SHAPS Digest (August 2024)

Liam Byrne (Honorary Fellow, History) and Emma Shortis (RMIT) published an article in the Conversation, looking back at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in the United States and comparing it to how party conventions operate today.

Paige Donaghy (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, History, and member of the Medical Humanities Research Lab) reported on a recent symposium on the medical and health humanities, for The Polyphony: Conversations across the Medical Humanities.

Paige Donaghy is also Managing Co-Editor of Vida, the Australian Women’s History Network blog, where she recently introduced a new blog series, ‘Premodern Gender‘, on gender in the medieval and early modern world.

Thea Gardiner and Cat Gay (PhD Candidates, History) wrote for The Conversation on ‘The Lindsays: How 10 Siblings from the 19th Century Shaped Australian Art and Identity‘.

Traces of Girlhood, an exhibition based on Cat Gay‘s PhD research, opened at Como House, South Yarra. The exhibition explores the experiences of girls and young women in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Victoria, as reflected in objects such as handiwork, scrapbooks, writing, archaeological artefacts and photographs. Co-curated by Cat Gay with Annie Muir, Heritage Victoria, archaeologist Dr Sarah Sato, and Maddi Miller (School of Agriculture, Food & Ecosystem Sciences), the exhibition was funded by a Hansen Little Public Humanities grant in partnership with the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). The exhibition is open until 24 October 2024.

Hannah Gould (HPS) featured in the SBS documentary ‘Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye‘, exploring attitudes towards death, dying and funerals in Australia. The documentary features Hannah and her students participating in new University of Melbourne Medical School subjects, Death and Dying: Lifting the Lid and Death and Dying 2: When is Dead really Dead?

Hannah Gould was also interviewed by the Guardian in relation to the documentary and featured on University of Melbourne’s Newsroom.

Ashleigh Green (Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed by ABC Radio Melbourne on the history of the first horse races in Melbourne.

A new exhibition, Chains of Empire: Australian Legacies of British Slavery, opened at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. The exhibition was developed by Zoë Laidlaw (History) in cooperation with colleagues at the University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University and UNSW and with guidance from First Nations communities. It explores Australia’s historical connections to the Atlantic slave trade and examines the enduring impact of British slavery on the nation’s development. The exhibition has been reviewed in the National Indigenous Times. For more information, see the UWA press release.

Zoë Laidlaw (History) reviewed Alan Lester’s edited volume The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism for the Australian Book Review (behind paywall).

Marilyn Lake (Professorial Fellow, History) reviewed Andrew Fowler’s Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty for the Australian Book Review (behind paywall).

Konstantine Panegyres (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics & Archaeology) wrote four articles for The Conversation: ‘Wrestling with Bulls, Meat-only Diets and Sex Bans: How the Ancient Olympians Prepared‘; ‘Aristotle, Aelian and the Giant Octopus: The Earliest ‘Citizen Science’ Goes Back More than 2,000 Years‘; ‘4 Things Ancient Greeks and Romans Got Right About Mental Health‘, and ‘Computer ‘Reconstructions’ of Faces from Ancient Times are Popular. But How Reliable Are They?‘

Jenny Spinks (Hansen Associate Professor in History) was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Art Show about the exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance, currently on display in the Arts West Gallery.

Awards, Appointments, Promotions

Nicole Davis (Forum, PhD in History 2023, Fellow in History) has been appointed to a two-year role as historical researcher for the Government House (Melbourne) History Project.

Nathan Gardner (PhD in History, 2023) and Jonathan Kemp (Cultural Materials Conservation) have been awarded Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy grants to support their respective book projects.

Nathan Gardner‘s forthcoming book, In the Face of Diversity: A History of Chinese Australian Community Organisations, 1970–2020, will be the first nationwide study of Chinese Australian communities in the time since the end of the White Australia Policy. It follows the history of more than a dozen Chinese Australian community organisations — using the English — and Chinese-language materials they produced and oral history interviews with ten current and former community leaders — as they responded to major developments in Australia and abroad. The book challenges prevailing conceptualisations of a unitary ‘Chinese Australian community’ and highlights the vibrant and important contributions these organisations made to modern multicultural Australia.

