School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview Available'To exercise a beneficial influence over a man': marriage, gender and the native institutions in early colonial Australia(eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies and with the assistance of Melbourne University Bookshop, 2008)This chapter examines understandings of marriage among missionaries and humanitarians connected with two early colonial ‘Native Institutions’. A comparison of the Parramatta Native Institution in New South Wales and the Albany Native Institution in Western Australia demonstrates that concerns about marriage were central in discussions about the formation and maintenance of these Institutions. Both of these Institutions were established and supported by British evangelicals, who had brought with them to Australia powerful assumptions about gender roles, particularly in marriage. These assumptions influenced their decisions regarding the children who resided in the Native Institutions. Within specific colonial contexts, however, the assumptions of humanitarians and missionaries did not remain static, and debates over the futures of the Aboriginal children they sought to educate reveal complex and shifting hierarchies of race, gender and class.
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ItemNo Preview Available'A longing desire in my heart': faith, family and the colonial frontier in the life of Euphemia Kramer 1887-1971(eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies and with the assistance of Melbourne University Bookshop, 2008)This chapter considers how writing the life stories of women missionaries can inform larger narratives about Indigenous-settler relations, gender and colonialism, through an examination of Euphemia Kramer, a Pentecostal convert from Victoria who travelled across central Australia with her husband in the 1920s, spreading God’s word. The Kramers’ travelling mission (supported by Adelaide humanitarian group the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association) provided sermons and bibles to isolated Aboriginal groups in the interior, as well as medical and other essential supplies. An effective study of Euphemia’s life must consider her various roles as a ‘missionary wife’, as a missionary in her own right, as a white woman on the colonial frontier, and as a mother. Her intense commitment to the Pentecostal faith, like her husband’s, informed much of her behaviour and actions; indeed, her written recollections are notable for Indigenous people’s absence. Despite working for and with Indigenous people for much of her life, faith and family commanded a much greater focus in Euphemia’s own view. This apparent contradiction runs counter to historical narratives of colonialism which seek to place missionary work at the centre of the European oppression of Indigenous peoples, suggesting instead an approach that considers the missionaries’ many motives.
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ItemThe ice-age(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2007)Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: because everything … 2005 is a table-top miniature world. One of a pair of major sculptures sharing the same title and mapping the same mysterious topography, the Govett-Brewster’s Mon grand récit: because everything’s alter ego, Mon grand récit: weep into stones… 2005 was shown at the Basel Art Fair in 2005. The two works are very similar, though the Govett-Brewster version is slightly larger and is dominated by a glossy, sprawling, white base resembling a vast glacier, whereas the same forms in Weep into stones… are suspended in space, like a huge train-set on scaffolding. Both works are composed of images of the wreckage of modern history’s mass utopias, of the twentieth century visions of crazy perfection that were shared by capitalism, fascism and communism. These visions have now disintegrated. First, this essay looks at Mon grand récit: because everything… as a work of art that represents the duration of modern history and its entropic end. It does this by translating duration into metonymic images, into images that represent the twentieth century’s failed utopias by architectural models of never-completed modernist monuments in construction: a hanging, bent wood freeway hovering above a snowy abyss; a mountainous central tower encrusted with miniature crystal models; a tiny scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed Monument to the Third International 1920 perched on a glacial waste. Second, the essay shows that because Lee Bul presents modern history as both personal and shared, the instructional diorama represents her quite strategic and very conscious argument against contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality, in favour of a determinedly global perspective.
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ItemDiagrammatology(Alt-X Press, 2007)Drawing together Derrida’s interest in grammatology and the inventive, and contemporary architectural interest in diagrams, this paper proposes the notion of ‘diagrammatology’.7 Diagrammatology is understood here as a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking – diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking – which, in turn, is linked to poetic thinking. This understanding is informed by contemporary architectural theory which conceives of the diagram as a ‘temporary formulation of intentions still to be realized, a machine for learning and change’, a ‘heuristic method’.8 This paper develops diagrammatology through example, by exploring three iterations of the (architectural) diagram. The first iteration is Derrida’s choral grid diagram, which emerged from his reading of the chora section of Plato’s Timaeus – a reading that framed his collaboration with the architect Peter Eisenman on Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project. The second iteration is the use Gregory Ulmer subsequently made of Derrida’s choral diagram and reading of the Timaeus in the development of the genre of ‘mystory’ and ‘heuretics’ (the ‘logic of invention’). The third iteration uses the choral grid as a guiding figure for speculating on the intermingled nature of contemporary teletechnologies.
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ItemThe Rehabilitation of the Jackdaw: Philo of Alexandria and Ancient Philosophy(Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2007)
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ItemThe Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia: A Half Century of Change(Penerbit Ledalero, 2008)
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ItemReliable Mr Robinson and the Controversial Dr Jones(Quintus Publishing, 2008)
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ItemRemorse and Moral Identity(Routledge, 2008)
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ItemThe Social History of British Diplomats in North Africa and How it Affected Diplomatic Policy(Oxford University Press, 2008)