so, it demonstrates how persistence and tacit expressions of resistance in the workplace amongst Chinese and Vietnamese textiles workers were located in interpersonal factory relationships, class aspirations and motherhood.
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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.