Work in Progress Day Abstracts
31st May 2007
Presenters and Abstracts
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Deb Anderson
No worries? Rethinking drought in light of climate change
Recollections of a golden age of agriculture loom large in Australian rural historiography. Lived experience is a powerful means to explore tensions between the rural past and ‘histories of the present’ – or narratives of endurance, uncertainty and risk. For three years I have gathered oral histories in drought-stricken farm communities of the Victorian Mallee. The project played witness to a rapid, significant shift in public discourse on global warming (during Spring 2006). In effect, the ongoing collection of stories began revealing interpretations of drought as climate change. Here I explore how ongoing dialogue enables recontextualisation of issues of cultural survival, socio-economic struggle and environmental change.
Robyn Ballinger
Pipedreams: the making of landscape on the northern plains of Victoria
Water supply projects have comprehensively transformed the Australian environment. This area of history has, for the large part, been ignored. Taking as my focus the northern plains of Victoria, my study charts the evolution of its landscape through the eyes of settlers and policy makers as they interpreted and interacted with this semi-arid place. In this paper, I explore physical and mental layers to uncover how conflict between Australian dreams and actualities can be traced in the landscape, and ponder what can be learnt from what is discovered.
Amanda Barry
The Racing of Class: Empire, Colonialism and Education in Victoria
In this paper, I will explore the connections between early nineteenth century British education policies and early attempts to educate and civilise Indigenous peoples in Australia. From the 1830s in the colony of Port Phillip, the colonial regime attempted to educate indigenous children using, I will argue, methods similar to those only recently instituted amongst the British working classes. Drawing on an early chapter of my thesis, I will argue that addressing these connections using a trans-national approach provides new ways of understanding and complicating the history of Indigenous-coloniser relationships, and in particular, our understandings of how colonisers constituted racial ideas in early colonial Victoria.
Kelly Butler
Our Colonial Inheritance: Family, Nation & Racial Violence in Kim Scott’s Benang and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth
Alongside the recent proliferation of memoir, testimony and life writing sit an increasing number of genealogical fictions that foreground the family as the primary site of colonial violence. By merging aspects of the family saga, genealogy and the historical novel, these literary family histories explicitly link the past and the present to expose the intimate nature of our colonial inherence. This paper will focus on the figure of ‘the descendant’ as employed in both Kim Scott’s Benang and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth and will consider the broader implications of thinking about the legacies of colonialism - personal, national and literary - through a familial lens. The narrator of Benang, Harley, as the ‘first white man born’, stands at a pivotal convergence of history and family. As the result of his grandfather’s personal eugenic experiment Harley struggles to negotiate a contemporary indigenous identity against the full weight of colonial discourse; ‘the virtual prison’ of official history. In The White Earth, McGahan too explores the silences in family stories and national history, focusing on the implications of the colonial past for a young child, the accidental heir to a once prosperous pastoral holding. In answer to the plaintive settler refrain ‘why weren’t we told?’ both novels offer familial memory to underscore the intimate nature of colonial violence and to explore the ways that present generations figure as descendants- both complicit and constrained by the deeds of their forebears. This paper will also consider how both novels remake colonising genres- including ‘official’ history and the pioneer narrative- and subvert an imperial epistemology of pedigree and nation-building to raise important questions about generational change, national memory and the persistence of colonial practices in twenty-first century Australia.
Christian Chenu
The Art of Holy War: Internal Crusading in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
The development of crusading practices succeeded a long and august history of Christian thought concerning the licit use of warfare. The diversion of crusades away from the Holy Land and the targeting of religious and political opponents of Christianity within western Europe required careful use of pre-established ideas concerning the nature of cause, intent and authority. This paper will argue that the manner in which these concepts were used to justify crusading in countries such as France and Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries revealed the often complex and substantial role in secular politics popes such as Innocent III claimed on behalf of the church.
