Early Twentieth-century Australia Research Articles

Parching for Principle: Hotel Boycotts in Regional Australia, 1901–20

This article serves as the first in-depth study of the nature, dynamics and growth of a set of consumer boycotts in early twentieth-century Australia. Labelled “beer strikes,” these targeted hotels over issues such as the price and quality of alcohol, food and accommodation, as well as the treatment of staff. The article examines how campaigners created and adapted a body of tactics and forms of organisation between 1901 and 1920, to the point where beer strikes became an established and recurring form of contestation. Identifying beer strikes as a primarily regional tactic, it also sheds new light on consumer activism outside of cities. It finds that beer strikes had continuities with other forms of working-class activism: making use of methods of organisation rooted in unions and in labour politics, and drawing on modern adaptions of ideas concerning “fair” prices and rightful compensation for work. It demonstrates that boycotts played a greater role in Australian working-class distributive and consumer struggles than has been previously acknowledged.

Rings of power: a legal history of the engagement ring in early twentieth-century Australia

This article explores the gendered regulation of courtship by providing a legal history of the engagement ring across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing the relationship between love, law, material culture and gender into dialogue, I use actions for breach of promise of marriage to trace the life path of the ring from the private world of romance to the moral theatre of law, examining how the ring functioned as tangible proof of contract, as a constraint on women’s sexuality, as a legitimation of their sexual identities, and as compensation for economic losses suffered in consequences of a broken engagement. Rather than a top-down analysis of how the state orders intimate life, this is a study of the vernacular life of law: of why people began imbuing rings with legal significance and how courts came to accept their reasoning.

J. A. Leach’s

An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna. Unlike today’s field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach’s Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between science, birdwatching, recreation and conservation in early twentieth-century Australia. It shows how Leach’s heavy weighting on natural history was integral to his promotion of birdwatching as an edifying recreation that would lead people not merely to be able to name the birds they saw but also, more importantly, to understand, cherish and protect them.

‘A Woman’s Tongue’: Representations of Gender and Swearing in Australian Legal and Media Discourse

This article considers historical and contemporary representations of the relationship between gender and swearing in Australian obscene language trials. An examination of language ideologies articulated in media and legal discourse in nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia reveals how swearing by women was often depicted as unladylike, and swearing in the presence of women, considered undesirable. Commonly-articulated ideas about gender and swearing prevalent in this period have become naturalised over time, so that they form part of judicial ‘common sense’ in contemporary offensive language jurisprudence. In addition, the idea that swear words are especially offensive when uttered in the presence of women has functioned to legitimise the criminal punishment of swear words used by Indigenous women towards police. The article argues that there is a need to recognise the presence of gendered language ideologies in discourse, including the role they play in maintaining hierarchies and obscuring cultural differences.

A New Rival State? Australia in Tsarist Diplomatic Communications by Massov Alexander (review)

