SHAPS Digest (June 2023)
Liam Byrne (PhD in History, 2017, Honorary in History) wrote with Emma Shortis (PhD in History, 2019) for ABC Religion and Ethics, ‘The Last of the Kennedys: How the Assassination of RFK Still Haunts the United States and its President’.
Tony Coady (Professor Emeritus, Philosophy) was interviewed for the Atlantic Council’s Guns for Hire podcast, for an episode entitled ‘What’s so Bad About Mercenaries?’ In the episode, he discusses key characteristics of mercenaries, including the motivation for private gain; the Geneva Convention’s definition of mercenaries; the grey area of military contractors in support roles; and whether it’s possible to base a moral or legal judgement on an individual’s intentions. He also considers the main moral objections to mercenaries, arguing that we should do as much as possible to tone down the resort to war as a standard political option.
Darrin Durant (HPS) recently published two articles analysing the notion that a ‘nuclear renaissance’ is underway: ‘Disarming the Persistent Myths of a Glowing Nuclear Renaissance‘, Crikey (behind paywall); and ‘Nuclear After-Life: From Tragedy to Farce, the Claims of a Nuclear Renaissance’ in Arena.
Cat Gay (Hansen PhD Scholar in History) published an article in the Conversation on nineteenth-century girls’ diaries about their experience of their journeys to Australia.
Four new episodes of the HPS Podcast were released. These featured Kristian Camilleri on the disunity of science; Alan Love on purpose in biology; Cordelia Fine on sex difference research; and Greg Radick on counterfactual history of science.
Louise Hitchcock (Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed by LiveScience for a piece addressing the question, ‘Indiana Jones — What do (Real) Archaeologists Think of his Legacy?‘
Tamara Lewit (Honorary, Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed on ABC Radio Sydney about her research for the historical children’s novel A Message Through Time by Anna Ciddor, set in the Ancient Roman world.
Andonis Piperoglou (Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas) took part in a discussion with Ghassan Hage on ‘The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism’, hosted by the Australian Centre.
Appointments
We are delighted to welcome the following newly appointed colleagues:
- Sarah Corrigan (Allan J Myers Lecturer in Classics, Latin Language & Literature)
- Jacinthe Flore (HPS Lecturer in Science & Technology)
- Jenny Judge (Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind/Cognitive Science)
- Kate Lynch (HPS Lecturer in Life Sciences)
- Pete Millwood (Lecturer in East Asian History)
- Patrick Ravines (Indigenous Scholar-in-Residence, Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation)
Freg Stokes (PhD in History, 2022) has been appointed to a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, where he will be working on the relationship between Indigenous resistance and forest conservation in tropical South America since 1492. He will do so as part of the Pantropocene Project, a cross-disciplinary investigation of land use and forest cover changes across the tropics during the colonial period (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries).
Freg will be conducting archival investigations and working with Indigenous researchers in South America to map the history of Indigenous resistance in South America’s tropical rainforests. He will then be working with archaeologists and climate scientists in Germany to explore how to integrate this history into deforestation and climate modelling.
Awards
Fiona Fidler (HPS/School of Ecosystem and Forest Science) received the Research Project of the Year Award at the 2022 Faculty of Arts Dean’s Awards, for the repliCATS project, a major interdisciplinary project which also features as core members in SHAPS, Martin Bush, Fallon Mody, and Eden Smith.
Andrew Jamieson (Classics & Archaeology) received an Arts Alumni Award for Contribution to the Faculty and University. The Arts Alumni Awards recognise the valuable contributions alumni have made all over the world across a range of fields, including the not-for-profit sector, government, education, business, arts and media.
Ted Clayton (BA Hons 2021, History major) has been awarded a Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholarship. The scholarship will support Ted’s pursuit of a Master of Public Administration (Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value) at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) in the 2023/24 UK academic year.
Mary Sheehan (PhD candidate, History), has been awarded the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s John Adams Award for the best article in the Victorian Historical Journal over the past two years. This was awarded for Mary’s 2022 article, ‘A Grassroots View of Spanish Influenza in Melbourne‘.
A number of our History staff and students have been shortlisted for this year’s round of Australian Historical Association (AHA) prizes:
- Joy Damousi, The Humanitarians: Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919–1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) (shortlisted for Marilyn Lake Prize for Australian Transnational History)
- Simon Farley (PhD Candidate, History) ‘”Barbarians and Bird-Butchers”: How Conservationists Constructed a Barrier to Assimilation in Australia’ (shortlisted for AHA Jill Roe Prize)
- Zoë Laidlaw, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (shortlisted for Marilyn Lake Prize for Australian Transnational History)
- Freg (James) Stokes (PhD in History, 2022), ‘The Hummingbird’s Atlas: Mapping Guaraní Resistance in the Atlantic Rainforest during the Emergence of Capitalism (1500–1768)’ (shortlisted for AHA General History Thesis Prize)
Academic Publications
Nicole Davis (History/MGSE) with Julie McLeod (MGSE), Kate O’Connor (La Trobe) and Amy McKernan, co-edited Temporality, Space and Place in Education and Youth Research (Routledge).
