SHAPS Digest (October 2023)
Mike Arnold (HPS) and Tamara Kohn (School of Social and Political Sciences) discussed different rituals involving remembering and letting go of the dead, in an article for Pursuit.
Matthew Champion (History) was featured on the ABC’s WTFAQ, answering the question: How did people wake up before the alarm clock?
Matthew Champion‘s ARC DECRA project, The Sounds of Time, convened a Zoom Collaboratory with Antwerp University and the ERC-funded project, Back to the Future, asking what new digital methods allow us to understand about temporality and epistolary culture across the period 1400–1800. The project is hosted a visit from Dr Tessa Murdoch from the University of Buckingham, a former curator with 20 years experience at the V&A, who spoke on ‘The Huguenot Diaspora, Horology and Time’.
The latest issue of the undergraduate History journal Chariot was launched. This year’s issue was produced by a team led by Tahlia Antrobus, Porter Mattinson, Dominique-Dee Jones, and Pamela Piechowicz.
Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History, and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Arts) was interviewed for the New Books Network Russian and Eurasian Studies podcast about his latest book, Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing).
Jacinthe Flore (HPS) was interviewed in the Washington Post regarding the legacy of the neurologist António Egas Moniz, a pioneer of the lobotomy, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1949.
A play based on Jacinthe Flore‘s fieldwork for the ARC Linkage project Borderline Personality as Social Phenomena was performed at Kaleide Theatre as part of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Awareness Week. The play, Borderline, was created from interviews conducted with people with BPD and aimed at unearthing a more human understanding of life with BPD.
A number of our staff, students and alumni signed the open letter by historians on the Voice Referendum.
The HPS Podcast entered into its second season, publishing four new episodes: Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide) on research repertoires; David Kaiser (MIT) on scientific training; Kristian Camilleri on the ‘turn to practice’; and Duane Hamacher on Indigenous Science. The HPS Podcast is produced and hosted by Samara Greenwood and Indigo Keel.
Molly McKew (PhD in History, 2019) published an article in Overland, ‘The Work of Friendship: The New Communities of Melbourne’s 60s and 70s Counterculture’.
Daniel Nellor discussed his book, What Are They Thinking? Conversations with Australian Philosophers, on 3RRR’s Uncommon Sense. The book features interviews with ten philosophers including SHAPS’ Margaret Cameron, Chris Cordner and Dan Halliday.
Tim Parkin (Classics & Archaeology) discussed life in Roman cities and towns on the history podcast PlanningxChange.
The videorecording of a talk delivered by Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Toward a Global History of Greek Diasporizations: Reflections and Pathways from Australia’ (2nd Greek Canadian Studies Conference, York University, May 2023) is now available online.
Andonis Piperoglou was interviewed [in English] at the YES March for SBS Ελληνικά (SBS Greek) on the Voice referendum and how diaspora communities can support the Yes vote.
The exhibition, Ancient Lives: Insights from the Classics and Archaeology Collection, Ian Potter Museum was reviewed in the Australian (behind paywall). The exhibition was curated by Classics and Archaeology Fellows Tamara Lewit and Caroline Tully.
Academic Publications
Purushottama Bilimoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy), Jaysankar Lal Shaw, Anand Vaidya and Michael Hemmingsen (eds), Mind, Body and Self: Perspectives of Consciousness (Palgrave Macmillan)
This book is a unique collaboration of philosophers from across the world bringing together contemporary concepts of consciousness, the Māori conception of self, as well as Indian and Buddhist concepts of self and mental states. Contemporary concepts of consciousness include higher-order consciousness and phenomenological approaches. The idea behind this volume came from an international conference on ‘Mind, Body and Self’ held at Victoria University of Wellington; organised by the Society for Philosophy and Culture. The authors herein contribute to the relationship between concepts of self, mind and body. The wide variety of contributors from across cultural backgrounds add to a diverse and valuable conversation on the nature of human existence and thoughts of self. This book appeals to students and researchers working in philosophy and religious studies.
Purushottama Bilimoria, Cogen Bohanec and Rita D Sherma (eds), Contemplative Studies and Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration (Routledge India)
This volume is one of the first wideranging academic surveys of the major types and categories of Jain praxis. It covers a breadth of scholarly viewpoints that reflect both the variegation in terms of spiritual practices within the Jain traditions as well as the Jain hermeneutical perspectives, which are employed in understanding its rich diversity.
