SHAPS Digest (May 2024)

Giorgos Anagnostou (Ohio State University), who was hosted by SHAPS last year, reflected on his visit to Melbourne and his interaction with the local Greek-Australian community in an article for Neos Kosmos. 

An obituary for the late June Factor (Honorary Fellow, History) (1936-2024) was published in the Age, by Gwenda Beed Davey and Judy McKinty.

Ash Green (Teaching Associate, Classics & Archaeology) has a monthly spot on ABC Radio National Victorian Afternoons with Trevor Chappell, discussing tidbits from Melbourne’s history. This month Ash discussed The Prison Treadmill of Port Phillip.

The HPS Podcast (hosted by Samara Greenwood and Carmelina Contarino) published new episodes:

Aslı Günel (MA candidate in Cultural Materials Conservation) and her work with Maitland Regional Art Gallery supported by a Hansen Public Humanities Grant was featured by the Faculty of Arts.

Tamara Lewit (Honorary Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) discussed the history of Mother’s Day on 3RRR.

Peter McPhee (Emeritus Professor, History) reviewed Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 (Allen Lane), in Australian Book Review (paywalled).

Carla Pascoe Leahy (University of Tasmania; SHAPS Honorary Fellow, History) and Cat Gay (Hansen PhD Scholar, History), wrote an article for Women’s Agenda: ‘How Motherhood is being Transformed in a Climate-changed World‘.

Andonis Piperoglou and Daphne Arapakis took part in a webinar, ‘(Mis)Using Histories: Mediterranean Diasporas and the Politics of Belonging’, as part of the Australian Centre’s 2024 Critical Public Conversations series ‘Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining Belonging in So-Called Australia.’

Stories of migration from the Mediterranean region to Australia have typically been framed within a settler national frame of historical analysis. That is, histories of Greek, Italian, Maltese, Cypriot, Turkish, and Lebanese migrant experiences are often positioned as stories of “struggle and success” in the national confines of Australian history. Such stories frame migrants from the Mediterranean region as a people who worked hard (often in small businesses or nation building infrastructure schemas) and then climbed the steep ladder of social mobility to become successfully assimilated, hyphenated Australians. Such historical narratives – which almost never centre First Nations people, Indigenous sovereignty, and Country – are frequently deployed by members of Mediterranean diasporas to claim an entitled sense of belonging to (so-called) Australia.

In this webinar, two diaspora scholars explore this (mis)using of the past. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of Greek diasporic identities today, they will explore how usages of migrant histories create culturally specific renderings of settler colonial culture, while also making space for anti-colonial activities that permit alternative, cross-border, senses of belonging.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) commented for ABC News on the recent arrests in connection with a foiled plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Tony Ward (Honorary Fellow, History) published an article challenging the notion that social media is a primary cause of violence against women in Australia.

Awards, Grants, Appointments

Robyn Sloggett (Grimwade Centre) has been awarded an ARC Industry Laureate Fellowship in support of the project, Safe Keeping: Effecting Solutions for Risk to Remote Indigenous Heritage.

The Fellowship will provide over $5 million over five years and support two postdoctoral positions, three PhDs, a program co-ordinator, ten Indigenous Knowledge Expert positions, ten Indigenous Internship positions, a consultant linguist, and Elder sitting fees. It will also support 150 hours of casual Grade 1 Research Assistance per year to employ Grimwade students to work alongside and provide support to Indigenous artworkers and IKEs in Melbourne. The partners are ANKA (the Arnhem, Northern and Kimberley Artists Aboriginal Corporation), and IAS (International Art Services) Fine Art Logistics.

With Australia witnessing the loss of Indigenous cultural heritage, the aim of this project is to produce research outcomes that will reduce the risk of further losses of remotely located Indigenous collections. It will unlock and secure the asset capacity of collections for Indigenous knowledge, income production, job creation, world-leading research programs, and deliver a community education resource for future generations. The project’s co-designed and co-delivered research – situated within the philosophy of two-way knowledge reciprocity practised by Gija, Yolngu, and other Indigenous partners – will deliver the first comprehensive analysis of risks to cultural collections in remote communities; identify ways to properly manage these risks; assess best-practice IP management; identify and evaluate potential income; and develop assessment tools to provide evidence of the economic and social value of these collections. The project will deliver a step-change in the capacity for Indigenous communities to care for their cultural heritage, contribute to self-determination and reduce risk to national assets.

