School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEveryday Traces: Diasporic Hauntings and the Affectivity of Historical Trauma Among Cambodian-Australian Women( 2020)This thesis explores how traces of the Cambodian genocide affectively haunts Cambodian-Australian women. I draw upon postcolonial theory, affect theory and feminist studies, to analyse the ways in which Cambodian-Australian women mediate memories and experiences in relation to broader cultural, social and historical structures. I contend that intergenerational trauma, gendered norms, and the politics of racism and belonging shape women’s connections to their Cambodian heritage and Cambodian identities in diverse and significant ways. My methodology, which includes qualitative in-depth interviews with Cambodian-Australian women is informed by a feminist approach that foregrounds women’s lived experiences. Yet, this thesis is not only about haunted diasporic subjects; it is also written from the perspective of a haunted diasporic subject. Given my positionality as an ‘insider’ researcher, I use a reflexive, autoethnographic approach, to writing, in order to challenge conventional modes of storytelling in academia and to interrogate what counts as ‘evidence’ in social science research. To this end, I situate my autoethnographic pieces alongside my participants’ narratives in an attempt to disrupt the subject-researcher distinction. My thesis adopts Grace Cho’s (2008) creative and reflexive approach and Avery Gordon’s (2008) method of ‘linking imagination and critique’, to not only explore the hauntings legacies of the Cambodian genocide, but to perform the very thing that my research tries to capture: ‘affective hauntings’. Using Avery Gordon’s (2008) theory of ‘haunting’ as an overarching framework, I argue that for many of my participants, all of whom were raised in Australia by one or both parents who survived the Cambodian genocide, the collective traumas of Cambodia’s devastating history have affected and continue to affect their lives, in subtle and not so subtle ways. Intergenerational hauntings, while sometimes difficult to locate, can provoke affective states that are embodied, and reflect emotions such as confusion, guilt, unease, melancholy, sadness, sorrow, pain, pride, and gratitude. These affective states are relational, contextually driven, cultural, discursive and continually negotiated. Certainly, embodied hauntings speak to histories of grief and loss, and yet from this loss, something else, something beyond psychopathology emerges. Drawing on feminist theories that highlight the generative possibilities of affect (Dragojlovic and Broom 2018; Ahmed 2010), I explore how intergenerational hauntings are sites of possibility that can open up new ways of thinking about identity and agency. As illustrated by my participants’ narratives, hauntings can be expressed by desires to actively engage with the past, recover histories, and ‘return’ to Cambodia.
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ItemA Gothic vision: the architectural patronage of Bishop James Goold in colonial Victoria( 2020)During his almost 40 years long episcopacy, James Alipius Goold (1812-1886), the first Roman Catholic bishop of Melbourne, laid strong foundations for the Catholic church in Victoria. The diocese of Melbourne counted only two churches and two chapels when he arrived in 1848, but, during his lifetime, clergymen claimed he laid as many foundations stones as Saint Patrick himself. After ten years spent as a missionary in New South Wales, Goold dedicated himself to the diocese of Melbourne. He established a firm administration, and was involved in several aspects of church building. He selected prominent locations and provided parish priests with suitable designs, he decided how to allocate Government funds and visited the building site whenever possible. His architectural patronage exemplifies the evolution of Gothic taste in Victoria. While earlier commissions encompassed Gothick churches, in the wake of the gold rush Goold had the resources to commission archaeologically correct Gothic Revival churches from the English architects Joseph and Charles Hansom. Over the years Goold developed a network including leading manufacturers in Europe and Australia to provide glass, furnishings and metalwork of the finest quality for the Gothic churches he was building. He gifted items to the parishes to dignify also the humble temporary buildings used for Sunday mass. In 1858, the English Catholic-convert architect William Wardell relocated to Melbourne. He had worked on about 30 church commissions in England, almost all of them in the Gothic Revival style faithful to AWN Pugin’s principles. Wardell was the man Goold needed to pursue his Gothic vision in Victoria. In the following decade, the bishop commissioned him to provide plans for at least a dozen parish churches ranging in size and refinement for city parishes and rural districts alike. His ambitious patronage culminated with the realisation of St Patrick’s Cathedral to Wardell’s grand design, a building rooted in French and English mediaeval tradition matching the size of European cathedrals. Bishop Goold played a remarkable role in shaping the built environment of the colony. His championing of the Gothic Revival style ascribes his name among the group of patrons who translated European culture to colonial Australia.
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Item'Once we had bread here, you gave us stone'. Food as a technology of biopower in the stories of Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Alexis Wright( 2019)This thesis presents the first comprehensive study of food in the works of Indigenous Australian storytellers. It uses Foucault’s analyses of biopower as a grid of intelligibility through which to describe food’s various functions and effects as they are recorded, reproduced, refracted, and resisted in Jack Davis’s, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s, and Alexis Wright’s storytelling. The thesis reads food as a technology of biopower: a means by which life ‘passe[s] into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention’ (Foucault 1978, 142). Following a Foucaultian methodology, it presents close and contextualised readings of the ways that food is instrumentalised as a technology of biopower and the functions, effects, and networks of biopower that result in and through the storytellers’ works. The specific topics the thesis engages include accounts of rationing and food-centric resistance in Davis’s plays, food insecurity and obesity discourse in Langford Ginibi’s life stories, and food’s relationship with alcohol and imperilment in Wright’s stories. It traces continuities between the storytellers’ treatment of food as well as identifying the way food generates and is implicated in evolving configurations and networks of biopower. It explores various resistance strategies and their efficacy in and through their stories, as well as the new subjects, hegemonic relations, institutions, forms of government, and fields of power-knowledge that result.