The volume illustrates a complex and nuanced understanding of the multifaceted category of Jain religious thought and practice. It offers a rare intrareligious dialogue within Jain traditions and at the same time, significantly broadens and enriches the field of Contemplative Studies to include an ancient, ascetic, non-theistic tradition. Meditation, yoga, ritual, prayer are common to all Indic spiritual traditions. By investigating these diverse, yet overlapping, categories one might obtain a sophisticated understanding of religious traditions that originally emerged in South Asia. Essays in this book demonstrate how these forms of praxis in Jainism, and the philosophies that anchor those practices, are interrelated, and when brought into dialogue, help to foster new tools for understanding a complex and variegated tradition such as Jain Dharma.
This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of religious and theological studies, contemplative studies, Jain studies, Hindu studies, consciousness studies, Yoga studies, Indian philosophy and religion, sociology of religion, philosophy of religion, comparative religion and South Asian studies, as well as general readers interested in the topic.
Matthew S Champion (History), ‘Saint Catherine and the Clock: Possible Histories of Sound and Time in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century France’, Speculum
This article charts the possible histories of sound and time inaugurated by a musical clock that was perhaps installed in the Benedictine Abbey of Sainte-Catherine-du-Mont, Rouen, in 1321. This clock is said to have played the advent hymn Conditor alme siderum [Dear Creator of the Stars] on its bells. The clock’s brief appearance in a later chronicle collection provides the cue for the article’s shape as a series of reflections on possible histories – historical analysis undertaken when the original object of research is empirically questionable. Commencing with an analysis of clocks with multiple bells from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the article shows that the clock at Rouen was not an anachronistic technology in the period. It then moves to consider the poetic temporalities of the hymn Conditor alme siderum, showing how multiple liturgical times were intertwined in the clock’s possible music. Turning from the object to the institution, the article then seeks out the historical and material conditions that may have made this clock possible at Sainte-Catherine’s. Finally, triggered by the connection of the clock to Saint Catherine herself, the article approaches sound and time through Catherine’s legend in the Legenda aurea and a sequence of images that can be arranged to reveal possible connections between sound, time, reason, devotion, and the suffering holy body.
Matthew S Champion, ‘Calendars, Clocks, and Crossings: Religious Temporalities in Medieval Middelburg’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte
This article takes as its focus the booming port city of Middelburg, Zeeland, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. As a node in networks of trade and travel, Middelburg’s religious life was shaped by the mobility of historical objects and agents. Despite its significance, however, Middelburg has remained relatively understudied both in the history of urban life and in the history of religion, partly because of the extensive damage to the city’s archives in the turmoil of the twentieth century. Turning to those sections of the town accounts that were recorded before the archive’s destruction, and drawing on material and literary records, the article first seeks out the rhythms of the city shaped by the liturgical calendar. It then turns to the remarkable new musical clocks that played fragments of liturgical chant and that were commissioned for the city in the early sixteenth century.
In 1515 a clock played Da pacem Domine on the hour and Regina caeli laetare on the half hour. In 1525, another clock was commissioned that played the Ave maris stella alongside Da pacem Domine – a chant particularly suited to Middelburg’s maritime setting. This object allows reflection on the sonic framework of urban religion and its close connections with the town’s maritime setting. Moving from the monumental and sonic experience of urban religion, the article then turns to examine the ways in which pilgrimage shaped the city’s time. It focuses first on the English mystic Margery Kempe, whose travel narrative allows an exploration of the possible affective rhythms of urban time. Finally, it traces the temporalities of pilgrimage at more minute scales, examining the archaeological record of pilgrimage. Taken together, the article suggests that urban religion in Middelburg must be seen as rhythmic in the sense of a local performance inflected by particular local contingencies. In approaching Middelburg’s urban religion through this transmedial history, the article seeks to model approaches to urban religious temporality that respond to time’s intricate complexities at multiple scales in a period of rapid change and urban expansion.
David Goodman (History), with Sarah C Dunstan and Glenda Sluga, ‘Cosmopolitan, Global, International? New York’s Material Sites of Memory and Forgetting’, in Sites of International Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press), edited by Glenda Sluga, Kate Darian-Smith and Madeleine Herren.
The essays in the book address the notion of a shared past, and how this idea is promulgated through sites and commemorative gestures that create or promote cultural memory of such global issues as wars, genocide, and movements of cross-national trade and commerce, as well as resistance and revolution. This chapter
map[s] a history of how New York has functioned as a site of repeated forgetting, where the many layers of its international pasts have been compressed and redacted. These include a New York that was a haven for the dispossessed and a space for the mixing of peoples. Then there was the New York that stood for the global philanthropic and business interests material to the changing skyline of Midtown Manhattan with its constant throb of transnational communication and exchange. As we show, without Rockefeller funding, New York’s sites of international memory would look radically different. As significantly, there was an international New York represented by the neighborhood of Harlem, a crucial site of the memory of twentieth-century internationalism that is a focus of this volume.