Clare Damen (current History Honours student) is the winner of the 2023 Australian Industrial Relations Commission Centennial Prize. This prize is awarded for the best research work (essay or thesis) submitted in the field of Labour History and Industrial Relations.

Clare won the prize for her essay, ‘Women’s Rights in Labour History: The Controversy of Muriel Heagney and the Council of Action for Equal Pay’, which she produced for the subject ‘Controversies in Australian History’ (HIST30064), coordinated last year by Dr James Keating. Clare writes:

My research highlighted continued feminist activism through the 1930s and 1940s, expanding my knowledge of women’s involvement in Australian labour history and industrial relations more broadly. I am honoured to receive the AIRC prize in acknowledgement of this work.

Jacinthe Flore (HPS) has been awarded a Dyason Fellowship to support her research project, Algorithmic Emotions: Exploring the Cultural History and Social Implications of Emotion Artificial Intelligence. 

Cat Gay (Hansen PhD Scholar in History) has been awarded the 2024 SHAPS Fellows’ Essay Prize, for her article ‘All the Perils of the Ocean’: Girls’ Emotions on Voyages to Australia, 1851–1884′, History Australia 20.2 (2023). This prize, generously funded by the History Fellows’ group, is awarded annually for the best article published by a post-graduate student.

Cat Gay also received an AHA Postgraduate and ECR Conference Award 2024 to attend the Australian Historical Association Conference in Adelaide in July.

Janet McCalman (Professorial Fellow, History) received a 2024 Arts Alumni Award for Contribution to the Faculty and University. The award recognises significant and sustained contribution to the Faculty and University through outstanding leadership, impact on students, and/or engagement with the University and broader community. In her response to the award, Janet McCalman reflected:

It’s our job [as historians] not only to find out what was going on and what it meant, but how it sits in the context of the wider world and of a longer time. [It’s] that role of truth-telling that all my colleagues… did as teachers, as writers, as public servants, and that spirit of commitment to honesty and scholarship was what the School of History gave us. And we must never fail in that, we must never start to become self-indulgent and be navel gazing and looking only at things which are comfortable or entertaining. History is not entertainment. History is real life. And unless we come to terms with history, we can’t live for the future.

Ravando (PhD in History, 2023) has been awarded a Herb Feith Centre Fellowship at Monash University. The inaugural Herb Feith Centre Fellowship assists doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars with the publication of their research in relation to social justice in Indonesia

Freya Smart (BA 2023, majoring in History and Philosophy) was awarded a 2023 European Studies Association Australia and New Zealand (ESAANZ) prize for the best essay by an undergraduate student, for her essay about cinema in the late-Soviet era, produced for the subject Red Empire: The Soviet Union and After (HIST20084). Her prize-winning essay has now been published as an article in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of European Studies. 

Grace Vanderkolk (BA Honours, History, 2023), now undertaking a Master of Teaching) won a 2023 ESAANZ prize for the best essay by a postgraduate student, for her essay on the interplay between how the history of famine is remembered in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the relations that these countries have with the Russian Federation. Grace wrote the essay for the subject Russia and the World (HIST90037). Her prize-winning essay has now been published as an article in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of European Studies. 

Academic Publications

Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. Volume 1: Truth, Ross L Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton (eds) (Melbourne University Press)

Dhoombak Goobgoowana acknowledges and publicly addresses the long, complex and troubled relationship between the Indigenous people of Australia and the University of Melbourne. It is a book about race and how it has been constructed by academics in the University. It is also about power and how academics have wielded it and justified its use against Indigenous populations, and about knowledge, especially the Indigenous knowledge that silently contributed to many early research projects and collection endeavours.

By appropriating Wurundjeri land for its buildings, and accepting donations drawn from the proceeds of colonisation of Indigenous Country, the University of Melbourne advertised its superiority as a whole institution to Indigenous people. Within its buildings, academics and students explored a worldview that effectively banished Indigenous knowledge and culture.

The University has supported injustices called progress, half-truths presented as facts, and prejudices pretending at objectivity. This volume follows the failings of many biographies and institutional histories that excluded race from their stories of achievement, overlooking how racist ideas complicated and shaped their narratives. Although many things have changed, the stain of the past remains. But the University no longer wishes to look away.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as ‘truth-telling’ in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people on whose unceded lands several University of Melbourne campuses are located.

