Anne O'Brien
Biographic Data
| ID | 4549478 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anne O'Brien |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anne |
| FAMILY NAME | O'Brien |
| SIGNATURE | BRIEN A O |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2265-9493 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Introduction to “Motherhood, Subjectivity, and Work”
Mothers who participate in the formal workplace confront the ongoing difficulty of mediating the relationship between home and work (O'Brien and Liddy, 2020; Crowley-Henry and Weir 2007; Gregory and Milner 2009). This negotiation is often seen to compromise their status, engagement, and well-being in both spheres, with implications for mothers' work and their everyday lives (Gatrell 2007; Gatrell et al. 2017). The neo-liberal individualization an…
Archaic laws’ and the making of the homelessness sector
The relationship between law and welfare in the governing of homelessness has been studied from a range of perspectives but their interconnections have had little scrutiny at that key moment in the later 20th century when vagrancy was repealed and homelessness became a ‘sector’ in most western countries. Focussing on Australia, this paper provides a critical historical analysis of how and why these interconnections limited reform. Despite the ear…
Housing the homeless: How revisiting the 1940s assists the struggle
A major obstacle in the political work of housing the homeless is convincing voters and lawmakers that housing is a right and should be available to all without conditions. This paper seeks to assist that project by showing that the tension between rights and conditions has a history. It focusses on the pivotal 1940s, which saw the first major investment in public housing and the first surveys of two relevant problem populations—“the problem fami…
Media Graduates at Work: Irish Narratives on Policy, Education and Industry
A Bargain with the Devil’: Human Rights and Homelessness in the Neoliberal Age
There is a growing literature on the synchronous ascendancy of neoliberalism and human rights that debates the extent to which the global rights movement was complicit with or constrained by neolib
Women, Inequality and Media Work
Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries. Examining women’s place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at…
The Empire’s Patriotic Fund: Public Benevolence and the Boer War in an Australian Colony
The Empire’s Patriotic Fund: Public Benevolence and the Boer War in an Australian Colony." Australian Historical Studies, 49(4), pp. 559–560
National Shame/National Treasure: Narrating Homeless Veterans in Australia 1915–1930s
For twenty years after World War I veterans experiencing homelessness inspired narratives that left their mark on the politics of repatriation. Fear of the vagrant mob underpinned the establishment of the system itself. Once it was in place, those suffering homelessness became figures of pity, slowly and unevenly drawn into the Anzac legend by its attachment to the nobility of defeat. But the figure of the homeless digger remained deeply ambivale…
Homeless' women and the problem of visibility: Australia 1900-1940
The historiography of women who experienced homelessness is spare but a small, important body of research addresses their long-standing problems with visibility. However, this writing mostly focuses on either ‘vagrant’ women who were subjects of the law, or ‘respectable’ women who were subjects of philanthropy. This article draws these groups into the same frame. It shows how the assumed dichotomy between them worked in mutually constitutive ways…
Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World
Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World." Australian Historical Studies, 48(3), pp. 452–453
Grounding governance
It's a Man's World: A Qualitative Study of the (Non) Mediation of Women and Politics onPrime TimeDuring the 2011 General Election
The manner in which women appear, or disappear, within the Irish politics–media intersection is a question central to understanding the nature of contemporary politics for Irish women. This article explores the manner in which the 2011 General Election coverage broadcast on RTÉ's flagship current affairs series Prime Time was gendered. The representation of Irish women's engagement in politics was constituted through four dominant frames. Firstly…
Citizens of the academic community? A societal perspective on leadership in UK higher education
This paper presents a societal perspective on academic leadership by exploring the preoccupations of academics as citizens rather than as employees, managers or individuals. It uses a listening post methodology to ask ‘what is it like to be a citizen of an academic institution in contemporary Britain?’ Three listening posts, comprising 26 participants from 15 higher education institutions, were conducted and analysed. A number of common themes we…
The Cambridge History of Australia
The Cambridge History of Australia offers a comprehensive view of Australian history from its pre-European origins to the present day. Over two volumes, this major work of reference tells the nation's social, political and cultural story. Volume 1 examines Australia's indigenous and colonial history through to the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Volume 2 opens with the birth of the twentieth century, tracing developments in the nation through…
Pauperism Revisited