In Jonathan Kemp‘s forthcoming book, Conservation as Version Control, he argues that the continuing preservation of any artwork, whether old or new, is always a process involving many hands and minds and that any display of a work represents a particular time-stamped ‘version of record’. The logic of this approach means that conservation can be redescribed as what’s called Version Control in software development. By drawing parallels between software and conservation, Kemp argues that conservators act like art developers in the ‘versioning’ of the heritage under their care and this has consequences for notions of authorship and authenticity as well as infrastructures for the care of cultural heritage.

Kate McGregor‘s book Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press), has been shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s History Award (General History category).

Pete Millwood (History) has won an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for his project, Island of Democracy: Transnational Currents & the Democratisation of Taiwan.

This project examines Taiwan’s transformation from one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes to the most vibrant democracy in East Asia today. Drawing on new sources from archives within and beyond Taiwan, the project will use an innovative transnational methodology to investigate the extent to which Taiwan’s democratisation was not only the result of a struggle in Taiwan but also of a global contest for the island’s future, involving Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese actors and taking place across Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Understanding the global context of how Taiwan broke free of authoritarianism will shed light on democratic resilience in the Asia–Pacific today and on alternative political futures in the Chinese world.

Emily Rayside (currently completing Honours in History) has won a 2024 Miegunyah Student Project award for the project “A World of Fern-trees”: Ferns, Gullies, and the Enchanted Settlers.

During the nineteenth century, tree ferns and their gully homes captivated settler-colonists in Tasmania and Victoria. In response, settler-colonists created a litany of art and literature, emphasising how ferns mediated their relationship with stolen land.

The annual Miegunyah Student Project Awards are generously supported by the Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Fund and administered by the University of Melbourne’s Museums and Collections Department. Six project awards are offered each year to University of Melbourne students, who research works of art in the University’s Grimwade collection.

Academic Publications

Melanie Brand (PhD in History, 2024, now Macquarie University), A Spy Thriller Outdoes Fiction: Popular Culture and the 1954 Petrov Affair, Journal of Australian Studies

Scholars are increasingly aware of the ways in which popular culture, particularly spy fiction and film, mediates public understanding of the clandestine world of espionage and intelligence. This article uses the 1954 Petrov Affair as a case study to argue that spy fiction and representations of espionage performed a mediating and framing process for the Australian public during the early Cold War. The events surrounding the defection of Soviet embassy Third Secretary Vladimir Petrov and his wife, Evdokia, to Australia in April 1954 were shocking and unprecedented; with little experience of the extraordinary events beyond the thrilling espionage narratives of popular culture, the Australian media began to frame the event using the familiar formula of spy fiction. By making the “story” of the Petrov Affair a recognisable narrative, rendering the events understandable and the mysteries decipherable, the media transformed Australia’s unsettling involvement in the world of international espionage into entertainment.

Jacinthe Flore (HPS) et al., What Does Leisure Have to Do with Mental Health? Arts, Creative and Leisure Practices and Living with Mental Distress, Leisure Studies

There is a growing interest in the role of leisure, arts and creative activities in cultivating health and wellbeing across different contexts. Leisure sports have historically been considered beneficial for achieving health, and similar focus has recently been placed on arts and creativity. Recent research into the role of arts and creative engagement for wellbeing highlights the benefits of these modes of engagement on emotional wellbeing and social connectedness. In this article, we examine the ways arts, creative and leisure practices and mental health converge, co-exist and collide. We draw on feminist leisure studies scholarship and Sarah Ahmed’s work on emotion to discuss insights from our research into the everyday experiences of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). We utilise qualitative methods to investigate people’s experiences of meaningful leisure practices and the dynamics between leisure practices and living well with the distress. We explore how leisure activities initiate complex processes of discovery and production of meanings, identity and wellbeing. Our discussion emphasises that leisure practices contribute to producing everyday forms of self-care and provide transformative space for self-discovery yet are simultaneously inseparable from the politics of living with mental distress while navigating accumulated effects of distress.

