School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Subject: Victoria × Subject: politics and government × Start date: 1960 × End date: 1979 ×

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    Groups in Victorian politics, 1889-1894
    Finlayson, Michael George ( 1963-12)
    To most Australian historians, the political history of Victoria during the final decades of the nineteenth century is a closed book. Except for the considerable attention bestowed on the labor party, which was after all of minor importance in Victoria until the early years of this century, few historians indeed have ventured to comment even briefly on this colony’s political life.
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    Instability in governments and parties in Victoria in the 1920s
    Vines, Margaret ( 1975)
    While many books and theses have been written about Federal politics, in the 1920s, and about Federal political figures, nothing substantial has yet been written about the Victorian Politics in the same period. Federal politics, as happened repeatedly in the events of the 1920s, have overshadowed the State in the historiography of the period also. The consequence for the researcher is a complete dearth of secondary material. In the absence of any specific historical account of Victoria in the 1920s, secondary source material amounts to: brief references in the fast chronological gallop of a Centennial History; the early years of a biography of a politician who made his mark in Federal politics; or the analysis, usually statistical, of a political scientist who seeks rather to generalise about the Australian scene as a whole. Unfortunately, the same concentration on Federal politics also affects the survival of manuscript material. Very few of the Victorian politicians or their associates have left private papers. The papers of H.W.S. Lawson, Premier 1918-24, were burnt by his son when he died in 1952. The very few who have left papers seem to have retained letters of sympathy or congratulation to the exclusion of much else. This was certainly the case with Sir William McPherson, M.L.A. 1913-1930, and Premier 1928-29. Thus, to gain clues about the behind-the-scenes negotiations and events of the period has been extremely difficult. The complete disappearance of all the official papers of the Nationalist Party compounds the difficulty, the more because they were less inclined than the Country Party or the Labor Party to air their internal dealings in public. The papers of F.W. Eggleston and J. Hume Cook, in the National Library, Canberra, proved invaluable for the period 1917-1924, in the Nationalist Party, but there are no similar sources for the second half of the decade. This shortage of manuscript material has entailed a concentration on newspapers and parliamentary material. The events of Victorian politics, since Federation, but particularly since 1914, have been shrouded in obscurity. My first task was the essential one of finding out what actually happened. For events in the Country Party, B.D. Graham’s “The Formation of the Australian Country Parties” was invaluable. In the absence of any work at all on the Victorian Nationalist Party, I have had to trace the emergence of the Victorian Party in the 1901-17 period and before, as well as its behaviour in the decade of the 1920s. This has meant, in this thesis, a much longer account of the role of the Nationalist Party, than of the Country Party – not because the Nationalist Party was necessarily more important in the political instability of the period, but simply because so much less has previously been know about it. (From Introduction)