James Keating (Teaching Associate, History), ‘”Trust the Women“: Dora Meeson Coates’s Suffrage Banner and the Popular Construction of Australia’s Feminist Past in the Late Twentieth Century’, Histoire Sociale / Social History
In 1988, the Australian federal government purchased Anglo-Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates’s Trust the Women banner as part of the country’s belated efforts to memorialise the suffrage victories that once made its white citizens the most enfranchised people on earth. However, between the fin de siècle and the 1970s, which witnessed the concurrent rise of women’s history and state feminism, feminists had been ambivalent about commemorating the suffrage campaigns, especially at the national level. Since the late 1980s, the banner has experienced a transformation from an artefact few Australians had known about, much less forgotten, into the most familiar symbol of the country’s suffrage movements. Brought about by memory agents – activists, bureaucrats, historians, and politicians – this shift reveals the public appeal of British suffrage iconography over the material record of Australian activists’ ‘quiet’ toil, a sentiment which has increasingly shaped the memorialisation of local suffrage stories.
Caroline Tully (Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) and Helen A Berger edited the recently released double special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 17 (3&4) on Contemporary Pagan Ecospiritualities. The journal originated from a series of papers from the Ecological Spiritualities Conference in April 2022 at Harvard Divinity School. The special issue includes an article by Caroline:
‘Paradise on Earth: Feraferia and the Landscapes of the Mind’
Feraferia, ‘a love culture for wilderness’, is a contemporary Pagan religion that celebrates humans’ erotic union with Nature. It was the brainchild of artist Frederick Adams (1928–2008), who in 1956 had a vision of a universal goddess and subsequently devoted himself to the divine feminine as a ‘Maiden Goddess of the Wilderness’ called Korê. Formally incorporated in 1967, Feraferia became the second Pagan church in US history, and it is still active today. Herein the author examines Feraferia through an ecocritical lens, with a particular focus on the role of trees, the anthropomorphisation of nature envisioned as a young female body, ecosexuality, and the construction of henges; circular structures aligned with local topography, used as seasonal and astronomical calendars wherein ritual magic and ‘faerie enchantment’ are employed in order to heal and revitalise the natural world. She demonstrates that Feraferia’s enchanted approach to the world resonates with contemporary ecological activist thought, particularly ecofeminism and ecosexuality. She concludes that many of Feraferia’s ecospiritual concepts have value today because they can heighten conscious awareness of human situatedness within the real physical world, both on our own planet as well as within the wider surrounding space of our part of the universe.
Other contributions by Caroline include the Introduction to the special issue, written with Helen A Berger, and two book reviews.
Awards & Appointments
Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan (PhD in History, 2023) is the winner of this year’s History Fellows’ Prize. The prize, generously funded by the History Fellows’ group, is awarded annually for the best article published by a post-graduate student. Divya won the prize for her article, ‘Gomastahs, Peons, Police and Chowdranies: The Role of Indian Subordinate in the Functioning of the Lock Hospitals and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act, 1805 to 1889′, published in 2022 in the journal NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin.
Recent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth-century Madras Presidency. The study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the gomastah, who were employed to detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native Indian and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis.
By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the Indian population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser’s knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff.
Principal Fellow Adrian Howe‘s book, Crimes of Passion since Shakespeare: Red Mist Rage Unmasked, has been nominated for an Socio-Legal Studies Association book prize.
Dominique-Dee Jones (final-year BA student, History major) has been awarded an Australian War Memorial Summer Vacation Scholarship.
Jonathan Kemp (Cultural Materials Conservation) is part of a team that has won an Asia and the Pacific Profile Grant (2023–2024) for their project Cultural Material Conservation in Laos: Showcasing a Joint Australian-Lao Cultural Research Initiative. The Lead Investigators are Louise Shewan (Science, University of Melbourne) and Jonathan Kemp. Investigators are Thonglith Luangkhoth (Director, Lao Department of Heritage), and Dougald O’Reilly (ANU).
This grant will enable preliminary work for the design and delivery of in-country conservation workshops to train local heritage personnel to assist them in meeting the requirements for protection of the Plain of Jars, an important UNESCO World Heritage site.
