Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Oral history Australia'

This practice-led PhD project consists of two parts. The first is an exegesis documenting how a fiction writer can enter a dialogue with the oral history project in Australia. I identify two philosophical mandates of the oral history project in Australia that have shaped my creative practice: an emphasis on the analysis of the interviewee’s subjective experience as a means of understanding the past, and the desire to engage a wide audience in order to promote empathy towards the subject. The discussion around fiction in the oral history project is in its infancy. In order to deepen the debate, I draw on the more mature discussion in ethnographic fiction. I rely on literary theorists Steven Greenblatt, Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette to develop a clear understanding of the distinct narrative qualities of fiction, in order to explore how fiction can re-present and explore an interviewee’s subjective experience, and engage a wide readership. I document my own methodology for producing a work of fiction that is enriched by oral history methodology and theory, and responds to the mandates of the project. I demonstrate the means by which fiction and the oral history project can enter a dialogue in the truest sense of the word: a two-way conversation that enriches and augments practice in both fields. The second part of the PhD is a novel, set in Brisbane and based on oral history interviews and archival material I gathered over the course of the project. The novel centres on Brisbane artist Evelyn, who has been given an impossible task: a derelict old house is about to be demolished, and she must capture its history in a sculpture that will be built on the site. Evelyn struggles to come up with ideas and create the sculpture, realising that she has no way to discover who inhabited the house. What follows is a series of stories, each set in a different era in Brisbane’s history, which take the reader backwards through the house’s history. Hidden Objects is a novel about the impossibility of grasping the past and the powerful pull of storytelling. The novel is an experiment in a hybrid form and is accompanied by an appendix that identifies the historically accurate sources informing the fiction. The decisions about the aesthetics of the novel were a direct result of my engagement with the mandates of the oral history project in Australia. The novel was shortlisted in the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards, unpublished manuscript category.

Despite the considerable significance of publicly funded education in the making of Australian society, state school histories are few in number. In comparison, most corporate and private schools have cemented their sense of community and tradition through full-length publications. This history attempts to redress this imbalance. It is an important social history because this school, Mac.Robertson Girls' High School can trace its origins back to 1905, to the very beginnings of state secondary education when the Melbourne Continuation School (MCS), later Melbourne High School (MHS) and Melbourne Girls' high School (MGHS) was established. Since it is now recognised that there are substantial state, regional and other differences between schools and their local communities, studies of individual schools are needed to underpin more general overviews of particular issues. This history, then, has wider significance: it traces strands of the development of girls' education in Victoria, thus examining the significance and dynamics of single-sex schooling, the education of girls more generally, and, importantly, girls' own experiences (and memories of experiences) of secondary schooling, as well as the meaning they made of those experiences. 'Girls, Education and Empowerment: A History of The Mac.Robertson Girls' High School 1905-2005', departs from traditional models of school history writing that tend to focus on the decision-makers and bureaucrats in education as well as documenting the most 'successful' former students who have made their mark in the world. Drawing on numerous narrative sources and documentary evidence, this history is organised thematically to contextualise and examine what is was like, and meant, to be a girl at this school (Melbourne Continuation School 1905-12; Melbourne High School 1912-27; Melbourne Girls' High School 1927-34, and Mac.Robertson Girls' High School from 1934) during a century of immense social, economic, political and educational change.

Feminist and social historians have long been interested in that particularly female ability to become pregnant and bear children. A significant body of historiography has challenged the notion that pregnancy and childbirth considered to be the acceptable and 'appropriate' roles for women for most of the twentieth century in Australia - have always been welcomed, rewarding and always fulfilling events in women's lives. Several historians have also begun the process of enlarging our knowledge of the changing cultural attitudes towards bereavement in Australia and the eschewing of the public expression of sorrow following the two World Wars; a significant contribution to scholarship which underscores the changing attitudes towards perinatal loss. It is estimated that one in four women lose a pregnancy to miscarriage, and two in one hundred late pregnancies result in stillbirth in contemporary Australia. Miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death are today considered by psychologists and social workers, amongst others, as potentially significant events in many women's lives, yet have received little or passing attention in historical scholarship concerned with pregnancy and motherhood. As such, this study focuses on pregnancy loss: the meaning it has been given by various groups at different times in Australia's past, and how some Australian women have made sense of their own experience of miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death within particular social and historical contexts. Pregnancy loss has been understood in a range of ways by different groups over the past 100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when alarm was mounting over the declining birth rate, pregnancy loss was termed 'foetal wastage' by eugenicists and medical practitioners, and was seen in abstract terms as the loss of necessary future Australian citizens. By the 1970s, however, with the advent of support groups such as SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support) miscarriage and stillbirth were increasingly seen as the devastating loss of an individual baby, while the mother was seen as someone in need of emotional and other support. With the advent of new prenatal screening technologies in the late twentieth century, there has been a return of the idea of maternal responsibility for producing a 'successful' outcome. This project seeks to critically examines the wide range of socially constructed meanings of pregnancy loss and interrogate the arguments of those groups, such as the medical profession, religious and support groups, participating in these constructions. It will build on existing histories of motherhood, childbirth and pregnancy in Australia and, therefore, also the history of Australian women.

