School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Influence of the friendly society movement in Victoria, 1835-1920( 2019)ABSTRACT Entrepreneurial individuals who migrated seeking adventure, wealth and opportunity initially stimulated friendly societies in Victoria. As seen through the development of friendly societies in Victoria, this thesis examines the migration of an English nineteenth-century culture of self-help. Friendly societies may be described as mutually operated, community-based, benefit societies that encouraged financial prudence and social conviviality within the umbrella of recognised institutions that lent social respectability to their members. The benefits initially obtained were sickness benefit payments, funeral benefits and ultimately medical benefits – all at a time when no State social security systems existed. Contemporaneously, they were social institutions wherein members attended regular meetings for social interaction and the friendship of like-minded individuals. Members were highly visible in community activities from the smallest bush community picnics to attendances at Royal visits. Membership provided a social cache and well as financial peace of mind, both important features of nineteenth-century Victorian society. This is the first scholarly work on the friendly society movement in Victoria, a significant location for the establishment of such societies in Australia. The thesis reveals for the first time that members came from all strata of occupations, from labourers to High Court Judges – a finding that challenges conventional wisdom about the class composition of friendly societies. Finally, the extent of their presence in all aspects of society, from philanthropic to military, and rural to urban, is revealed through their activities and influence in their communities. Their physical legacy has diminished as buildings were demolished or re-purposed, but it remains visible in some prominent structures in major Victorian cities. A final legacy is the Victorian community’s on-going financial use of private health insurance cover. This financial prudence has its roots in the friendly society movement. Theirs is largely an invisible history but one deserving of being told.
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ItemAt the intersection of heritage preservation, urban transformation, and everyday life in the twentieth-century Australian city( 2018)This thesis offers a fresh global urban history of the Australian city, its heritage places, and the preservationists who shaped those places. During the twentieth century, Australian urban preservationists – such as architects and planners, boosters and policymakers, heritage consultants and regulators, and activists and everyday people – valued and sought to safeguard many kinds of urban places, comprising buildings, streets, precincts and suburbs and invoking communities, histories, memories and stories. From at least the 1900s, alongside shifts in Europe, North America and elsewhere, the leading impulses for preserving urban heritage – erasure, boosterist, historical, visual and reformist – forming identity and community – resonated in Australia’s modernising cities. During the postwar period (1940s–60s), particularly in the rapidly growing capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, the pursuit of modern urbanism meant city-shapers tended to erase existing environments. Urban Australians still embraced their heritage places, and preservationists furthered the urban heritage processes that drove the 1960s–80s transnational ‘heroic period of conservation’ and the Australian heritage movement. A watershed was the Whitlam Government’s Inquiry into the National Estate (1973–74), which produced an Australian conception for heritage as progressive, democratic, interventionist and integrated. Heritage regimes and their principles and practices were refigured, but contrary to the activists’ demands, preservation never triumphed over other urban priorities. In the 1980s–90s, nevertheless, preservation was strikingly integrated into CBDs and suburbs and their social processes and built forms. Employing rich social history sources and drawing on the insights of urban and heritage studies, this thesis argues that across the twentieth-century Australian city, urban and heritage processes were co-constitutive, relational and entangled. In this study, heritage preservation becomes an integral urban historical process with the potential to enhance cities, places and urban life.
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ItemThe hospital south of the Yarra: a history to celebrate the centenary of Alfred Hospital Melbourne 1871-1971( 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.