Jonathan Kemp has also secured Indigenous Knowledge Institute Seed Funding (2023–2024) for the project Conserving Rock Heritage in Gariwerd using Machine Learning, Indigenous Knowledge Institute. Jonathan Kemp is the project’s Lead Investigator, heading a team comprising Wendy Luke (Parks Victoria), Jake Goodes (Parks Victoria), Louise Shewan (Science, University of Melbourne), Kourosh Khoshelham (Engineering and IT, University of Melbourne).
Despite advances in Machine Learning (ML) and 3D visualisation, these technologies are yet to be used to make cost effective holistic conservation for both advocacy and targeted conservation of imperilled Aboriginal rock heritage. The IKI grant enables the team to build a proof-of-concept model using data gathered from sites in Gariwerd.
Zoë Laidlaw (History), as part of a team comprising Jane Lydon (UWA), Catherine Hall (UCL), Alan Lester (Sussex), Keith McClelland (UCL), Edmond Smith (University of Manchester), Kiera Lindsey (History Trust of South Australia), and Annette Shiell (National Trust of Australia [Victoria]) has been successful in the latest round of ARC Discovery Project grants.
Australian Legacies of British Slavery: Capital, Land and Labour … aims to bring Australia into the global history of slavery by exploring the legacies of British slavery in South Australia and Victoria. Through developing methods for biographical research and digital mapping, it will trace the movement of capital, people and culture from slave-owning Britain to the new settler colonies, and produce a new history of the continuing impact of slavery wealth in shaping colonial immigration, investment, and law. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced capacity to build international disciplinary collaborations, new research methods, and research capacity building. Benefits include a radically new perspective on Australian history and abolition in the present, with major public outcomes.
Classical Association of Victoria Annual Prizes
The Classical Association of Victoria (CAV), founded in 1912, operates for the propagation and wellbeing of Classics and Ancient World Studies in the state of Victoria. A number of SHAPS students recently had success in the CAV’s annual prize rounds.
The Alexander Leeper Prize is awarded annually to the highest-achieving undergraduate honours students in the state of Victoria who completed their honours degree in Classics in the previous calendar year. It is a condition of the award that the student studied Latin or Ancient Greek during their honours year. The prizes were awarded to two SHAPS students: Dan Crowley, who completed in Semester One, 2022, with the thesis ‘Stories to Savour: The Power of the Plupast in Narrative in Herodotus’ Histories‘; and Leo Palmer (see below), who completed in Semester Two, 2022 with the thesis ‘The Social Function of Bacchic Rites’. Dan and Leo are now both enrolled in a Master of Arts (Thesis Only) in Classics in SHAPS, supervised by Associate Prof. Hyun Jin Kim.
The CAV’s Undergraduate Essay Prize was established in 2018 for the best essays written by third-year undergraduates studying Classics, Ancient History, Ancient World Studies or Archaeology at a Victorian university. This year, the prize was open to work submitted in the second half of 2021, and in 2022. After a rigorous double-blind judging, three students with essays in SHAPS subjects won prizes:
Phoebe Leggett won First Prize with her essay ‘Who Knew What When? Reconciling Mythic Traditions with Contemporary Panhellenic Themes in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis‘, written in 2021 for the subject Ancient Greek 6 (CLAS30025). As the first prize winner, Phoebe’s paper is eligible for publication in the Classical Association of Victoria’s journal, Iris. As of October 2023, Phoebe is finishing her Honours degree in Linguistics at University of Melbourne.
Adam Moore won second prize with his essay ‘To What Extent Does the Ideal Relationship Between erastes and eromenos as Described by the Character of Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium Reflect the Broader Ideals of the Athenian Institution of Pederasty?’ written in 2021 for the Ancient World Studies capstone, Interpreting the Ancient World (ANCW30017). Adam went on to finish Honours in Classics in SHAPS in 2022; as of October 2023, Adam is at Cambridge in the UK pursuing an MPhil.
Victoria Streeton-Cook won an Honourable Mention for her essay ‘Describe the Depiction of Women in Petronius’s Cena Trimalchionis. What does this Tell us About the Attitudes of the Characters and/or the Narrator?’ written in 2022 for the subject Latin 5 (CLAS20030). Victoria finished her Bachelor of Science and Diploma in Languages (Latin) in mid-2023 and is now considering applying for a Melbourne Juris Doctor.
