Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2002. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2003. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne, 2001. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-234).

Thesis (PhD) -- University of Western Sydney, 2004. / Bibliography: leaves 318-344.

Thesis (PhD)--University of Technology Sydney, 2007.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 2000. / Bibliography : leaves 370-387.

This dissertation compares and connects the parallel histories of two indigenous community-controlled health services, the Seattle Indian Health Board (SIHB) and The Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) of Sydney. These were among the first clinics of their kind to be established and run by and for urban indigenous communities in the U.S. and Australia. Formed in the 1970s within months of each other, I bring their seemingly disconnected histories together to illuminate a larger transnational history about the political ramifications of twentieth-century postwar urbanization (and the associated growth of an indigenous diaspora) on native people’s concepts and practices of political sovereignty. By considering how these clinics provided a key forum for new urban pan-indigenous forms of political and cultural identity—and claims to indigenous rights—to be expressed and recognized, my work makes two significant contributions. First, it reveals the importance of health as an arena of indigenous political action in the twentieth century. Second, it underscores that indigenous sovereignty, as a political project, must be understood as both adaptive and responsive to change. Drawing on archival research and oral histories conducted over two years across Australia and the United States—including interviews with activists and health workers who were on the front lines of indigenous politics in the 1950s-1970s—I explain why in their pursuit of self-determination, urban pan-indigenous communities steadily turned away from a purely western conception of sovereignty as jurisdiction over land. The health struggles of urban indigenous peoples since the Second World War are a pointed demonstration of how the loss of even limited territorial sovereignty (that is, relocation from reserves and reservations) led to damaging structural invisibility, discrimination, and neglect within the social welfare system. Thus, this dissertation shows how and why the communities in Seattle and Sydney were driven to pursue other forms of practiced, or what I call “deterritorialized”, sovereignty centering on their rights to self-governance through the creation and transformation of various social organizations (in this case health clinics) in line with distinctive cultural perspectives. This is the first book-length study to take healthcare reform seriously as an arena in which indigenous political actors worked to redefine the reach and the meaning of indigenous sovereignty for communities without recourse to land or nationhood in the assertion of their sovereign rights. Moreover, by bringing a comparative view to this historical inquiry, my work reminds us that trans-Pacific networks of ideas and people formed a shared context for these peoples and histories. I argue that indigenous health activists in the U.S. and Australia became active at precisely the same moment, because each saw their struggle for recognition and self-determination as part of a global challenge to racism during the Civil Rights era. Moreover, these indigenous community-controlled clinics should be recognized as part of broader changes taking place in grassroots health advocacy at the time, as reflected in the contemporaneous community and women’s health movements, and the movement to form People’s Free Clinics by the Black Panthers. In its consideration of the unique problems of recognition faced by urban pan-indigenous communities, “Sovereign Bodies” also contributes towards an understanding of processes of ‘place-making’ in a period of great mobility following the Second World War. This dissertation argues that the indigenous urban health clinics very quickly came to represent the social production of a new kind of political space: not a tribal homeland or even a mosaic of different homelands, but a generic native space in the city that gave physical form to new ideas of a non-territorial, or ‘deterritorialized’ sovereignty. Moreover, it shows that at work in the efforts of Seattle and Sydney’s urban indigenous health activists, was the idea of a ‘portable’ or ‘mobile’ indigenous status. This was intended, among other things, to allow indigenous people to live in cities—or wherever they choose for that matter—without having to give up their identity, cultural practices, or their legal status as indigenous people and ensuing ability to make special claims on the government. At stake in their health activism, this dissertation argues, was a form of place-making that aimed to make indigenous people at home everywhere within the national spaces of the U.S. and Australia.