Jacinthe Flore (HPS) et al., Experimenting with Arts-based Methods and Affective Provocations to Understand Complex Lived Experience of a Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, Social Science and Medicine

This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences of distress associated with a BPD diagnosis communicate through sensation, emotion, image and affective capacity, the authors put to work Blackman’s (2015) concept of “productive possibilities of negative states of being” and the broader theoretical framework of new materialism. This approach allows a more transformative feeling-with that exceeds the normative affective repertoires and scripts associated with a diagnosis of BPD. The authors recognise the often unspoken and invisible affects of complex mental distress and trauma, and purposefully open the space for affective and symbolic aspects of creative artworks to communicate what is less known or has less presence in dominant biomedical frameworks about living with a BPD diagnosis. The article foregrounds the lived and living experience of participants to generate experiential rather than clinical understandings of the diagnosis.

Ashleigh Green, Vesuvius Comes to Melbourne: The 1887 Production of James Pain’s Pyrodrama, The Last Days of Pompeii, Iris: Journal of the Classical Association of Victoria

In 1887, the Australian city of Melbourne hosted a spectacular pyrotechnic show called The Last Days of Pompeii, based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel of the same name. The event was orchestrated by famed pyrodramatist James Pain, who had previously toured his shows at London’s Crystal Palace and New York’s Coney Island. Through a combination of elaborate sets, costumed actors, musicians, and electrical illumination, Pain brought the city of Pompeii to life for the people of Melbourne before simulating its destruction by the eruption of Vesuvius through a dazzling fireworks display. This article provides the first full account of this now-forgotten piece of Melbourne’s history, describing how the show was organised, conducted, and received by audiences. It investigates how this piece of classical reception reflects upon the cross-class prosperity that ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was enjoying in 1887, as well as the city’s general character and its attitude towards public entertainment.

Ashleigh Green, La Trobe and the Establishment of Yarra Bend Asylum (1848), La Trobeana

Charles Joseph La Trobe is recognised as having had an active hand in overseeing the establishment of many public amenities and institutions in Victoria, but to date his part in the creation of Melbourne’s first lunatic asylum has been overlooked. This paper explores his role in the building, financing, and staffing of the Yarra Bend Asylum that opened in 1848. It charts the many difficulties that plagued the Asylum’s construction and explores how the colonial government housed and treated ‘lunatics’ before, during, and shortly after its completion.

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 recognizes 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.

Konstantine Panegyres (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics & Archaeology), The Greco-Roman Contribution to Lifestyle Medicine, Lifestyle Medicine

Lifestyle has become a major and well-recognized aspect of modern healthcare, but there is little awareness of the origins of lifestyle medicine. This paper shows that a major contribution to lifestyle medicine was made by Greco-Roman physicians. Ancient Greek and Roman doctors placed considerable emphasis on the role lifestyle played in determining the state of their patients’ health.

Gijs Tol (Classics & Archaeology) et al., Navigating the Past of the Pontine Plain, Human and Wetland Interaction from Protohistory to the Early Modern Period, L’archeologo subacqueo

Throughout history, the Pontine Plain was characterised by the presence of numerous and extensive water bodies. Lagoons lined the coast while rivers, lakes and marshes characterised the vast inland plain up till the Lepine and Ausoni mountains. Essentially this situation lasted up to the fascist land reclamations of the 1930s when drainage of superfluous water became controlled and malaria was eradicated.

Before this transformation, the populations inhabiting the Pontine Plain interacted closely with this wetland ecosystem, using its rich natural resources and profiting from access to the sea. The coastal lagoons could be used as natural ports when trading became increasingly important within a context of growing social complexity. The dynamic nature of the wetlands, however, posed challenges to its exploitation in terms of permanent settlement and agricultural exploitation and we know of several historical attempts to improve drainage conditions dating as far back in time as the Roman Republican period.

