Colonising Poso : the diary of Controleur Emile Gobee, June 1909 - May 1910

"While the colonisation of Central Sulawesi was a process that was unique to the particular demographic, social, political and economic characteristics of the region, in broad terms it replicated Dutch colonial policy and practice in the rest of the archipelago at the beginning of the 20th century. The diary of Aspirant Controleur Emile Gobee, records the process which imposed the relocation and resettlement of the Pamona people of the Poso region of Central Sulawesi into villages and therefore began a dramatic process of change. The document provides a rare example of the process of colonialism and goes to the heart of understanding the nature of the colonial project in the Dutch East Indies."--Publisher's website.
"The 1909-10 diary of Aspirant Controleur Emile Goběe, of Poso, Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, with a scholarly introduction that explains the significance of Dutch colonial and missionary intervention, which intentionally destroyed traditional cultures and lifestyles. During the time covered by this diary, the administration moved entire villages to places where they could be observed, changed their farming practices, and introduced trade and Christianity." -- Publisher.

South Africa's transtion from apartheid : the role of professional closure in the experiences of black chartered accountants

As apartheid gave way to political freedom in South Africa in the last quarter of the 20th century, chartered accounting firms began to hire black South African trainees for the first time. The study examines the oral histories of black chartered accountants within the context of social closure theory and South Africa’s changing political and ideological landscape. The evidence indicates that processes of professional closure and credentialing excluded the majority population from the ranks of the profession on basis of race and class throughout the period 1976–2000.

Soldier settlement after World War One in south western Victoria

This thesis addresses the physical aspects of farming on soldier settlement blocks in south west Victoria. The undeveloped land, high establishment costs, stock losses through animal diseases and lack of managerial skills all contributed to the settlers' inability to meet their financial commitments. These factors are analysed, as are the effects of declining rural commodities prices during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, the relationship between the settlers and the successive administrative agencies is examined. The scheme was administered by the Closer Settlement Board from its inception until 1932 and much of the discussion during this period concerns the interaction between settler and inspector. Soldier settlement after World War One represented one of the last attempts to create a large body of 'yeoman' farmers. From the early 1920s there was an increasing dichotomy between the 'yeoman' and the 'managerial' ideologies. This dichotomy placed additional pressure on soldier settlers who were expected to be 'efficient' without adequate finances. In the post C.S.B. era, the focus shifts to the attempts by the Closer Settlement Commission to salvage the scheme and its greater understanding of the problems faced by the settlers. While this part of the thesis necessarily becomes more political, the physical and financial environment in which the soldier settlers worked was still an important factor in their success or failure. Unlike the C.S.B. which tended to blame soldier settlers for their situation, the Commission acknowledged that settlers' ability to succeed was often constrained by circumstances beyond their control. Under the latter administration, instalments were written off, additional land was allocated and finally the blocks were revalued to guarantee the men at least some equity in their farms. Those settlers who had survived until these changes were instituted received a 'successful outcome of their life's work'.

Art and Oedipus

[No Abstract]

Holocaust literature : an exploration of second-generation publication in Australia

Normally we expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust and the flow is reversed (Clendinnen 1998, p. 185). This dissertation explores the relationships between the second-generation Holocaust writer, the Australian publishing industry and the reading public. It contends that a confluence of elements has made the 'genre' of second-generation Holocaust writing publishable in the late 20th century in a way that would not seem obvious from its major themes and the risk-averse publishing strategies increasingly adopted by the multinational conglomerates controlling the Australian industry. The research explores the nature of connections between writing, publishing and reading Holocaust literature, seeking to answer the following questions: What are the driving forces that compel children of Holocaust survivors to write about their parents' lives and their own experiences of growing up in a 'survivor' family? By what mechanisms are such stories published in an Australian industry dominated by international conglomerates focused on mass-market publishing? How do readers receive and make sense of this material?