Hyde Park Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women, Sydney was the New South Wales government’s first direct initiative in social welfare for the aged with the provision of residential care for women. It was the genesis of a system of destitute asylums (later state hospitals) that lasted for more than a century. For its duration (1862-1886), Hyde Park Asylum was the only one of its type in the colony. This empirical study looks at the day-to-day lives of its inmates at Hyde Park Asylum and follows them to their new home at Newington Asylum on the Parramatta River in 1886. The external and internal administration of the asylum under the Government Asylum’s Boards and later as a sub-department of the Colonial Secretary ‘s office is examined, including the roles of the manager and the matron. / Master of Arts (Hons)

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is concerned with an examination and re-assessment of the establishment, operation and management of the Female and Male Orphan Schools, in the first half of the nineteenth century in New South Wales. The chaplains and governors in the early penal settlement were faced with a dilemma, as they beheld the number of children who were ‘orphaned’, neglected, abandoned and destitute. In order to understand the reasons why these children were in necessitous circumstances, the thesis seeks to examine the situations of the convict women, who were the mothers of these children. Governors Philip Gidley King and Lachlan Macquarie respectively in 1801 and 1819 established the Schools, which provided elementary education, training and residential care within a religious setting. Researching the motives underlying the actions of these men has been an important part of the thesis. An examination of the social backgrounds of some of the children admitted to these Schools has been undertaken, in order to provide a greater understanding of the conditions under which the children were living prior to their admissions. Information about family situations, and the social problems encountered by parents that led them to place their children in the Schools, have been explored. The avenues open to the girls and boys when they left the Schools, has formed part of the study. Some children were able to be reunited with family members, but the majority of them were apprenticed. A study of the nature of these apprenticeships, has led to a greater understanding of employment opportunities for girls and boys at that time. In 1850 the Schools were amalgamated into the Protestant Orphan School at Parramatta. By examining the governance and operation of the Schools during their last two decades as separate entities, we have more knowledge about and understanding of these two colonial institutions. It is the conclusion of this thesis that some of the harsher judgements of revisionist social historians need to be modified. It was the perception that more social disorder would occur if action was not taken to ‘rescue’ the ‘orphaned’ children, usually of convict parentage. However genuine charity, philanthropy and concern was displayed for the children in grave physical and moral danger. The goals of the founders were not always reached in the Orphan Schools, nevertheless they performed an invaluable service in the lives of many children.

The use of community consultation to address socio-environmental degradation is entwined with contested democratic principles polarising views of its role. I frame this problem by examining three democratic paradigms faced with two contemporary problems. The deliberative argument that preferences require enrichment with debate mediates between the liberal-aggregative view that preferences are individual, private and amenable to aggregation and the view that participation in public life is foundational. Viewing consultation as deliberative reconciles the liberal-aggregative view of consultation as the illegitimate elevation of unrepresentative minority groups with the participationist view that consultation constitutes a step towards participatory democracy. Theorists of social reflexivity, however, point to an elided politics of knowledge challenging technoscience's exemption from politically garnered consent. Also neglected by much democratic theory is how functional differentiation renders self-referential legal, political, technoscientific and administrative domains increasingly unaccountable. I employ Habermas' procedural theory that public spheres allow social irritations into the political domain where they can be encoded into laws capable of systemic interjection in response, along with a dialogic extension accommodating the politics of knowledge. I then use this procedural-dialogic deliberative understanding of democracy to elucidate the context and outcomes of the NSW State's consultative strategy. The NSW state, institutionally compelled to underwrite economic growth, implicating itself in that growth's socio-environmental side effects provoking widespread contestation. The resulting Environmental Planning and Assessment Act (1979) and its adjunctive consultative provisions helped highlight the socio-environmental degradation of the Hawkesbury Nepean River Catchment via Western Sydney's urban sprawl, politicising the region. The convenement of a consultative forum to oversee a contaminated site audit within the region facilitated incisive lay critique of the technoscientific underpinnings of administrative underwriting of socio-environmental degradation. The discomforted NSW State tightened environmental policy, gutted the EP&A Act's consultative provisions and removed regional dialogic forums and institutions. I conclude that the socio-economic accord equating economic growth with social progress is both entrenched and besieged, destabilising the political/administrative/technoscientific regime built upon it. This withdrawal of avenues for critique risks deeper estrangement between reflexive society and the NSW State generative of electoral volatility.