SHAPS Digest (January 2025)

A number of SHAPS staff contributed to the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria ‘History Hooks‘ series of short videos to support secondary school teachers and students of history:

• Oleg Beyda (Hansen Lecturer in History) on the Russian Revolution and on World War II;
• Julie Fedor (History) on the Russian Revolution through objects;
• Peter McPhee (Emeritus Professor, History) on the French Revolution;
• Frederik Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology) on Ancient Rome.

Liam Byrne (Honorary Fellow, History) and Emma Shortis (RMIT) commented on US President Joe Biden’s legacy in an article in the Conversation.

As part of his ARC DECRA ‘The Sounds of Time’, Matthew Champion (History) directed and sang with the new polyphony ensemble Cantus temporum in a programme of works by Guillaume Du Fay, Antoine Busnoys, Josquin des Prez, and Orlande de Lassus for the Ballarat Festival of Organ and Fine Music. The concert was repeated at St Mary’s Anglican Church, North Melbourne. Matthew Champion sang as a soloist in a programme of Bach cantatas with Alchemy and the Melbourne Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Gary Ekkel in the closing concert of the Ballarat Festival of Organ and Fine Music.

In January Matthew Champion also convened a symposium on the history of sound and temporalities with guests from Cambridge, King’s College London, and the University of Vienna, alongside colleagues from the University of Melbourne and Monash; and appeared on ABC Radio Overnights discussing the history of calendars.

Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) recorded a video introducing the Arts Faculty Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space (RIPSS).

Konstantine Panegyres (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) reflected on what letters in the ancient world can tell us about human nature.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies) gave an interview for the Ukrainian network of Polish Radio, about her work on “Holodomor and Contemporary War. Materiality as Means of Survival: Women’s Histories” (in Ukrainian).  

Awards

HPS lecturer Hannah Gould’s book, When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan(University of Chicago, 2023) has been awarded the Modern Japan History Association’s 2025 F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize.

Through an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials.

Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones—the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, Buddhist altars installed inside the home. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing.

In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral-goods showrooms, neglected cemeteries, and cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Hannah Gould analyzes the lifecycle of butsudan, illuminating how they are made, circulate through religious and funerary economies, mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, and—as the population ages, families disperse, and fewer homes have space for large lacquer cabinets—eventually fall into disuse. What happens, she asks, when a funerary technology becomes obsolete? And what will take its place? Gould examines new products better suited to urban apartments: miniature urns and sleek altars inspired by Scandinavian design, even reliquary jewelry. She visits an automated columbarium and considers new ritual practices that embrace impermanence. At an industry expo, she takes on the role of “demonstration corpse.” Throughout, Gould invites us to rethink memorialization and describes a distinct form of Japanese necrosociality, one based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.

Congratulations are also due to Hannah Gould on her recent promotion to Lecturer.

Asha Hamilton (BA History/Anthropology, 2024) has been awarded a Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant to support her research project on the history of the Paralympics and representations of disability in Australia.

Academic Publications

Dvir Abramovich (Jewish Culture and Society), Aharon Appelfeld’s To the Land of the Cattails: A Journey into Darkness, Mentalities/ Mentalités

This article analyses and probes Aharon Appelfeld’s novel To the Land of the Cattails. Discussed are the work’s key themes, such as pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe, the complex relationship between the Jews and their cultural/religious identity in the face of the impending catastrophe and the subject of return & Memory. Appelfeld’s indirect approach to the Holocaust — writing about what came just before rather than the events themselves — creates a unique perspective on the tragedy. By focusing on the moment before catastrophe, he highlights both the richness of pre-war Jewish life and the terrible weight of its imminent destruction. This approach also emphasizes how the Holocaust didn’t just destroy lives but attempted to erase an entire culture and way of life.

James Bradley (HPS), Robert Lee and his Undisciplined Medical Self: Life Writing, Character and ‘Technologies of Self’ in the Victorian Medical Profession, Social History of Medicine

Robert Lee was a divisive figure who, for much of his professional life, mismanaged his reputation. In this article, I use a diary written between 1837 and 1873 to explore the part character played in Lee’s fraught relationship with the medical profession. Special attention is paid to Lee’s dual use of life writing. On the one hand, he was an avid reader of biographies, memoirs and obituaries, which he then recorded in his diary. On the other, his diary writing was designed to audit his behaviour and then transform his self, making him a disciplined medical professional. Presented like this, his diary bears the hallmarks of a Foucauldian ‘technology of self’. However, Lee’s dual engagement with life writing revealed the character flaws that did much to damage his professional standing, and despite the diary’s use as a tool for self-fashioning, an unruly professional subject emerged from its pages.

