School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemWith my needle: embroidery samplers in colonial Australia( 2008)This thesis examines a group of more than one hundred needlework samplers stitched in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century. It uses them as documents of social history to examine the lives of individual girls and women during that time, and to trace changing expectations of girls, especially in the later decades of the century. Although there are many individual stories that can illuminate certain aspects of Australian history such as migration, settlement, and death and mourning, these samplers are most useful as documents in the examination of girls' education and the social expectations transmitted through the education system. It addresses the contradiction between the sampler's continuing presence in girls' schooling and the increasing irrelevance of the skills embodied in it. The thesis argues that needlework samplers retained their place in girls' education well into the twentieth century because of their significance as symbols of feminine accomplishment. They were physical expressions of a definition of respectability that was based on the `feminine ideal' of the nineteenth century and allayed anxiety about girls' involvement in formal schooling.
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ItemBeyond the book: reshaping Australian public history in the Web 2.0 environment( 2008)With digital media and the web becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday lives, few historians have considered in depth the impact that this is having on the ways that history is represented and communicated in the public sphere. This thesis is an examination of how the practice of public history in Australia is being reshaped in the Web 2.0 environment. In the context of new media theory, public history practice is considered in relation to identifiable changes in the ways the web is used and understood. The public historian’s concern with interpreting the past to a public audience means that changing social practices and information patterns are pertinent to their work. This thesis highlights the ways in which different forms of history are being produced, distributed and consumed on the web. It focuses on the potential role of the web user as an active producer of personal and creative interpretations of the past and on how experimental public history practices in the Web 2.0 environment have emerged in response to changing audiences. This study argues that the rise of Web 2.0 is reflected by personalised, ubiquitous, democratic and innovative public history practices on the web. Through an in depth analysis of The Powerhouse Museum collection search and YouTube as case studies, this thesis shows how increased participation, the proliferation of user-generated content, social networking and existing practices by users in the Web 2.0 environment reshapes public history. This thesis goes beyond conceiving of the web as a site of historical source material, both digitised and born-digital, to an understanding of the value of participatory media and informal communication in enabling the sharing of historical knowledge and materials between and among networks of people on the web.
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ItemRoger Barlow: Tudor trade and the Atlantic world( 2008)This thesis is about Roger Barlow. He was born near Colchester, sometime between 1480 and 1496, into a family with connections to the woollen cloth trade, and he died in Pembrokeshire in 1553. Barlow lived and traded in Seville during the 1520s as a member of a community of English merchants who prospered there. When Sebastian Cabot sailed from Seville in search of a route to the Moluccas or Spice Islands, Barlow accompanied him and joined in his exploration of the Rio de la Plata. He returned to Castile in late 1528 before returning to England around 1530 and marrying the daughter of a Bristol merchant. In the mid 1530s, Barlow moved to Pembrokeshire and cooperated with his brothers to further the Crown's policy for Wales while building up an estate around the dissolved commandery of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem at Slebech. He retained his links with trading networks in London and Bristol and in 1541 presented the king with a cosmography, subsequently titled A Brief Summe of Geographie, and a proposal, initially developed with fellow merchant, Robert Thorne. The crux of the proposal was that the English should undertake exploratory voyages to establish a trade route to the East via the Northwest Passage. As Barlow had inserted his personal account of the Rio de la Plata, including a description of a Tupi cannibal feast, into his cosmography, this would have been the first personal account of the Americas to appear in English, had Henry supported its publication. The contention of this thesis is that Roger Barlow's story is significant because it reveals the complex and influential role of guilds and informal merchant networks during the Henrician period, the nature of England's trading relationship with Spain and its Atlantic settlements before the Reformation, and the reactions of merchants, power brokers and monarchs to the New World during the first half of the sixteenth century. As well as connecting a myriad of geographical locations, Barlow's story links the mercantile world with that of the landed gentry and the clergy at a time when both social structures and forms of belief were being challenged. Barlow accumulated a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for an Englishman in the first half of the sixteenth century. Such knowledge was the bedrock of the exploration, settlement, colonization and mercantile developments that gained momentum in the century that followed.