Onward Bound: -- the first 50 years of Outward Bound Australia traces the founding and development of this unique, Australian, non-profit, non-government organisation from its earnest beginnings to its formidable position today where it attracts some 5,000 participants a year to its courses. The project included interviewing hundreds of people and scouring archives and public records to piece together a picture of how and why Outward Bound Australia (OBA) developed -- recording its challenges and achievements along the way. A mediated oral history approach was used among past and present OBA founders, staff and participants, to gather stories about their history. This use of oral history (in a historical book) was a way of cementing the known recorded facts and adding colour to the formal historical outline, while also giving credence to the text through the use of 'real' people's stories.

Onward Bound: -- the first 50 years of Outward Bound Australia traces the founding and development of this unique, Australian, non-profit, non-government organisation from its earnest beginnings to its formidable position today where it attracts some 5,000 participants a year to its courses. The project included interviewing hundreds of people and scouring archives and public records to piece together a picture of how and why Outward Bound Australia (OBA) developed -- recording its challenges and achievements along the way. A mediated oral history approach was used among past and present OBA founders, staff and participants, to gather stories about their history. This use of oral history (in a historical book) was a way of cementing the known recorded facts and adding colour to the formal historical outline, while also giving credence to the text through the use of 'real' people's stories.

The Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) is a 16-hectare urban renewal redevelopment project of the Queensland Department of Housing and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Over the last century, the land has housed military and educational institutions that have shaped Brisbane and Queensland. These groups each have their own history. Collectively their stories represented an opportunity to build a multi-art form public history project, consisting of a creative non-fiction historical manuscript and a collection of digital stories (employing oral history and digital storytelling techniques in particular) to construct a personal sense of place, identity and history. This exegesis examines the processes used and difficulties faced by the writer/producer of the public history; including consideration of the artistic selection involved, and consequent assembly of the material. The research findings clearly show that: giving contributors access to the technology required to produce their own digital stories in a public history does not automatically equate to total participatory inclusion; the writer/producer can work with the public as an active, collaborative team to produce shared historically significant works for the public they represent; and the role of the public historian is that of a valuable broker--in actively seeking to maximize inclusiveness of vulnerable members of the community and by producing a selection of multi-art form works with the public that includes new media.

The Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) is a 16-hectare urban renewal redevelopment project of the Queensland Department of Housing and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Over the last century, the land has housed military and educational institutions that have shaped Brisbane and Queensland. These groups each have their own history. Collectively their stories represented an opportunity to build a multi-art form public history project, consisting of a creative non-fiction historical manuscript and a collection of digital stories (employing oral history and digital storytelling techniques in particular) to construct a personal sense of place, identity and history. This exegesis examines the processes used and difficulties faced by the writer/producer of the public history; including consideration of the artistic selection involved, and consequent assembly of the material. The research findings clearly show that: giving contributors access to the technology required to produce their own digital stories in a public history does not automatically equate to total participatory inclusion; the writer/producer can work with the public as an active, collaborative team to produce shared historically significant works for the public they represent; and the role of the public historian is that of a valuable broker--in actively seeking to maximize inclusiveness of vulnerable members of the community and by producing a selection of multi-art form works with the public that includes new media.

Women have been playing football (soccer) in Australia since the late nineteenth century. Over the past forty years the game has grown significantly with the national team achieving global recognition and the game becoming more widely accepted within the male-dominated football culture. According to FIFA there are an estimated 30 million women playing the game worldwide (FIFA Women’s Football Survey 2014), with around 378, 000 playing in Australia (Roy Morgan Research 2015). Despite this long and compelling history, researchers have largely ignored the history of women’s football in Australia, and the voices of women players remain unheard. The women’s game is yet to be written into the history of the code. My research project aims to address this shortage of knowledge by asking the question – ‘What can the oral history of women who played and play the game of football contribute to the understandings of gender and football history in Australia?’ The research uses oral history as a method of qualitative interview and is based on interviews with eighteen women and three men, some of whom have represented Australia, other players, administrators and referees. My methodological approach provides the participants with an opportunity to express, in their own words, their role in the history of the game.