Merete Colding Smith
Sunday School Reward Books 1830-1860
During the first half of the 19th century a large number of small Sunday School Reward Books were produced in England by publishers including the Religious Tract Society. They were aimed at children of four to fourteen years of age from poorer families attending Sunday Schools. The contents are diverse but rarely fictional. Many tales appear factual with incidental social history, either about children who might serve as role models for others, or who get into trouble by behaving badly. The authors all appear middle class. Many of the SSRB have charming wood engravings increasing their appeal for children.
Liam Connell
‘Shee should never Enjoy him’: Mary Hale and the Bewitching of Michael Smith, Massachusetts, 1681
The 1681 witchcraft trial of Boston widow, Mary Hale was unusual for a number of reasons. Mary’s witchcraft, for instance, is almost incidental to the trial testimony, which centres on a complex relationship between a recently deceased young man and two other young women who he appears to have been courting at the same time. The paper explores the limits of female authority within what is considered an inflexibly patriarchal society, as well as the variety of intense emotions that drove responses to death. Part soap opera, part medical mystery, part cautionary tale, the case provides a glimpse of social relationships among ordinary lay folk in a ‘Puritan’ community.
Kieran Crichton
Resisting the Empire? The Associated Board comes to Melbourne
(Note: abstract not yet supplied)
Wendy Dick
‘With every feather in her hat shaking with the intensity of her indignation …’: representations of Ellen Mulcahy as parliamentary candidate
When Ellen Mulcahy, after several years of vigorous activity as a Labour Party and trade union organiser, stood as Independent Labour for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1913, her candidature was bound to excite considerable interest. Not only was she a trail-blazer as a female aspirant to parliamentary office, but she had the temerity to oppose the much-admired, long-standing Labour member, ‘the little Doctor’ – Dr William Maloney. This paper explores some of the perspectives from which her candidature in this two-way contest for the seat of Melbourne was viewed at the time, drawing on press reports and Labour records.
Penny Duckworth
Community buildings and belonging
Despite their ubiquity in urban and rural settings, community buildings in Australia have received little academic attention. This paper is drawn from a thesis that examines the provision and community use of local services such as libraries, community centres and swimming pools, over a 50-year period (1920-1970) in selected sites. Public policy decisions at State and local government levels regarding the provision of community infrastructure and the everyday experience of those places and spaces by the citizens they were designed for will be explored. The findings will contribute a critical and historical depth to contemporary debates about the provision of community infrastructure and community building. This will include an exploration of how individuals have utilised and experienced community spaces and places over time. How did people respond to the incorporation of new buildings into the existing fabric of a place and how have their perceptions changed over time? How important were these sites and spaces in contributing to a sense of belonging within a place? To what extent are particular buildings or places symbols of local community struggle and achievement, connection or even rejection ? Do they form a part of a narrative of community and connection?
Prudence Flowers
‘The Baby Killer Approach’: The Impact of the New Right into Abortion Politics in the United States
At the end of the 1970s, abortion was increasingly conceived of as a political issue in the United States, and those opposed to the procedure began to be conflated with the New Right. Although right-to-lifers benefited from this association with the Right after the election of Ronald Reagan, the rhetoric and tactics of conservatives caused a great deal of anguish for both individuals and organizations within the broader movement. This paper discusses the work and strategies of American Citizens Concerned for Life (ACCL), an organization that attempted to posit itself as an alternative to the strident conservatism of groups such as the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation. Arguing that the absolutism of conservative politics jeopardized the future of the anti-abortion movement, ACCL explicitly critiqued the Right’s intervention into abortion politics, and this paper will argue that in the late 1970s the alliance between the Right and anti-abortionists was neither inevitable nor particularly appreciated.
Nick Frigo
A career in the making – Oscar Wilde and the pursuit of ‘celebrity’
A nineteenth century scrapbook bequeathed to the British Library in 2005 casts new light on the early career of Oscar Wilde. The volume of advertising materials, newspaper and magazine clippings compiled by Oscar Wilde’s American tour manager, Colonel W. F. Morse, contains material which presents a career in the making and a very conscious construction of a modern celebrity. Having only recently emerged from conservation, to date this archive has not been used by any other historian.
