School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 1987-05)This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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ItemThe Chinese in Australia 1930-45: beyond a history of racism( 1995)The present thesis is a contribution to the history of the Chinese in Australia. In it, I have endeavoured to look at the relations between European and Chinese settlers in Australia from a perspective other than that of racism. Discrimination against the Chinese was common in all settler societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the basis of archival documentation and in conjunction with contemporary sources, I would suggest that a different history can be told in regard to Australian Chinese. To look at the history of the Chinese in Australia in light of the immigration policy alone ignores other aspects of Australian-Chinese history, aspects which concern the daily lives of those Chinese who lived and worked in Australia as Australian citizens. With due regard to Federal political policies implicated at a bureaucratic level, the actual experiences and achievements of Australian Chinese still indicate that they fared better than most authors on the subject would have us believe. ..... In presenting the results of my research, I do not mean to belittle the experience of racism suffered by people of Chinese ancestry in Australia. This experience has been well documented and is, moreover, still being endured. My point is merely that racism was not the sum total of the Chinese experiences of Australian society. As a recent collection of essays shows, the time has come to write about other aspects of Australia's Chinese history. In this thesis I have documented the attitudes and efforts of the Chinese Nationals and Australian Chinese in Australia during the war years. Their efforts, combined with the Australian Chinese communities' supportive role and the increased wartime interactions with other Australians contributed during this period to establishing a greater understanding between the different communities in Australian society. (From introduction)
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ItemStudies in the relations between Indian and Australian colonies in the nineteenth century( 1987?)Geoffrey Blainey's reference to India in The Tyranny of Distance initiated my interest in researching the relationship between India and Australia in the nineteenth century. While Blainey made several references to India in the early development of colonial Australia, other historians have not developed that issue. I started my research with Blainey’s lead that there were some years in the nineteenth century when Australia seemed to be a satellite of India as well as a colony of England and that cargoes from Bengal fed and equipped the colony and also gave it a hangover. It seemed so obvious that the two 'neighbouring' British colonies have contact with each other and as Blainey pointed out, Australia was so far from England, and communication between the two was so irregular, that Sydney slowly drifted into Asia's net of commerce. (From introduction)
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ItemMagic and science: aspects of Australian business management, advertising and retailing, 1918-40( 1989)This thesis is concerned with four dominant themes: - the rise of a new managerial formation and associated ideology during the inter-war period, which provided an important base for the spread of managerial skill and power in later decades. - the reconstruction by managers of workers as consumers during the inter-war period. Structural and ideological changes in industrial managements, especially in the fields of advertising, media and retailing were important in promoting a particular ethic of consumption. - the role of empirical social sciences, especially economics and legitimating managerial psychology, aspirations in and technology and in fuelling the reconstruction of social and cultural life. - the influence of ideas and developed in America on businessmen, their practice thoughts. values first Australian and their thoughts.
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ItemDarwinism and Australia, 1836-1914( 1992)This thesis is an examination of certain themes and ideas surrounding the development of Darwinism as an intellectual concept in Australian culture. Beginning with a discussion of the manner in which Australian resources played a role in the formulation and growth of Darwin's ideas, it then moves to an analysis of a number of public controversies and debates around aspects of Darwinism which are seen by current Darwinian scholars as being of central importance. The work of a number of Australian scholars is explored to illustrate the way in which evolutionary theory found its way into the academic and public culture of Australia. Finally, discussion is given over to the way in which evolutionary theory became diffused through all areas of intellectual life. Among the chief claims made here are firstly, that, Darwinism played a significant role in the intellectual life of Australia in the last part of the nineteenth-century and that Australians made significant contributions to the development of evolutionary theory. Secondly, it is claimed that for the history of Australian science to have any real meaning it must be understood in its own terms, here on the periphery, and not as an adjunct to events and happenings at the centre. Finally, it is urged here that Australian science and its growth is not bound to a pre-determined and periodised historical development, but that insofar as it is tied to the history of Australia generally, it exhibits the stresses and tensions of the social context in which it exists. At all times this thesis should be seen as an attempt at intellectual history, but one seeking to embed that history within a specific social context.