REVIEWS 177 off of the altars of its Nativity and Intercession cathedrals, preventing their use for religious services. It was only at Easter 1905, against the background of the developing revolution, that the altars were re-opened, on the eve of Nicholas II’s decree on religious toleration. De Simone’s account of the history of the Rogozhskoe community provides a detailed and illuminating picture of many aspects of the lives of the Moscow popovtsy, including the architecture of their cathedrals, the activities of their charitable and educational institutions and the growth of merchant dynasties such as the Morozovs and the Riabushinskiis. The author has made good use of archival materials, although his attitude towards his sources is somewhat uncritical, producing a highly sympathetic picture which sometimes verges on the hagiographical. De Simone focuses on the relationship of the Rogozhskoe community to the state and the official Orthodox Church, while largely ignoring its position in the broader spectrum of Old Belief. He says little about the attitude of the Rogozhskoe priested community to its priestless counterpart, the Moscow Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery community, nor to other priestless and priested communities throughout the Empire. Many of the more radical groups considered the Moscow popovtsy to be hopelessly compromised, not least by their swearing of the oath of loyalty to Alexander III after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. It is not too surprising, therefore, that the authorities were mistrustful of professions of loyalty by a community that aspired to a leading role in a movement that included groups which still identified the tsar as Antichrist. The monograph is thoroughly researched, with a full scholarly apparatus and some well-chosen illustrations. Unfortunately, however, the author’s style is somewhat pedestrian and repetitious, and the publisher has allowed far too many typos to slip through the proof-reading net. But overall this is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Russian religious history. Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies Maureen Perrie University of Birmingham Massov, Alexander; Pollard, Marina and Windle, Kevin (eds). A New Rival State? Australia in Tsarist Diplomatic Communications. Australian National University Press, Acton, ACT, 2018. xiii + 353 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. AUS$ 55.00 (paperback). This volume covers six decades of despatches by imperial Russia’s consular representatives in Melbourne, from the establishment of a Russian consular service in the Australian settler colonies in 1857 to the Russian revolutions SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 178 of 1917. The reports selected from the Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii (AVPRI) throw an interesting light on the growing relations between the two countries in this period. But they also offer useful insights into the economic, social and political history of the Australian federation. Ever since Leopold von Ranke based his history of the Reformation on the Venetian relazioni ambasciatori, historians have learnt to appreciate the value of foreign diplomatic sources for the study of a country’s internal history. Historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia will similarly find much of interest in the reports compiled by the eight Russian consuls. At the same time, their despatches also reveal the cultural, social and political norms of the country which they represented in this fast modernizing outpost of the British world in the Southern hemisphere. Its dynamism elicited admiration and fascination, but it also met with an altogether more traditional Russian response of hostility towards uncontrolled, from-the-bottom-up change, unfettered by governmental direction. Russia’s first contact with the Antipodes occurred in 1807, when the Russian sloop Neva put into Sydney harbour en route from Kronstadt to Alaska. From the early 1850s onwards there was an increase in immigration from Russia to Australia, triggered initially by the ‘gold fever’ of 1851. This first wave of immigration lasted until the 1890s, to be followed by a second in the decade before 1914. Indeed, on the eve of the First World War, the Russian community inAustraliaincreasedby120–150permonth.Inbothperiods,therecentarrivals were drawn mostly from the peasant class, reflecting the shortage of available land in Russia. But there was also a significant element formed of political refugees and oppressed ethnic minorities. Following the Polish uprising in 1863, Poles arrived in substantial numbers (doc. no...

The Boarding Pass: Pathways to Corporate Networks in Early Twentieth-century Australia

Networks are an enduring feature of Australian economic life. Connections between firms and individuals have long provided access to new knowledge and resources, while also maintaining the wealth and interests of a small group. This article examines the network of board members of large Australian corporations in the 1910s. Social network analysis is used to identify the structure of the network, and prosopography is used to understand the characteristics of the group and the possible pathways through which interlocking directorates developed. The evidence reveals a heavily interlocked business sector in Australia in the 1910s. Multiple directorships were the result of professional skills, prior business experience, kinship, marriage, class, gender and empire. By combining a range of sources, this approach integrates different types of Australian history. It reimagines the Australian economy by revealing that power was relational, and that the economic sphere was a stratified and interdependent space.

Carnegie in Australia: philanthropic power and public education in the early twentieth century

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).FindingsThe paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling.Research limitations/implicationsThe influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation.Originality/valueThe paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.

“Men, money, and motors”: The motor car as an emerging technology in Australian Federal Election Campaigns, 1903–31

The appearance of the car in early twentieth-century Australia significantly re-shaped election campaigns. Political parties used cars to bring voters to polling places, and some voters took advantage of elections by making their voting contingent on these free rides. Politicians and other campaigners took exception to the cost of supplying cars and to the attitudes evident in demands for rides. Some saw compulsory voting as a way of forcing voters to provide for their own transportation. Introduced mostly in the 1920s, compulsory voting’s impact was initially muted. But over time it did change how cars were used in Australian politics. One hundred years on compulsory voting remains in force in Australia, and cars are still seldom used on election day. This serves as an enduring example of how new technologies could have a disruptive impact on campaigning prior to the advent of radio and television.