This contribution aims to delineate the nature of human and landscape interactions in the Pontine wetland environment over time and the scale and scope of human interventions in the natural landscape. It discusses changes in settlement organisation, in the wetland and in its periphery, over a period spanning the ancient Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. The authors draw upon data from various research projects coordinated by the Universities of Groningen and Amsterdam, which have focused on this area, and add new data provided by their current work. The mapping of anthropic dynamics is complemented, in a dialectical relationship, with that of the environment and physical landscape. Together, geology and archaeology reveal the dynamic nature of human interactions with this wetland through time.

Stephanie Lynn Budin and Caroline J Tully (eds), A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough (Routledge)

This multidisciplinary volume examines the ongoing effects of James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough in modern Humanities and its wide-ranging influence across studies of ancient religions, literature, historiography and reception studies.

It begins by exploring the life and times of Frazer himself and the writing of The Golden Bough in its cultural milieu. The volume then goes on to cover a wide range of topics, including: ancient Near Eastern religion and culture; Minoan religion and in particular the origins of notions of Minoan matriarchy; Frazer’s influence on the study of Graeco-Roman religion and magic; Frazer’s influence on modern Pagan religions; and the effects of Frazer’s works in modern culture and scholarship generally. Chapters examine how modern academia – and beyond – continues to be influenced by the otherwise discredited theories in The Golden Bough, ideas such as Sacred Marriage and the incessant Fertility of Everything. The book demonstrates how scholarship within the Humanities as well as practitioners of alternative religions and the common public remain under the thrall of Frazer over one hundred years since the publication of the abridged edition of The Golden Bough, and what we must do to shake off that influence. 

The book features chapters by SHAPS’s Tim Parkin, ‘The Golden Bough: Setting the Scene’, and Caroline J Tully, ‘Moon and Huntress: Frazer’s Arician Diana in Italian-American Witchcraft’.

PhD Completions

Aloysius Landrigan (PhD in History, 2024), May Day 1890–1914: Internationalism and Unity across the Labour Movement and Working Classes of Britain, Australia and the United States of America

This thesis uses annual May Day demonstrations as a prism through which to examine how the labour movement strove to instil internationalism in British, Australian and American working-class consciousness from 1890–1914. As May Day demonstrations developed, 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. 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.

Supervisors: Professor Sean Scalmer, Professor Joy Damousi

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Kristal Buckley (PhD Completion Seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Heritage in Trouble? Learning from World Heritage in Asia and Australia

Sources of trouble are embedded in World Heritage through its Eurocentric, state-centric and universalising orientations and politicised decision-making. Using the lenses of nature, cities and landscapes, trouble is explored based on Australian and Asian cases and an insider perspective. This thesis argues that perceptions of trouble arise through conceptual fluidity, multiple and competing purposes/expectations, rights tensions, and ineffective conservation tools for an ever-broadening array of places and pressures. Trouble is also a potential catalyst for evolution, suggesting optimistic and pessimistic possibilities.

Ferdinand Wülfmeier (Bonn University/University of Melbourne. PhD Confirmation Seminar, Classics & Archaeology), The Distribution of Selinuntine Pottery in Sicily. Studies on West Sicilian Domestic Trade and the Economic Genesis of a Greek Polis

In this first presentation of the PhD-project, the questions that the project poses to the previous findings were developed. Following a brief overview of the preceding research in the Kerameikos of Selinunte, the resulting questions regarding the distribution of Selinuntine pottery were discussed. Was there a systematic overproduction of pottery in Selinunte to supply the markets of the neighbouring Elymian, Punic and Greek settlements, or were the products of the largest known pottery quarter in the Greek world intended primarily for the polis itself? The paths and methods for answering questions like these and the implications for our understanding of the contact between the Selinuntinians and their Sicilian neighbours were outlined. The initial results from the case studies completed so far reveal interesting tendencies that may influence the further course of the work and provide initial insights into the trade relations of the Greek polis.

