School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemSocial and scientific factors in the development of Melbourne's early water supply( 1981)The research towards this thesis commenced in 1978 during a period of sabbatical leave from Melbourne State College. I would like to thank the College Council for the opportunity to consult material at the British Library and the Wellcome Institute, London. In my often fruitless searches for material I have been grateful for the knowledge and goodwill of many librarians and archivists. I would like to particularly acknowledge the assistance of Mr. R. Price, Wellcome Institute, London; Miss A. Tovell, Australian Medical Association library, Melbourne; Miss W. Johns, Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Library; and the reference staff of the La Tribe Library and the Victorian Public Records Office. My supervisor Miss D. Dyason introduced me to the history of public health. Her expertise and wide knowledge were utilised extensively throughout this project. I will always be grateful to Ingrid Barker for her ability to translate my endless rough drafts and marginal notes into a typed manuscript. Finally, I wish to dedicate this thesis to my wife, Dawn, who more than anyone else encouraged me to continue my part-time studies and finally complete this research.
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ItemMcCrea, a matter of paradigms( 1980)
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ItemBodies in revolt: a look at three Melbourne based performance artists( 1995)This thesis considers the work of three locally based performance artists; Jill Orr, Linda Sproul and Stelarc. Their performance work will be discussed with specific reference to the ways in which the human body is used and signified. Performance art is an anti-formalist practice which addresses embodied existence by placing 'the body' at the fore of the performance event. I will explore the themes which arise out of the selected performances by these well known performance artists, and in particular, I will demonstrate that the lived human body is continuously produced and reproduced through enactments, rendering essentialist notions of sex, gender and identity outdated. The human body is viewed as always and already mediated by the social and the cultural as well as the biological. The following discussion will also unleash an attack on a western philosophical tradition which has cast the body as a fixed and purely natural entity.
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ItemTwentieth century stained glass in Melbourne churches( 1997)This present study is intended to supplement the documented knowledge on Melbourne's church stained glass and to examine the major threads that run concurrently through the century: the continuation of nineteenth century images, techniques and themes and the influence of modernism on stained glass. It seemed appropriate to chronologically follow from Down's closing date of 1910, subsequently revised to cover the early years of the century and to close with the flurry of activity surrounding the Bicentennial Year, 1988. (From introduction)
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ItemPiece pipes: clay tobacco pipes from the site of "Little Lon", Melbourne, Australia( 1998)This thesis describes, discusses and illustrates some of the pipes from intact deposits at the historic Melbourne site of 'Little Lon'. A discussion of the current state of pipe research with specific reference to the situation in Australia - is followed by a background to 19th century clay tobacco pipes, which includes a background to Australian Aboriginal pipe-smoking, gender issues in smoking, and a discussion of the possible existence of a pipe industry in the State of Victoria. A summary of the history and archaeology of the site of 'Little Lon' is then given. The results of earlier artefactual, architectural, and historical research into several pits from the site are outlined, after which the pipes from these same areas of the site are described, discussed, and compared with the findings from other evidence at the site. Selected pipes of special interest are then discussed in greater detail, and a background to the manufacturers represented at the site is given. The work concludes with a discussion of the 'Little Lon' pipes and suggested directions for future research into clay tobacco pipes, particularly those found in Australian sites.
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ItemThe yeast is red( 1994)The Yeast is Red is a case study of the Australian new left of the late sixties. The new left initially emerged as part of a movement of growing opposition to the Vietnam War. The war shattered the previously dominant framework of 'Cold War' assumptions and profoundly altered the Australian political culture. Even though Vietnam and the associated conscription of male youths was the catalyst for the youth radicalisation of the sixties which produced the new left, the new radical consciousness was caused also by the effects of the social and cultural changes of the period. While actively opposing the foreign war, theorists of the new left began to develop an original and sophisticated critique, based partly on the demand for more participatory democratic forms, of their own society. Vietnam, an increasingly unpopular involvement, became a metaphor for what was seen as a suffocating and conformist malaise at home.
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ItemEvolution of a zoo: a history of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, 1857-1900( 1990)The Melbourne Zoo in the late twentieth century is a popular venue which attracts up to one and a half million visitors per year. It has a large income gathered from entrance fees, Government contribution and private sponsorship. The gardens are most attractive, some of the enclosures are of the latest design, there is an active and innovative education program which reaches large numbers of school children every year, the breeding programs have achieved some measure of success, and the collection of animals is large and diverse. Yet there is something discomfiting about an institution which holds baboons in wire cages with concrete floors and tigers in an enclosure not much bigger than a tennis court. A history of the institution can shed light on why the Zoo now incorporates such features; more importantly it can assist the contemporary administration in planning a Zoo by identifying the historical legacies and evaluating their relevance for a twenty-first century audience.