Pamie Fung
Alternatives to mandatory detention: studies of a the Maribyrnong/Miday Hostel
Whilst Maribyrnong, Villawood and Baxter are well established in the national consciousness, little is known about the migrant hostels that were also on these sites. Maribyrnong/ Midway hostel existed for many years where the Detention Centre and the Student Village is now located. It accommodated various groups of migrants at different stages from 1949 to 1988. Towards the end, Midway became the ‘first-home’ of many Indo-Chinese and South American refugees. This paper will follow-on from an earlier paper, to discuss the stories that have been gathered so far about the hostel from past residents and workers and some of the possible meanings that arise from these narratives about different forms of hospitality in Australia.
Bill Garner
A camping story
It is only in the past five years that historians have paid any attention at all to the history of camping in Australia - barely a couple of chapters in total. Yet camping as a material phenomenon and a social practice is present throughout Australian history. Does this lack of interest reflect the marginal nature of camping itself, or does it tell us something about what historians regard as suitable subjects? Indeed, is it a suitable subject? How would one go about writing a history of camping? What form should it take? These are questions I consider as I begin work on "Camping Out in Australia: An Ephemeral Heritage".
Claudia Guli
The trial of Charles I and the reciprocal bond between King and Subject
At the trial of Charles I it was argued that one of the foundations of sovereignty was a twofold bond of protection and allegiance between a king and his people. Should the king break this bond, then the people would be released from their fidelity. This paper will examine the role of this argument in contemporary justifications of Charles I’s trial, the originality of the argument and the extent to which historical examples, such as the depositions of Edward II and Richard II, were used to support it.
Darius von Güttner
Holy War on the Baltic: its narrative twelfth-century sources
The pagan nations who inhabited the Baltic littoral formed the last bastions of paganism in Europe of the twelfth century. The narrative sources of the period provide an image of the pagans which echoes the rhetoric employed by the chroniclers of the First Crusade. This paper explores two of these narrative sources which illuminate our understanding of how the Central European pagans were viewed by their Christian neighbours at the brink of the Second Crusade.
Madeleine Hamilton
‘Smile and say cheesecake!’ Pin-up girls and Australian photography magazines, 1950-1959
In the 1950s the quality of life improved for many Australians. With higher employment levels and wages, increased leisure time, and greater mobility, Australians had the capacity to engage in hobbies and other amusements. As the local magazine market expanded, publications catering to special-interest readers and hobbyists were a growing presence, and also highly attractive to advertisers of specialised products. Members of the burgeoning amateur photography movement, for instance, could consult Australasian Photographic Review and Popular Photography for technical advice and information regarding the very latest equipment. Despite their specific audience, camera magazines recruited the barely-clad or nude pin-up girl to sell cameras and related products. These publications did not, therefore, depart from the wider post-war media in which sexualised images of women were increasingly used to generate profit and promote consumerism.
Jenny Hibben
Biography in Progress: Shirley Andrews OAM (1915-2001)
This paper will explore the process of beginning a new chapter with only the vaguest outline of where it will be going. My thesis is a biography of Shirley Andrews OAM (1915-2001). Last year I spoke of her student life here at the University of Melbourne from 1934 to 1938. The new chapter will be based on her working life. It will begin with an outline of what I already know – a very small section. Then I will consider the questions that I would like to ask and where I might most usefully find answers. The paper will conclude with a forward look to future chapters.
Brett Holman
Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5
The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats - "defence panics" - can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.
Heather Holst
Spanning the Distance: family ties and finding home
The local Castlemaine newspaper carried notices of departures for Europe very regularly throughout the 1870s and 1880s as the goldrush emigrants grew in age and material wealth. Some of these resettlements were permanent but many did not succeed and others were only meant as visits. This paper will examine these returns to the country of origin as an expression of the conflicting loyalties between old and new places, between families and communities of origin and newer networks of relationship and affection and as an attempt to locate ‘home.’