Angas Downs is a pastoral station situated in the arid Central Australian rangelands, 300 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs. Yet, as pastoral station, it does not articulate easily with the established historiography of Aboriginal people’s participation in the northern pastoral industry. Nor does it conform to the image of the outback cattle station popularised in myths of pioneers and pastoralists which dominate Central Australian history. Located in the marginal lands of the desert interior, Angas Downs was a largely defective capitalist enterprise, and one which actually ‘employed’ very few Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, significant numbers of Anangu lived on Angas Downs, or used it as a base between 1930 and 1980. By approaching the station as moments in time and space, this thesis examines the ways in which this desert pastoral station was made – and unmade – by Anangu and others in their encounters with each other over fifty years across the middle of the twentieth century. It asks: What kind of place was Angas Downs? And how should we see it and understand it as place? It shows that pastoralism is but a fraction of the story. Taking a spatial approach to history and memory, and drawing insights from anthropology, ethnography and cultural geography, the thesis traces the ways in which Anangu drew upon existing social practices to make sense of the new places that emerged when whitefellas came to the desert. The thesis traces travels, itineraries, and networks of movement. In doing so, it grapples with the question of how people, dislocated by historical and spatial shifts, made a place for themselves. Oral histories are a key resource. More than recollections of the past, Anangu historical remembrance is conceptualised in this thesis as an ‘inscriptive practice’ that brings places into being, and endows them with meaning that is both learned, shared and sustained through particular narrative modes and techniques. Focusing upon extended oral histories of lives that spanned five decades of change, the thesis presents a detailed analysis of the complex and creative social processes involved in place-making at Angas Downs. Rather than a single site produced through colonial structures, relations and processes, Angas Downs emerges in this study as a deeply complex place of dynamic interaction and social life. The spatial approach and analysis draws out the multiple and layered meanings of Angas Downs, which were created in and through intersecting travels, encounters and exchanges. The thesis explores themes of Anangu knowledge and historical change; the production of locality and place-making as social practice; mobility as productive of social relations and of place; and the interplay between environmental and social ecologies and the ways in which this shaped the making and unmaking of Angas Downs. At a time when the politics of place continues to be keenly felt in Australia, this thesis contributes to understandings of practices of place-making that reflect the complex legacies of colonialism, while holding out Angas Downs as a symbol of hope for more responsive and creative formulations of relationships to place.

Aboriginal arts practices in the southeast of Australia have, since the early years of colonisation, been rarely considered within the realm of authentic Aboriginal arts practices. Such attitudes were a reflection of the colonial encounter and associated attempts to assimilate the Aboriginal population with the White. This thesis explores Aboriginal arts practices and asserts that there has always been Aboriginal art in the southeast and that, despite the overwhelming effects of colonisation, the work of Aboriginal artists provides a distinct and definite counter-history to that endorsed by the dominant culture. Using published historical and contemporary accounts and recent interviews from Aboriginal artists and arts workers, this thesis investigates the continuation of the knowledge and practice of southeast Australian Aboriginal art and its connection to culture, identity and wellbeing. It explores the corresponding adaptations and changes to these practices as Aboriginal people contended with the ever-expanding European occupation of the region from 1834 onwards.
This project adopted a collaborative research methodology, where members of the Aboriginal arts community were consulted throughout the project in order to develop a study which had meaning and value for them. The collaborative approach combined an analysis of historical data along with the stories collected from participants. By privileging the Aboriginal voice as legitimate primary source material, alternative ways of exploring the history of Aboriginal art were possible. Although the story of Aboriginal art in the southeast is also one of tensions and paradoxes, where changes in arts practices frequently positioned art, like the people themselves, outside the domain of the ‘real’, the findings of this project emphasise that arts practices assist people with connecting and in some cases reconnecting with their communities. Aboriginal art in the southeast is an assertion of identity and wellbeing and reflects the dynamic nature of Aboriginal culture in southeast Australia.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
This thesis is an analysis of a coal mining community based around a coal mine at Teralba, on the north-western edge of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales. In order to uncover this community, as it is remembered in a series of oral history interviews by men who worked there, this thesis seeks to redefine the term ‘community’ in such a way as to make it an effective methodological tool as well as a descriptive term. Having considered the uses and misuses of ‘community’ in labour history, this thesis will then present a methodology, utilising a community web, as discussed by Taksa in 2000. Historiographically positioned and methodologically developed, the thesis then moves on to consider the case study of the Pacific Community during the 1980s. Utilising the community web, this community’s narratives are analysed for their lessons on working within a coal mine, but also on behavioural expectations acceptable and unaccepted by the community. Having established the inclusive as well as alienating aspects of the community, the thesis moves on to consider the influence and expectations of community members who did not work at the mine, such as female partners and union officials. The final chapters consider the changing political and social circumstances of the 1980s and the way these pressured and finally altered the community members’ expectations. The thesis will consider the concept of historicisation, where the community is not destroyed, as its narratives still exist, but it is unable to grow as those narrative are no longer able to be passed on. This thesis argues that an effective definition of community and an effective methodology for uncovering community, not only allows hidden communities to be examined, but also ensures all community members are recognised, including women and people that may not work at a mine site. It also argues that communities cannot be destroyed by outside pressures. Rather, the Pacific community case study shows that communities continue to exist as long as members have the willingness and ability to share the narratives that bind it.

