School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe transformation of Australian military heroism during the First World War( 2019)This thesis examines how Australian heroism was defined and represented during the First World War. I present an in-depth analysis of two sets of primary sources: Victoria Cross (VC) medal citations and Australian wartime newspapers. Victoria Cross citations are official British military descriptions of battlefield acts that have earned a serviceman the VC medal and therefore offer a window into how British and dominion commanders awarded and prescribed heroism. My analysis of all British and dominion VC citations, from the institution of the medal in 1856 to the end of the First World War in November 1918, show that the type of act that was primarily awarded the VC changed in late 1916 and early 1917. While most VCs were awarded for acts of saving life before this point, this changed to an emphasis on acts of killing. Statistics compiled from VC citations also show that Australians were exceptional in the way they were awarded the medal during the conflict, receiving proportionally more awards for killing and fewer for life saving than any other British or dominion nation. Analysis of major Australian newspapers’ representations of military heroism during the war reveals a similar trend. Australian newspapers primarily represented stretcher-bearers and wounded men as the heroes of Gallipoli in reports throughout 1915, yet from the entry of Australian forces into the Western Front in 1916, newspaper representations of heroism focused far more on men who killed the enemy. This thesis offers an original contribution to the literature by showing how and why pre-war ideals of heroism transformed in Australia during the course of the First World War. It specifically identifies the dominant model of Australian heroism that existed in 1914, and traces how it was displaced by new ideals of heroism considered more necessary and apt for the conditions of the Western Front. In identifying the shifting ideals that were officially recognised and widely represented as epitomising the highest forms of military valour, this thesis is the first to examine the nature of Australian hegemonic heroism during the First World War. In analysing the dominant heroic model in Australia during the First World War and showing how and why this model transformed over the course of the conflict, this study presents new insights into the nature of heroism and masculinity in wartime Australia.
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ItemThrough Fire and Flood: Migrant Memories of Displacement and Belonging in Australia( 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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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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ItemBeyond the aetiology debate: the “great LSD scandal” at Newhaven Private Hospital & the social foundations of mental health legislation in Victoria, Australia( 2017)This research presents a case for the extension of existing analyses of Australian psychiatric scandals beyond the conclusion that such events are an inherent feature of the profession by virtue of its failure to resolve the aetiology debate. A mid-century impasse in the aetiology debate – the continuous shifting over time of professional commitment between organic and environmental aetiologies of mental illness – has been identified as the catalyst for the emergence of the therapeutic paradigm of eclecticism that fostered the deep sleep therapy and ‘Therapeutic Community’ programs that were central to Australia’s two infamous psychiatric scandals at Chelmsford and Townsville, respectively. While these two affairs were enduring the scrutiny of commissions of inquiry, the recommendations of which translated to the legislative reform of mental health services in the states of New South Wales and Queensland, a third such scandal was unfolding at Newhaven Private Hospital in Victoria involving the “injudicious use” of therapeutic LSD. By the late 1980s and early 90s, a number of former “patients” of Newhaven emerged claiming that they had never suffered any mental illness and that the LSD they had received had not been administered for therapeutic purposes but rather as a recruitment tool for a fringe religious sect known as The Family that had commandeered the hospital and the loyalty of a number of its staff. What constituted the scandal at Newhaven, however, was the fact that these activities continued unchallenged despite the implementation of statutory regulations – the Poisons (Hallucinogenic Drugs) Regulations 1967 – designed specifically to protect against the abuse of therapeutic hallucinogens. Having avoided any formal inquiry of its own, the Newhaven case represented not only a compelling narrative history opportunity, but also a test of the robustness of the prevailing argument that such scandals emerge as a consequence of the profession’s failure to achieve consensus on the aetiology of mental illness against the implication that inadequate legislation facilitated the abuse. Using the case of Newhaven as a working example, this research analyses the historical mental health legislation of Victoria and parliamentary debates to construct a legislative history of the aetiology debate and confirm its role in the emergence of psychiatric scandal, arguing that the Poisons (Hallucinogenic Drugs) Regulations 1967, and indeed mental health policy more broadly, were in fact products of the debate. Furthermore, it demonstrates how, far from being insulated within the profession of psychiatry, the debate itself was informed by wider prevailing social, cultural, political and economic trends. The abuse of therapeutic LSD unfolded under permissive regulations which reflected the permissive nature of broader mental health policy embodied in the Mental Hygiene Acts and their signature initiative of deinstitutionalisation. This permissiveness was a symptom of the underlying atmosphere of eclecticism that characterised mid-century psychiatry in Victoria as it sought to accommodate simultaneously the biological and social bases for the eugenic and community-based measures, respectively, that developed in response to the co-emergent social forces of the ‘mental hygiene’ and ‘anti-psychiatry’ movements.
