School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemObject lessons: public history in Melbourne 1887-1935( 2000-05)The thesis studies history-making in Melbourne’s central civic sphere, from its emergence in the 1880s to its decline in the 1930s. It identifies public history’s major themes and forms, and the relationships between them, based on four main cases of history-making: the articulation of the past and history in Melbourne’s 1888 Centennial International Exhibition; the historical backgrounds, development, unveilings and partial after-lives of Sir Redmond Barry’s statue, unveiled in Swanston Street in 1887, and the Eight Hours’ Day monument, unveiled in Carpentaria Place in 1903; and history-making around Victoria’s 1934-1935 Centenary Celebrations, with special emphasis on the Shrine of Remembrance and a detailed study of Cooks’ Cottage.
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ItemRecreating Batman's Hill: a study of urban development changes from 1835-2005( 2005)This thesis is a close study of planning developments on the Batman's Hill Precinct site, Docklands, Melbourne. It focuses on planning proposals, historical documents, descriptive texts and commemorational images to provide the first in-depth history of the Batman's Hill site from initial white settlement in 1835 to 2005. The repeated re-conceptualisation of Batman's Hill as a symbolic and historical place, and a site for urban development, was instrumental to the rapid growth of central Melbourne. The changes in land use facilitated the rapid growth of Melbourne from township to city. This detailed study of the planning and utilisation of the site of Batman's Hill enables a critique of how contemporary development on the Precinct has drawn upon colonial history to market this location. This thesis proposes that the history of Batman's Hill as the location of Melbourne's foundation, and the image of John Batman as Melbourne's founder, have been linked to the site's development at various times. This site has undergone many physical and zoning transformations that relate to the changing importance of Melbourne's cultural heritage for the public, and the need for industrial and transport facilities. Thus, public appreciation of the Batman's Hill site as a culturally significant location in Melbourne's urban history has fluctuated over time. From settlement in 1835, Batman's Hill was used for public recreation and was the first choice for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. However, the rapid boom in population, as a result of the1850s goldrushes, put pressure on industrial, transport and building infrastructure. It was therefore rezoned to allow for railway and port expansion. Chapter One is a history of the effects of colonial governance on Batman's Hill. It details the change of Batman's Hill from a public space to an industrial zone. The industrialisation of Batman's Hill resulted in the removal of the elevated 'hill' in the late nineteenth century for the expansion of the Spencer Street railway lines. The name 'Batman's Hill' was still used although it was not consciously commemorating Melbourne's foundation or a hill. By the early twentieth century with Melbourne's centenary approaching, there was a renewed interest in reclaiming the identity of John Batman as the founder of Melbourne. Chapter Two discusses this period of industrial land use, and the reinvigoration of the image of Batman through the popular press and historical societies. Batman's Hill remained as an industrial area until the late twentieth century. The City of Melbourne's urban design agenda in the 1980s was to refocus the city's development toward the Yarra River and Port Phillip Bay. Such regeneration of docklands followed global urban design and planning trends. The history of Melbourne's foundation and John Batman, partially achieved in the early part of the twentieth century, was appropriated in the planning for residential development at Batman's Hill Precinct at the Melbourne Docklands. The use of this specific history within urban planning and marketing documents is discussed in Chapter Three. As the developers endeavour to reinstate Batman's Hill as Melbourne's 'Plymouth Rock', the place of 'first' white settlement by John Batman, the history of the site that is repackaged for the public is a fragmented one.
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemNot just routine nursing: the roles and skills of the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War 1( 2006)This comparative labour history seeks to reveal the working life and nursing practices of female military nurses I the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during this period, and to highlight the importance of trained female professionals in caring for soldiers within many allied medical services. Official histories concern themselves with the logistics and administrative arrangements for the AANS rather than discussing the elements of hands-on nursing, and secondary sources tend to highlight the travel adventures of, and the impact of war on, the nurses themselves. Through a detailed examination of archival sources, this thesis explores the development of the AANS’s roles and skills from a military perspective. From an examination of pre-war civilian nursing, it explores in detail the impact of foreign physical environments, other allied personnel and systems, the military itself and war diseases and injuries on nursing work. While A.G. Butler, the official medical historian, may have thought that work in Australia hospitals in France was ‘routine’, this study explores the many events such as the ebb and flow of war that make military nursing different to civilian nursing. Australian army nurses did not limit their war work to nursing care. The exigencies of war expanded the scope of nursing into medical, military and non-nursing roles. The AANS performed military administrative roles such as Orderly Officer and in known roles such as that of Home Sister, now transformed into something akin to a hotel manager. They took on medical roles such as anaesthetist and assistant surgeon. Often providing the only female presence to soldiers who had been at the front for months, they also provided important mental comfort, moral support and friendship. In many cases, the expansion of their roles, skills and authority helped them to save more lives. During World War I, military nurses formally became part of the Australian military system for the first time. In doing so, they created a recognized niche for future military nurses.