John Ireland
R.D. Ireland in Victoria, 1853-55
I am writing a Life and Times of barrister, R.D. Ireland. I have previously reported on his involvement in Ireland in the Young Ireland movement and the Protestant Repeal Association. This paper continues the story with his migration to Victoria, his establishment of a career in the Law, which involved him in becoming a leading defender of those charged with treason following the Eureka Stockade affair. It also discusses the development of Liberalism and Democracy in Victoria and the influence of Eureka and its aftermath, on them and on Victorian society generally.
Isabel Jackson
My people, our image
‘We have to talk about yesterday first, before we can talk about today – then we can move into tomorrow’. This quote from Kevin Buzzacott, Arabunna elder, ‘maverick social activist and self-styled peacemaker’ (The Age 23/4/07) summarises a key motivation of my research. The deafening chatter about Australian values and immigration debates and border control measures is almost drowned out by the roar of the continuing silence around the relationship between the Australia built as a settler nation, and the populations it supplanted. My research identifies arts projects that have contributed to, and are now re-addressing, the imbalance.
Jeanette Krongold
Breaking the Rules? Legislating out rights and asylum seekers 1992-2002
Over the decade from mandatory detention (1992) to the ‘Pacific Solution’ (2001), I trace the tension between national sovereignty and the human rights discourse. The codification of the Migration Act 1958 led to legislative enactment of immigration restriction laws pertaining to refugees as well as arbitrary provisions concerning their presence in Australia. When the High Court is caused to review and interpret such legislation, it has no recourse to principles of universal human rights when parliamentary-made law excludes them. This trend towards express arbitrariness within Australian migration law stands in contradiction to the previous historical decade, which had seen an expansion in the incorporation of international human rights principles into Australian law.
Sarah Martin
Writing Public Lives: Reverend Dr J Davis McCaughey
My thesis covers the early years of the Rev Dr J Davis McCaughey (1914-2005) who came to Australia in 1953 aged thirty-nine, and played a significant role in the theological, academic and political life of Victoria, as Master of Ormond College, as prime mover in the establishment of the Uniting Church in Australia and as Governor of Victoria. By documenting the pre- Australia years, a greater understanding of the influences that shaped him, and the era through which he lived can be reached, setting the scene for the more important half of his life in Australia.
Crystal McKinnon
Fighting to Fight Again: Contemporary Indigenous musicians resisting Australian settler colonialism
In Australia, the process of settler colonialism aims to erase Indigenous peoples and their respective cultures. Through acts of resistance, Indigenous people have survived, and are continuing to survive, settler colonialisms ongoing structures. One of the key ways in which this resistance has and is occurring is through various contemporary musical genres. Contemporary music has enabled communication, community building and formulations of culture and identities to be articulated and shared. Most importantly, perhaps, is the simple statement ‘we are here’, both explicitly and implicitly, in spite of the processes and structures of settler colonialism. I will share some recent interviews conducted with contemporary Indigenous musicians, and draw upon key themes and narratives which illustrate Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism. I will maintain that Indigenous singer songwriters have been a key cohesive mechanism of the collective Indigenous resistance, and that their presence within the ongoing structure of settler colonialism in Australia sends a powerful message of resistance and survival.
Claire McLisky
(En)gendering faith?: Missionary performances of masculinity and femininity on the settler-colonial frontier at Maloga mission, 1874-1888
This paper explores the gendered subjectivities of two nineteenth century Australian missionaries – Daniel and Janet Matthews. Married in 1873, these Wesleyan Non-conformists co-founded Maloga Mission the next year, on a plot of their own land on the northern banks of the Murray River in New South Wales. Like many of their peers, Daniel and Janet performed their middle class, gendered subjectivities both consciously and unconsciously. Through a close reading of their personal relationships and interactions, I hope here to shed light on the often troubled relationship between settler colonial subjectivities, and the ideological, economic and religious structures which enable them.