The several lives of Cassim Mahomet: race, mobility and performance in White Australia

Recent accounts of efforts to racially circumscribe mobility in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia have described how the figure of the Indian immigrant came to be perceived by white settlers as a threat to their visions of a settled order. However, the case of Cassim Mahomet escapes this analysis. Cassim was the son of a family of Indian circus performers brought to Australia in the 1890s, who, after serving in army concert parties during World War I, returned to Australia to build a lengthy and popular career as a vaudeville performer, magician, actor and recording artist. Cassim’s success in show business was founded on his creative exploitation of two apparently contradictory stereotypes, the Australian digger and the mysterious Oriental magician. The first of these characters, ‘the Indian Digger’, emphasised Cassim’s connections to the emerging tradition of the digger and the Anzac legend; ‘the Son of India’ was a composite, orientalised figure familiar to Australian audiences as a stock character in vaudeville and the circus. This article highlights Cassim’s ability to perform multiple identities successfully. It reconsiders the equation of Indian mobility to and within Australia with white settlers’ negative perceptions and, by approaching Cassim’s microbiography from the perspective of performance, investigates the interplay of race, mobility and performance.

“More Like a Swagman than a Parliamentary Candidate”: Federal Election Meetings in Rural New South Wales and Victoria, 1910–22

Public meetings were one of the key electioneering methods employed in early twentieth-century Australia. These meetings and the beliefs that surrounded them did much to shape the era’s broader approach to electioneering. Rural candidates embarked on extensive tours of their constituencies, reinforcing a political culture focused on local representatives. Wide-ranging networks of party supporters were required to organise and publicise these tours, and so the public meeting also helped sustain a need for large party memberships. Meetings could be used to target some voter groups, but the time-consuming character of candidates’ tours meant that this potential was not often fully realised in the country.

‘She Felt Strongly the Injury to Her Affections’: Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Medicalization of Heartbreak in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury.

The Price of Prejudice: Women’s Work and Labour Force Discrimination in Australian History

This article examines changes in women’s participation in the workforce and female wage rates in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, focusing on the period of boom, depression and recovery from 1890 to 1910. Instead of explaining the trends in terms of family income or labour market segmentation, it is argued that the changes observed can be explained on the basis of sex-based discrimination in the labour market. Evidence from Victorian manufacturing during this period supports the discrimination hypothesis. Statistics for manufacturing industry in Brisbane during this period also give support to the discrimination hypothesis. As the economy slipped into depression and the general level of incomes fell, people were less willing to pay the price of prejudice against women workers. Both employment discrimination and wage discrimination against women were temporarily alleviated. Consequently there was the concurrence of rising employment of women relative to men and rising women’s wages relative to men’s wages.

Wobblies on the Wallaby

This article draws attention to the dominant but neglected rural dimension of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia. We argue that wandering bush workers formed the bulk of the IWW in Australia, whereas most studies have emphasised the role of the IWW’s Sydney “Local.” In overturning the dominant interpretation of the composition and character of the IWW in Australia, this article also shines light on an under-examined demographic feature of early twentieth-century Australia. By clarifying that the majority of Wobblies worked in the bush, we also show how the swagman, the itinerant worker of rural life, so prominent in our understanding – and our imaginations – of late nineteenth-century Australia, remained a prominent feature of the New South Wales and Queensland rural workforces during the early decades of the twentieth century. To put it simply, Australia had not settled down and neither had its most revolutionary unionists.

A Secular Australia? Ideas, Politics and the Search for Moral Order in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Australia

This article argues that the relationship between the religious and the secular in Australia is complex and that there has been no simple transition from a religious society to a secular one. It argues that the emergence of apparently secular moral orders in the second half of the nineteenth century involved what Steven D. Smith has termed the “smuggling in” of ideas and beliefs which are religious in nature. This can be seen clearly in the economic debates of the second half of the nineteenth century in Australia in which a Free Trade based on an optimistic natural theology battled with a faith in Protection which had powerful roots in a secular form of Calvinism espoused by David Syme. The article concludes with an analysis of twentieth-century historian W. K. Hancock's comparison of the medieval commonwealth and Machiavelli, concluding that Hancock found both the Free Trade and the Protectionist visions of moral order to be inadequate.