The cover photograph shows the members of a 1901 expedition through central Australia led by Frank Gillen (seated, left) and Baldwin Spencer (seated, right). To the rear stands mounted constable Harry Chance. Beside these white men are two Arrernte men, Erlikilyika (to the left) and Purunda (to the right). This image has been chosen to represent the unacknowledged participation of Indigenous people in the activities of academics in the University’s history. The uncredited work of Erlikilyika as interpreter of both language and culture informed many of the conclusions of the white ethnographers and the anthropologists who followed. The expedition would have been impossible without the knowledge of these Indigenous men, and the scholarship it produced exists only because of them.

This volume includes the following contributions by SHAPS staff, students and honoraries:

  • Simon Farley, Flora and Failure: A History of Plants and People on the Parkville Campus
  • Ross L Jones and Simon Farley, Indigenous Knowledge
  • Richard Gillespie, A Computer Server and Indigenous Reconciliation
  • David Goodman, The History Discipline and Aboriginal Dispossession
  • Zoë Laidlaw, Settler-Colonial Philanthropy and Indigenous Dispossession

The e-book is available for free download via the MUP site.

Andrew Alexandra (Honorary Fellow, PhD supervisor, Philosophy), with Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Patrick F Walsh and Roger Bradbury, The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions (Routledge)

Intelligence collection by agencies such as the CIA, MI6, and Mossad involves practices that are apparently inconsistent with the principles of ordinary morality – practices such as lying, spying, manipulation, and covert action. However, in the defence of national security, such practices may not only be morally permissible, but may also under some circumstances be morally obligatory. One approach to the ethics of national security intelligence activity has been to draw from the just war tradition (so-called ‘just intelligence theory’).

This book identifies significant limitations of this approach and offers a new, institutionally based, teleological normative framework. In doing so, it revises some familiar principles designed for application to kinetic wars, such as necessity and proportionality, and invokes some additional ones, such as reciprocity and trust. It goes on to explore the applications of this framework and a revised set of principles for national security intelligence institutions and practices in contemporary and emerging political and technological settings.

Christopher Bendle (MA in Classics & Archaeology, 2020), The Office of ‘Magister Militum’ in the 4th Century CE: A Study into the Impact of Political and Military Leadership on the Later Roman Empire

This monograph presents a novel investigation of the magistri militum, the highest-ranking officers within the late Roman army. It posits that between 340 and 395 CE, specific magistri seized opportune moments, notably during the political voids following emperors’ deaths, to reshape the character of their office and expand its pivotal role in the military-political sphere. This transformation played a decisive role in the eventual dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Furthermore, the study employs the prosopographical method to reevaluate previous scholarship regarding the proportion of barbarian and Roman generals. Notably, the research posits that the balance between Roman and non-Roman officers was far more equitably distributed than hitherto conjectured. Additionally, prosopography is used to reconstruct the fourth-century cursus honorum. Finally, this work utilises the analytical framework of social network analysis, predicated upon the application of mathematical equations and formulae to elucidate the intricate dynamics of positive and negative relationships.

Purushottama Bilimoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy), Hindu Diaspora in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific)’, with Jayant Bapat, Philip Hughes, Alison Booth, and Rajendra Prasad (region contributors). In Knut Jacobsen (ed.) Hindu Diasporas (Global) (Oxford University Press)

Oceania comprises Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Tonga, and habited by distinct ethnic peoples, to which ‘Hindoos’ were brought by colonial powers. With the arrival of indentured labourers (girmityas) in Fiji 150 years ago, Fiji-Hindus have worked tirelessly towards preserving their way of life. Over the generations, Hindu sects have created their unique identity through their culture and adapted practices. Recently, New Zealand’s resident Indian populations have also increased significantly. Generations of Hindus from Gujarat, joined by Indo-Fijians, South Indians, and Hindus from elsewhere, have established temples and associations representing a diversity in languages and religious cultures. South Asians began arriving as seamen onboard ships from India to the colonies of terra australis, circa 1790s. Even during ‘White Australia’ years, significant numbers of Hindoos were recruited as farmworkers, labourers, and mineral-diggers, some becoming hawkers and merchants. With surges in professional and student migration, in more recent decades, Hindus with their temples, community centres, comparatively high profile and education, are contributing to the region’s multiculturalism, while passing on their heritage to the next generations.

Purushottama Bilimoria, Personal Laws in India: Colonial Legacy and Constitutional Debates, Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law and Practice, Special Issue on Uniform Civil Code and the Future of Muslim Identity in India, edited by Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddique

The article traces the trajectory of the development of personal laws in India in the historical context. History is read not only as a set of events over a time, but also through varied conceptions of ‘law’ as they have evolved during the period. Emphasis is given to modifications in Hindu Law and from there the debate is contextualised to understand the evolution of Muslim Law.