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ItemBroken promises: Aboriginal education in south-eastern Australia, 1837-1937( 2008)This thesis is a comparative study of the education of Aboriginal children from 1837-1937 in the colonies (later states) of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, which together form the south-eastern, and most heavily settled, portion of the Australian continent. It explores early missionary education, the consolidation of colonial authorities' control over schools and the shift to government-run education and training for Aboriginal children of mixed-descent in particular, as part of wider ‘assimilation’ programs. It also pays attention to Aboriginal responses to, protests about, and demands for education throughout this period of rapid change. The thesis demonstrates that missionary, colonial and government attempts to educate Aboriginal people in the south-east constituted an attempt to transform Aboriginal people's subjectivity to suit various aims: for conversion to Christianity, for colonial control, or for training for ‘useful’ purposes. The thesis argues, however, that these attempts constituted a ‘broken promise’ to Aboriginal people. The promise was, that once educated, Aboriginal people might join and participate in colonial society. Instead, they were relegated to its economic and geographical fringes, dispossessed as settlers spread across their land and accorded only liminal positions in the settler-colonies and later, states of the Australian Commonwealth. Temporally, this thesis is bound by two government reports which were influential in the development of colonial and state governance of Aboriginal people. The first is the 1837 British Parliament's Select Committee on Aborigines: British Settlements report; the second, published exactly one hundred years later, is the Australian intergovernmental Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of State Aboriginal Authorities of 1937. The thesis also makes use of extensive missionary and government archival material from the south-east. As the first multi-state Aboriginal education history, this thesis offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-Aboriginal relations in Australia as well as interrogating the reasons for the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Aboriginal welfare policy. It places this study within a broader transimperial and transnational framework of colonialism, empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, demonstrating that the education of Aboriginal children was not a single project with a single aim. Rather, it constituted a multitude of approaches, sometimes disparate, formed in response to a broad rubric of colonisation and empire as well as local specificities and situations. In doing this, the thesis engages with the significant methodological challenge of historicising post-contact Aboriginal education, an aspect of the colonial project which was, for Aboriginal people in the south-east, both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously.
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ItemIn her gift: activism and altruism in Australian women's philanthropy 1880-2005( 2008)This thesis examines the experiences of Australian women philanthropists who donated money to social causes and public institutions in the decades from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a colonial society where wealth generation and its disposal was essentially the province of men, a small but significant number of women who were wives and daughters of men of substance found themselves in a position to use family resources for their own chosen philanthropic ends. They did so in a context of colonial women's activism through women's associations, and derived motivation from their religious faith. Australian women's philanthropy drew upon British and American traditions. The remarkable wealth generation of the industrialising United States underwrote philanthropic women's very considerable donations, deployed with a moral authority that was fostered by evangelical Protestantism. Likewise, in Britain, evangelical work was supplemented by funding from elite wealthy women who could access familial fortunes. Australian women's philanthropy was distinctive because, despite the country's comparatively modest prosperity, the energetic and pragmatic association of women around philanthropic causes, often with a religious imperative, emboldened women of independent means to become exceptional givers. In the first half of the twentieth century, possibilities for women's active involvement in philanthropy expanded. Women in Australia gained political citizenship for federal elections in 1902, and by 1908, had been awarded political rights in each state. The 'new woman citizen' was able to assume a stronger profile in the workforce, in the professions and in business; social change that was mirrored in the activism of women philanthropists. Rapid economic growth after World War Two, and a developing national consciousness of the importance of philanthropic endeavours saw the backgrounds of women philanthropists diversify, just as a new women's movement arose to challenge and reshape women's public roles. There are undeniable continuities in women's philanthropy from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in direct giving and fundraising, in commitment to women's causes, and in the influence of religion. Nevertheless, by 2005, women were sustaining an unprecedented and outstanding presence, not only as individual philanthropists, but in the highest levels of decision-making in an arena increasingly referred to as the 'third sector' of the economy. They have assumed a central role in the growing number of Australian philanthropic foundations and in the shaping of policies on funding for social change. Moreover there are clear signs that the influence of women in philanthropy, as in other public spheres including mainstream politics, will amplify in future. In investigating the development of women's philanthropy in Australia, with a focus on those who had money within their gift, this thesis profiles over fifty women with specific reference to Mrs Anne Bon, Janet Lady Clarke, Mrs Ivy Brookes, Dr Una Porter, Ms Barbara Blackman, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, and Ms Jill Reichstein.
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ItemThe road to Singapore: Australian defence and foreign policies 1919-1941( 2008)Nationalist historians have argued, variously, that Australia was betrayed by Britain in 1941-42 with the fall of Singapore, and plunged into crisis, or conversely, that the nation was 'armed and ready' for the much feared Japanese invasion. Arguing that neither proposition is true, this thesis establishes that Australia was not armed and ready even for a much feared large-scale Japanese invasion. Nor was the nation ready for the small-scale Japanese attacks which were more probable and which, under Imperial defence, were a local defence responsibility. This thesis explains why Australia was unprepared. It does this by exploring Australian understandings of Imperial defence, assessing Australian responses to international crises 1919-1939, evaluating criticisms of those responses, and analysing the nature of domestic politics. It concludes with a socioeconomic analysis of Australia's key elites - political, military, and industrial.(Open document for complete abstract)