Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Journalism Victoria Melbourne History'

Bibliography: p. 367-392. This thesis takes an overview of urban waste disposal practices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide since the time of their respective settlement by Europeans through to the year 2000. The narrative identifies how such factors as the growth of representative government, the emergence of a bureaucracy, the visitation of bubonic plague, changed perceptions of risk, and the rise of the environmental movement, have directly influenced urban waste disposal outcomes.

In Melbourne between 1880 and 1907, the construction and propagation of a vagrant stereotype and its manifestation in law, constituted an important means of controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups who were perceived to be socially undesirable or economically burdensome.

It is difficult to locate the genesis of any subject of creative and critical inquiry. However, I consider I embarked on this MA research project because having a decent coffee was important to me, and I did not know why. I recall the precise moment I realised I was attaching special meaning to coffee. I was in a new cafe at Airey's Inlet, seaside town on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, my home State, and I had ordered a cafe latte: The woman serving me was in her sixties and appeared to be out of her depth; she was most likely helping her daughter set up the cafe and trying to be useful. I imagined she lived on one of the surrounding farms - she reminded me of my mother. Her hands had probably made a thousand morning teas for shearers with big pots of tea, the best china for the jug of milk and tea cups, and big baskets of scones with cream and jam. But using an espresso machine had baffled her. I, on the other hand, no longer wanted the life of tea and demanded a decent coffee (Cook, 2005:15). At that moment I realised there were a number of reasons for me wanting that coffee to be 'decent'. They related to my growing up in the country and wanting to live in the city, to my experience of cafe life in Europe, and finally to personal rebellion - against certain conservatism of the 1970s in Australia, and ultimately against a colonial English custom of tea. This project is located in food and social history and focuses particularly on the introduction of espresso coffee to Melbourne in the 1950s and '60s, as in my view the Italian cafes of that period had the greatest influence upon present cafe culture. However, this project is not pure social or food history, as it synthesises my own personal experience, and that of my interviewees, with archival, scholarly and more journalistic/literary research, and with a particular approach to the writing of non-fiction narrative, known as 'creative non-fiction'. The final thesis can be seen therefore as a fusion of qualitative and scholarly research, with memoir and oral history - or, in summary, as what I have termed a 'selective cultural history'.

When Australian law teaching began in 1857, few lawyers in common-law systems had studied law at university. The University of Melbourne's new course joined the early stages of a dual transformation, of legal training into university study and of contemporary common law into an academic discipline. Victoria's Supreme Court immediately gave the law school what was known in America as 'diploma privilege': its students could enter legal practice without passing a separate admission exam. Soon university study became mandatory for locally trained lawyers, ensuring the law school's survival but placing it at the centre of disputes over the kind of education the profession should receive. Friction between practitioners and academics hinted at the negotiation of new roles as university study shifted legal training further from its apprenticeship origins. The structure of the university (linked to the judiciary through membership of its governing council) and the profession (whose organisations did not control the admission of new practitioners) aided the law school's efforts to defend both its training role and its curriculum against outside attack.
Legal academics turned increasingly to the social sciences to maintain law's claim to be not only a professional skill, but an academic discipline. A research-based and reform-oriented theory of law appealed to the nascent academic profession, linking it to legal practice and the development of public policy but at the same time marking out for the law school a domain of its own. American ideas informed thinking about research and, in particular, pedagogy, although the university's slender financial resources, dependent on government grants, limited change until after World War II. In other ways the law school consciously departed from American models. It taught undergraduate, not graduate, students, and its curriculum included history, jurisprudence and non-legal subjects alongside legal doctrine. Its few professors specialised in public law and jurisprudence, leaving private law to a corps of part-time practitioner-teachers. The result was a distinctive model of state-certified compulsory education in both legal doctrine and the history and social meanings of law.

Triestine migration to Australia is the direct consequence of numerous disputations over the city's political boundaries in the immediate post-World War II period. As such the triestini themselves are not simply part of an overall migratory movement of Italians who took advantage of Australia's post-war immigration program, but their migration is also the reflection of an important period in the history of what today is known as the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region. By examining the migrant experience of both first and subsequent generations of Triestines in the Australian city of Melbourne in a historical context, this study highlights the importance of both the past and the present experience in the process of migrant settlement and identity construction.