We argue that legal pluralism has been the order of the day since antiquity, and that the notion of a uniform law comes more a result of the adoption of Western understanding of what common law is and what purposes it needs to serve. While nations like Canada and Australia are exploring ways to give more agency to communities and certain identified sections of the population, it is rather curious that the developments in India are taking us in a reverse direction. The conclusion drawn is that while a Uniform Civil Code may become a reality for the country, it cannot be welcomed if it adopts a singular worldview dominated by a certain understanding of how personal relations of people must be forged in times to come.

Melanie Brand (PhD in History, 2023; now Macquarie University) In the Name of National Security: Press Censorship in Cold War Australia, Australian Historical Studies

Though little known, a system of voluntary press censorship based on the British D Notice system operated in Australia during the Cold War. The Australian D Notice system, while successful in the early decades of the Cold War, became increasingly contested throughout the 1970s before apparently falling into disuse in the 1980s. The belief that Australia’s D Notice system simply decayed through lack of use is generally accepted by scholars; however, this explanation does not sufficiently convey the complexity behind the breakdown of the system. The system relied heavily on trust and requires a degree of transparency between governments and the press. This article makes the case that a broadening of the definition of national security combined with the simultaneous growth of both investigative journalism and the perception of increased government secrecy was the ultimate cause of the failure of the D Notice system in Australia.

Helen M Davies (Honorary Fellow, History), Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish Women in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press)

Herminie and Fanny Pereire were sisters-in-law, married to the eminent Jewish bankers and Saint-Simonian socialists Emile and Isaac. They were also mother and daughter. This book, a companion to the author’s acclaimed Emile and Isaac Pereire (2015), sheds new light on elite Jewish families in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on the family archives, it traces the Pereires across a century of major social and political change, from the Napoleonic period to the cusp of the First World War, revealing the active role they played as bourgeois women both within and outside the family. It offers insights into Jewish assimilation, embourgeoisement and gender relations, through the lens of one of the most fascinating families of the century.

Jackie Dickenson (Honorary Fellow, History), “The Poor Man’s Overdraft“: A Longer History of Australian Retail Credit, History Australia

Most histories of Australian cultural life pin the start of consumer credit’s popularity to the 1950s and the heady days of the early long boom. This article reveals the longer history of consumer credit in Australia. Middle-class Australians have long made use of forms of credit provided by retailers such as monthly accounts to supplement their incomes, take advantage of special offers, deal with unexpected expenses, or indulge impulsive desires. Those with more limited and less regular incomes, working-class families unable to secure credit from banks or department stores, also became enmeshed in credit culture, but through a different route. An early form of retail credit – the cash-order system – played a crucial role in preparing working-class consumers for the postwar boom in credit culture. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cash-order system provided a bridge between older forms of working-class retail credit such as the tick and the slate, and modern forms such as the department store budget accounts that would become widely available after the Second World War.

Samara Greenwood (PhD candidate, HPS), The Problem of Context Revisited: Moving Beyond the Resources Model, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The problem of context, which explores relations between societal conditions and science, has a long and contentious tradition in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. While the problem has received little explicit attention in recent years, two contemporary positions remain evident. First is the resources model, which seeks to maintain the autonomy of scientists by denying contextual influence, restricting the role of contexts to providing a pool of ‘novel inputs’. Second is the contextual shaping position which recognises that societal conditions influence science but remains conceptually vague and theoretically undeveloped. This paper argues, given current disciplinary conditions, the problem of context deserves renewed attention. In this paper I first review the history of the debate from the 1930s, highlighting several anxieties that continue to hamper the open study of the problem. After this historical review, I provide a critique of the resources model and assess the possibilities and shortfalls of the contextual shaping position. By addressing past and present perspectives, my goal is to move firmly beyond narrow accounts of context, as exemplified by the resources model. Instead, I propose a renewed program of research in which rich empirical studies are combined with equally rich theoretical work directed toward developing conceptual tools better able to capture the multiple intricacies evident in context-science relations.

Dan Halliday (Philosophy), Population Aging and the Retirement Age, Journal of Applied Philosophy

Numerous jurisdictions have recently raised the age of retirement or plan to do so. Pressure to extend people’s working lives is due to population aging, which makes it harder to fund retirement through existing methods. Raising the retirement age can improve the ‘dependency ratio’ by increasing the fraction of the population that works (and pays taxes) relative to the fraction retired. This article gives sustained attention to connecting the case for retirement with one view about wellbeing, according to which old age is subject to distinctive goods.

