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

David Trevorrow, Jessica Cunnington, & Clare Thorpe The Records of the Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament offer a fascinating insight into the history of the anti-nuclear movement in Australia. Though the hand printed leaflets and cartoons are largely of a bygone era, the messages contained within them remain salient to the recently reignited debate about nuclear energy. There also exist interesting historical parallels. Just as the Cold War shaped the 20th century debate around nuclear energy, so too does the AUKUS pact and Australia’s plan for nuclear-powered submarin ..read more

Olivia Cobbledick, Imogen Brown, Youngeun K, & Marina Gabra A deep dive through the dense archival material predating and informing the Henderson Poverty Report provides an insightful glance into the context, aims, and biases in which the study is grounded. Beginning in 1966, the Institute of Applied Economics embarked on the first systematic evaluation of the extent of poverty in Australia. This task grew further under the newly elected Whitlam government. Thereafter, it aimed to identify the social groups falling victim to poverty, their income needs, and related welfare and housing issu ..read more

Anthony Jenkins From his home in Fitzroy, Melbourne, the archaeologist John Lockyer O’Brien captured evidence of the inner-city’s evolving urban and social landscape, documenting a transitional stage between the overcrowded “slums” which attracted condemnation, and the construction of the Housing Commission Towers which sprung up from the razed grounds of urban renewal.1 Hidden within the collection of his photographs are vestiges of entire neighbourhoods condemned as “slums” by the Slum Abolition Board (precursor to the Victorian Housing Commission) that were consequently razed. The picture b ..read more

Alexia Rutkowski Figure 1: The Three Cooks, undated, University of Melbourne Archives, Records of Stadiums Pty Ltd, 1987.0094.00132. In the digitised images of the Stadiums Pty Ltd archive collection, Australian boxer, George Cook caught my attention as several photographs included portraits with his wife and daughter, Julie, therefore, relating to his personal life as well as his boxing career. Intrigued to learn more about George, I questioned how a man from Cobbora, Dubbo, New South Wales could have a successful international boxing career during the 1920s and 1930s. Matthew Taylor explores ..read more