Helen Merritt
Reconstructing the Yorkshire Plot (1674-1682)
The Yorkshire Plot is one of the least studied cases of the late seventeenth-century Popish Plot. The focus for historians has always been upon the treason trials held in London and the significance of those events for English legal and political history. This paper will discuss the problems and benefits of attempting to piece together the lives and actions of those involved in the Yorkshire Plot prior to the treason trials that took place in London and York.
Caitlin Murray
Unsettled Minds: Medicine, Madness and the Colonial Project
Aboriginal people were integrated into the New South Wales psychiatric system from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This paper is concerned with the meeting of colonised and coloniser on the pages of lunatic asylum case books. It is also addresses the published medical literature that gave meaning to these encounters. Both sets of texts raise rich lines of enquiry about the relationship between medicine, madness and colonisation. How did the medical fraternity interpret Aboriginal insanity and how did these interpretations change over time? How did ideas expressed in the medical literature relate to actual treatment? Can the actions and behaviours of individual Aboriginal patients be read as resistance to colonial rule? Are asylum doctors implicated in controlling resistance by pathologising certain behaviours? And can medical interpretations of Aboriginal insanity be seen as legitimising the project of empire building, settlement and colonial rule? Considering the contested nature of madness, whereby biological explanations vie with theories of social contructedness, the answers to these questions are not simple. My paper will explore these questions in order to draw out the intersections between madness and race in the Australian settler-colonial context.
Nell Musgrove
Children of the Empire: child protection in Victoria 1851-1874
The 1850s gold rush stimulated population growth and commensurate social dislocation in Victoria, and the visibility of families who had fallen on ‘hard times’ rose. To contemporaries, one of the most alarming consequences of families living in poverty was the looming spectre of masses of children ‘lapsing’ into ‘careers of vice and crime’. In 1864 the colonial government responded by legislating in favour of direct state involvement in child welfare, and over the next decade debate flowed about how children should be dealt with in order to produce the future productive and respectable working families of the colony. Policy makers looked to the commentaries of those engaged in similar fields in Britain, but the solutions which emerged had their own colonial bent, reflecting an attempt to build a society in the image of ‘Home’ that could also flourish in the new setting.
Patrick Naughtin
The Dillon Mission to Victoria and the Irish-Australian Convention of 1889
The 1889 mission to Australia of three Irish Parliamentary Party members, led by John Dillon, has long been acknowledged as crucial for raising money to sustain the program of land reform in Ireland known as the ‘Plan of Campaign’, of which Dillon was a chief architect. However, this paper will also contend that the mission had a profound and lasting significance for the Irish nationalist movement in Victoria. The presence of an Irish leader like Dillon, who exerted broad appeal as an Irish patriot, was of critical importance as a rallying focus to unify a local Irish nationalist movement that was increasingly leaderless and divided. The Dillon mission would culminate in an Irish-Australian Convention in Melbourne in September 1889, from which would emerge the young, Australian-born Dr Nicholas O’Donnell as president of the Irish National League in an attempt to unify the leadership of the movement.
Barbara Nichol
Early Chinese restaurants and the reconfiguring of Chineseness
This paper will cover aspects of Chinese restaurant development in Melbourne over the first half of the 20th century, focusing in particular on business operations and decision making. It will explore, for instance, the layers of meaning embedded in the choice of dishes offered to Chinese and non-Chinese customers, identifying how and why these changed over time. It will argue that the early Chinese restaurant was the product of very deliberate business decisions by restaurateurs in response to shifts in the social and political landscape of the 1930s and 1940s which established the blueprint for the extraordinary success of post war Chinese restaurant businesses and the development of new Chinese Australian identities.
Caitlin Nunn
Ten heads are better than one: the case for participant as co-researcher
Participants are at the core of most social research. Yet too often, the participant is viewed not as an active subject, but objectified as a ‘data source’, one component of a ‘sample group’. This does a disservice both to the participant and to the research. By recognising participants as experts in their fields of experience, and entering into meaningful dialogue with them, the ensuing research is significantly enhanced. Simultaneously, opportunities are created for participants to develop new skills and to have their voices amplified, thus enabling research to directly impact the people it most immediately concerns, rather than being relegated to the distant worlds of academic journals and policy papers.