This book explores the everyday ways in which time marks the experience of education as well as the concerns and methods of education and youth research. It asks: what do we notice afresh and what comes into sharper view when temporality becomes a focal point? What theories and ways of seeing offer new angles onto temporality in interaction with space and place?
In responding to these questions, the book engages with approaches from sociology, history, and cultural and policy studies. It brings critical attention to the movement and layers of time in the memories, aspirations and orientations of educational actors – across lives, generations and diverse places. Informed by the politics of local/global relations and new transnational formations, the chapters feature case studies located in Australia, the UK, India, South Africa, the Philippines and Finland.
Topics examined include processes of social and educational differentiation in disruptive times, affective practices, intergenerational dynamics, collective memory, archiving, mobilities and migration, school spaces and difficult histories.
The authors grapple with what is involved methodologically in interrogating the times and places of education – including the construction of educational ideas, problems and policy solutions – and in historicising the time and places from which we research, write and work.
Thea Gardiner (PhD candidate, History), ‘”The Nation’s Health Is the Nation’s Wealth“: Portia Geach (1873–1959) and the Good Health Movement in Interwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies.
In the interwar period, the Australian artist and activist Portia Geach was a leading advocate of the ‘good health movement’ in Australia. Geach produced a public campaign promoting nutritious eating and rejuvenation practices, helping to introduce a health consciousness to the Australian public. A ‘female sojourner’, her ideas about diet and health were imported to Australia from across the globe, where she became educated on nutrition science, home economics, natural health, and physical exercise. By foregrounding Geach as a leader of the good health movement, and an active participant in cultural formations, this article highlights an avenue through which Australian women articulated their expanding role in public life during the interwar period, and how women’s leadership roles were formed through transnational engagement. Her participation in cultural exchanges helped to create a new national public health discourse led by women.
Carolyn Rasmussen (Honorary, History) published an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography on Doris Jessie Carter (1912–1999), teacher, athlete, and air force officer.
PhD Completion
Elena Heran, ‘Sidelining the Feminine in Ovid’s Metamorphoses‘ (PhD in Classics & Archaeology)
This thesis answers two key questions regarding the treatment of gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: 1) How does the poem utilise mythical narratives in order to explore peculiarly Roman masculine concerns and anxieties, such as fatherhood, the transition from boy to man, the tension between sexual desire and the masculine ideal of self-control, the social problem of female desire, and the maintenance of one’s personal reputation in the homosocial sphere? 2) In the course of these explorations, in what ways does the poem marginalise and oversimplify the experiences of its female characters? In answering these two intertwined questions, the thesis will demonstrate both the enduring relevance of Ovid’s text as a site for feminist rereading, and the importance of considering women’s perspectives in any discussion of patriarchal expectations and their effects on the individual.
Supervisors: Professor Tim Parkin, Associate Professor K O Chong-Gossard, Professor Parshia Lee-Stecum
Katherine Molyneux (PhD in History, 2023) ‘Getihu: Peddlers, Cadres, Housewives and Everyday Exchange in the Chinese City of Nanjing 1949–1985′
In the early 1980s, a growing number of small merchants and peddlers appeared on the streets of China’s cities. They became known as ‘getihu‘. The getihu were early symbols of the new era of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ that emerged in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nearly thirty years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China as a communist state in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communist Party tentatively introduced market-based reforms which would eventually unleash the Chinese economy and change both China and the world.
Focusing on the city of Nanjing, this dissertation draws from a broad range of written sources including newspapers, archival documents, annals, government collections, and discarded official records to explore the getihu and their historical antecedents. Told chronologically, it explores the path from the small merchants, peddlers, and handicraftsmen of Republican Nanjing, through the socialist years dominated by the leadership of founding Chairman Mao Zedong, to the getihu of the 1980s.
It shows that small-scale private commerce had originally played a vital role in the everyday life of Nanjing. That vital role persisted long into the socialist ‘Mao era’ (1949–76). Ultimately, however, Nanjing’s urban culture of independent commerce and everyday exchange came into conflict with a new model for city life centred on the planned economy and the state workplace (or danwei). By the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, successive waves of ideological campaigns, industrial expansion and unpredictable regulation had pushed small merchants into an increasingly marginal position in everyday life in Nanjing. The rigid socialism of the Cultural Revolution finished the job, and peddlers and other merchants almost disappeared from Nanjing’s streets after 1966.
