Transformations : landscape in recent Australian fiction / Gillian Mary Tyas

Focusing on novels written since 1980 by Australian authors Rodney Hall, Liam Davison, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley and Gerald Murnane, and engaging with responses to the land by visual and performing artists, this thesis explores the idea that the writer and artist are mediators in the multitude of experiences that constitutes landscape.

Mary De Garis

The thesis is a biographical study of the life and times of Dr Mary De Garis, (1881-1963) an early medical woman. It examines her extensive writing, her research on childbirth and her modernising of the Geelong Hospital in the 1920s and 1930s. Her life illuminates Australian women in the first half of the twentieth century.

Janet Lady Clarke (1851-1909) 'Leader in the good work'

This thesis is a biographical study which examines the life and career of Janet Lady Clarke. As a leader of women's philanthrophic, health, educational and political organisations in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Victoria, she promoted new ideas within a conservative colonial society. Her legacies remain an integral part of Victoria's cultural heritage.

Sir Walter Scott in the western district, 1836-1851

A survey of 30 early settlement squatters in Victoria, using their letters, diaries and memoirs to compile a regional history of colonial readers. The resulting reader-responses support the emerging interpretations of Affective Reading, rather than more conventional strategies of literary criticism (New Historicism and Discourse Analysis).