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ItemGood men and true: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853( 1986)Good men and true is the phrase used by the Commandant of the 1842 Corps of Native Police in summing up for Superintendent LaTrobe the outcome of the first experimental expedition of the Corps to the Western District. It is the age-old Service accolade, bespeaking praise and affection and pride in the troops under the command. This is a history of those men. Since Stanner wrote over twenty years ago that the Aborigines had been left out of Australian history, much has been written about them. Perhaps impelled by emergent black nationalism, maybe running parallel with it, this generation of writing about the Australian past has been useful and necessary in raising Australian consciousness to the extent necessary to take seriously the Aboriginal part of our joint past. To a large extent though, it has been an ethnocentric discussion of white behaviour towards Aborigines producing the Aboriginal people as subjects who seem to stand stock still, as one reviewer has said, and allow things to happen to them. It has produced the cultural perception of past and dead Aboriginal people as mainly victims, or in a few exceptional cases as heroic figures of resistance. Broome's observation about one chapter in one book is capable of general extension - we have replaced an earlier historical falsehood of a non-violent frontier with a new stereotype of a violent one. It could be added - with clearly defined and allocated roles, and moral evaluation thrown in for good measure. There is much truth in these histories, but even taken together, they do not encompass truth: they do not take account of positive Aboriginal choices. Our models of explanation, Stanner wrote, have been based either on the dramatic secondary causes - violence, disease, neglect, prejudice, or on the structure of Aboriginal society or both, but they have not taken into account Aboriginal initiatives towards European society, their curiosity, their zest for living, their choices, their creations. This study concerns itself with one of their choices - it is a history of co-operation, an Aboriginal success story. Why it has not been told before is puzzling: a cursory glance at the secondary section of the Bibliography (which is select, noting only those works which specifically mention the Corps) is sufficient to demonstrate a widespread awareness in the past of the Native Police Corps of the Port Phillip District. Yet out of all those passing mentions, it could scarcely be said that our knowledge has been advanced; five attempts only have been made to constitute the Corps as a subject of knowledge, and none to understand the men. Spender's question must at least be asked here, though it cannot be answered - "Why do we know so little about ... blacks for example, and why is so much of what we do know about them false, negative or derogatory. Who has made this knowledge, on what basis, and for what reasons?” Shades of Foucault. The explanatory processes used by white historians (which black historians reject) still draw their inspiration from Elkin's work. The story of Aboriginal co-operation in policing resembles to some extent the adaptive response which Elkin has described as intelligent parasitism. It was more though than that. Parasitism, however intelligent might well be an accurate description of the actions of men who choose a way of life for what they can get out of it, and abandon it when they get a better offer; or simply abandon it when its attractions dim, but it does not come anywhere near explaining in this particular instance the evident bonds of affection and loyalty which developed between the men who joined and their European officers. In this story, feelings matter. The Government's initial aim in setting up a Native Police Corps in the Port Phillip District was two-fold: it wanted a policing force to deal with bushrangers, and at the same time, it hoped to "civilise" the men of the Corps. In this work, the civilising aim is ignored, except in so far as it was expressed in regulations for living, though it may be noted in passing that the Corps was described as the only success of all the Government's policy initiatives with regard to Aboriginal people. But success in European terms is not the issue. This enquiry is directed at the terms of existence for the men themselves; it seeks to tell the story of their choice, and to understand and explain it. The story and the explanation both turn around the dual consciousness of being Aboriginal and being a policeman.
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Item"Gentlemen, the ladies have come to stay!": the entry of women into the medical profession in Victoria and the founding of the Queen Victoria Hospital( 1987)In 1890 Emma Constance stone became the first woman to be registered as a doctor in Australia. Unable to gain admission to an Australian medical school, she obtained her qualifications overseas. While she was away women gained entry to the Melbourne Medical School. Stone, and the Melbourne pioneering medical women, the first of whom graduated in 1891, later went on to perform a wide variety of medical work, but their most outstanding achievement was the foundation of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital for Women in 1896. The pioneers encountered hostility from the medical profession, especially from the male medical students, and enjoyed widespread support: from women who welcomed a hospital where they would be treated only by qualified female practitioners. American and British medical women had already started their own hospitals in order to provide health care for women after established hospitals had refused to appoint them. In Melbourne, although similar opposition limited the opportunities of women, they were not completely excluded from hospital staffs. Unlike the overseas hospitals on which it was modelled, the Queen Victoria Hospital was not founded only, or even, perhaps, primarily as a result of exclusion. The more positive aim of providing health care for women by women was a powerful motive behind the setting up of a hospital for women officered by qualified female doctors. (From Introduction)