The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Australia

Resources for Sydney University Summer School lecture to HSTY2614, “Australian Social History”: The Rise of the Nuclear Family

Reflecting on Achilles and the Black Dog

Yesterday I went to Driving the Future of History and Philosophy, and saw Dr. Larissa Aldridge’s amazing keynote address, “Achilles and the Black Dog: Coping with Feelings of Inadequacy during the PhD Process.”[1] People familiar with psychology will have guessed that Larissa’s title references the “black dog” metaphor for depression, and Harold Bloomfield’s Achilles Syndrome, a (pseudo?) psychological book published in 1985 which popularised the concept of pseudocompetence, more commonly referred to as “Impostor Syndrome.”[2]

In her address, Larissa shared the battles with self-doubt and depression that she fought during her PhD journey. It was a touching, and also brave, talk, because I believe that most, if not all, graduate students, and academics, frequently exhibit depression-like symptoms and self-doubt. But we are encouraged (socialised, perhaps?) not to discuss it. Instead, we have rooms full of graduate students sitting at their desks, tapping away, all worried that the person next to them is achieving more than they are. We have conferences full of historians who have a book a year overdue, a half-finished peer-reviewed article they hate, a course outline barely started but due to be finished tomorrow, and a huge grant application to complete, trying their best to project an air of calmness and self control.

Eat History!

History Week  is almost here! Mark Dunn and the team at the NSW History Council have done a marvellous job teeing up a whole suite of interesting and exciting events. This year’s theme, Eat History, is rather topical, and all the buzz has even encouraged my old friend Harriet Wicken to join Facebook. Who would have thought?

It’s great to see interest in history being generated. The City of Sydney, Sydney University, State Records NSW, Tony Bilson (!) , and a whole host of other people and organisations have stepped in to create what is certainly going to be the biggest history week so far.

The Humanities PhD at Sydney

Paper presented to Gateway: the PhD and its Future, St. Paul’s College, Sydney University, Monday the 8th of August. 

The past few years have been a time in which the university, and the higher education sector more broadly, has been reflecting very deeply on the role of the PhD in today’s society. We’ve had a working party review the PhD process, we’ve had the University White and Green Papers, we’ve seen the Bradley Review, and the reports of parliamentary standing committees into Research Training in Australia (Bradley et al. 2008; Standing Committee on Industry 2008; Sydney University PhD Review Working Party 2009; The University of Sydney 2010, 2011).

Today I’d like to think in a more practical manner about what the university could do to re-enforce what I believe to already be an outstanding humanities research environment. I’ll apologize now for what might come across as talk which promotes the impression that PhD candidates have a boring predilection for practical and financial matters. I get the impression that Alan was hoping for a more abstract discussion of lofty ideals. However, at the end of the day, practical and financial matters are the foundations upon which we learn. Without money, and without a place to work, it’s hard to put our minds towards the kind of higher learning, and higher thinking, that our University demands. The most brilliant candidate cannot complete a thesis if there’s no food on their table, or worse, they’ve no table to put the theoretical food upon.

Conference Abstract: Eugenics, rural cultures, and conceptions of intellectual disabilities

It’s a touch late, I know, but I should include the abstract to the paper I recently gave at the recent AHA History at the Edge conference in Launceston.

“Our Tasmanian Secretary laments that some teachers in that State… think all their pupils feeble-minded”:[1] Eugenics, rural culture and conceptions of intellectual disability in Australia, 1911 – 1928

In 1911, delegates to the Australasian Medical Congress gathered in a smoke-filled theatre and unanimously agreed that “the feeble-minded” posed a grave threat to the Australian nation. The first stage in their plan to solve the problem was the implantation of a nation-wide into the prevalence of feeble-mindedness amongst school children. As Ross Jones has recently argued, these surveys were an abysmal failure: a national survey was not completed until 1928, under the auspices of the Commonwealth Department of Health.[2]

In this paper I examine these early attempts to survey the feeble-minded population in Australia. Using insights from disability studies and whiteness studies, as conceived by Matt Wray, I argue that schoolteachers’ diagnosis of feeble-mindedness were often informed by class and cultural considerations.[3]

Conference Abstract: ‘The Association for Aiding Educable Sub-Normal Children Only.’

 

Today I submitted an abstract to the upcoming Australasian Welfare History Workshop, which is being held at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, later in the year. I’m quite excited about this conference, the last one was fantastic, and I am confident that this will be quite a good paper, too. If you’re interested in reading more about Mary Barton, check out my earlier post on her. Hopefully I’ll write the second half over the next few weeks.

‘The Association for Aiding Educable Sub-Normal Children Only:’ Communities, power, and categories of disability in Australian voluntary organisations for disabled children, 1950 – 1965

Race and Disability History: Casual Paper

This is a short paper I gave to Sydney University’s Australian History Postgraduate Group on the 28th of March. I was asked to suggest a reading relating to “Race and the ‘Other’” and comment on its relevance to my own work.

The article I submitted for reading was Laura Tabili’s “Race is a Relationship and Not A Thing.”[1]

It’s one of my favourite articles, but it wasn’t until I recently re-read it that I really remembered why.

As you probably know, I work in the field of disability history.

And Laura’s insistence that “racial processes” are “contingent, protean and relational in nature… [like] all historical processes” allows us to think about race in history in very interesting ways, ways which are sometimes overlooked by historians of race in the Australian context.[2]

It also allows ideas of race to intersect neatly with the kind of thinking that I do, in terms of the history of disabilities.

An Introduction to the Spastic Centre

Mapping it Out

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Conference Paper: Reviewing Dr. Benn

The Australian Historical Association’s biennial conference, “Reviewing History,” came and went last week. A wonderful event, and a great chance to catch up with old friends and colleagues, and meet some new ones. I was particularly proud of the large contingent of postgrad students from The University of Sydney, every one of whom presented an excellent paper (or two).

My turn was on Friday morning. It’s always hard to compress any argument down to twenty, presentable, minutes, especially while trying to express some nuances and complexities. For quite a while I was struggling to keep this paper to a reasonable length. Luckily, it emerged that Professor Charlie Fox had been working on a paper on the “parent’s groups” in the 1950s, which took a lot of the background work away from me. Charlie’s paper was great, and a solid introduction to my paper. The other paper on the panel, Caitlin Mahar’s discussion on the links between eugenics and euthanasia in the early 20th century, made for a wonderfully rounded discussion.

I think my paper was fairly good. I would like to have spent more time on the States Grants Act debates, and should probably have drawn more explicit links to the “home vs institution” debates and the Benn case. In retrospect, the conclusion is also a bit feeble, and could certainly be strengthed before I submit this as an article.

This is Maurice Benn, head of the German Department here at the Uni of West Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, he’d married Irene, a German, and together they’d moved to Perth to further Maurice’s career. For years they tried for a baby, but it was not until 1959 that their first son, Bernard, was born. Needless to say, they were overjoyed.