PhD Completions
Melanie Brand (PhD in History) A Question of Trust: Secrecy and Intelligence Accountability in Cold War Australia
Intelligence oversight 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. While a certain level of secrecy is protective, this thesis will demonstrate that excessive secrecy and a lack of accountability surrounding intelligence services is ultimately destructive. Using the role, functions and public perceptions of ASIO in Cold War Australia as a case study, I will establish that secrecy negatively affected intelligence efficacy in this period in Australia in multiple ways. With little to no guidance or oversight from Government, ASIO’s products became increasingly irrelevant to policymakers, and both Government and opposition members would lose sight of ASIO’s capabilities, limitations and value to Australian society. With no external guidance and no requirement to be accountable for its actions, secrecy allowed ASIO staff to break the boundaries of their legal remit and become involved in overtly political and partisan affairs. Significantly, secrecy also contributed to reduced trust in intelligence agencies and their staff. ASIO was deeply embedded within the community it served and significantly affected by the attitudes, beliefs and actions of the broader public. When intelligence agencies such as ASIO lose the trust of those they are supposed to protect, the morale of existing staff plummets, the recruitment of quality staff is made more difficult, influence with government and opposition is weakened and government spending on intelligence is threatened. The very legitimacy of intelligence agencies as a necessary element of democratic government can – and did – come in question, and with it, the future of the organisations themselves. Secrecy did not ensure intelligence efficiency in Cold War Australia: by destroying trust in the agency and its legitimacy in the eyes of the Australian public, it eroded it.
Supervisors: Professor Sean Scalmer, Dr Julie Fedor
Cancy Chu (PhD in Cultural Materials Conservation), Preserving Plastics in Paper-Based Collections
Plastics, referring to semi- or fully-synthetic mouldable polymeric materials, are now found in a wide range of cultural heritage materials. Ongoing research focused on plastics in museum collections show that the chemical stability of certain plastics are short-lived. These unstable plastics may additionally produce acidic products during deterioration, causing damage to neighbouring collections. Existing case studies of the rapid degradation of plastic materials associated with book and paper collections suggest the need for conservation attention to manage deterioration in libraries and archives. However, the types and condition of plastics in paper-based collections are not documented. Additionally, there are currently no targeted preservation strategies available.
This dissertation aims to gain an understanding of plastics in paper-based collections in order to make informed preservation recommendations. Interdisciplinary methods were employed in a four-stage progressive investigation:
1. Firstly, a literature review of relevant preservation practices situates the research within the plastics conservation field. A classification of plastics in paper-based collections is proposed. Existing preservation methods addressing each material subtype are summarised, revealing a gap in the literature on plastics associated with paper materials: bindings, organisers and protectors.
2. Next, an industry survey of professionals working in Australian archives was used to assess the need for preservation strategies. Results show that plastics are pervasive in Australian archives, found in at least 90% of responding institutions. Furthermore, plastics associated with paper in archives are reported in poor condition by more than half of respondents. Respondents rated highly the need for storage strategies and standardised guidelines, supporting a need for preservation solutions.
3. To understand plastics in paper-based collections, the object types, condition, and preservation strategies were determined though collection surveys of post-1950s paper-based collections at the South Australian Museum Archive in Adelaide, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation in Melbourne. Using ATR-FTIR, 11 common polymers were identified, and ten binding structures were described. Observed deterioration was classified under four contributing causes. Based on observations, preservation recommendations were proposed addressing each of the four deterioration categories.
4. Lastly, a proposed storage strategy for plasticised poly(vinyl chloride) book covers was tested using artificial ageing. Three common sheet materials used in paper conservation were compared as possible interleaving materials. Although interleaving was observed to benefit the reduction of ink offset, other types of damage were accelerated by all three materials. This stage demonstrates the specific testing needs of a composite material combination.
Findings contribute to a deeper understanding of effective preservation approaches for plastics in paper-based collections. Overall, results show the need for storage guidelines, specific testing of composite materials, and interdisciplinary collaboration to improve preservation approaches.
This thesis is centred on practical industry outcomes and is amongst the first to specifically consider the overlap between plastics conservation and paper-based collections. Knowledge gaps addressed include material types, deterioration patterns, and suitable preservation methods. Although the thesis is focused on Australian collections, resulting recommendations are broadly relevant to paper-based collections, benefiting the preservation of information and culture for present and future generations.
Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Petronella Nel, Prof. Robyn Sloggett
Max Denton (PhD in History), Same-Sex Marriage in Australia and the Transformation of an Institution, c. 1930–2017
This thesis explores the history of same-sex marriage in Australia between 1930 and the introduction of marriage equality in 2017. It examines the performance of religious and non-religious same-sex commitment ceremonies and weddings, and advocacy for relationship recognition. This thesis draws on a diverse range of archival sources to argue that there was a prominent and sustained interest in same-sex marriage in Australia and internationally since the emergence of modern lesbian and gay politics in the 1970s. It can be traced even earlier, with same-sex weddings forming an important part of pre-liberation Australian camp cultures. This interest in same-sex marriage was dispersed and haphazard, forwarded by same-sex couples, lesbian and gay Christians and other figures in public sexual politics. Yet it forms an important part of the history of sexual and social change in the twentieth century. The history of relationship recognition reform and activism in Australia was unique but was also shaped by global trends and flows of people and information. Ritual and ceremony played an important role in the development of new sexual identities and the conceptualisation of same-sex relationships, furthering the social acceptance of homosexuality in Australia. This thesis represents one of the first considerations of same-sex marriage as a historical phenomenon in Australia and historicises recent debates over marriage equality. The complicated and contested history of same-sex marriage prior to legalisation reveals much about how sexual politics has evolved in Australia, and how the institution of marriage itself has transformed over the twentieth century.
Supervisors: Prof. Joy Damousi, Dr Mary Tomsic (ACU)
Research Higher Degree Milestones
Completion Seminars
Kristal Buckley (PhD candidate, History), ‘Heritage in Trouble? Learning from World Heritage Designation in Asia and Australia’
Based on Australian and Asian cases and an insider perspective, this thesis argues that trouble for World Heritage is embedded in its state-centric and universalising intentions. Promulgating a western framing of heritage, including a nature-culture divide, World Heritage is also troubled by its conceptual fluidity, competing purposes served by multilateral instruments, and limited effectiveness of conservation tools for an ever-broadening array of places and pressures. However, there is merit in ‘staying with the trouble’. I argue that these tensions have created the ability for World Heritage and its prestige to evolve, creating both optimistic and pessimistic expectations.
Supervisors: Prof. Andrew Jamieson, Prof. Philip Goad, Prof. Kate Darian-Smith
Emily Cox (PhD candidate, History), ‘Wunggurrwil Dhurrung: A Case Study of the Relational Ethic for non-Indigenous Designers working on Country’
While humans have always actively designed the built environment, settlers occupying the continent now called Australia have dramatically transformed and interrupted systems of place, causing significant damage to peoples and ecologies. My thesis analyses the design of the built environment in Australia as a relational practice involving First Nations and non-Indigenous peoples. The research considers the ethics, guidelines, protocols and practices that underpin design processes and works with the people who created Wunggurrwil Dhurrung as a case study to understand how relationships can underpin design practice. Engaging with critical Indigenous thinkers and designers, I discuss how non-Indigenous designers might understand the invitation to learn to live more lawfully in this place, acknowledging connections to and understanding of Country that stretch over 80,000 years of culture, or since time immemorial. Drawing on Settler Colonial theory, my analysis shows that the relational aspect of design practice is undertheorized, and that relational practices, beyond technical and procedural capabilities commonly understood as the principle concern for designers, have a significant impact on the success of built form on Aboriginal Country, especially but not only for First Nations.
Supervisors: Dr Julia Hurst, Prof. Sarah Maddison
Simon Farley (PhD candidate, History), ‘”Alien Hordes”: A Cultural History of Non-Native Wildlife in Australia’
From 1788 on, settler Australians introduced a host of animal species into this continent. We did so largely deliberately, with high hopes, and often viewed these species with immense fondness. Yet now we label them “invasive species” and kill them at will. How did we get here? This seminar will trace settler Australians’ changing attitudes towards non-native wildlife from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Taking a longitudinal approach and focusing in particular on wild birds, I will discuss how the language, imagery and knowledge surrounding non-native wildlife changed over this period, as well as accounting for why these changes occurred. I argue that the introduction of animals is best understood in the context of settler colonialism as a system that generates ideas about who and what belongs to the land. As Anglo settlers’ understanding of their own belonging in this continent has changed, this has influenced their relationship to non-native wildlife. This has not occurred in a vacuum, of course, and this seminar will discuss the international scientific background to some of these shifts. But ultimately, this is not a story of empirical fact, but of culture and values.
Supervisors: Prof. Zoë Laidlaw, Prof. David Goodman
Amy Hodgson (PhD candidate, History), ‘Chile’s Truth Commissions: Oral Histories of Individual Impact for Staff and Testifiers’
Truth commissions are the transitional justice tool most often reached for by transitional or post-conflict nations. They are often touted as ‘victim-centric’ processes, with therapeutic potential for victimised communities. Yet, as several scholars have highlighted, the impact a truth commission has on the individuals and communities who provide testimony is varied and complex, and possibly affected by the political, professional and personal positions of the truth commission staff with whom they interact. This dissertation seeks to add to this discussion by examining Chile’s two truth commissions: the 1990–1991 Rettig Commission and the 2003–2004 Valech Commission. I ask, how did staff and testifiers experience their participation in the truth commissions? Were aspects of the commissions abrasive or upsetting for staff and/or testifiers? And, how are the experiences of staff and testifiers connected? I argue that the experiences of staff and testifiers are deeply linked, and that that the very structure of the truth commission model makes it difficult to prioritise either testifier or staff welfare. While truth commissions may be methodologically ‘victim-centric’, they are ultimately fact-finding missions and not therapeutic instruments.
