Associate Professor John Murphy

Biography

Associate Professor John Murphy was Director of the Australian Centre in 2006, and has now taken on the position of Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts.

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Research

After an honours degree in history at the University of Melbourne, John completed an MA in politics at Monash, and then a PhD in history at the University of Melbourne. From 2000 to early 2005, he was Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research at RMIT University, where he also taught history and politics for many years. He is the author of Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia (UNSW Press & Pluto Press, 2000) and Harvest of Fear: a History of Australia's Vietnam War (Allen and Unwin, Sydney and Westview Press, USA,, 1993), both of which were short-listed for the NSW Premier's Award.

In addition, he has co-edited The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s (with Judith Smart, Melbourne University Press and special issue of Australian Historical Studies, 1997) and the papers from an Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia workshop, Working Mothers and Social Change (with Pat Grimshaw and Belinda Probert, Melbourne Publishing Group, 2005.)

John's research focuses on Australian social and political history since the second world war, on the historical development of Australian social policy, on public narratives about welfare, masculinity and nation, and on the interplay of memory, history and biography. He is completing an ARC Discovery project about the non-government welfare sector in the mixed economy of welfare in Australia, which focused on the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Wesley Central Mission and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, examining their shifting place in welfare provision, and the influence of their different faiths on how they imagine the poor.

Current ARC-funded research projects:

• ARC Linkage grant (2005-8): "Life after care: the life-histories of those who left institutional care, 1945-1989". With Suellen Murray of RMIT University, this project is conducting interviews with care leavers to investigate how memories of childhood in an institution contribute to their contemporary sense of identity. The Industry Partner is MacKillop Family Services.
• ARC Discovery project (2006-8): “Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds: Designing Everyday Modernism for Australian Communities 1920-1970.” With Kate Darian-Smith and Philip Goad, Hannah Lewi and Julie Willis (Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning). This project is studying the relationship from 1920 to 1970 between experiences of community and the municipal-level buildings such as maternal and child health centres and public libraries that were intended to be part of those communities.
• ARC Linkage grant (2006-9): “The face of the poor: a history of poverty through the eyes of the St Vincent de Paul Society.” This PhD project is conducting research in a unique collection of minute books of parish level groups of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Victoria over the 20th century. It is intended to write a social history of poverty, to include comparison between urban and rural experiences, and contribute to understanding how one Christian denomination imagined poverty and social exclusion.
• ARC Linkage grant (2006-9): “150 low-income Australians: a group biography over time”. With Belinda Probert at University of Melbourne, Mark Peel at Monash, Greg Marston at University of Queensland, and Jenny Chalmers at UNSW and Suellen Murray at RMIT. This project consists of life-history interviews with 150 low-income Australians, combined with a longitudinal panel design. The project aims to illuminate how incentives and obstacles are perceived, to describe patterns of interdependency, and to understand people’s discourses and values about justice, obligation and welfare reform. The Industry Partner is Jobs Australia.

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Recent Publications

2007

• Murphy, John, “Suffering, Vice and Justice: religious imaginaries and welfare agencies in postwar Melbourne”, in The Journal of Religious History, (forthcoming, 2007)
• Murphy, John, “The Voice of Memory: History, Autobiography and Oral Memory”, a re-publication of a 1986 article in Trev Lynn Broughton (ed), Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies: Vol III, Routledge, London, pp. 116-136

2006

• Murphy, John, “The other welfare state: non-government agencies and the mixed economy of welfare in Australia”, in History Australia, vol. 3, no. 2, December, pp. 44.1–44.15
• Murphy, John, “The fifties”, in Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan (eds), Sociology: Place, Time and Division, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp 186-191
• Murphy, John and Gabrielle Berman and Robert Brooks, "Funding the Non-profit Welfare Sector: Explaining Changing Funding Sources 1960-1999", in Economic Papers (Sydney), vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 83-9

2005

• Murphy, John and Belinda Probert, “Never Done: The Working Mothers of the 1950s”, in Pat Grimshaw, John Murphy and Belinda Probert (eds), Double Shift: Working Mothers and Social Change in Australia, Circa, Melbourne Publishing Group, Melbourne
• Murphy, John, "Work in a time of plenty: narratives of men's work in post-war Australia", in Labour History, no.88, May, 215-231

2004

• Murphy, John and Belinda Probert, "'Anything for the house': recollections of post-war suburban dreaming", in Australian Historical Studies, no.124, October, 275-293

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Teaching

102-497A Century of Australian Social Policy

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Supervision

Primary:

• Penny Duckworth, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, [ARC APA] PhD
• Bill Garner, Under canvas: a social history of camping, PhD
• Karolina Kurzak, The face of the poor, [ARC APA(I)] PhD
• Terry McDonnell, The 1922 election, MA
• Sybil Nolan, Robert Menzies and the Age: A relationship in liberalism
• Peter Stell, The Sydney Dance Company and Graeme Murphy

Co-supervisor:

• Bob Marmion, Colonial defence in Victoria
• Anne McCarthy, Women in literature in Australia and NZ
• Kristy Yeats, The New Left Movement in Australia, 1956-1972

Associate:

• Carla Pascoe, The Spaces of Childhood in 1950s Australia
• Karen Pickering, Wars of Words
• Gareth Sobey, The Christian Right

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