‘Pauperism’ is a familiar and powerful explanatory concept for historians of charity and welfare, one that underpinned the discourse of charity in the nineteenth century. However the rhetoric of pauperism did not follow the same pattern in all colonies, nor was it applied with equal rigor to all Indigenous communities. This article tracks differing perceptions of pauperism in colonial Australia. It argues that the use (or non-use) of the language…
Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia
Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia Anne O'Brien In recent years reparation has become one of the most important ethical issues facing settler societies. Despite this, there has been little research on nineteenth-century conceptions of reparation, though various historiographies inform the subject without addressing it directly. The "new imperial history" that emerged in the 1990s generated important work on humanitarianism but i…
Books
Books
Saving the ‘Empty North’: Religion and Empire in Australia
The task of understanding the relationships between religion and empire in Australia is compounded by the fact that the historiography of each of these fields is not highly developed. While transnationally, histories of modernity have generally been conceived as representing ‘the triumph of secularism’, in Australia the marginalization of religious history is arguably more pronounced than elsewhere. 1 Anti-clericalism in its convict origins and i…
Creating the Aboriginal Pauper: Missionary Ideas in Early 19th Century Australia
This article examines the relationship between nineteenth century English poor law discourse and missionary work in colonial Australia. The text analyses key sites of Christian missionary philanthropy in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria in the period 1813-1849. It looks at changes in the ethos of one benevolent institution set up for poor whites, the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Activated by Christian paternalism at its foundation in …
All Creatures of the Living God’: Religion and Leprosy in Turn of the Century Queensland
The church played a role in the ‘retainting’ of leprosy in the nineteenth century, but religious ideas had multiple effects. A small group of ‘coloured lepers’ on Friday Island responded to Christian teaching in the early 1900s, supported by Gilbert White, Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria, a vocal opponent of their incarceration. They were led first by Islander teachers and later, an Indigenous man, Thomas Moreton, whose leadership flowed from the …
Kitchen Fragments and Garden Stuff’: Poor Law Discourse and Indigenous People in Early Colonial New South Wales1 My thanks to Patricia Curthoys for research assistance, to participants at the Australa…
This paper seeks to draw welfare and Indigenous history into the same analytic frame by analysing the religious impulses underpinning ideas about welfare for Indigenous people and poor whites in a period of acute transition for the poor law between 1815 and the 1830s. During these years the conceptual framework of the new poor law (less eligibility, pauperisation, indoor relief) came to dominate attitudes towards poor whites, particularly in the …
Missionary Masculinities, the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915
The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension a…
Rethinking Blasphemy: Religious ideas in the writings of W. K. Hancock, Manning Clark and Russel Ward
Religious ideas have had a subtle but important influence on the writing of Australian history. This paper analyses the autobiographical writings of three of Australia's most influential historians to trace links between the variety of their childhood experiences of religion and their writing of history
Books
Taking Assimilation to Heart Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937. By Katherine Ellinghaus. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 276. $US49.95 cloth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. By Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 285. $41.95 paper. A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia. …
Citizens of the academic community? A societal perspective on leadership in UK higher education
This paper presents a societal perspective on academic leadership by exploring the preoccupations of academics as citizens rather than as employees, managers or individuals. It uses a listening post methodology to ask ‘what is it like to be a citizen of an academic institution in contemporary Britain?’ Three listening posts, comprising 26 participants from 15 higher education institutions, were conducted and analysed. A number of common themes we…
A church full of men’: Masculinism and the church in Australian history∗
Archaic laws’ and the making of the homelessness sector
The relationship between law and welfare in the governing of homelessness has been studied from a range of perspectives but their interconnections have had little scrutiny at that key moment in the later 20th century when vagrancy was repealed and homelessness became a ‘sector’ in most western countries. Focussing on Australia, this paper provides a critical historical analysis of how and why these interconnections limited reform. Despite the ear…
Housing the homeless: How revisiting the 1940s assists the struggle
A major obstacle in the political work of housing the homeless is convincing voters and lawmakers that housing is a right and should be available to all without conditions. This paper seeks to assist that project by showing that the tension between rights and conditions has a history. It focusses on the pivotal 1940s, which saw the first major investment in public housing and the first surveys of two relevant problem populations—“the problem fami…