Simon Farley (History), ‘Their beneficial effect upon a people‘: Settlers, Songbirds and Civilisation in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, Settler Colonial Studies

Through the figure of journalist and philanthropist Edward Wilson (1813–1878), this article explores the settler-colonial dimensions of the mid-nineteenth century acclimatisation movement in Australia. In the latter half of the 1850s, Wilson became obsessed with the new science of acclimatisation, which promoted the transportation of plants and animals across the planet for a variety of purposes. By importing familiar wildlife, especially birds, to Australia from the metropole, Wilson and his fellow acclimatisers hoped to ‘improve’ Australian landscapes and, consequently, the humans dwelling within those landscapes. In doing so, they also aimed to create a likewise ‘improved’ emulation of metropolitan society. By drawing links between Wilson’s promotion of acclimatisation, his rejection of convict transportation, and his interest in ‘civilising’ the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria, this article adumbrates the extent to which settler colonialism has shaped settlers’ feelings towards and interactions with flora and fauna.

The latest issue of the Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, edited by Julie Fedor (History), published by ibidem Press in Stuttgart and distributed by Columbia University Press, features a special section, ‘Teaching IR in Wartime’, guest-edited by Kateryna Zarembo (New Europe Center, Ukraine, and ZOiS, Germany), Michèle Knodt (TU Darmstadt) and Maksym Yakovlyev (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy).

The latest issue of Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria, includes a tribute to Anand Jayprak and the Presidential Address to the 25th World Congress Philosophy in Rome by Luca Maria Scarantino.

Graham Willett, Before Mardi Gras: Lesbian and Gay Activism in Australia, 1969 – 1978 (Interventions, Inc.)

In the more than 40 years since the first Mardi Gras, Australian society and the lives of all those who live here have been transformed. Reforms, from the decriminalization of sex between men to marriage equality, mean that lgbtiq+ people no longer live the kind of lives that they did in the 1950s and sixties.

What is less noticed is the decade before this. This is the story of the 1970: the Homosexual Law Reform Society of the ACT (1969), the Daughters of Bilitis (1970) and the Campaign Against Moral Persecution launched a movement that challenged laws, regulations, professional policies and public opinion, which laid the foundations for all that followed.

But the movement that they founded spent its first decade in the streets, in the corridors of power, in the schools and the union and churches. Activists published newspapers and flyers and ran radio programs. They graffitied and pasted up posters. They lobbed eggs and lobbied. They danced and kissed in public; produced and wore badges.

The Seventies were a decade of struggle for recognition, reform and respect. It was a decade that changed Australian society. When the NSW police attacked the first Mardi Gras in 1978, they were taking on forces that they barely knew existed.

This book examines the often-overlooked first decade of lesbian and gay rights activism in Australia, when the foundations for our communities were laid.

PhD completion

Kristal Buckley, Heritage in Trouble? Learning from World Heritage in Asia and Australia (PhD in Cultural Materials Conservation)

This thesis is motivated by curiosity about perceptions, sources and responses to trouble in the implementation of the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention). In 2022, the 50th anniversary of World Heritage was celebrated against a backdrop of a world seemingly awash with crises, profound disruptions and challenges. And yet, the desire by national governments and communities to seek World Heritage status has never been greater. Some sources of trouble are embedded in World Heritage as a mechanism of diplomacy and multilateralism, including its state-centric and universalising orientations, and politicised decision-making. Practitioners and critical heritage scholars have mapped problems arising from its Eurocentric conceptual framing, privileging of professional elites, institutional separation of nature and culture, and insufficient attention to human rights and social justice. Development of World Heritage as a prestigious heritage brand links its outcomes to nationalism and commodification for mass tourism; and the effectiveness of conservation tools has not kept pace with the expansion of heritage concepts.

The research questions for this study aim to aid understanding of trouble from the perspectives of people working within heritage systems. Using qualitative research methods and an insider positionality, the questions directed attention to the sources of trouble, and to the ways that the World Heritage system both complicates and responds to them. Three specific lenses were selected: nature as heritage, cities as heritage, and landscapes as heritage. Case studies from Australia and Asia provide vehicles for discovery, localising the analyses and revealing variations and new issues. This research demonstrates that there are multiple heritage paradigms in play, and diverse motivations and expectations for seeking and keeping World Heritage recognition. These are revealed in the ‘nomination story’ for each place, a story everyone knows and tells, even if they were not involved at the time. Although World Heritage applies to very few heritage places in the world, there is a multi-directional flow of ideas and approaches between World Heritage and other international and national regimes for heritage designation. I argue that perceptions of trouble are evident in the binaries and shifts in the meaning of heritage, blurred expectations about the limits to what heritage designation can deliver, and the diverse purposes for the recognition and safeguarding of natural and cultural heritage. As many scholars have emphasised, heritage is not a thing. But neither is its use inherently good, bad, toxic or beneficial. The important focus is on what it ‘does’, and this varies enormously across time and place. My conclusions do not rush to solve problems but aim for deepened understanding. Trouble can be a potential catalyst for evolution, creating optimistic or pessimistic possibilities. Our times are not the same as the decades before, or the unknowable future that will follow. Stimulated by the advice of anthropologist Donna Haraway to respect the importance of ‘learning to be truly present’, this thesis has aimed to demonstrate the value of ‘staying with the trouble’.

Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Andrew Jamieson (Classics & Archaeology), Prof. Philip Goad (Melbourne School of Design), Prof. Kate Darian-Smith (University of Tasmania)

MA Completion

Kelly Herbison (MA in Philosophy), Analysing Second-Personal Phenomena with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Style’

In our engagements with others, seemingly minor or small gestures matter: a friend’s glance or smirk in my direction can suggest something about his experience of the situation, where the nuance of what is suggested is imperceptible to those who do not know him. While this very general point may itself be uncontroversial, the phenomenological structure of this is not straightforward. This thesis aims to get clearer on what occurs in such interactions, and does so by employing a Merleau-Pontyan conception of style to analyse second-personal phenomena. This framework not only explains the enriched encounter between subjects who are known to one another, but also addresses more controversial problems at the second-personal level. Through taking on and extending Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of style, I submit that someone’s style offers greater insight than we might ordinarily think into their relationship to being, and that this framework allows us to capture a variety of interesting phenomena in second-personal interactions.

The insights gleaned from the first half of the thesis are largely commensurate with–and at times extend–previous inquiry into Merleau-Ponty’s conception of style as it appears in his discussions of art and embodiment, though I have the distinct goal of drawing out this term so that it is appropriately geared for a second-personal analysis. Specifically, I suggest that encountering another’s style involves unifying their conduct according to a more general impression of their situatedness in the intentional field. The latter half of the thesis refines the story of style’s disclosive function by introducing the concepts of existential proximity and revelatory style. These concepts pad out Merleau-Ponty’s own position, while at the same time make noticeable the possibility for ‘breakdown’ or remarkable cases, wherein revelatory style leads to changes in existential proximity in second-personal space such that one is brought closer to or made more distant from someone, sometimes in a way that is disorienting. While this understanding of style is particularly illuminating in the context of second-personal interactions, I argue that it is not indifferent to (and indeed, can complement) recent work in critical social phenomenology, specifically by thinking about how prejudicial habits can be re-cast in terms of style.

Supervisors: Dr Andrew Inkpin, Assoc. Prof. François Schroeter

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Frank Vitelli (PhD completion seminar, History), ‘Ornament and the Spectre of Dispossession: Melbourne and the Biopolitics of the White Settler Colonial City, 1803-1934’

At the beginning of its nineteenth-century colonisation, Melbourne was described as an ornament. In this study, ornament refers to the dissembling art of empire premised on the fictional belief that settler colonialism was sanctioned by the racial fiction of whiteness, that colonialism was a ‘civilising’ biopolitical process, and that colonial space was a terra nullius. This thesis argues that ornamentalism, as the dissembling art of the superfluous, legitimated dispossession between 1803 and 1934, which as a history now haunts the nation. 

Other Happenings

Lucyna Artymiuk (PhD candidate in History, and President of the Polish Museum and Archives in Australia) spoke at the recent launch of the book, Our Journeys in Australia 1947-1977, an English translation of a 1977 text written by the men of the Polish Carpathian Brigade who had arrived in 1947. The book tells the story of post-World War II Polish Tobruk veterans who settled in Australia.

The book was launched by Edward Kremzer, Honorary Consul of Poland in Hobart, and Andrzej Soszynski, Honorary Consul-General of Poland in Melbourne, both of whom are sons of Polish Tobruk veterans. Edward Kremzer was the driving force behind the English translation, raising money and seeing it through to publication. The book was launched at Tobruk House in Albert Park, the home of the Rats of Tobruk Association. Dr Robert Webster, President of the Victorian RSL, and Elżbieta Dziedzic, President of the Polish Community Council of Victoria, were also in attendance.

The book is available for purchase through the Polish Museums and Archives in Australia.

This month, students taking the Summer intensive subject ‘The Age of Alexander the Great’ (ANCW30016), coordinated by Lieve Donnellan (Classics & Archaeology), and featuring a guest lecture by Maxx Schmitz (Faculty of Arts) on Macedonian warfare, had the chance to try out a sarissa and pieces of armour.

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

Feature image: From left to right: Quin Thomson, Louisa Hunter-Bradley, Paul Bentley-Angell, Daniel Thomson, Matthew Champion, Grantley McDonald, performing Orlande de Lassus’ ‘Tempus est ut revertar’ at St Mary’s Anglican Church, North Melbourne, 16 January 2025.