Peter O’Toole
From Bendigo to Bien Hoa: Victorian Newspapers and the Vietnam War
For a decade the war in Vietnam was one of the biggest news stories in the world. For newspapers in Victoria, however, it was also local news. Starting with the first deployment of American and Australian troops in 1965 this story was not only the province of metropolitan dailies, but also of regional newspapers. Until the fall of Saigon a decade later newspapers all over Victoria reported on the war, reflecting concerns from the global to the very local. This paper will examine the way that a variety of newspapers in Melbourne and rural Victoria covered the war in Vietnam.
Katherine Pace
The Power of Reason
My paper analyses a discursive logic contained within the Christian Cooperative Credit Union Manuscripts, an archive held at the State Library of Victoria. In particular, it looks at material produced from 1926 to 1939 by the Mental Deficiency Group of the Citizens Educational Fellowship and the Victorian Aboriginal Group. My reading of the archive is informed by feminist and post-colonial theory. It attempts the beginnings of a larger analysis of the particular shape modernity – which I define as a globally hegemonic world view – assumed in Australia.
My paper makes two arguments: 1) the expert is a category oriented towards power and, consequently, is a sight of intersection of class, race and gender; 2) as those given the task of ensuring social progress, experts were amongst society’s most modern. Through the expert, we can see modernity’s orientation towards power, also along lines of class, race and gender.
Jana-Axinja Paschen
Decolonising the gaze at Uluru
The critique of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 2002) on Indigenous bodies and landscapes is a classic in critical perspectives of tourism. However, the concept has been contested by feminist and post-colonial critique as reinscribing the very gap between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. In the tourist setting at Uluru, Aboriginal presence is powerfully (in-) visible in the ‘prohibition of the gaze’. In reading the visual as equal part of a multi-sensual ‘knowing practice’ I seek to illustrate how Aboriginal agency disrupts habitual Western ways of seeing, encouraging tourists to engage with ‘other’ forms of ‘seeing’ and Aboriginal knowledge of place.
Susan Reidy
Progress for All: the rise and fall of the Fairy Hills School between the wars
In 1925 on the very edge of Melbourne, the tiny suburban community of Fairy Hills wrote to the Director of Education demanding the urgent necessity of establishing a local school. The Department said no. The people of Fairy Hills refused to accept this. For three years, the residents systematically lobbied the department and their political representatives in local and state government, until a small school was successfully opened in the community's "Progress Hall" in 1928. The school survived for just seven years, its existence constantly clouded by threats of closure. This paper will explore the residents' idealism and commitment and the efforts they undertook, through the auspices of their local progress association, in pursuit of their dream. The young men and women of this growing city-edge locale confidently strove to shape their little suburb into their own ideal of a whole and total community. The desire for the school to open and flourish underscores aspects of this ideal that encompassed the availability of education for all, the importance of local amenities, active engagement with officials and governments, and the safety and comfort of children.
Noah Riseman
‘Japan fight. Aboriginal people fight. European people fight’: Yolngu Stories from World War II
Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in the Second World War. This paper presents ‘highlights’ from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defense of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.
Ross Robson
Ronald Reagan, religion and individual rights
Some historians assess Ronald Reagan favourably as the president who restored national optimism and pride, brought economic prosperity, changed popular expectations of government, helped end the Cold War and championed liberty. Other historians are sceptical of these achievements. There is little dispute, however, that Reagan’s political policies and their ultimate effect were driven by strong personal values and beliefs. This paper addresses one of Reagan’s fundamental political-religious beliefs: that men and women are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The paper analyses its genesis, its expression in Reagan’s speeches and writings and its consequences for his policies.