The importance of being able to access these goods in old age favours an eventual exit from labour market participation that retirement provisions enable. This view is stronger than one that treats retirement as merely a safety net to enable people to stop work only when advanced aging makes it unreasonably burdensome. At the same time, the view likely does not justify status quo retirement ages, meaning that some increase to the retirement age might be defensible. The article also seeks to illuminate ways in which different aspects of population aging – in particular the distinction between dependency ratios and inequalities in longevity – bear differently on the wider debate about justice and retirement.

Thomas J Keep (PhD Candidate, Classics & Archaeology) with RG Gunn and J Goodes, Stretching the Surrogate: An Initial Test combining DStretch Image Enhancement with Photogrammetry Modelling at Bunjil’s Shelter and Gulgurn Manja, Australia, Rock Art Research 

This paper presents the initial results of a digitisation project exploring the combination of photogrammetric 3D modelling with DStretch and 3D model display within virtual reality head-mounted displays. DStretch is an image enhancement technique used in rock art recording to make faded pigments more visible. The technique has long being used to enhance photographs of rock art, but researchers have recently being experimenting with applying it to 3D digital models. Using the sites of Bunjil’s Shelter and Gulgurn Manya within or near Gariwerd as case studies, the paper outlines a process for applying DStretch enhancement to photogrammetry textures and reapplying these textures to the 3D models, allowing a completely DStretch-enhanced 3D model to be viewed within virtual reality. 

Aloysius Landrigan (PhD candidate in History), Creating the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’: Early Socialist Literature on the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States, History of European Ideas

This article analyses the role of early radical and socialist texts in forming the understanding of the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States. The Commune, while a French event, came to be associated with socialists, radicals, and as a symbol of internationalism. Marx’s The Civil War in France established the interpretation of the Commune that would see it become a radical shibboleth. This article analyses articles by Edward Beesly, Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871, E B Bax’s Short History of the Commune, and Lenin’s State and Revolution to trace the influences of Marx’s interpretation. This analysis includes examination of the radical publishers in both Britain and the United States to explore how these texts were edited and changed, and how they were circulated to reach the intended working-class audience. The article addresses the following core questions: where did this interpretation come from? How was it constructed? And how did it come to dominate the interpretation of the Commune? These questions are significant due to the Commune’s pre-eminence within socialist history, serving as an example of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for many future revolutionaries.

Aloysius Landrigan (PhD candidate in History), Remembering the Commune: Celebrations in Britain and the United States, Labor.

The Paris Commune led to annual celebrations across the labor movement across the globe. This article focuses on those in Britain and the United States from 1871 to the end of the century, exploring how the event’s interpretation and function within a community has fluctuated over this period. It discusses the internationalism present in demonstrations as people shed their national identity and joined an internationalist community in celebration each year. It analyzes how the labor movement in each country responded to perceived threats from outside their community in the wake of the Haymarket Affair. It also demonstrates that the Commune was a palimpsest, an event that could be reinterpreted each year to express whatever ideals the movement needed. It was a call to reform and revolution, to hope and despair, and to past and future. The article’s analysis of British and American Commune celebrations reveals a rich and evolving community that emphasized internationalism and oppression during a turbulent period.

Andrew J May (History) reviewed Graeme Davison’s latest book, My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British–Australian Family (The Miegunyah Press, 2023) in the latest Victorian Historical Journal.

Val Noone (Honorary Fellow, History) reviewed Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend by Robert W Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2023), also in the Victorian Historical Journal.

Ágota Duró (Hiroshima Jogakuin University) and David Palmer (Honorary Fellow, History), Japan’s Forgotten Korean Forced Laborers: The Search for Hidden Wartime Graves in Hokkaido, International Labor and Working-Class History

The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War Two forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilised nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilised throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced labourers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible.

This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

PhD Completions

Simon Farley (PhD in History), “Alien Hordes”: A Cultural History of Non-Native Birds in Australia

From 1788, settlers introduced a host of organisms to the Australian continent. They did so largely deliberately, with high hopes, and often viewed these species with immense fondness. Yet now many of these species are labelled ‘invasive’ and killed at will. This about-turn requires explanation. This thesis traces settler Australians’ changing attitudes towards nonnative wildlife from the late 1820s to the present. Taking a longitudinal approach and focusing in particular on wild birds, it describes how the language, imagery and sentiments surrounding non-native wildlife changed over this period, as well as accounting for why these changes occurred. I closely read public texts – books, lectures, pamphlets, parliamentary debates and, above all, articles from periodicals – in order to uncover the suppressed colonial and racial anxieties underlying seemingly rational and scientific discussion of avifauna. I use species such as the house sparrow, the red-whiskered bulbul and the common myna as case studies to challenge established narratives about the rise and fall of the acclimatisation movement in Australia and to explain why the settler public’s hostility towards and anxiety about non-native wildlife grew so dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. 

