a blog on urban history and heritage conservation.
FEDERATION Square CEO Jonathan Tribe told us in these pages that the square faces significant challenges. Apparently, its buildings are deteriorating, its visitor numbers are in free fall and its visitor experience is old-fashioned.
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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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My 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).
Read moreBruce 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 moreAn article on how ‘trendies’ in the 1960s-70s changed how we think about the inner suburbs of Australia’s cities.
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 moreA couple of weeks ago I was in Helsinki for the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) 13th international conference on the theme ‘Reinterpreting Cities’.
Read moreIn July, a few hundred historians working in and on Australia assembled in Ballarat for the annual Australian Historical Association conference on the theme ‘From Boom to Bust’. This blog reflects on this conference from an urban perspective; the first in a series of posts on conferences that I have attended in mid-2016.
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