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ItemWriting places: whiteness and the design of the built environment( 2018)The design of the built environment affects people. In Australia, designed spaces reflect specific ideas about nationhood that do not represent the reality of a diverse population. Instead, a white national identity pervades with unresolved issues of land often at the heart of such identity narratives. Whiteness, understood as a specific power structure, operates through landscapes and architecture in explicit and implicit ways. Indigenous cultural identities are also present within and against all of these expressions of whiteness. Such tensions arise in the first instance due to manifestations of whiteness in designed spaces being situated in Indigenous lands and Country while colonial histories and their associated violence, both symbolic and literal, remain largely unacknowledged. This thesis uses a mixed methodology to investigate a range of spaces, including demarcated national spaces, memorial sites, and places of exhibition, through the lens of critical race and whiteness studies to reveal how these identity tensions occur. Though the Australian context is the main focus of the study, an initial look to how similar issues are playing out in the US highlights the existence of transnational whiteness and the nature of the newly-formed relationship between the two nations at the time of Australia’s Federation. It is argued that the complicated relationship between these cultural identities affects the way landscapes and architecture are experienced, whether this is realised on a conscious level or not. Further, by using critical and reflexive modes of engagement, designers can gain deeper insights into place, see and feel their position in relation to these identity tensions, and understand how power is operating through them. This examination of the way cultural identities such as whiteness and Indigeneity are expressed through the design of national, memorial and exhibition spaces, allows a way into thinking about how the same tensions and power dynamics may also be taking place in more everyday spaces.
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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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ItemEugene von Guerard and the science of landscape painting( 2007)Eugene von Guerard (1811-1901) is regarded as one of Australia's most important nineteenth century landscape painters. He was forty one when he arrived in Australia in 1852. His training, his contact with artists in Rome, Naples and Dusseldorf and his engagement with contemporary scientific thought in Europe shaped his response to the Australian landscape. In this thesis von Guerard's origins in Vienna and the role played by his artist-father in his early art practice are explored. The reconstruction of von Guerard's early life in Europe is based on the artist's sketchbooks and unpublished oil sketches. His training under Bassi in Rome (1830-32), his immersion in the German community of artists there, the significance of the Nazarene painters and the influence of Joseph Anton Koch for his career are examined. In Naples, where von Guerard lived and worked for six years, he painted with Pitloo and the School of Posillipo, he was introduced to Hackert's work and ideas and he undertook an extensive Sicilian expedition recorded in the sketchbooks of both father and son. In Naples von Guerard's interest in volcanic geology was ignited. Following the death of his father in 1836 von Guerard arrived in Dusseldorf 1838 where he studied landscape painting under Schirmer and Lessing, participating in their open air painting expeditions to the Neander Valley and the Eifel. He made studies volcanic phenomena in the Eifel, an important site for the emerging science of geognosy. In Dusseldorf he was exposed to the ideas of Humboldt and Carus, took sketching expeditions along the Rhine, met his future wife Louise Arnz and was a founding member of the Kunstlerverein Malkasten. An examination of the landscape paintings and lithographs that he produced during the almost thirty years he spent in Australia (1852-1882) indicates that Humboldt's ideas were the enduring imperative for von Guerard's journey to Australia. In a series of case studies von Guerard's career as a Humboldtian Reisekunstler is explored. Von Guerard's scientific interests were nurtured in mid-century Melbourne by the community of eminent German scientists resident there. His expedition to Kosciuszko with the eminent geophysicist, Georg von Neumayer, epitomized Carus's ideal of the complementary relationship between art and science. His interpretation of the volcanic Western District, prior to government geological surveys, was informed by his studies of parallel phenomena in Germany's Eifel region. In Victoria's fern gullies and the sub tropical rain forest of New South Wales von Guerard portrayed plant species from Humboldt's sixteen Urpflanzen in their natural groupings and environmental context. His album, Eugene von Guerard's Australian Landscapes, was recognized by the geologist of Novara expedition fame, Ferdinand von Hochstetter in Vienna in 1870 for its geological and botanical content. Carus and Humboldt looked for a poetic response to nature, one that would communicate a sense of the inner life of the subject and this von Guerard achieved through the sensitivity of his touch, the honesty of his response to nature and the compositional geometry of his works, works that brought Humboldt's vision of unity and interconnectedness to the Australian landscape.