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ItemAn imaginary economy : gambling, commodity, meaning( 2005)This thesis draws on the example of the contemporary phenomenon of electronic gaming machine (EGM) use in the Australian state of Victoria in order to construct an argument in the mode of social theory, relating the psyche's demand for meaning to the nature of consumption in contemporary capitalism. The thesis argues that EGM consumption may be viewed as an example of commodification of the 'interiority' of the subject. Two paths are utilised. The first is a theoretically oriented discussion of the necessity impelling humans to the generation of meaning, and the manner in which this meaning is created. This discussion also encompasses the importance of signification and processes of institution for the maintenance of heteronomous society, and the pseudo-mastery of social institutions. It involves a discussion of the creation of the social individual as consuming individual. The second path is a discussion of empirical material (including official data and the accounts of gamblers) which is used to generate an argument about the socio-economic processes maintaining heteronomous society, and the development of an ethic of life focussed on intensified forms of capitalist consumption. Arguments drawn from Nietzsche, Weber, Castoriadis and others are utilised to illustrate the fragmentation of the originary monad, required for successful creation of the social subject, and how this process of socialisation draws and must draw on processes of meaning creation and signification to create a social relationship formed between society and the psyche, via the concatenation of the social and radical imaginaries. The centrality of the significations of commodity and money is utilised to argue that consumption of EGMs is an exemplary example of contemporary consumption, the consumption of interiority, in which consumption has become a duty and an ethic, providing apparent access to a much desired state where monadic unity is apparently available, at a price.
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ItemNeither bad nor mad : the competing discourses of psychiatry, law and politics( 1999)Garry David's dramatic threats of violence against individuals and the community, as well as his acts of gross self-mutilation, set in train a discourse between psychiatry, the law and politics, which focused on the place of the severely personality-disordered in the institutional context. The Victorian Labor Government's determination to detain him in custody, in the absence of either criminality or a legally-defined mental illness, tested the way in which the historically uncertain boundary between 'madness and 'badness' is drawn, as well as the differences between the concept of a mental illness and a mental disorder. It is argued that Garry shared many of the characteristics of other personality-disordered prisoners', who are ultimately released and, therefore, the reasons for his preventive detention and singular actions of the Government need to be understood, especially in the light of the social justice strategies, which had enhanced the rights of mentally disordered offenders by limiting their detention in custody. A major theme explores why he was singled out, and the significance of the Government's decision to proceed with the implementation of 'one-person' legislation, which was clumsily drafted, out of step with fundamental legal principles, and came dangerously close to making him a martyr through the exercise of powers of attainder. A sub-theme considers the interaction between psychiatry and the law, particularly in the courtroom, and the different way in which each discipline constructs its response to the same problem. It was concluded that the state's unusual action was triggered by the coalescence of a number of factors, rather than any clear demonstration of Garry David's propensity for dangerousness, apart from his sel-mutilation. Of particular importance were: the arousal of intuitive fears about dangerous persons in the wake of some recent multiple killings; the Government's need to reaffirm its support for the Victoria Police; the influence of structural changes within forensic psychiatry; and finally, the way in which Garry's dramatic and articulate threats were intensified by his ability to violate his own body and by his unusual tenacity in resisting carceral pressure. The legacy of Garry David was three fold: more general preventive detention legislation was implemented under the provisions of the Sentencing Act 1991 (Vic); a niche was created for the treatment of some of the more severely personality-disordered; and the High. Court of Australia rejected singular legislation for dangerous persons. This case is a palpable demonstration of the need to safeguard the traditional distinction between the Executive and Judiciary, and it points to the inadvisability of governments directly intervening in professional areas of decision-making.