History of the Geelong Regional Commission

This thesis is the first systematic history of the Geelong Regional Commission (GRC), and only the second history of a regional development organisation formed as a result of the growth centres policy of the Commonwealth Labor Government in the first half of the 1970s. In particular, the thesis examines the historical performance of the GRC from the time of its establishment in August 1977 to its abolition in May 1993. The GRC Commissioners were subject to ongoing criticism by some elements of the region's political, business, rural and local government sectors. This criticism focused on the Commissioners' policies on land-use planning, their interventionist stance on industrial land development, major projects and industry protection and their activities in revitalising the Geelong central business district. This thesis examines these criticisms in the light of the Commission's overall performance. This thesis found that, as a statutory authority of the Victorian Government, the GRC was successful over its lifetime, when measured against the requirements of the Geelong Regional Commission Act, the Commission's corporate planning objectives and performance indicators, the corporate performance standards of private enterprise in the late 1990s, and the performance indicator standards of today's regional economic development organisations in the United States of America, parts of the United Kingdom and Australia. With the change of Government in Victoria in October 1992 came a new approach to regional development. The new Government enacted legislation to amalgamate six of the nine local government councils of the Geelong region and returned regional planning responsibilities to the newly formed City of Greater Geelong Council. The new Government also made economic development a major objective of local government. As a result, the raison d'etre for the GRC came to an end and the organisation was abolished.

Attributes for Australian mechanical engineers through proximal and distance education

The 1996 Johnson stakeholder review of Australian engineering education recommended the development of a number of broadly defined attributes in all engineering graduates. The Institution of Engineers, Australia (now Engineers Australia) responded swiftly by switching the focus of its engineering course accreditation requirements from course content to graduate attribute outcomes. To maximise the effectiveness of this approach to the mechanical engineering discipline a clear understanding of the relative significance of a more detailed range of attributes to Australian industry is essential, yet the scope of the mechanical engineering profession is broad and views of individual practitioners contributing to debate on attribute requirements are largely influenced by their own often unique professional formation. The research presented in this thesis is unique in using a role based analysis of the relative significance of an extensive range of attributes considered relevant to Australian mechanical engineers. The study covers the six industries found to employ the greatest number of Australian mechanical engineers. The significance of these attributes in the core mechanical engineering roles of each industry are weighted according to the numbers of mechanical engineers employed in those roles. These attribute significance profiles are considered in the context of a study of the formative development of the profession under the extensive influence of 19th and 20th century UK and US practices and recent momentous changes in engineering employment and formation. A wide range of appropriate teaching strategies to develop the most significant attributes through proximal and distance learning are explored and a brief account of the candidate’s work in developing and assessing the use of technology to enhance flexible learning in the field of engineering education is also included in this thesis. Whilst major areas of the mechanical engineers knowledge base are considered as part of the main study, further case study based research is presented to assess in more detail the knowledge base requirements for Australia’s best performing manufacturing industry by ‘industry value added’ - Food, Beverage and Pharmaceuticals and as such provides an indication of the relevance of the content base of Australian mechanical (as well as chemical and electrical) engineering degree programs to an Australian industry sector.

Career in writing : Judah Waten and the cultural politics of a literary career

This thesis examines the literary career of Judah Waten (1911-1985) in order to focus on a series of issues in Australian cultural history and theory. The concept of the career is theorised as a means of bringing together the textual and institutional dimensions of writing and being a writer in a specific cultural economy. The guiding question of the argument which re-emerges in different ways in each chapter is: in what ways was it possible to write and to be a writer in a given time and place? Waten's career as a Russian-born, Jewish, Australian nationalist, communist and realist writer across the middle years of this century is, for the purposes of the argument, at once usefully exemplary and usefully marginal in relation to the literary establishment. His texts provide the central focus for individual chapters; at the same time each chapter considers a specific historical moment and a specific set of issues for Australian cultural history, and is to this extent self-contained. Recent work in narrative theory, literary sociology and Australian literary and cultural studies is brought together to revise accepted readings of Waten's texts and career, and to address significant absences or problems in Australian cultural history. The sequence of issues shaping Waten's career in writing is argued in terms of the following conjunctions of theoretical and historical categories: proletarianism, modernity and theories of the avant-garde; the "e;migrant"e; writer and minority literatures; realism, political purpose and narrative self-situation; communism, nationalism and literary practice in the cold war; utopianism and the "e;literary witness"e; narrative of the Soviet Union; assimilationism, multicultural theory and the "e;non-Anglo-Celtic"e; writer; theories of autobiographical writing, and autobiography in Waten's career. The purpose of the thesis is not to discover a single key to Waten's writing across the oeuvre but rather to plot the specific occasions of this writing in the context of the structure of a career and the cultural institutions within which it was formed.