Peter Russell
Is Biased Justice Useless Justice? Selective Prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
One of the most persistent criticisms directed at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia concerns the issue of bias, as it has been allegedly demonstrated by selective prosecution, and its meaning for the value and legitimacy of the tribunal. This particular allegation, which was being made almost before the tribunal was established and continues up to the present, revolves around two points. First, that far more Serbs than Croats or Muslims (or indeed Albanians) have been indicted, and, second, that potential Western war crimes have never even been seriously investigated, still less resulted in the indictments or prosecutions. Taken together, these are presented as proof that the ICTY practises a politically driven prosecution, which yields biased justice—that it is a hoax which demonstrates that international criminal justice seems destined to remain a hypocritical expression of power. These critics then assert that this bias is a fatal flaw which renders the tribunal effectively worthless. This immediately raises two questions: first, is the allegation of bias correct, on both counts, and, second, are the conclusions which are drawn from this accurate?
Megan Sheehy
Beyond the Book: historical scholarship on the internet
In the 21st century there is increasing pressure on historians to venture beyond the literary confines of the discipline. This paper will discuss the impact that the internet is having on scholarly conventions in the field of history. By removing the procedures associated with print culture are we threatening the quality of the historian’s work or does the internet provide an outlet for new kinds of historical scholarship? I will argue that the main potential of the internet is that it can present conflicting views of the past, whilst allowing users to explore and challenge linear narratives and conclusions.
Georgia Shiells
The White Face of Australian Nationalism: Fantasy and Nationalist/Racist Violence in 'White Australia’
I argue that in twentieth-century Australia, a ‘fantasy of the nation’ in which white Australians are positioned as ‘natives’ and gatekeepers has often underpinned calls for racial exclusion in the name of the nation-state. Zizek argues that the bond linking members of a (national) community ‘implies a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated’. While the promise of the Thing can never be fully realised, the pursuit of it by nationalists is sustained by the belief that the fantasy could eventually be realised, if it were not for the presence of an Other who does not share ‘our’ relationship to the Nation qua Thing. I consider one important moment in which Australian political elites articulated a fantasy of nation that spoke to the desires of white Australians: the 1901 debates regarding the establishment of a ‘White Australia’. The Other that sustained the manifestations of a fantasy of nation has not been the indigenous people of Australia but migrants and refugees, those Others who exist outside the territory of the nation-state but who may 'come here' and 'steal' from white Australia their Enjoyment (jouissance). The fantasy that has been invoked to justify the violence of racial exclusion is thus one that allows white Australians to envisage themselves as 'natives' and gatekeepers.
Ben Silverstein
Indirect Rule in Australia: The Aborigines Protection League and the Victorian Aboriginal Group
Indirect rule was creatively used to deal with the difficulties of colonialism in Africa, where the colonial state needed to manage the articulation of two overlapping and intertwined economies: one the native peasant economy, and the other the settler or colonial capitalist economy. It functioned to administer the native peasantry through what were considered to be ‘native institutions’. In a settler colony such as Australia, on the other hand, there was no desire to manage the indigenous economy; rather at the level of state practice it was to be eliminated. In this paper I will look at two Australian humanitarian proposals – from the 1920s-30s – which I argue were heavily influenced by indirect rule, as case studies to speculate on the implications of such translations of structures of rule into a settler colonial setting.
Jordy Silverstein
‘We're dealing with how do these students live and work with this memory and what are they supposed to do about it’: Examining ways in which Holocaust memories are put to use in New York Jewish communities
New York Jewish identities draw on many different aspects of the past and the present to form what are complex, often contradictory ideas of what it is to be Jewish. In this paper I will be examining the discourses surrounding progressive Jewish identities and in particular the ways in which they are tied to remembrances of the Holocaust. By juxtaposing the words of teachers of the Holocaust at Jewish schools with symbols of protest situated in the public realm, I will interrogate the place of the Holocaust in discourses of Jewish identity in New York today.
Kate Seward
‘Swing qui peut’: La Gerbe and the Zazous, June 1942
Over the month of June, 1942, the Parisian weekly newspaper La Gerbe published a four-part series by Pierre Ducrocq titled “Swing qui peut”. The summer of 1942 was a turning point in the Nazi occupation of France, and was particularly important to the history of the “swing” youth or Zazous. Not only can we observe a rise in the attention given to the subculture in the press at this time, we can also discern a shift in the nature of the campaign against it. By analysing Ducrocq’s articles, this paper will examine the ways in which collaborationists constructed the Zazou identity. It will discuss whether, in this context, the Zazous can be classed as cultural resistance to the Vichy régime.
