Chris McConville

Making a place in Footscray: everyday multiculturalism, ethnic hubs and segmented geography

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore through analyses of interviews the meanings and experiences of everyday multiculturalism in a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The people we interviewed valued and experienced diversity in different, yet interrelated ways: as an experience of multiculturalism, as providing comfort in diversity and as embodied in ethnic hubs in a segmented geography. Everyday racism can make forging belonging and connections across diverse ethnic groups difficult. Yet, Footscray is constructed as a place in which diversity is regarded as normative and protective. Our focus on a local suburb has allowed us to develop insight into the diverse ways identities are constituted through multiple understandings and experiences of diversity.

Cultural landscape and goldfield heritage: towards a land management framework for the historic south-west Pacific gold mining landscapes

Abstract This article investigates how cultural landscapes (especially the potentially limiting organically evolved landscape) can be used as a research framework to evaluate historical mining heritage sites in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that when mining heritage sites are read as evolved organic landscapes and linked to the surrounding forested and hedged farmland, the disruptive aspects of mining are masked. Cultural landscape is now a separate listing for World Heritage sites and includes associative and designed landscape as well as those that have evolved organically. These usages have rarely been scrutinized with care. We analyse how mid-nineteenth century goldmining sites can be best thematically interpreted and understood for their heritage, indeed World Heritage, significance and, where appropriate, developed for their sustainable heritage tourism potential. Drawing on a number of research disciplines, a schematic framework is offered for interpreting and classifying these new world cultural landscapes based upon analysis of gold-rush heritage sites throughout the Trans-Tasman world. We evaluate and apply this framework to place-based case studies in Victoria, Australia and Otago, New Zealand.

Powering Perth: A History of the East Perth Power Station

world of institutional and personal rivalries where the mere fact that something was done in NSW meant that Victoria frowned on it. Godden analyses these forces clearly and dispassionately, showing how competing visions of nursing influenced Burbidge’s work. Burbidge was always busy. Memorably, she described herself in 1954 as just ‘an educational battle axe’ who sat ‘on far too many committees’ (131). In what time she had outside Fairfield, Burbidge sat on the Victorian Nurses Board, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the board of her own professional organisation, the Royal Victorian College of Nursing. As an early adherent of postgraduate education she fought for the establishment of the College of Nursing, Australia. Nursing shortages were partly overcome by Burbidge’s espousal of introducing nurses’ aides and overseas-trained staff. At Fairfield she worked hard to turn what had been a feared isolation hospital into a more open institution, one, for example, where families could visit their loved ones. Nurses’ educational, recreational and professional conditions at Fairfield were transformed. There was also the perennial power struggle with the administration, a struggle fought in many other Australian institutions. Victories could be short-lived. For instance, Burbidge won the right for the Fairfield Matron to attend Board meetings. As soon as she resigned this privilege was rescinded in what appears to be little more than a piece of petty spite. Hospital managers were good at that sort of thing. Godden has a deft hand in tracing these campaigns and manoeuvres. A reader new to the subject matter is guided through the different interlocking bodies and their changing nomenclature. She does not lose sight of the big picture, setting her account of Burbidge’s time at Fairfield against a background of postwar expansion of the health system and major changes within hospital practice. Burbidge helped break down public fear of infectious diseases just as those scourges were being overcome by the antibiotic revolution. To describe Burbidge as ‘Australia’s controversial matron’ is in some ways misleading. Other nursing leaders in the post-war world also fought against sluggish health systems and politicians wishing to do things on the cheap. However, it does indicate how Burbidge was willing to take on authority if she felt that change was necessary. Thoroughly researched and very well written, Australia’s Controversial Matron treats its subject with respect and affection without succumbing to hagiography. The high-quality photographs are also revealing, showing Burbidge as conservatively but impeccably presented, well aware of the impression she was making and looking very competent. It is pleasant to read that after a life devoted to her profession and its place in the world, Burbidge appeared to have few regrets about leaving it and enjoying a happy retirement. This is a significant addition to Australian nursing history.

Forging Imperial and Australasian Identities: Australian Rules Football in New Zealand During the Nineteenth Century

The localised successes but geographic boundedness of Australian Rules football raise interesting questions about the relationship of sports to the regional character of the South-West Pacific. Although it is called ‘Australian’, the game has historically been restricted to roughly half of the population of the colonies and states, failing to capitalise on its initial flowering in Queensland and New South Wales. In the nineteenth century, it was better known by its urban (Melbourne) and colonial (Victorian) origins. Although sport historians have occasionally sought to explain the games failure to win popular followings in northern Australia, the more intriguing question is why it failed to survive in New Zealand – the colony that had most in common with the games birthplace in Victoria. This paper explores the diffusion of the code to New Zealand during the colonial era, and discusses the wider ramifications for its eventual loss of purchase across the Tasman Sea.

‘Just Sugar’? Food and Landscape along Queensland’s Sunshine Coast

Of all the foods which have been the subject of scholarship, sugar has probably received the most attention. Yet there are dimensions to the history of sugar’s cultivation that have not yet been subjected to historical enquiry. In what sense has the growing, cutting and milling of Australian cane sugar created a distinctive cultural landscape, one that displays in its enduring patterns, a vernacular way of life? Novelist Jean Devanny’s classic account of the Weil’s disease strikes in Queensland’s canefields captures one phase in Australian sugar farming, conjuring up for us a working life now vanished.2 Her story of a young Sydney woman who marries a cane cutter at the end of the inter-war Depression and finds herself at the heart of an angry strike in the mills around Mourilyan and Innisfail in far north Queensland, opened readers’ minds to the beauty of the cane landscape, the solidarity of cane cutters and their families, the ethnic diversity of the cane towns and the fundamentally exhausting nature of cane cutting itself. The threat central to the strike, of illness, through Weil’s disease — spread from rats’ urine in canefields — eventually led to a signature image of the cane landscape: the firing of fields prior to cutting. Australia’s canelands still burn in the weeks before winter harvesting, even though cutting by hand has ended and farmers and mill workers look nervously, not to the threat posed by local rodents, but to a possible catastrophe brought on by new trade agreements with the United States and endemic corruption in world markets.3

Writing Australia's history: fact or fabrication? [Paper originally delivered at a part of the closing forum, AHA Conference (2003: Mildura).]

Whilst the current controversy over ‘History Wars’ and ‘Australian History Fact or Fabrication’ is overblown, at least it provides an opportunity to revisit some fundamental aspects of historical research and for the profession to rethink ways in which it might engage with the media in the future. Three issues are dealt with: the possibility of defending individual historians unfairly attacked in print and electronic media; the practicalities of developing professional protocols for archival research, and the impossibility of defending the scholarly detachment of historians who have willingly placed themselves at the centre of the current controversy.