Supervisors: Dr Julie Fedor, Dr Roland Burke (La Trobe University)
Aloysius Landrigan (PhD candidate, History), ‘May Day 1890–1914: Internationalism and Unity across the Labour Movement and Working Classes of Britain, Australia, and the United States’
Annual May Day demonstrations in Britain, Australia, and the United States from 1890 were an annual opportunity to develop internationalism and unity across the working class and labour movement. As May Day demonstrations evolved, they reflected the shifting membership, power, conflicts, and ideals of the British, Australian, and American labour movements. Demonstrations drew on similar practices including banners, marches, speeches, and resolutions. May Day was experienced locally and as such was influenced by local politics, economics, and concepts of leisure, for example. However, May Day was also an internationalist event that created and maintained transnational ties. Consequently, May Day exists as a duality, both local and international. By closely considering this duality analysis of May Day can reveal the relationship between the local working class and international socialism.
May Day’s beginning in 1890 coincided with an era of manufactured traditions and drew upon pre-industrial traditions as part of its practice. Children dancing around Maypoles and other traditional, pagan, medieval, and naturalist motifs gave these demonstrations a sense of an ancient rite reclaimed. Labour’s May Day seemed ancient and historic as it adopted these rituals. It espoused an internationalist ideology that had its participants acknowledge internationalism and socialism as an extension of their working-class identity. This was dialectically opposed to the cosmopolitan, capitalist, identity of the bourgeoisie. They were expected to embrace their comrades from across the globe as internationalists. They shared newspapers, artwork, poetry, fraternal greetings, victories, and defeats with them each May Day as they professed universal peace. May Day was a vital time in the labour movement and is a key moment to study its strength, composition, unity, transnational ties, artistic representation, cultural practices, unity, ideas, objectives, and failing.
Supervisors: Prof. Sean Scalmer, Prof. Joy Damousi
Confirmation Seminars
Ronak Alburz (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘Transmission of Orientalizing Trends to Central Italy via the Steppes and the Balkan Region’
The introduction of Oriental cultural and artistic traditions in Italy has conventionally been attributed to the Phoenician and Greek colonists who settled in central and southern Italy during the eight and fifth centuries BCE. This influence was believed to have primarily traveled through Mediterranean routes. However, this research project seeks to challenge this widely held perspective by examining scattered archaeological findings. These findings hint at the possibility that specific elements of Eastern culture might have reached northern and central Italy through an alternative continental route, possibly via the Pontic/Balkan region. This project will explore two potential transmission routes in pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon. Ultimately, it holds the potential to reveal previously undiscovered evidence of contact between the population in north-central Italy and the western Black Sea region during the eight to fifth centuries BCE.
Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Gijs Tol, Assoc. Prof. Hyun Jin Kim, Dr Lieve Donnellan
William Hoff (PhD candidate, History), ‘Becoming Robin Hood: [Re-] Constructing the Myth in the Tudor Century’
The Robin Hood tradition endured three centuries of social and political change to become a major figure in sixteenth-century popular culture. What once was a fugitive footnote in manorial records of the thirteenth century became a leading man, who even welcomed Henry VIII to his own pageants and feasts. Robin as a commoner, an everyman, was central to the universality of the myth, yet this changed in the Tudor century, with Robin reimagined as the noble Earl of Huntington, embodying characteristics which, a generation earlier, he had openly attacked. There is a discontinuity between the two conceptions of Robin Hood which has not been fully explored to date. The project aims to reconstruct the myth of Robin Hood as it stood in the sixteenth century to not only explain a crucial turning point in the myth, but to explore medievalism as a constructivist practice as early as the fifteenth century. This presentation will introduce the core tenets of medievalism as a discipline, and how they will be applied to the case study of Robin Hood, to analyse the way in which the medieval past was evaluated, constructed, and performed in both scholarly and popular culture in the Tudor century.