Helen Slaney
The Black Sea at Athens
The Black Sea region represents, for Classical Athens, both a tantalizing colonial opportunity and a danger zone on the furthest fringe of the Hellenic world, where ethnic categories and stable definitions break down. This paper addresses two interrelated aspects of the Black Sea’s Athenian representation. Firstly, through a reading of Xenophon’s Anabasis and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, I will consider how any opposition of the categories “Greek” and “foreign” become particularly problematic when tested on the Black Sea coast. I will then suggest that the Black Sea’s perceived eremia – its emptiness – is also a threat which can be located at the centre of the Classical polis itself.
Charlotte Smith
The Ottoman Turks in the Biblical Illustrations of Jost Amman
Printed images of Ottoman Turks in sixteenth-century Bibles offer a key source for understanding the visual construction of the Turk in early modern Europe. Jost Amman (1539-1591), one of the most prolific print makers of the later sixteenth-century, typifies traditions of presenting Turkish costume in early modern Biblical illustration. His engravings mirror the changing relationship between East and West in theological and intellectual opinion, as well as diplomatic practice. The relationship between biblical images and Amman's other works, including costume books and figure studies, exemplifies conflicting traditions of portraying the East, including European ideas of oriental exoticism.
Ron Sulman
History as Research
The idea of research is central to the idea of the modern university. And central to the idea of research is the notion of discovery of new knowledge. However, the discovery of new knowledge – as distinct from simply the accumulation of more knowledge or the manipulation of existing knowledge – is unavoidably entwined with the exploration of epistemological and ontological questions. Consequently, the historian, in the role of research specialist seeking to discover new knowledge, cannot assume as self-evident accepted humanist, moral, frames of reference. In this seminar the history of history as an academic research discipline in Germany and England in the 19th century will be outlined, and the different assumptions behind their inquiry will be discussed.
Elizabeth Taylor
Alice, Lady Northcote, wife of Lord Henry Northcote, 3rd Governor-General of Australia: the genesis of an incorporated wife
Hitherto, historians have known Alice only in her public persona through her work, particularly her charitable work while Henry was Governor of Bombay, and her sponsorship of the 1907 Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work. This paper examines through primary sources Alice’s life prior to leaving England, in order to discover the private woman. This allows us to better understand how she performed as colonial governor’s “incorporated” wife – a wife who is subordinate but crucial in the accomplishment of a joint enterprise in which the job belongs formally to the husband. These sources also illuminate the particular circumstances in which Henry accepted a colonial governorship.
Erin Taylor
Burmese migration to Australia: introducing a transnational history
Having begun my PhD two months ago, this paper will offer an introduction to my thesis topic with the view to receiving critical and constructive feedback from my fellow postgraduate students and academic staff. I will begin with the story of the eight Rohingya asylum seekers who are currently in detention on Nauru, having been caught up in Australia's “Pacific Solution” since their arrival on Ashmore Reef in 2006. I will then outline my theoretical approach, specifically my intention to write a transnational history that focuses on how and why both Australia and Burma can be conceived of as raced nations. Finally, I will offer a brief overview of the proposed structure of my thesis.
Robyn Vickers-Willis
Celebrating Transilient heroes and heroines
The dominance of the conquering hero storyline in recording and celebrating Australian’s achievements has led to a collective shadow which will be healed by bringing to consciousness in the Australian psyche the storyline of transilient heroes and heroines - individuals, who through their actions demonstrate a resilience and inner transformational capacity to enable them to act outside current collective understandings to bring about a ‘healing’ of the collective shadow created by conquering heroes. To explore my research question I will use:
- selected Australian historical narratives and biographies
- psychological understandings
- my previous research on development of consciousness at midlife
- interviews with Australian transilient heroes and heroines
- other relevant research