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ItemShakespeare in Australia: the making of a colonial literary institution from 1788 to 1901( 1997)In the 1980s and 1990s Shakespeare scholarship in Britain and North America has produced powerful analyses of the ways in which Shakespeare operates as a cultural institution. In analysing Shakespeare as a cultural institution it is less the meanings of his plays or poems that are examined than the role that Shakespeare plays in securing important social and institutional relationships, both inside and outside the academy. This thesis adds to that body of scholarship an analysis of Shakespeare as a cultural institution in colonial Australia during the period from 1788 to 1901. Its aim is to examine the historical conditions for the development of Shakespeare's preeminent signifying power with a focus on the ways in which the "transportation" of Shakespeare from Britain to the Australian colonies occurred. The thesis develops the argument that the transportation of Shakespeare to the Australian colonies and his reproduction within the colonies were important enabling conditions for the formation of a colonial public domain. In the early years of colonial settlement the presence of Shakespeare in the colonies enabled them to exhibit evidence of the development of colonial culture both to imperial eyes and to the colonists themselves, while later in the century a number of literary and cultural organisations were established with the affirmation of Shakespeare as one of their central goals. Colonial reproduction of Shakespeare therefore helped to secure channels of communication between the colonies and the metropolitan centres of the British Empire and influenced the formation of central colonial cultural institutions - the theatre, criticism, and literature, for example - through which this communication occurred. At the same time, colonial Australia's Shakespeare helped the colonies to negotiate tensions and contradictions in their relationships with the metropolitan culture, in part because the colonies' constructions of Shakespeare registered complex interactions between discourses of colonialism, nationalism and imperialism. This thesis draws upon recent work in Shakespeare studies, postcolonial studies and Australian studies, and on original archival research into nineteenth-century Australia. Its analysis of Shakespeare as a colonial cultural institution aims to contribute to our understandings of Shakespeare's continuing influence in Australian culture and to revitalise discussion of established topics in Australian literary studies.
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Item‘Something we can only desire’: writing the past in recent Australian literature & an extract from the novel 'To name those lost'( 2014)In the last decade, the novel in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny from historians, academics, and the wider public as novelists offer a vision of our past that often sits uneasily beside more formal historiographic investigations. There is a general expectation that fiction should be truthful with the past. Fiction, however, often undermines the empiricist view of referentiality that history promotes, instead exploiting the paradoxical break from the referent that the imagined topography of fiction allows. This leads to what Ellison has called ‘referential anxiety’, or an uncomfortable awarness of the loss of reciprocity with the world. Given this range of responses and the paradox of which they are indicative, to claim that the novel is a form of historiography misunderstands the nature of truth in fiction. This dissertation focuses on three Australian novels that exemplify the problematics of reference, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. The dissertation is paired with an extract from the novel To Name Those Lost, the story of an itinerant labourer and Black War veteran named Thomas Toosey. His journey takes him along the Launceston-Deloraine railway line during the early years of its operation as he searches for his son, William. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey finds the town in chaos. Riots break out in protest at a tax levied on citizens to pay for the rescue of shareholders in the bankrupt Launceston and Western Railway Company. Toosey is desperate to find his son who is somewhere in town amid the looting and general destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
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Item"Scattered cedars in a western town": interviews with Lebanese Muslims on the family, ethnicity, gender and racism( 2003-02)This study examines the views of twenty Sunni Muslim Lebanese families about issues of family, ethnicity, gender and racism. It provides insights into some of the complex ways these participants tend to define and experience ethnicity in Australia. This thesis also considers some of the ways Sunni Muslims narrate the ethnic self in regard to their social and cultural practices in contemporary Australia. It highlights the similarities and differences between the views of Sunni Muslim families from a community perspective. This study also made important connections between the notion of ethnicity and issues of class, gender and generation. This thesis provides a seven part analysis. The first part of this study provides an outline of contemporary issues relating to the social network of the Islamic Lebanese community in Victoria. The next part is about applying the methodology of this thesis. The methodological themes of interview-narratives were explored in this chapter. In so doing, it outlines the advantages of family group interviews in ethnic community-based studies. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemThe legend of the Goodfella Missus: white women, black society, 1840-1940( 1991)The legend of the Goodfella Missus is a gendered myth dear to white Australian history. The most constant motif of the Goodfella Missus is her acclimatization to and affection for all that is different in the antipodes. Concepts of aboriginality are inextricably mixed with her vision of the strange landscape and its flora and fauna. She has had a hallowed place in the Australian annals. The power and persistence of the legend, with its repressive ideology of charity and chastity, is the subject of this thesis. It is a study of race, class and gender in the context of colonization. The stereotypes of aboriginality remain remarkably constant over the century, though place, time and Aboriginal society may be radically different. The gender boundary is the most troubling and revealing because of its ambiguity in the interstice between black and white, servant and mistress, matriarch and monster. Much of the evidence has had to be recuperated, reinstating a selection of verbal and visual images of what white women could come to know of Aboriginal life. My argument works as much through repetition and resonance as it does through explication and exegesis. The historical patterning of three generations of women’s images forms a kind of unhappy hearth history, from Emigrant Gentlewoman of the 1840s, to Australia’s Daughter of the 1870s, and Modern Woman of the early twentieth century.