This is an historical investigation into the provision of education services for deaf children in the State of New South Wales in Australia since 1860. The main focus is those deaf children without additional disabilities who have been placed in mainstream classes, special classes for the deaf and special schools for the deaf. The study places this group at centre stage in order to better understand their educational situation in the late 1990s. The thesis has taken a chronological and thematic approach. The chapters are defined by significant events that impacted on the education of the deaf, such as the establishment of special schools in New South Wales, the rise of the oral movement, and aftermath of the rubella epidemic in Australia during the 1940s. Within each chapter, there is a core of key elements around which the analysis is based. These key elements tend to be based on institutions, players, and specific educational features, such as the mode of instruction or the curriculum. The study found general agreement that language acquisition was a fundamental prerequisite to academic achievement. Yet the available evidence suggests that educational programs for most deaf children in New South Wales have seldom focused on ensuring adequate language acquisition in conjunction with the introduction of academic subjects. As a result, language and literacy competencies of deaf students in general have frequently been acknowledged as being below those of five their hearing counterparts, to the point of presenting a barrier to successful post-secondary study. It is proposed that the reasons for the academic failings of the deaf are inherent in five themes.
PhD Doctorate

This is an historical investigation into the provision of education services for deaf children in the State of New South Wales in Australia since 1860. The main focus is those deaf children without additional disabilities who have been placed in mainstream classes, special classes for the deaf and special schools for the deaf. The study places this group at centre stage in order to better understand their educational situation in the late 1990s. The thesis has taken a chronological and thematic approach. The chapters are defined by significant events that impacted on the education of the deaf, such as the establishment of special schools in New South Wales, the rise of the oral movement, and aftermath of the rubella epidemic in Australia during the 1940s. Within each chapter, there is a core of key elements around which the analysis is based. These key elements tend to be based on institutions, players, and specific educational features, such as the mode of instruction or the curriculum. The study found general agreement that language acquisition was a fundamental prerequisite to academic achievement. Yet the available evidence suggests that educational programs for most deaf children in New South Wales have seldom focused on ensuring adequate language acquisition in conjunction with the introduction of academic subjects. As a result, language and literacy competencies of deaf students in general have frequently been acknowledged as being below those of five their hearing counterparts, to the point of presenting a barrier to successful post-secondary study. It is proposed that the reasons for the academic failings of the deaf are inherent in five themes.
PhD Doctorate

Since 1945 Australians have served as peacekeepers across the world in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific. They have contributed to one of the most startling attempts at worldwide collective security in human history. That sweeping story has been well explored, but the experiences of peacekeepers themselves have remained rather elusive. And yet peacekeeping outcomes largely depend on what happens at the ground level between people. The central aim of this thesis is to pull these stories from obscurity and demonstrate that peacekeepers’ recollections, descriptions and perspectives are a central and necessary part of peacekeeping histories. That story is explored here by examining Australian peacekeepers’ oral histories of serving in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and East Timor between 1997 and approximately 2006. These are valuable case studies because all three peace operations overlapped in the same decade, all occurred under the same Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and all were elided together in strategic and political discourse. More significantly, each was also bound, in Australian imaginations, to a nebulous region called ‘the Pacific’. This unique intersection of the three operations creates opportunities to explore broader questions about Australia’s relationship with the Pacific. Though not exclusively used, peacekeepers’ narratives are central to this history. Over sixty Australians from across the country shared their stories for this work. The peacekeepers’ came from three different organisations – the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Public Service and the Australian Federal Police. Exploring what peacekeeping meant to people across these three organisations means this history tells a more varied story than would be possible by focusing solely on one group. That variety also makes it possible to further dissect the nuances and connectedness of peacekeepers’ representations of national, regional and Pacific identities. Ultimately, this is a history of peacekeeping is centred by peacekeepers’ own experiences. All History is, of course, people centred in its own way, but it does not inevitably follow that people are always the centre of the narrative. They often exist in and amongst events swirling around them, actors for sure, but not necessarily the stars. That has certainly been the case for peacekeeping histories so far. We need those stories, but we need the ones in this thesis too. Peacekeeping in the Pacific has very much been about relationships, about very human attempts to understand what it means to build peace in varied and complex contexts; and doing so while labouring under various historical and cultural inheritances that complicated and made specific peacekeepers’ struggles and experiences. This is a story that meets peacekeepers in that space while also showing that those experiences say much about being Australian, being a peacekeeper and being in the Pacific at the turn of the century.