Homeless' women and the problem of visibility: Australia 1900-1940
The historiography of women who experienced homelessness is spare but a small, important body of research addresses their long-standing problems with visibility. However, this writing mostly focuses on either ‘vagrant’ women who were subjects of the law, or ‘respectable’ women who were subjects of philanthropy. This article draws these groups into the same frame. It shows how the assumed dichotomy between them worked in mutually constitutive ways…
It's a Man's World: A Qualitative Study of the (Non) Mediation of Women and Politics onPrime TimeDuring the 2011 General Election
The manner in which women appear, or disappear, within the Irish politics–media intersection is a question central to understanding the nature of contemporary politics for Irish women. This article explores the manner in which the 2011 General Election coverage broadcast on RTÉ's flagship current affairs series Prime Time was gendered. The representation of Irish women's engagement in politics was constituted through four dominant frames. Firstly…
Sins of Omission? Women in the history of Australian religion and religion in the history of Australian women. A reply to Roger Thompson
A Bargain with the Devil’: Human Rights and Homelessness in the Neoliberal Age
There is a growing literature on the synchronous ascendancy of neoliberalism and human rights that debates the extent to which the global rights movement was complicit with or constrained by neolib
National Shame/National Treasure: Narrating Homeless Veterans in Australia 1915–1930s
For twenty years after World War I veterans experiencing homelessness inspired narratives that left their mark on the politics of repatriation. Fear of the vagrant mob underpinned the establishment of the system itself. Once it was in place, those suffering homelessness became figures of pity, slowly and unevenly drawn into the Anzac legend by its attachment to the nobility of defeat. But the figure of the homeless digger remained deeply ambivale…
Pauperism Revisited
‘Pauperism’ is a familiar and powerful explanatory concept for historians of charity and welfare, one that underpinned the discourse of charity in the nineteenth century. However the rhetoric of pauperism did not follow the same pattern in all colonies, nor was it applied with equal rigor to all Indigenous communities. This article tracks differing perceptions of pauperism in colonial Australia. It argues that the use (or non-use) of the language…
Missionary Masculinities, the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915
The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension a…
Australian Religion Review, 1980–2000, Part 2: Christian Denominations
Australian Religion Review, 1980–2000, Part 1: Surveys, Bibliographies and Religions Other Than Christianity
Children of the Backlanes. Destitute and Neglected Children in Colonial New South Wales
Australians to 1788
Poverty's Prison. The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918
A church full of men’: Masculinism and the church in Australian history∗
Arguing about the Welfare State: The Australian Experience
The case of the ‘cultivated man’: Class, gender and the church of the establishment in interwar Australia∗
This article argues that the cultural significance of the Anglican Church is greater than historians have acknowledged. The career of John Stoward Moyes, Bishop of Armidale 1929–64, shows that a prophetic churchman could wield considerable authority in his local community, particularly in the divisive interwar years. One of a group of ‘social gospellers’, Moyes saw himself acting as a force for unity and cohesion. Analysis of his relationships wi…
Sins of Omission? Women in the history of Australian religion and religion in the history of Australian women. A reply to Roger Thompson
A History of the Australian Churches
Australian Religion Review, 1980–2000, Part 1: Surveys, Bibliographies and Religions Other Than Christianity
Militant mothers: Faith, Power and Identity in the Mothers' Union in Sydney, 1896-1950
Women's religious organisations can provide insights into the experiences of women usually hidden from historical view within marriage and motherhood. The Mothers' Union, the centrally organised association of Anglican women, was an unusual women's organisation because its chief function was not fund-raising but the ‘spiritual elevation’ of mothers. Examination of its history in Sydney over the first half of the twentieth century reveals how ‘ord…
Australian Religion Review, 1980–2000, Part 2: Christian Denominations
Historical overview spirituality and work Sydney women, 1920–1960
This article examines some of the meanings of religious belief in the lives of Protestant evangelical women who worked as missionaries and deaconesses in the early to mid‐twentieth‐century. It suggests that faith could both impede and facilitate their search for personal autonomy, that it framed their relationships with those in authority and those to whom they ministered, and that as a source of women's agency it needs more investigation
Who is Worthy? The role of conscience in restoring hope to the church
Social identity, social influence and reactions to potentially stressful tasks: Support for the self‐categorization model of stress
An experiment was conducted to investigate the role that social influence plays in the appraisal of a potentially stressful situation. Participants (N = 40) preparing for a mental arithmetic task were exposed to a message in which the task was described as stressful or challenging. The message was delivered by the same person in each condition but this person was said to be either an ingroup member (a University student) or an outgroup member (a …