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ItemThe remaking of youth: a study of juvenile convicts and orphan immigrants in colonial Australia( 1987)One aspect of the development of modern western society upon which liberal democracy has always been self-congratulatory is the ongoing reforms made in the care and treatment of criminal, destitute and neglected youth. Almost every decade since the late eighteenth century has brought with it new, more 'enlightened' juvenile penal and welfare policies. As a corollary, the policies of preceding decades have been disowned, shunned and condemned. This has been the pattern of 'progress'. Progress has always rested on the invocation of an essential dissimilarity between 'then' and 'now'. The past is thus used only to serve as a distant and sometimes shocking backdrop to the enlightened present. If there is one general characteristic of the bulk of work done to date on the history of childhood and youth in western societies, and indeed on the more general history of penal and welfare reform, it is that it celebrates this notion of progress. The past is examined merely in order to assure us of our present state of advance. And so the past, in all its complexity, is not really examined at all. (From Introduction)
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ItemPrivate and public regulation of the general insurance industry in Australia 1897 to 1992( 1993)Only one third of the number of Australian insurance companies that were trading in 1890 survived the financial crisis of the decade that followed. In the wake of these collapses, a group of the major British companies operating in Australia set up a cartel-like organisation in 1897 which set rates and policy terms for the whole country. Through an agency network it controlled distribution, and its inter-company trading rules concerning reinsurance and risk sharing effectively excluded any new opposition. Despite a Federal Royal Commission appointed in 1908 to inquire into the insurance industry, which recommended Commonwealth regulation in 1910, governments did not proceed with legislation. With the pressures of World War I the matter was passed over. This private regulation, known as the 'Tariff', went largely unchallenged until 1974. The Tariff co-existed with State regulation introduced in Queensland in 1916, resisted competition from Lloyd's and other free-riders between the Wars, and adapted to deposit only requirements for insurance companies introduced by the Commonwealth in 1932. It also co-existed with a number of state government insurance companies, the first of which was established in Victoria in 1915. The Tariff distribution system, and the political pressure it applied to keep state offices out of the direct competition they were designed to create, prevented the state offices from making any significant impact on the market. Competitive pressures exerted by overseas brokers, and by new insurers entering the expanding motor vehicle insurance market, eroded Tariff dominance to some extent after World War II, but private regulation was abandoned only after the introduction of the Trade Practices Act 1974. In 1973 the Commonwealth introduced solvency regulation for all general insurance companies. This regulation is still in place. This history offers a rare, perhaps unique, opportunity to compare the behaviour of two markets in the same country, one under private and the other under public regulation. For a period of more than forty years the outcomes of public regulation of the industry in Queensland can be compared with outcomes of private regulation in the rest of the country. It is also possible to measure changes in the market under private regulation arising from some competition after the Second World War, and the further changes which occurred when private regulation was abandoned in the face of the Trade Practices Act 1974. The evidence produces the conclusions that private regulation kept profits and distribution costs at a level that allowed the least efficient companies to remain in the market, and created super-normal profits for the most efficient. State government insurance offices are shown to have been failures as mechanisms for government to regulate markets. Although the present market is shown to be much more efficient, a critique of existing Federal regulation is offered. This increasingly expensive operation has failed to achieve the purpose for which it was established. The failure rate of insurance companies is higher under public regulation that it was before the legislation was introduced, the public are not able to obtain full information of the financial status of insurance companies from the Insurance and Superannuation Commission, and policyholders are not protected by a guarantee fund from company failure. Finally, classic regulatory theory is tested against each of these forms of regulation and their outcomes. The conclusions reached are that these theories could not have predicted either the forms of regulation adopted, or the outcomes of the movements.