School of Historical Studies History

Eisenhower and the Red Menace

6th March 2008
Michael Birkner, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Liberal Arts, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The confrontation between Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Eisenhower Administration is one of the leading set pieces of 1950s historiography. This paper will revisit the confrontation between the rogue senator and the president over national security in 1953 and 1954. It will relate and evaluate the argument that Eisenhower employed a “hidden hand” approach to undermining McCarthy — saying nothing in public, while privately using various tools to bring the Senator into disrepute. Finally, the paper will assess Eisenhower’s handling of McCarthy and the Communist issue.

Thursday 6th March 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

Covered Writing: The Wesley Brothers’ Personal Memoirs

13th March 2008
Professor Richard Heizenrater, Duke Divinity School

Professor Richard Heizenrater of Duke Divinity School is a Visiting professor to the University of Melbourne and has been a guest of the United Faculty of Theology. He is Professor of Church History and Wesley Studies at Duke, best known for breaking the code of John Wesley's personal journal, and widely respected for this and other studies of early Methodism.

An abstract for the seminar will be following shortly.

Thursday 13th March 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

An Inch of Rain and What it Means: Landscapes of the northern plains of Victoria 1836-1930

20th March 2008
Robyn Ballinger, PhD candidate, School of Historical Studies

In this paper I argue that settlement of the semi-arid northern plains of Victoria in the period 1836-1930 was shaped by dominant images developed around the idea of deficiency, and contend that these images have endured to inform contemporary expectations of a water supply. In a time of climatic uncertainty, I ask how future visions might be imagined.

Thursday 20th March 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

Convict Culture and the Land: The Van Diemen’s Land experience 1803-1823

3rd April 2008
James Boyce, Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, and the author of Van Diemen’s Land (Black Inc 2008)

One of the persistent themes of Tasmanian (and Australian) environmental history is that early British settlers were little changed by their encounter with the new land. Trained to objectify the land by the Enlightenment, empowered to transform it by the Industrial Revolution, it is widely assumed that the settlers sought to reproduce the society and environment of rural England. However there is considerable evidence that among the majority settler group, convicts and former convicts, environmentally induced changes in food, clothing, and shelter were extraordinarily rapid. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, convict shepherd-hunters and to a lesser extent small farmers, developed a distinctive way of life which facilitated their access to the essentials of life without recourse to capital or land title. This paper will explore the resulting Van Diemonian culture, and its relevance to Australian history more generally.

Thursday 3rd April 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

“Now we ask, not for protection, but for education”: Aboriginal assimilation, education and citizenship in 1930s Australia

10th April 2008
Amanda Barry, PhD candidate, School of Historical Studies

This paper draws on my doctoral research of the post-contact education of Aboriginal children, through an examination of debates about citizenship rights for Aborigines which emerged in 1930s south-eastern Australia. In these debates, Aborigines and non-Aborigines alike singled out education and training of Aboriginal children as key to ensuring their equality. Schooling would smooth the path to Aboriginal citizenship rights. Such demands complicate Australia’s historiography of colonisation, which casts education as simply an exercise in colonial oppression. This has mitigated against closer study of the post-contact education of Aboriginal people and of Aboriginal agency in receiving, resisting, challenging and accommodating it. Re-examining Aboriginal education in this way, however, raises the methodological challenge of negotiating an aspect of colonisation that was both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously. On the one hand, the education of Aboriginal children was culturally destructive, breaking down traditional family structures. On the other, this very upheaval meant that Aboriginal people needed education and training to ensure their economic survival.

This paper explores the theme of education to rethink Australian Aboriginal history’s pervasive dichotomy of oppression and survival, suggesting new ways of understanding the complex rhetoric surrounding ‘assimilation’ and ‘citizenship’ in the inter-war period. As our Prime Minister’s recent apology to Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’ made clear, ‘education’ remains key to the rhetoric of ensuring Aboriginal equality. Understanding its history, therefore, is vital.

Thursday 10th April 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

'Pistols! Treason! Murder!: A Multimedia Assassination

17th April 2008
Jonathan Walker, International Research Fellow, University of Sydney

This paper dramatises the assassination of Giulio Cazzari in Venice in July 1622 and considers its significance using a variety of techniques and media: original comic strips in the style of seventeenth-century broadsheets, a slow-motion video of the firing sequence of a wheel-lock pistol, specially-designed screen layouts, snippets from contemporary plays, and, last but not least, extensive quotations from archival sources.

Thursday 17th April 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

“Each time I'm reminded of it, I feel as though I need therapy”: Footy tragedies and the question of catharsis

24th April 2008
Matthew Klugman, PhD candidate, School of Historical Studies

Australian football matches have long been seen as a place of catharsis. In particular, the yelling and roaring that barrackers are renowned for has often been seen as something beneficial, purifying even. Studies of catharsis in footy and other sports, however, have generally ignored the more extensive literature examining the catharsis apparently experienced in viewing tragic plays. And yet footy barrackers often speak of especially traumatic losses as tragedies. These losses are so painful that many barrackers find nothing of benefit in them and speak of trying to erase them from their memory. Notwithstanding this wish, football conversations return frequently to these painful losses. Might this repetition of trauma be intertwined with the mysteries of catharsis?

