School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemAustralia and the Pacific: the ambivalent place of Pacific peoples within contemporary Australia( 2018)My thesis examines the places (real and symbolic) accorded to Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism. It demonstrates how these places reflect and inform the ways in which Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. While acknowledging the important historical and contemporary differences between the New Zealand and Australian contexts, I deploy theoretical concepts and methods developed within the established field of New Zealand- centred Pacific Studies to identify and analyse what is occurring in the much less studied Australian-Pacific context. In contrast to official Australian discourse, the experiences of Pacific people in Australia are differentiated from those of other migrant communities because of: first, Australia’s colonial and neo-colonial histories of control over Pacific land and people; and second, Pacific peoples' important and unique kinships with Aboriginal Australians. Crucially the thesis emphasises the significant diversity (both cultural and national) of the Pacific experience in Australia. My argument is advanced first by a historicisation of Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific people, detailing intersecting narratives of their migration to Australia and Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial engagements within the Pacific region. This is followed by case studies of two celebrated sites of Australian “Pacificness”: first, a mapping of the involvement of Pacific players in the sport of rugby league in Australia; and second, an analytic record of Australia’s representation at the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts, held in the Solomon Islands in 2012. A Pacific Studies methodology is developed to provide a theoretically sound and empirically informed approach to Pacific research that distinguishes it from current studies in or of the Pacific.
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ItemAustralian media representations of sea-level rise in the Pacific: an assessment of coverage around COP21( 2016)This study examines Australian mainstream media coverage of those in the Pacific most at risk of suffering due to climate change-related issues. It develops a multidimensional framework to assess the performance of news texts published by four key online outlets around the time of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. The study finds, through measuring performance against journalistic ideals, that there are many areas where the potential to improve coverage exists. This includes: better representation of Pacific Islanders, conveying the global and regional significance of the issue, the use of visioned cosmopolitan discourse, mentioning the potential for adaptation, critiquing climate policy and engaging in debate, including a vast range of diverse voices, and using environmental narrative to inspire action.
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ItemPitcairn Island: " Where are we going, Fletcher?"( 2011)From the Southern Pacific power struggle on the Bounty that produced one of the most famous of all mutinies, to the return of the primal Hobbesian ‘war-of-all-against-all’ that founded the state of Pitcairn Island; and from the paternalism of John Adams and his bible as a puritanical mode of governance as a means of a return to Eden, to the trial of the Pitcairn men and the subsequent appeal for sovereignty, it seems that no generation since the HMAV Bounty mutiny has not been fascinated with the politics of this tiny microstate. This thesis will investigate the dual function of Pitcairn as a functional microstate and as a fantasy space for the Western imagination and seek to determine what this subaltern island and the recent enforced import of Western governmentality reflects back upon the global politics of the past decade. As a supplement to the thesis, a creative work based on the trial in the form of a learning play is a fictional re-telling of the events of the trial.