School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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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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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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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 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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ItemThe state of modern Greek language as spoken in Victoria( 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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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.
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ItemThe Victorian charity network in the 1890's( 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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ItemFraming Fitzroy: contesting and (de)constructing place and identity in a Melbourne suburb( 2002)This thesis examines the ways in which Melbourne's 'worst suburb', Fitzroy, was constructed, both physically and culturally, from the Great Depression of the 1930s until the gentrification of the suburb in the early 1970s. The thesis argues that an array of institutions, extending from social welfare and slum reform groups to the media and a variety of policing agencies, relentlessly constructed Fitzroy as the site of social evil in Melbourne. It examines the variety of texts, both written and visual, that were utilised to construct a singular and negative representation of Fitzroy that legitimated particular forms of intervention. The thesis critiques and contests this representation through an analysis of the lives of those who lived in Fitzroy in the period covered by this thesis and by using a variety of original sources, including the testimonies of those who lived and worked in Fitzroy. It is a central argument of this thesis that Fitzroy was a place of complexity, vitality and cultural value for those who lived there.