This paper explores the place of catharsis in Aussie-rules football by way of those especially traumatic football losses that are often deemed tragic. What place, I ask, do these so-called tragedies have in the seasonal lives of football barrackers? How are they remembered, mourned and memorialised? And what might they reveal of the nature and meaning of catharsis?

Thursday 24th April 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

Poppaedius Silo: Dux et auctor of the social war

1st May 2008
Chris Dart, PhD Candidate, School of Historical Studies

Livy believed Quintus Poppaedius Silo to have been dux Marsorum, auctor eius rei. The Social War has produced directly contrary arguments and interpretations by modern scholars. Studies on the leading Italian generals are conspicuously absent amongst much scholarship on the Social War and on social conflict in Italy during the late second and early first centuries BCE. Among the Italian leaders, Quintus Poppaedius Silo stands out because of his political activities in 92/91 BCE and the frequency with which he is mentioned by ancient sources. This paper seeks to investigate and analyse the role of Poppaedius Silo in one of the most important conflicts in Italian history under the Roman Republic. This has not been previously investigated.

Thursday 1st May 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

'At the Point he always wished for': William Blackstone as judge

8th May 2008
Wilfrid Prest, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne

William Blackstone is best known for his Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in 4 volumes between 1765-69, and continuously reprinted down to the present day. Blackstone's fame as author of the most celebrated and influential law book in the English language has tended - not surprisingly – to eclipse all other aspects of his career. In particular, his decade of office as a justice of King's Bench and Common Pleas (1770-1780), which was also the last decade of his life, has tended to be regarded as something of an anticlimax. Legal historians have seen him as no more than a competent judicial functionary, and certainly not a 'great judge'.
This overview of Blackstone's judicial career argues for a somewhat more positive assessment.

Thursday 8th May 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

For Love of Mankind: Women Philanthropists in Australian History

15th May 2008
Barbara Lemon, PhD candidate, School of Historical Studies

‘Humanity is the virtue of a woman,’ wrote Adam Smith in 1759, ‘generosity of a man… That women rarely make considerable donations is an observation of the civil law.’ Most would baulk at Smith’s blatant division today but it is true that Australia’s most prominent philanthropists tend to be male, while Australian women’s philanthropy has traditionally centred around voluntary work. For over a century, though, a small number of Australian women – some well-known, others less so – have given significant sums of money to charitable causes alongside their wealthy male counterparts. Is there anything distinctive about Australian women’s philanthropy? How has it affected civil society and public policy? Does it have anything to do with the women’s movement? This paper presents the findings of a three year investigation into the history of Australia’s women philanthropists: from the domineering Elizabeth Austin, who funded the Austin Hospital in 1880; to the enigmatic Helen Macpherson Schutt, recently disinterred from a pauper’s grave in France, whose 1951 legacy is now worth well over $80 million; and the spirited Dame Elisabeth Murdoch who, at 99 years of age, still supports 110 charities per year.

Thursday 15th May 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

Witchcraft and European History: Changing perspectives over thirty years

22nd May 2008
Charles Zika, School of Historical Studies

Prior to the 1967 publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay on The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries the historical phenomenon of witchcraft barely rated a mention in historical work on medieval and early modern Europe. From the early 1970s, historical interest in what Trevor-Roper called ‘a bizarre but coherent intellectual system which…gave to otherwise unorganised peasant credulity a centrally directed, officially blessed persecuting force’ turned into a river; and in the last fifteen years the river has become a flood. The paper will be a reflection on changes in the historiography of this subject over the last thirty years since I first taught an History honours seminar, Magic & Witchcraft in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, at the University of Melbourne in 1979.

Thursday 22nd May 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building

Weapons of Mass Communication: The censorship and surveillance of Australian reporters during war

29th May 2008
Fay Anderson, Australia Centre, School of Historical Studies

This paper will examine the censorship of Australian reporters during conflict by considering the silencing of correspondents on the Western Front, the specific targeting and surveillance of recalcitrant and ‘poisonous’ journalists during WWII and the experiences of Australian reporters in Iraq. The relationship between the media and the Australian Defence Force is widely understood to have sunk to a new level during Iraq and Afghanistan but historically it has always been fraught. Indeed the Australian military and governments were and continue to be, unashamed censors, eclipsing their US and British counterparts in terms of severity and motivation. This paper will chronicle the historical precedents, the complex relationship between the media and military, the intent and the wider ramifications. Using archives and interviews with the leading Australian correspondents, it will seek to examine the conflict between an industry that seek to ‘get the story’ and an organisation intent on secrecy.

Thursday 29th May 1 - 2pm
Jessie Webb Library, John Medley Building