The goods and services Nanjing’s small merchants had once provided were never satisfactorily replaced. By the late 1970s, problems of inconvenience and unemployment were acute. The final chapters of this dissertation will suggest that the market reforms introduced after Mao’s death in 1976 were as much a belated concession to the everyday needs of urban citizens as they were to ‘capitalism.’ The getihu quickly found a market in Nanjing, offering the same breakfast foods and petty repairs that had been popular decades before. But the intervening decades had changed the operating environment. The vibrant private sector of the 1980s in China was largely rural. In cities, small merchants remained social and economic outsiders. Their goods and services were welcome, but they were not.
Supervisors: Professor Antonia Finnane, Professor Christine Wong (Asia Institute)
MA Completion
Natham McCall, ‘Divergent Dominions: Comparing Pre-First World War Defence Policies of British Dominions and their Effects on the Introduction of Wartime Conscription’ (MA in History)
By the third year of the First World War, the voluntary enlistment rates in Australia, Canada and New Zealand had fallen to a level that could not be relied upon to sustain the dominion’s expeditionary forces in France, Belgium and the Middle East. Individually, the leaders of each dominion concluded that in order to maintain their war efforts abroad, their governments would need to introduce conscription. New Zealand successfully introduced a conscription policy in August 1916, while Canada followed in September the following year despite strong opposition from the French-speaking population. In Australia, two efforts were made to introduce conscription via plebiscite, one in 1916 and another in 1917. Both failed to secure a majority ‘Yes’ vote and, so, Australia continued to rely on a voluntary system to provide reinforcements to its expeditionary forces.
Why these three dominions responded to calls for conscription in such different ways, despite the similarities that existed between them, is a field of research that has not yet been thoroughly explored. Even less well explored are the impacts of pre-war policies, ideologies and attitudes on the wartime efforts to introduce conscription. This thesis will explore those pre-war factors and embed them in our understanding of how the conscription efforts in each dominion developed and why they developed differently. Examining how those pre-war factors shaped the defence policies of the dominions prior to the war and linking them with the forces that supported and opposed wartime conscription allows us to better investigate the interplay between politics and societies during wartime. …
By examining the factors that influenced pre-war dominion national defence and imperial defence policies, this thesis will examine how those factors would in turn influence the outcomes of the varied wartime conscription debates and further explain why the debates had such varied outcomes.
Supervisors: Professor Sean Scalmer, Dr Jackie Dickenson
Research Higher Degree Milestones
Melanie Brand, ‘A Question of Trust: Secrecy and Intelligence Accountability in Cold War Australia’ (PhD completion seminar, History)
Intelligence accountability and transparency have traditionally been conceptualised as a zero-sum equation in which decreases in secrecy were believed to come at the cost of intelligence agency efficacy. This thesis challenges that view. Using the experience of ASIO during the Cold War as a historical case study, it demonstrates that secrecy did not ensure the effectiveness of Australia’s domestic intelligence service. By weakening trust in the agency and its legitimacy in the eyes of the Australian public, secrecy eroded the ability of ASIO to fulfil its primary role of ensuring the security of the nation.
Elizabeth Muldoon, ‘Learning History with the Founding Foremothers of the Redfern Black Movement’ (PhD completion seminar, History)
This thesis is about the activism of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women within the Redfern Black Movement from 1968 to 1973. Beth Muldoon has worked in partnership with eight founding foremothers of the Movement to develop an historical analysis of the philosophy and praxis of the Movement based on their oral histories. This thesis contends that Movement women conceptualised their overarching goal of “self-determination” in terms of “community control” and “land rights”. The four major strategies they developed were “direct action”, “sharing and caring”, “unity” and “solidarity”, each of which carried its own strengths and challenges.
Eliza O’Donnell, ‘The Painting is Broken: Understanding Issues of Authenticity and Art Attribution in Contemporary Indonesia’ (PhD completion seminar, Cultural Materials Conservation)
The circulation of counterfeit paintings in Indonesia’s art centres is a sensitive issue that threatens the cultural record and intellectual property of artists and their legacy. However, the study of painting attribution from a conservation perspective lacks a strong scholarly response. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary methodology to investigate the relationship between the booming art market and the circulation of counterfeit paintings attributed to Indonesian artists. It seeks to elucidate the strategies that contemporary Indonesian artists are adopting to protect themselves from intellectual property theft in the absence of a robust copyright framework, and examines integrated approaches to building secure artist records.
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