Books
A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields. By Philip Temple. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002. Pp. 584. NZ$69.95 cloth. The Irish in New Zealand: Historical Contexts and Perspectives. Edited by Brad Patterson. Wellington: Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, 2002. Pp. xiv + 212. NZ$34.95 paper. Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History. Edited by Lyndon Fraser and Katie Pickles. Dunedin: University of Otago Press,…
Taking the strain: Social identity, social support, and the experience of stress
The social identity/self-categorization model of stress suggests that social identity can play a role in protecting group members from adverse reactions to strain because it provides a basis for group members to receive and benefit from social support. To examine this model, two studies were conducted with groups exposed to extreme levels of strain: patients recovering from heart surgery (Study 1), bomb disposal officers and bar staff (Study 2). …
Why Do People Engage in Collective Action? Revisiting the Role of Perceived Effectiveness
Research has shown limited support for the notion that perceived effectiveness of collective action is a predictor of intentions to engage in collective action. One reason may be that effectiveness has been in terms of whether the action will influence key decision makers. We argue that the effectiveness of collective action might be judged by other criteria, such as whether it influences third parties, builds an oppositional movement, and expres…
Faith, Fetes and Domesticity in Australia
To feminists in the 1970s the fete symbolised women’s marginalisation in church and society but in the nineteenth century its respectability was far from assured. This article uses the shifting history of the fete and other forms of women’s fund‐raising over the years between the 1880s and the 1970s to examine changes in ‘ordinary’ women’s subjective and practical experiences of domesticity. It shows how women used the fete to carve out a place f…
God's Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia
This work examines the ways religious beliefs and institutions have shaped the lives of women in Australia over 200 years. It looks at Catholic nuns, protestant missionaries, deaconesses, and laywomen
Rethinking Blasphemy: Religious ideas in the writings of W. K. Hancock, Manning Clark and Russel Ward
Religious ideas have had a subtle but important influence on the writing of Australian history. This paper analyses the autobiographical writings of three of Australia's most influential historians to trace links between the variety of their childhood experiences of religion and their writing of history
Books
Taking Assimilation to Heart Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937. By Katherine Ellinghaus. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 276. $US49.95 cloth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. By Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 285. $41.95 paper. A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia. …
Saving the ‘Empty North’: Religion and Empire in Australia
The task of understanding the relationships between religion and empire in Australia is compounded by the fact that the historiography of each of these fields is not highly developed. While transnationally, histories of modernity have generally been conceived as representing ‘the triumph of secularism’, in Australia the marginalization of religious history is arguably more pronounced than elsewhere. 1 Anti-clericalism in its convict origins and i…
Creating the Aboriginal Pauper: Missionary Ideas in Early 19th Century Australia
This article examines the relationship between nineteenth century English poor law discourse and missionary work in colonial Australia. The text analyses key sites of Christian missionary philanthropy in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria in the period 1813-1849. It looks at changes in the ethos of one benevolent institution set up for poor whites, the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Activated by Christian paternalism at its foundation in …
All Creatures of the Living God’: Religion and Leprosy in Turn of the Century Queensland
The church played a role in the ‘retainting’ of leprosy in the nineteenth century, but religious ideas had multiple effects. A small group of ‘coloured lepers’ on Friday Island responded to Christian teaching in the early 1900s, supported by Gilbert White, Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria, a vocal opponent of their incarceration. They were led first by Islander teachers and later, an Indigenous man, Thomas Moreton, whose leadership flowed from the …
Kitchen Fragments and Garden Stuff’: Poor Law Discourse and Indigenous People in Early Colonial New South Wales1 My thanks to Patricia Curthoys for research assistance, to participants at the Australa…
This paper seeks to draw welfare and Indigenous history into the same analytic frame by analysing the religious impulses underpinning ideas about welfare for Indigenous people and poor whites in a period of acute transition for the poor law between 1815 and the 1830s. During these years the conceptual framework of the new poor law (less eligibility, pauperisation, indoor relief) came to dominate attitudes towards poor whites, particularly in the …
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (25 works) · History (24 works) · Australian History and Society (19 works) · History (18 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works)