This book review is published in the Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine, Fall/automne 2023. Australia is the driest continent on Earth. Its regions fluctuate between punishing drought and intense rainfall. With their knowledge of Country, and their conservation cultures, First Peoples have had continual access to water for millennia. Water and weather shaped their everyday activities and cultural traditions. The British colonisation of Australia from 1788 onwards, and the development of its cities since the nineteenth century, has transformed how water is both understood and managed across the continent. The relationships between people, cities, and water, particularly the expanding provision
Read moreCategory: Reviews
Book Review: Giving Value to Architecture and Heritage
Review of Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture, by Ashley Paine, Susan Holden and John Macarthur, eds., Amsterdam, Valiz, 2020, 288 pp. ISBN: 978-94-92095-93-0.
Read moreJaynie Anderson, Max Vodola and Shane Carmody lead two volumes on a Baroque Archbishop who shaped Melbourne’s colonial life
This book review of ‘The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect’ and ‘The Architecture of Devotion: James Goold and His Legacies in Colonial Melbourne’ is published in History Australia, 2022.
Read moreBOOK REVIEW: City Life: The New Urban Australia By Seamus O’Hanlon. (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018.)
Book Review of City Life: The New Urban Australia by Seamus O’Hanlon. It investigates the restructuring of Australian urban economy, society and culture since the 1970s amid the intensification of globalisation and neoliberalism.
Read moreBOOK REVIEW: City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (NewSouth, 2016).
Here is my book review of City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia by Graeme Davison. This review was published in Urban History journal in 2017, and reflects both on Davison’s important book and his broader contribution to the practice of urban history.
Read moreExhibition Review: A History of the Future: Imagining Melbourne
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 moreFrom Ballarat to Helsinki: further urban history conference reflections
A 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 moreAustralian urban history in 2016: reflections from the AHA Ballarat conference
In 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.
Read moreAustralian urban history at AHA 2015
Urban history is one of the oldest forms of history practiced in Australia. Early local historians like A.W. Greig were interested in cities and its spaces. Similarly, since World War II, the Australian city has been subject to much local and academic historical analysis, and remains a perennially popular topic.
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