a blog on urban history and heritage conservation.
This article was originally published in The Age on 20 December 2017. Five days before Christmas, news has dropped that a section of Federation Square has been given to Apple for its flagship Melbourne store. The Yarra Building will be demolished, and its tenants, including the Koorie Heritage Trust, relocated to make way for a globally familiar glass cube design.
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Last year I wrote a review of the exhibition A History of the Future: Imagining Melbourne, presented at the City of Melbourne Gallery. It originally appeared in the Melbourne Historical Journal (vol. 44). Reviews also appeared on the ABC, in the Age and elsewhere. Apologies for the slightly blurry images! Exhibition Review: A History of the Future: Imagining Melbourne 12 May to 12 August 2016, City of Melbourne, curated by Clare Williamson. Free Admission. Two thousand and sixteen marks the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Englishman Thomas More’s Utopia. More inspired the idea that humankind might imagine and create a better world. This anniversary was
Read moreOutstanding Contribution to Journalism winner: Bruce Petty #Walkleys — Walkley Foundation (@walkleys) December 2, 2016 Bruce Petty was awarded the gong for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Journalism’ at the annual Australian Walkley journalism awards this evening. I first came across Petty as part of my research into Australian urban history. From the 1960s onwards, his political satire appeared across various periodicals including the Bulletin magazine, the Australian and the Age newspapers.
Read moreThis article was originally published in The Conversation on 3 November 2016. Read the original article. The Australian Ugliness, architect and critic Robin Boyd wrote in 1960, incorporated the “background ugliness” of Australia’s cities: a suburbia of: … unloved veneer villas and wanton little shops, and big worried factories. These are the kinds of suburban places that in 2016 sell at weekend real estate auctions for six or seven figures. Despite the frequent outcries of today’s residents of “Trendyville”, these buildings are readily converted to fashionable heritage homes, or demolished to make way for new apartment blocks. Heritage has a history. The kinds of
Read moreTwo thousand and sixteen marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the National Trust of Victoria. Drawing from my research into heritage in Victoria, I wrote the following article for the National Trust of Victoria’s special anniversary magazine.
Read moreIn late January, a hundred or so urbanists descended on the Gold Coast for the 13th Australian Urban History Planning History (UHPH) Conference. Attendees included academics, historians, planners and practitioners, who delivered a range of papers on the Australian city, from pre-colonial times to the present-day. Hosted every two years—the next in 2018 is in Melbourne—this is the largest Australasian conference of its kind.
Read moreLast year I published a book review of What is Urban History? by Shane Ewen in the Melbourne Historical Journal (vol. 43). Since then, reviews have appeared on the LSE blog and in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, amongst other places. Ewen was also recently interviewed on the excellent German based Global Urban History blog . Written for an Australian audience, my review is republished below.
Read moreThis article was originally published on The Conversation on 7 June 2016. Read the original article. By Andrew J. May, University of Melbourne and James Lesh, University of Melbourne Sydney’s lockout laws, as well as current and proposed restrictions in other Australian cities including Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Newcastle, are perhaps more about regulating people’s behaviours in cities than about liquor licensing. Such knee-jerk responses to tidy up the mess of complex issues belie society’s need for diversity. They also neglect culture’s debt to the manifold possibilities of social behaviour in urban space. Viewed as part of a broader historical pattern, such episodes of
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