Picture boys : biography, community and travelling picture shows

This thesis explores the relationship between the travelling picture shows, the lives of the "Picture Boys" who ran them, and the rural communities of Westland, New Zealand, 1932 to 1956. The shows brought change, as represented by Hollywood, but they also added significantly to social cohesion in the remote communities.

Civil war, conflict resolution and culture in Lebanon and Algeria

This thesis examined the explanatory capacity of political culture in relation to civil war and conflict resolution in Lebanon and Algeria. It argued that political culture operates to affect the form and legitimacy of peace agreements by employing a method of content analysis that emphasised 'contextuality' in resolution processes.

L. Bernard Hall and the feminine in Australian painting 1885-1935

This thesis draws on images to explore the processes by which an individual - Lindsay Bernard Hall - and a categorical concept - the feminine - became devalued in Australia's national tradition. It celebrates Hall's contribution to Australia's cultural heritage and the significance of his art in the visual record of modernising womanhood.

The development of manufacturing in greater Geelong in the nineteenth century

Contrary to received opinion, Greater Geelong was among the most diversified manufacturing centres in Victoria, relative to Melbourne, Greater Ballarat and Greater Bendigo between 1854 to 1900. This was based on a manufacturing specialisation and export orientation established between 1841 and 1861.

After-life of modernist abstraction

An investigation of the consequences of pluralism for abstract painting. A central theme examines the possibilities for contemporary abstraction to question its own condition and history. The theoretical model of after-life forms facillitates an understanding of modes of abstraction which recombine unresolved, syncretic forms and address domains excluded by modernism.

Maternal realms : an exegesis and novel

Combines a novel and exegesis. The fictional autobiography, "The wardrobe drawer", describes a girl's prepubescent experiences in a dysfunctional family. The exegesis explores the process of life writing and renegotiates terms for motherhood and femininity by drawing from feminism, autobiography, queer theory and psychanalytic theory.

Leavings : a novel and exegesis

In the novel, Billie, a painter living on the Hawkesbury River, remembers her life in Italy and England in a search for family and identity. The exegesis investigates the prophetic figure of the Sibyl from a writer's perspective, exploring notions of writing, research, creativity, authority and textual longevity.

International standing, international reputation and Australian foreign policy

This thesis provides a systematic study of the concepts of international standing and international reputation in four significant episodes in Australian foreign policy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. These concepts are shown to have influenced Australian diplomacy, both as objects of policy and as instruments of policy.

Disrupting disordered neurocircuitry : treating refractory psychiatric illness with neuromodulation

Despite the premature and somewhat infamous rise and fall of psychosurgery in the mid-20th century, the current era of functional neuromodulation proffers immense opportunity for surgical intervention in treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders. On the basis of recent successes with novel, focused, less invasive, and reversible treatment strategies for movement disorders, several therapeutic trials have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in treatment-resistant depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and Tourette syndrome. The many anatomic targets for these psychiatric disorders are indicative of both the system-wide effects of DBS and the network-level dysfunction mediating the emotional and cognitive disturbances. To gain insight into the application of neuromodulation therapies and their further advancement, we must elucidate neuroanatomic networks involved in refractory psychiatric illness, the neurophysiological anomalies that contribute to disordered information processing therein, and the local and system-wide modulatory effects of DBS. This review discusses the history of psychosurgical procedures, recent DBS clinical data, current anatomic models of psychopathology, and possible therapeutic mechanisms of action of DBS neuromodulation. Our search criteria for PubMed included combinations of the following terms: neuromodulation, DBS, depression, OCD, Tourette syndrome, mechanism of action, and history. Dates were not restricted. As clinical and basic scientific investigations probe the neuromodulatory effects of DBS in the treatment of refractory neuropsychiatric illness, our knowledge of these disorders and our potential to treat them are rapidly expanding. Indeed, this modern era of neuromodulation may provide the key that unlocks many of the mysteries pertaining to the biological basis of disordered emotional neurocircuitry.

Forever troubling: feminist theoretical work in education

My life and intellectual history are closely connected to the late 20th Century rise of the second wave women’s, student and civil rights movements. These decades also witnessed the professionalization of women’s traditional fields of work— teaching and nursing—with their introduction into the academy. But as all feminists know, and my intellectual and personal history illustrates, there is no gradual progress towards the betterment of all or a fairer redistribution of power, and there is no safe discourse of equality. Any restructuring of the social relations of gender arising from local, national or global social, economic and political shifts often reasserts masculine privilege.

A delayed inheritance: The Medical Board of Victoria's 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect"

The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register “legally qualified medical practitioners”. It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in “infamous conduct in a professional respect” (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board’s inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments’ distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century. The article maintains that the granting of the power to the Board was a crucial event in the history of the regulation of the Victorian medical profession. This is illustrated both by the difficulty encountered by the medical profession in dealing with doctors’ unethical conduct before 1933, and the Board’s concern to use its new authority responsibly and appropriately to protect the public and the profession in the three years after it attained the power.

The event, the subject, and the artwork into the twenty-first century

Partly guided by Alain Badiou's controversial Century and its interpretation of the events and art of the last century, this book opens debates about these for the twenty-first century.