Rei Yoshii, Siena Lentini, Claire Hawdon, & Peiran Liu With nuclear power being promoted once again as an energy solution for Australia, considering past debates is ..read more

Chitrangi Kakoti Photographs of protests against the establishment of a U.S. military base in Gippsland, as part of their global Omega navigation system, feature prominently in ..read more

Carl J. Sciglitano The records of the Melbourne Social Survey contained in the Wilfred Prest collection in the University Archives are an important resource for researchers ..read more

Aseera Shamin For nearly three decades, Albert Park has hosted the annual Formula 1 Grand Prix, transforming the streets of Melbourne into a vibrant motorsport spectacle ..read more

Gwynneth Thomas On an autumn evening in the city, Tom looked sideways at other people’s lives –The Lost Dog, p. 8 During this first year of ..read more

Patrick Gigacz ‘Paid £120 extra for H.W.S. [hot water service], electric stove and extras … W.C. [water closet – toilet] will be inside when sewerage put in.’ These comments to an interviewer for the University of Melbourne Social Survey in 1941 provide a glimpse of the decisions, frustrations and complexities that accompanied the expansion of modern infrastructure in the city in the mid-twentieth century. Using a sample of the digitised Social Survey forms from houses in Sunshine, Braybrook and Maribyrnong, this blog post explores how enhancing the rudimentary geographical metadata of this ar ..read more

When picturing working on the audiovisual (AV) component of the George Paton Gallery Collection, I imagined watching and listening to buried gems from the Melbourne 1970s and 1980s contemporary art scene. The reality of the project has offered me a glimpse into the significant and rewarding task which comes prior to watching and listening – the preparation of AV items for digitisation.    University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) AV collection spans over 11,000 items, meaning AV makes up a portion of most major collections at UMA. UMA’s AV holdings captures a diverse range of conte ..read more

Shouyue Zhang Today’s Box Hill in Greater Melbourne is widely recognised as a vibrant Asian community and the most populous Chinese-Australian enclave in Victoria. In 2021, around 30 percent of Box Hill residents were born in China (Whitehorse City Council, 2021). But it wasn’t always that way. In this article I explore how Box Hill transformed from a train town into a suburban Chinatown. Why did Chinese Australians move from the Chinatown on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne’s CBD to Box Hill? What was the demographic landscape of Box Hill in the 1940s? And how did Chinese immigrants reshape ..read more

Jacobin Bosman Picture Footscray. What comes to mind? The answer, at least for Melbournians, is probably some variation on the setting for 1992’s Romper Stomper with gentrification threatening from all sides. In the 1940s, however, Footscray was the eighth largest municipality in Greater Melbourne, a significant industrial hub and a centre for munitions manufacturing. In 1943, the economist Wilfred Prest chose Footscray as the site of a supplementary inquiry to the University of Melbourne Social Survey, concentrating on the ‘extent and magnitude’ of wartime social and economic change. By mappi ..read more

Yichen Wang, Elizabeth Sim, Chante Mullins, & Megan Grove The archives relating to the Henderson Poverty Report provide not only an insight into early theorisations of poverty, but also a frozen-in-time snapshot of the style of media coverage, research methods, and socio-political discourse in 1970s Australia. These archives also invite reflection on the rigorous organisation and coordination needed for data collection before the advent of modern technology. The first of its kind in Australia, the Henderson Poverty Report emerged from the premise that to address poverty one needed first to ..read more