School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemIn Black and White: The rise, fall and on-going consequences of a racial slur in Australian newspapers( 2019)In Australia, racism cannot be extricated from settler expropriation of indigenous labour. In this thesis, I trace this entanglement through the lens of a single word – ‘nigger’ – as it has appeared in Australian print media in reference to Aboriginal people and Papuans, from when the term gained currency in the 1860s until its dwindling nearly a century later. I argue that increasing use of ‘nigger’ represented a shift in the way settlers perceived these peoples. Settlers began to conceive of indigenous peoples less as primitive savages or land-occupying natives and more as an exploitable source of cheap labour. This occurred as part of a global process, as Europeans and especially Neo-Europeans consolidated and invested in a dichotomous discourse of race, increasingly figuring themselves as ‘white’ and those whose bodies and labour they exploited as ‘black’. While the use of the slur itself rose and fell, the hierarchical racial schemata of which it was the herald are yet to be dismantled.
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ItemPhotography for history’s sake: the Military History and Information Section in the Middle East 1941-1942( 2014)This thesis explores the creation, objectives and operation of the Military History and Information Section (MH&IS) in the Middle East from August 1941 to mid-1942. It compares the MH&IS to equivalent official war photographic organisations in Britain and the United States, and considers the photographic results of the MH&IS in the Middle East. The concept of historical record photography held by its leader, John Treloar, is evaluated according to a set of themes.
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ItemSustaining the resistance: the role of Australian activist organisations in resisting the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, 1975 - 1991( 2014)This thesis focuses on the activities of Melbourne based activist groups ACFOA and AETA as representative aid and solidarity organisations as defined in transnational activist literature. It explores their early activities, and how they responded to changing circumstances through the 1970s and 1980s inside the territory, within Australia, and internationally. It will show how activist efforts evolved from solidarity to advocacy, from expressions of outrage to considered framing of issues, and how a nexus between the two organisations developed that facilitated them playing complementary and effective roles in sustaining the idea of continued resistance within Australian politics, media, and international civil society. It does not attempt to chart the entire history of the organisations, or that of the independence struggle. Instead, through ACFOA and AETA it seeks to provide the first account of specific Australian activism in the under-explored period of 1975 - 1991. (From introduction)