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ItemThe provision of hospital care in country Victoria 1840's to 1940s( 1999)Many hospital histories have been written whose authors have usually made exaggerated claims about the significance of individual hospitals. This narrow approach fails to take into account the influences of ideological and economic changes such as the rise of the Labour movement between 1890 and 1915, the erosion of the charitable ideal, the secularisation of Australian society and the increased acceptance of certain welfare provisions as a right rather than a privilege. This results in some misconceptions and a blinkered view of hospital development. A comparative analysis of how country hospitals were administered during this early founding period is important because it reveals that prior to 1862, three categories of hospitals were established, namely, working men's hospitals, custodial or hospital/benevolent institutions and semi-voluntary hospitals. All were controlled by hospital committees dominated by lay community leaders. Country hospitals provided an important focus for small communities with hospital committees defending their independence and resisting attempts by central authorities to wrest administrative control from them. The control exerted by an increasingly centralist State government over hospitals in country Victoria (heavily influenced by the medical profession), hindered their development to a greater degree than those in metropolitan areas. The mechanisms for achieving this were the enforcement of the Appropriation Acts from 1862 and the rigid implementation of the 1923 Hospital and Charities Act. Both of these kept hospitals tied to the voluntary/philanthropic model (or semi-voluntary model because charities received significant funding from the state) until the 1930s thereby delaying the establishment of more viable community hospitals. After the early 1930s, a transition from charities to community hospitals occurred. A major source of their concern was the already inequitable levels of funding compared to metropolitan hospitals. This inequity meant that Hospital Committees spent much time raising funds through enlisting subscribers, fund-raising and soliciting bequests. Their first collective action was the formation of the Country Hospitals Association in 1918. The number of charitable hospitals in country Victoria grew rapidly from fourteen in 1859 to thirty-four in 1891 and sixty-one in 1923. In that year there were also 476 private hospitals, which prior to the 1890s were little more than nursing homes. Whilst the Charities Board sought to control the spread of public hospitals, hospitals established by the Bush Nursing Association proliferated outside their control, leading to conflict between the Board and the Association. Funding for public hospitals dropped significantly between the 1890s and 1930s. At the same time there was an increase in the demand for beds in public hospitals by the lower middle classes who found private hospital costs prohibitive and wanted the higher standard of care provided in public hospital facilities. An increased dependence on medical technology led to an urgent need for the upgrading of Victorian country hospitals' technologically obsolete equipment. Additionally, Victorian hospitals were heavily influenced by North American views on efficiency and standardisation. Finally, the impetus to improve hospitals came in the 1930s when unemployment relief funds and a gambling tax levy subsidised new hospital facilities.
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ItemA networked community: Jewish immigration, colonial networks and the shaping of Melbourne 1835-1895( 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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ItemA history of Churchill Island: settlement, land use and the making of a heritage site( 2015)This thesis utilises a public history approach to respond to the desires of the project’s public stakeholders to obtain a rigorous and detailed history of Churchill Island, and to examine its nature as a heritage site. It examines how Churchill Island has been variously imagined and used to make a permanent settler colonial space. In doing so it argues that the history of the island offers a rich example of the complexity of settlement in Victoria. An exploration of the intersections between the practices of community engagement, academia and history, the thesis responds to the challenges thrown up by the History Wars and the Churchill Island Project by making a history of settlement that is both academically critical and publicly accepted.
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ItemGreat Britain's exiles sent to Port Phillip, Australia, 1844-1849: Lord Stanley's experiment( 2014)This thesis examines the origin, operation and outcome of the exile scheme implemented in Port Phillip between 1844 and 1849. It argues that the scheme announced by Lord Stanley, British Colonial Secretary, was an experiment in prisoner reform and labour deployment originating in imperial desperation and expediency. It notes how the scheme divided European settlers and inflamed the issue of separation from New South Wales. I conclude that this significant, often-overlooked episode in Australia's immigration history had positive outcomes for many, whilst others re-offended, partly due to government mismanagement. The early 1840s was a time of economic distress and increasing crime in Britain, but also a time of changing attitudes to prison reform. This period also witnessed economic depression in the Australian colonies. The exile scheme was created largely in response to the deteriorating employment circumstances in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, to which the exiles were destined. One aim of the experiment was to provide opportunities for the exiles to begin new lives in the colony. Between 1844 and 1849, Britain transported to Port Phillip nine shiploads of conditionally-pardoned exiles from Pentonville, Millbank and Parkhurst Prisons. These 1,727 men and boys had experienced lengthy periods under the ‘separate system’ of incarceration, during which they learned a trade and improved their literacy levels. Upon arrival they landed as free men in Melbourne, Geelong and Portland, provided they did not return to Britain during the remainder of their sentences. The despatches containing Lord Stanley’s announcement and instructions accompanied the exiles in the first ship, the Royal George. These despatches were addressed to the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, to the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, and to the Superintendent of Port Phillip, Charles La Trobe. The exiles were enthusiastically received by pastoralists anxious for rural labourers, but stigmatized and feared by the townspeople who dubbed them ‘Pentonvillains’. The dread of a convict taint, inflamed by the press, resulted in the exiles’ presence becoming a catalyst which unleashed a spirit of defiance amongst the townspeople against the imperial government’s policy. Their response accelerated political action, which re-emerged in the campaigns of the Anti-Transportation League. This thesis seeks to give greater voice to the exiles and their descendants. In so doing, it draws on a wealth of archival sources in Britain and Australia, supplements limited secondary sources on this topic and utilises for the first time information provided by family historians. In particular, this thesis has benefitted from a meticulous examination of the prison registers. My thesis argues that while the exile scheme had positive outcomes for many participants who established productive lives in Australia, others were less successful in the colony. Finally, this thesis asserts that, despite the failures, the exile scheme was a qualified success, and that many exiles and their descendants have contributed significantly to Australian society.
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