Vision and rationalisation : a study of the school psychology profession within the Victorian Government school system

Since its origins in the 19th century, modern schooling has been a continuously contested domain within nation states. Underlying this contestation dynamic lie competing value systems about the social purpose of education; competing values around which are generated different discourses, and which in turn generate inherently contradictory social and organisational structures. As reflected in other areas of society, the 20th century expansion of state-provided schooling has essentially developed around variations of a bureaucratic model Thus, organisational cultures based around bureaucratic values have come to permeate the enterprise of schooling on a world wide scale. Concomitantly, the value for education to be fundamentally associated with human emancipation from psychological, social, political, or economic states of being, persists as a recurring theme in modern schooling. Premised on these understandings, the thesis argues that the development of the practices of school psychology as a profession, like education in general, and special education in particular, has similarly been influenced by tensions between different and competing constellations of values. It is argued that throughout the 20th century, the pervasiveness of formal schooling systems suggest that schooling may be understood as a modernist cultural archetype. As a socially constructed reality, the phenomenon of schooling has become unproblematic the apparent cultural inevitability of formal schooling in the modern era can also be understood as a premise of a systemised way of looking at the world; that of bureaucratic consciousness. Dialectically, bureaucratic consciousness persists in influencing every manifestation of schooling; structurally through its organisational forms, and epistemologically through the institutionalization of teaching and learning. A particular illustration of the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and the social forms and social practices of schooling is the school psychology profession which has developed as a part of school systems. The thesis argues that the epistemic archeology of psychology as a knowledge discipline can be traced through an earlier European intellectual and cultural tradition, but in the 20th century, has come to develop a symbiotic yet contradictory relationship with compulsory schooling in the modern nation state. The research study employs historical and fieldwork methods in a study of the development of the school psychology services within the Victorian Education Department, particularly between 1947 and 1987. The thesis also draws upon several usually distinct literatures; the philosophical and theoretical discourse of modernity and post modernity, the history and development of modern schooling, the ethnography of schooling, the international comparative literature on the school psychology profession, and the literature on action research in education practice and curriculum development, As a case study of Victorian school psychology, the research eschews a quantitative statistical approach in favour of qualitative investigatory genres, which have in turn been guided by the values of action research in education, as well as those of critical theory. The important focus of the thesis is its investigation of some aspects of the development and transformations within the Victorian state education bureaucracy, and the dialectical relationship that has persisted between the evolution of change processes and the shifting conceptions of school psychology practices in the 20th century. A history of the organisational development of school psychology services in Victoria constitutes an important part of the thesis. This is complemented by specific illustrations of how some school psychologists have been influenced by and have contributed towards paradigm shifts within the profession, shifts relating to how the changing nature of their work practices have come to be understood and valued by teachers and by school administrators. The work of J. R. MacLeod from the 1950s is noted in this regard. Particular attention is also drawn to the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and school psychology's professional orientation in the 1980s. As a means of providing field data to explore this relationship, ethnographic case studies with two school communities are included as part of the fieldwork of the thesis, and are based upon the author's own work in the mid 1980s. These case studies provide a basis for conceptually refraining the school psychologist's professional experience within schooling systems, and an opportunity to examine how competing value systems impact upon the work of the school psychologist. The thesis concludes with some observations about bureaucratic transformations within educational organisations, and about the future relationship of the school psychology profession with schooling systems, as framed by the theoretical parameters of the modernist /post modernist debate. The issue of competing value systems within the administration of public education is re-examined as is the value of promoting human empowerment in the ongoing work of the school psychologist. Finally, some scenario building with reference to the future of school psychology in Victoria in is undertaken.