This thesis examines economic growth and change across the city of Melbourne over the 2000s. In the late 1970s to early 1980s, and again in the early 1990s, Melbourne was seen as having a bleak future, as a consequence of the deindustrialisation occurring in the city throughout the late twentieth century. However, Melbourne grew rapidly at the start of the twenty-first century, renewing its profile globally and attracting population. This thesis examines the factors behind the rise of Greater Melbourne over the 2000s, and specifically the rapid revival of the central city area of Melbourne. The study assesses the relevance of economic geography theories (the Global Cities hypothesis, the World City Network (WCN) and agglomeration economies) in relation to Melbourne’s economic growth. Globalisation related theories concerning knowledge cities and workers are also considered.

In this creative‐writing research project, I set out to create a narrative nonfiction manuscript that investigates the contemporary politics surrounding abortion. The fundamental question driving the creative manuscript was, ‘Why is abortion largely invisible in Australia?’ Abortion is the second‐most common therapeutic surgical procedure in Australia, yet the history, the politics and the practice of abortion remain hidden from view. This invisibility allows us to avoid grappling with and confronting the complicated issues abortion raises. Using techniques commonly associated with fiction writing, such as narrative arc, characterisation, dialogue and scenes, the 69,000‐word manuscript investigates the factors, tiers and characters involved with abortion in Australia. The narrative nonfiction manuscript should be read first. The manuscript is accompanied by a 31,500‐word exegesis analysing the production, lineage and ethical implications of consciously political narrative nonfiction, a term that refers to works that make deliberate political interventions. Similarly to Hartsock (2000), I argue that when writing a consciously political narrative nonfiction work, the writer does not objectify the world as something different or alien from the reader, and instead strives to render characters as complex human beings. The exegesis reviews theories of ethics, objectivity and narrative within a form that is fundamentally journalism, yet can never fit within this narrow definition as it is primarily about mapping the cultural other (Sanderson 2004). The exegesis also scrutinises the usefulness and complexity of immersion as a research methodology. While I initially attempted to immerse myself as a limited participant‐observer in the world of pro‐choice and pro‐life politics, over the course of the research, my methodology resulted in a kind of radicalisation prompted by my fieldwork. For example, after witnessing the ongoing harassment of clinic patients and staff, I found myself openly hostile to the position and tactics of pro‐life activists. While I felt I remained capable of transcribing and depicting the worlds of these subjects, a seditious need grew to challenge their authority and worldview outside the text. This led me to make a political intervention inside and outside the text, and I thus crossed the precipice from observation to active participation. While I acknowledge that this is an unconventional narrative position, one that rejects ideals of journalistic objectivity, I argue that this subject position was born of the research and practice of this project – that is, of actually participating in the world of my subject, abortion. Moreover, this level of participation in the world of the textual subject is a direct result of writing a consciously political narrative nonfiction work, a subgenre that allows for the practitioner’s politics and reactions to situations to help shape the text, and the consequences beyond.

This Masters by Research project involves two ways of meeting that explore, in complimentary ways, the question of belonging. It comprises this exegesis and a performance at a spot near where I’ve lived for 15 years, on the banks of the Merri Creek in Melbourne. This spot is where John Batman probably met with Wurundjeri elders on June 6th 1835, with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the buying of 500,000 acres of their land. When I walk along the Merri Creek I feel that it is in some way ‘mine’, but know that this is only the case because the original inhabitants were violently prevented from maintaining their traditional lives here. For contemporary Aboriginal people, Australia can be felt as ‘theirs’ and ‘not theirs’; and many immigrant Australians who now ‘belong’ here were, either themselves or their ancestors, violently moved off their own homelands. It could be argued that Australians’ relationship to the land is paradoxical. I am interested in what theatre, specifically site-­‐specific theatre, can do to address the issue of belonging. Neil Leach describes belonging as inherently performative.1 Assuming that the personal, social, historical and spatial are inseparable and interdependent, I have chosen a site that is particularly evocative of my (and hopefully other Australians too), exploration of connection to this country.