Ferdinand is a Bonn-based candidate for a joint Bonn-UoM PhD project between Lieve Donnellan (SHAPS) and Martin Bentz (Bonn). The project aims at studying local pottery productions between Greek colonies and their native hinterlands in South Italy and Sicily in the first millennium BCE. The project currently has two PhD theses in progress and will see the candidates spend time at both institutions.

Ruby Mackle (MA Confirmation Seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Roman Agriculture in the Landscape: Literary Constructions and the Archaeological Reality

This thesis investigates how the role of the landscape in ancient Roman agriculture is depicted in the agricultural works of Cato the Elder, Varro, and Columella, and how these depictions compare to the information revealed in the archaeological record. It will look at evidence of building size, number, and location, agricultural infrastructure, and crop growth to investigate the veracity of the advice given by the ancient agronomists, gain an insight into how their advice was received by Roman farmers of varying economic backgrounds, and look at the role the landscape played in ancient Roman agriculture.

Emily Morgan (MA Confirmation Seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Magic and Witchcraft in the Poems of Ovid: Imagination, Transformations, and Carmina

This thesis examines Ovid’s uses of the figure of the witch and other “magical” imagery in his poems, taking an aesthetic approach to the study of these texts. Ovid’s poems contain an extraordinarily rich variety of views of the witch and the concept of magic. The thesis proposes that Ovid was a sensitive aesthete with a vivid imagination. It argues that he found witches and magic to be ideal vehicles for storytelling and for the creation of powerful artistic effects in his poems.

Grazyna Zajdow (MA Confirmation Seminar, History), Szymon Zajdow, International Brigadier: Understanding Transnational Anti-Fascist Experiences in the Interwar Period

Szymon Zajdow (1915-2004) was born in German-occupied Warsaw in what was still the Russian empire. He was brought up in a Warsaw that became capital of Poland, among the largest and most diverse Jewish population in Europe. At 14 he joined the youth wing of the illegal Polish communist party and then travelled across Europe to become one of the transnational players in the anti-fascist fight of the Spanish civil war in 1937.

The central argument of this thesis is that it is possible to understand some of the great upheavals of Europe from the early 1930s to 1945 through Szymon’s story. He did not become a public figure, neither politically or in other spheres, nor did he leave any published works. But there are enough traces to be able to follow and understand his journey. This dissertation will lie in the space between what Barbara Caine (in her Biography and History, 2019) suggests is biography and microhistory. Szymon Zajdow’s life illustrates both the ways that the wider forces of history and culture produced this individual, and in this way how his life mirrors, and is also produced by these forces. 

This presentation outlined Szymon’s early life in particular, and Jewish life in general, in the Polish Second Republic of the interwar period. It contextualised his life to give us an understanding of how structures and networks are made tangible by the individual lives that underscore them.

Other Happenings

On 15 August SHAPS co-hosted (together with the Classical Association of Victoria) the annual VCE Latin Schools Night in Arts West. This event is designed to prepare year-12 VCE students for the written examination in November with lectures on general themes on the set text (Vergil’s Aeneid) and on how to answer specific exam questions. It also gives us an opportunity to bring together Latin students from the wider Victorian community as one group, including students from the country, and to showcase the School’s offerings for next year.

Over 220 students attended this year. After a reception featuring pizza, Professor Margaret Cameron welcomed them, while Dr John Tuckfield of the Classical Association, who coordinates the Latin teachers in all Victorian Schools, acted as MC. Speakers included Dr Sarah Corrigan from SHAPS, who lectured on the role of women in Aeneid Book 7, and Mr Lindsay Zock, who gave a very precise presentation on how to answer questions relating to questions on rhetoric and metre, based on previous years’ exams. We were ably supported throughout by our professional staff who ensured that the event ran well.

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

^{Feature image: Head of School Margaret Cameron opens the VCE Latin Schools Night, August 2024}