Beyond the analogon; the "transfer of the referent" : the relationship between the external world experienced through culturally generated perceptual models constructed in the human mind, and the transfer of these images, via visual language, onto referen

Within 20th. Century art, the concept of the ‘normative’ image, as an attribute of things, has been challenged. As a consequence, paintings must now picture the ‘real’ world in other ways, incorporating knowledge and meaning beyond the analogon. Such descriptive representations were revealed as paradigmatic, rather than incontrovertible fact. Dependent on pre-conceived notions of stereotypicality, these descriptive images relied on surface illumination. My thesis explores images of things in the world as culturally inspired and information based. I examine paintings and sculptures of other cultures, such as black African, and other historical periods such as the Medieval, which reveal metonymously the basis for variations in representations of the ‘real’ world. The new enhanced representations which Modern artists created in their work were denigrated as deviant from the absolute ‘normative’ or regarded as distortions for purely mannerist and stylistic reasons. Postmodern research has reassessed them as multiple or extended imagings in whose facture new knowledge and human responses can be incorporated. These new forms of representation can be regarded as theoretical constructs rather than stylised depictions of appearance. In this way referents are transferred through the mind onto objects and vistas in the real world to align with our developed view of the physical world and better our understanding of humanity’s symbiotic relationship with nature.

How do detectives make love? : themes of the survival of the child: corruption in relation to innocence

The major component of the thesis is a manuscript of poetry titled How do detectives make love? which includes forty poems written over a period of two years. Many of these; poems have been published in literary journals and magazines both in Australia and internationally as well as being performed at various performance poetry venues. How do detectives make love? was accepted for publication by Penguin Books, Australia in 1994. Also included is a 12,000 word exegesis in support of the manuscript titled How do detectives make love? Themes of the survival of the child: corruption in relation to innocence. The exegesis explores various themes and motifs occurring throughout the work, including the motif of birds and dogs, and the themes of love and the police, guns and weaponry, the outback and parklands, the parents, the change from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood, and the survival of the child. The current vital social relevance of these themes and motifs is explored in the poems. The literary use of the themes is explored comparatively with the work of other Australian poets including Gig Ryan, Kenneth Slessor and Les Murray. The purpose of the exegesis is to give the reader insights into the poet's intellectual processes and literary concerns throughout the work itself.

Vertigo : Riccardo Formosa's composition technique

Riccardo Formosa has been identified as being an important and widely recognised young Australian composer. Formosa's possession of a sophisticated composition technique is central to his approach to composition and to his reputation among contemporary composers. Vertigo: Riccardo Formosa's Composition Technique aims to define the composition technique employed by Formosa. It does so by analysing the works from a number of clearly defined perspectives. The study proceeds firstly through a description of the works as a whole and their relationship to the composer’s personal history. Secondly, the note-to-note operations Formosa has employed are reassembled through a detailed examination of the scores. Thirdly, an assessment is made of the function of the various techniques within the musical texture. Lastly, a number of comparisons are made between Formosa’s work and the work of his compositional models. The study concludes that Formosa’s works show evidence of a composition technique operating effectively on different levels. The note-to-note processes, simple in themselves, are multiplied to form a complex counterpoint. On both the note-to-note level and the relationship between larger sections of the works, the controlling factor was found to be one of ‘binary expression’ in the form of symmetry or complementarity, a compositional aesthetic also held by Formosa's teacher. Franco Donatoni.

More than a mere story : social and political markers in Australian short fiction of the 1980's

This thesis is a literary history which argues that much of the short fiction published in Australia during the 1980s was deeply influenced by the rapid social and political changes during that decade. My argument concentrates on links between the short stones of the period and the socio/political environment into which they were written. The decade was marked by massive changes in technology, the workplace, and in all other areas of social life. In general terms, the ideology of the 'market' predominated over notions of small 'l' liberalism and the last vestiges of state intervention in the economy. The Australian short story benefited from the social 'experiments' of the 1970s in that its concerns became broader - encompassing the onslaught of feminism, the foregrounding of 'multicultural' concerns, and a move away from the bush into the city as a primary site for narratives. The decade was a rich period for the genre. Why was there a tolerance for a new diversity, in literary terms, when the social and political environment was turning to the right? This is a central question of the thesis. I argue that instead of the 'base' determining the 'superstructure' (i.e. culture) the superstructural changes were essential to the deconstruction of the social and political landscape. This thesis contends that a relationship always exists between the 'literary' and 'the social'. I argue, among other things, that many of the short fictions were influenced by 'postmodern' theory to the extent that they became a form of traumatic note-taking, which masked a late romanticism beneath a fear of the sovereign subject. The fear of 'closure' which insinuated itself into many of the texts, besides being a form of academic corrective, was also a flight from emotional candor. I argue that storytelling was, in many cases, the loser.

Fundamentalism meets feminism : postmodern confrontation in the work of Janette Turner Hospital

[No Abstract]