Nature study, Aborigines and the Australian kindergarten: lessons from Martha Simpson’s Australian Programme based on the Life and Customs of the Australian Black

This article examines an experimental kindergarten programme Work in the Kindergarten: An Australian Programme based on the Life and Customs of the Australian Black developed by Martha Simpson in early twentieth-century Australia. Here Simpson adapted international Revisionist Froebelian approaches to cultural epoch theory and nature study in an Australian context. Accepting that human development recapitulates, Simpson posited that Aboriginal culture could serve as stimulus for age-appropriate and improving child-centred activities. Local contingencies, including histories of violent cross-racial encounter, complicated an attempt by kindergartener Helen Beaumont to apply the programme in the Sydney slum suburb of Leichhardt. These contingencies are documented and analysed.

Gender, Class and Sporting Opportunity: Working-Class Women and Sport in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

This paper addresses a major blind spot in the history of Australian sport by investigating women's participation in sport with relation to social class. This is a question that has been largely overlooked in the current literature on the history of women's sport, but stands out as an issue deserving of further attention. The paper considers whether the obstacles faced by Australian sportswomen have been irrespective of social class and status, or if working-class women faced a double burden of both gender and economic barriers to sporting activity? Drawing upon an in-depth examination of sport and identities in an inner-city working-class Australian suburb, the paper examines and analyses the sporting experiences of local women in the early part of the twentieth century. Based on an extensive evaluation (and critique) of the local, city and sporting press and local histories, the paper argues that not only did working-class women have far fewer opportunities to participate in sport than their working-class male counterparts, but that they also had much less access to sport than middle- and upper-class women. It concludes that issues relating to class were the most significant deterrent to sporting involvement amongst local women.

Rethinking Female Pleasure: purity and desire in early twentieth-century Australia

This article explores the multiple and complex ways white heterosexual women constructed female sexual pleasure and desire in early twentieth-century Australia. It considers the idealisation of female sexuality, and the ways this was both subverted and re-iterated by women themselves, through a study of female writers. It suggests that the challenge to female sexual normativity—as marital and reproductive—was slow and staggered, with many women unable to firmly challenge the sexual ideal. But a close reading of the work of a number of female authors, especially the poet Zora Cross, allows glimpses of how some women did explore, construct and rethink sexual pleasure within their writings, negotiating between the sometimes contradictory impulses of purity and desire.

A new teacher for a new nation? Teacher education, ‘English’, and schooling in early twentieth-century Australia

The late nineteenth-century expansion of public schooling in Australia from an initial focus on the elementary phase to post-primary provision, and then to a more systematic secondary education over the early to mid-twentieth century, went hand in hand with the emergence of new populations of children and young people – a new constituency. In turn, these developments called into being a New Teacher, and a new system of teacher education, formed in accordance with what was widely understood as the New Education. Moreover, this was conceived as clearly in the service of nation-building. This paper traces aspects of the history of teacher education in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, proposing that this is best understood with reference to the cultural and ideological significance of English teaching and the English language, nation and empire.

‘Pupils differently circumstanced and with other aims’: governing the post-primary child in early twentieth-century Australia

Writing in 1927, five leading scholars and administrators of the Australian schooling systems published a book entitled Education in Australia: a comparative study of the educational systems of the six Australian states. These authors wrote of Australian education in a time of great optimism, and one of the key areas of reform they addressed was the introduction of forms of post-primary schooling for a ‘problem’ population of 12–15-year-olds who were not attracted to, or staying with, the high school curriculum which led towards university study. Through the lens of Education in Australia, this paper undertakes a genealogical exploration of the way the adolescent emerged as an object of school reforms in the early twentieth century and shows that these reforms were articulated with discourses of race, social efficiency, science and culture.

Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s

Songs in which male protagonists expressed tender sentiments about mothers or sweethearts were everywhere in early twentieth-century Australia. They could be heard in vaudeville shows, home sing-songs, neighbourhood parties and amateur concerts—even those held for or by servicemen during the First World War. In this article I explore the implications of this for Australian masculinities between 1900 and the 1930s, paying particular attention to ‘rough’ and/or working-class masculinities in the First World War era. Drawing on oral histories and a case-study of the vaudevillian, Harry Clay, I challenge the idea that Australians had ‘lost their taste for the sentimental’ in the early 1900s. While men were coming under increasing pressure to be stoic or tough I argue that this made sentimental songs more important rather than less, as a forum in which men could voice feelings considered unacceptable at other times in their lives.