Much has been written about non-native wildlife in Australia, but little of this is adequately historicised; almost all of it is highly scientistic, taking for granted the current (and much contested) orthodoxy of ‘anekeitaxonomy’, that is, the classification and judgement of species by their geographical origin. Although the great reversal in attitudes may appear to be justified by ‘improving’ ecological knowledge, I argue that it is best understood in the context of settler colonialism as a system that generates ideas about who and what belongs to the land. As settlers’ understanding of their own belonging in the continent has changed, this has influenced their perceptions of and attachments to wild animals, native and non-native alike. Ultimately, this is not a story of empirical fact but one of culture, values and how these have changed over the course of Australia’s colonial history.

Supervisors: Professor Zoë Laidlaw, Professor David Goodman

PhD Milestones

Viktor Linusson (PhD confirmation seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Production, Circulation and Consumption of Ceramics in the Plain of Gioia Tauro

This thesis investigates the economical processes ongoing in the Plain of Gioia Tauro (Calabria, Italy) between the ninth and fourth centuries BCE. The archaeological record of this ancient marshland suggests that the, as of yet, poorly understood developments of the urban infrastructure were underpinned by contemporary transformations of the local economy, as manifested by changing patterns of consumption and production of ceramic materials.

This research develops new hypotheses on the impact and character of these economic transformations using archaeometric methods to analyse ceramic fabrics, while attempting to contextualise the role of the Plain in regional and Mediterranean trade routes and exchange networks. As part of the project, new non-invasive archaeological surveys have been conducted in the Plain of Gioia Tauro, allowing for the first time the integration of rural contexts with legacy data from early urban contexts. This presentation frames the aims and scope this PhD project, and puts forward some findings of the research in its earliest stage.

Laura Pisanu (PhD completion seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Social Complexity and Maritime Connectivity in Nuragic Sardinia: The South Montiferru and the North Campidano

From the sixteenth to the sixth century BCE, Nuragic groups inhabited Sardinia (Italy). They have generally considered to be hierarchically organised and to have played a secondary role in the Mediterranean connectivity. However, archaeological record points towards more complex explanations. Focusing on the Montiferru and Campidano, Nuragic social complexity and maritime connectivity are investigated. Data collected during fieldwork activities and research periods in Italy and Greece have been studied using GIS-based and typological analyses and they are critically reassessed. In conclusion, new insights on social complexity of Nuragic communities and their role in the panorama of Mediterranean trade are provided.

Daniel Rule (PhD completion seminar, History), Sir John Latham: A Biography

This thesis is a biographical study of the political and judicial careers of Sir John Latham (1877–1964). Covering his childhood, his time as Attorney-General in the 1920s, his leadership of the Opposition during the Great Depression through to his retirement as Chief Justice in 1952, it examines the life of a leading non-Labor politician and judge. It focuses particularly on the origins, nature and impact of free-trader liberalism and cultural puritanism, which shaped his time in Parliament and the High Court and reveals continuities in non-Labor politics during a period of frequent party upheaval.

Other Happenings

Jenny Spinks (Hansen Associate Professor, History) gave a presentation at the Grimwade Conservation Services Labs on the materials from the university’s special collections that are being prepared for the exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance, which opens on 27 July at the Arts West Gallery, running until 29 November. This follows on from Albrecht Dürer’s Material World, held at The Whitworth, University of Manchester, running from 30 June 2023 – 10 March 2024. Both exhibitions are part of the Melbourne-led international research project, Albrecht Dürer’s Material World – in Melbourne, Manchester and Nuremberg, funded by the Australian Research Council (DP210101623).

Jenny Spinks at Grimwade Conservation Services Labs presenting materials from the university’s special collections being prepared for exhibition. Photographer: Penny Tripp

SHAPS staff, fellows, students, alumni: if you have news items for the monthly SHAPS digest, email us the details.

Feature image: Grimwade Conservation Services Labs and material from the university’s special collections being prepared for exhibition. Photographer: Penny Tripp