Supervisors: Dr Matthew Champion, Prof. Stephanie Trigg, Prof. Stephen Knight
Seth McKellar (PhD candidate, History), ‘The “Felt Sense” and Being Trans in the 1990s and 2000s in So-called Australia’
This research focuses on a ‘felt sense’ of transness in so-called Australia at the turn of the last century. I will use the method of semi-structured interviews with trans people to create an oral history that is enriched with archival newspapers, newsletters, and articles. My work seeks to highlight the lived experiences of an underrepresented social group in Australian society, through the lenses of transfeminism and phenomenology, to provide a capacious reimagining of the 1990s and early 2000s. I hope to render trans people as the subjects of their own knowledge, which counters their often pathologised and medicalised historical representation as objects of knowledge.
Supervisors: Prof. Joy Damousi, Dr CQ Quinan
Rosemary Morgan (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology) ‘Trade in the North African Frontier Zones: The Transformative Potential of Periodic Rural Markets’
Scholarship relating to fairs and markets has typically centred on the highly urbanised and densely populated Italian mainland. The Campanian setting provides valuable literary and epigraphic evidence of synchronised urban market calendar cycles, economic networks and mobility among neighbouring Vesuvian towns, but does little to explain the evolution and sociocultural dynamics fostered by rural periodic markets in far-flung provinces. This investigation acknowledges the north African frontiers as porous constantly shifting spaces, defined by Roman conceptions of space and legal definitions of land usage and ownership. The north African periodic markets are unique. Their remoteness and distinctive topographical settings, irregular schedules and patronage by immigrant and nomadic communities (multi-ethnic, multicultural and highly mobile) are therefore seen to reflect evolving spaces of interaction. The key research question informing this investigation is ‘what transformations accompanied the establishment of rural periodic markets in the frontier zones of north Africa?’ This question aims to elicit the economic, political, religious and sociocultural functions of markets and how each aspect fostered opportunities for interaction between indigenous and Roman settlers.
Supervisors: Prof. Frederik Vervaet, Assoc. Prof. Gijs Tol
Shannon Peters (PhD candidate, History), ‘Democratising the “Temple of Learning”: The Intersection Between Progressive Education and Social Activism in Early-Twentieth-Century New York City’
In the early twentieth century, New York City underwent a period of rapid, substantial change, transforming into a dynamic, transnational hub of ideas and reformist movements. As the population became larger, more diverse, and increasingly fragmented, many reformers came to believe education had a particularly vital role to play in ensuring social cohesion. While schooling was used to promote assimilation, Americanisation, and a reaffirmation of existing socioeconomic and racial hierarchies, some reformers espoused a more democratic and inclusive vision, criticising the enduringly exclusionary nature of ‘the Temple of Learning’. The growth of progressive education in the United States in this period has generally been attributed to leading intellectuals such as John Dewey and George Counts; however, this emphasis has obscured the significance of the community-driven initiatives instigated by teachers and social workers, whose involvement in activist causes informed their pedagogical approaches. Thus, this study explores the overlooked spaces in which progressive educational initiatives arose, with a specific focus on teachers themselves, especially African American and Anglo-American women, whose contributions have been underemphasised. This research examines the efforts of activist-educators who sought to foster cultural inclusivity and societal transformation in the face of profoundly unequal conditions.
Supervisors: Dr Julia Bowes, Prof. David Goodman
Anna-Elisa Stümpel (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘Urbanism and Urban Transformations in the Plain of Gioia Tauro from c. 1000 to 250 BCE’
My thesis research addresses the settlement development and urban transformations in the Plain of Gioia Tauro (PGT), situated in Calabria, within a time frame from around c1000 to 250 BCE. In this context, it critically examines if and in how far Greek migrants and an increased commercial connection to the Aegean World at the end of the Early Iron Age have acted as a catalyst in transformations regarding the urbanisation of settlements and landscape management within the indigenous communities situated in the PGT. This thesis research aims at gaining a new, detailed insight into the process of indigenous urbanisation and landscape management, closely examining the dispersion, continuity, and discontinuity of indigenous settlements. While often investigated unilaterally in the light of Greek ‘colonisation’, recent efforts in (landscape) archaeological research conducted in the region of Calabria are increasingly trying to move away from this biased viewpoint. By studying the vast archaeological record offered by the indigenous and ‘colonial’ Greek settlements alike within a postcolonial framework, objective insights are gained regarding the general history of ancient Calabria as well as the research area (PGT), the indigenous communities located there, their (material) culture and the (political) relations between them and the Greek settlers.
Supervisors: Dr Lieve Donnellan, Assoc. Prof. Gijs Tol, Dr Jesús García Sánchez
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