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ItemDrawing a line: the colonial genesis of the Hume highway( 2006)The colonial archives of the Hume Highway return to an inception narrative containing tropes of intrusion and conflict. In Chapter One a survey of the maps and literature relating to the 1824/5 expedition leads to a discussion of these tropes. The first of these, 'intrusion', concerns the process through which Aboriginal place was first reconfigured as colonial space. Beginning with Hamilton Hume's act of 'drawing a line' through the blank space of a government supplied skeleton chart, this act of intrusion was rapidly followed by the expedition party's penetration into the Aboriginal countries of south-eastern Australia. The second trope, 'tug of war', concerns the rivalry between Hovell, a British free settler, and Hume, a first-generation Australian. Throughout the 1824/5 expedition differences between the two men smouldered, before erupting in controversy in 1855 when Hume published his vitriolic pamphlet Facts. By placing the expedition and these men in their colonial context, Chapter One draws parallels between this conflict and class tensions within the Australian colonies during the same period. Such information enables the reader to appreciate the inception narrative of Chapter Two. How the expedition party made the road during their three and a half month expedition is recreated by drawing from associated exploration texts. By contrasting the explorers' distinct attitudes to the land and the Aborigines, the relationship between the two tropes also becomes evident. As the two men walked the road, so they would write it. Chapter Three examines the key moments and motivations of their controversy. With the publication of Facts 1 in 1855 Hume reasserted his authority over a road since inscribed with the regular traversings of settlement and gold traffic. In doing so, Hume also drew a line through the name of Hovell and ensured that the line in the skeleton chart eventually became known as the Hume Highway.
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ItemTheatre of body in Japan: Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness)- Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction)( 2004)This thesis is an analysis of two Japanese theatres of body; Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) and Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), and a practical and theoretical investigation of the possibilities for an embodied political philosophy. It is divided into two chapters. The first identifies the genesis and development of the philosophy and methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Butoh in a chronological analysis beginning in late 1950s Japan. Apart from introducing some new material to the study of Ankoku Butoh and analyzing Hijikata's concepts, the first chapter serves as a genealogical source for the examination of the theatre of body of Gekidan Kaitaisha in the second chapter: the practice, philosophy, and productions within the social and political context. Flowing on from Hijikata's radically subjective work born from and profoundly rooted in an ethos and socio-political context of rebellion, Kaitaisha's theatre responds to 'what is' and refuses to accept it is all there is. Both Ankoku Butoh and Gekidan Kaitaisha are designed to actually deconstruct physical and perceptual codes integrated in the body to create the conditions for the body to become itself. While implicitly showing how one has informed the other, debate is focused on their distinct methods of embodied resistance to social conformity and on interpretations in relation to the political environment. The methods of Kaitaisha described in this thesis are generally based on the principle of 'moving the inside out to allow the outside in'. In tracing the evolution of two theatres of body in Japan) parallels are made with the conditions of the period, beginning with the transformations of late 1950s modernity, through the 1970s and the birth of post-modernity to its results being carried from the twentieth into the twenty-first century in the bodies of Kaitaisha.
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ItemSydney Dance Company: a study of a connecting thread with the Ballets Russes( 2009)This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This study sketches the origins of the Ballets Russes, the impact its launch made on dance in the West, and how it progressed through three distinguishable phases of influence. It summarises the important features of the visits to Australia of Russian ballet companies from Adeline Genee in 1913 to the culturally altering impact of the revived Ballets Russes companies over three extended tours between 1936 and 1940. It charts the formation of viable ballet companies in Australia, commencing with Kirsova in 1939 and Borovansky in 1940, to the Australian Ballet in 1962 and the Sydney Dance Company led by Murphy between 1976 and 2008. Drawing on distinctions between classical and contemporary dance, it attempts to demonstrate the groundwork of example established by the Russian ballet, and, particularly, the revived Ballets Russes visits up to 1940. Data for this thesis was drawn from a personal interview with Graeme Murphy, original documentary research in public collections in Australia, government and Sydney Dance Company archives, newspapers and secondary literature.