Graeme Davison

Car wars : how the car won our hearts and conquered our cities

In Art and Suburbia Chris McAuliffe describes Graeme Davison as “the foremost historian of the Australian suburb” (1996, p. 44). This claim, although necessarily inviting debate, is no mere hyperbole. Since gaining a wide audience with The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne (1978), a revision of his 1969 doctoral study of Australia’s first suburban boom of the 1880s, Davison has deftly narrated the events, motivations and contradictions that have shaped the suburban forms in which the majority of Australians now live. While Australian urban history was a neglected subject in the 1970s, it now boasts many excellent works. Yet few have the interdisciplinary appeal typical of Davison’s contributions and few can be claimed to have added as much impetus to the emergent field of Australian suburban studies. With his latest book, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, a study of Australia’s second suburban boom of the 1950s and 1960s, Davison is likely to extend this appeal further and reach a general audience. In easy-going prose, and once again taking Melbourne as his subject, Davison describes Australia’s troubled love affair with the car from 1945 to the Kennett Government’s manic ‘automobilism’ of the 1990s. The narrative moves fluidly. Internal academic debates are avoided and the record of detailed research is submerged in endnotes. The book’s exclusive focus on Melbourne (a fact that ought be acknowledged in the title) enables a richness of detail, but also inevitably raises questions about Australian urban experience that lies beyond its range. While a case can be made for the national, and international, significance of Melbourne’s encounter with the car, Davison seems simply to assume this. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, he broadly succeeds in his aim of telling nothing less than a story of Australia’s “encounter with the project we sometimes call ‘modernity’” (p. xii). It is a story saturated in irony and ambivalence. In keeping with his previous efforts to counter patronising and deterministic representations of suburbs as ‘half-worlds’ for the vacuous, Davison challenges “terrace-dwelling intellectuals” who might “sneer at the delight of suburban Australians in their cars” (p. xi). He calls upon his readers to “make an honest and open-minded appraisal of how cars have both enriched and impoverished our lives” (p. xii). In so doing, Car Wars adds another layer to our understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of Australian suburbs with their mix of noble intentions and avarice, passivity and passion, democratic achievement and reckless wastefulness. A Melbournian whose life spans the period under study, Davison is

Carlton and the Campus: The University and the Gentrification of Inner Melbourne 1958–75

Gentrification exhibits some common traits across Western societies but takes the colour of the societies in which it appears. In Australia, one of its most striking characteristics was its close association, chronological and geographical, with the post-war expansion of the universities. This study examines the relationship between the growth of the University of Melbourne and the citys premier gentrified neighbourhood, Carlton. It argues that gentrification was preceded and shaped by a process of ‘studentification’ and that the revaluation of the inner city landscape was inseparable from new understandings of urbanity generated by academics and students drawing upon university-based systems of knowledge and cultural production.

Urban studies in Australia: A road map and ways ahead

Charting the dominant approaches in Australian urban studies over the past 30 years by way of a narrative history of research practice and publication, the paper emphasises the significance of environmentalism, feminism and postmodernism for urban research since the 1980s. Current preoccupations include globalisation and social polarisation, expressions of social difference in cities, and the effects of privatisation and new information technologies on urban infrastructure and planning.

The Social Survey and the Puzzle of Australian Sociology

Sociology was a late arrival on the Australian academic scene. But it had been preceded, and its appearance was possibly delayed, by an earlier tradition of social investigation—Christian, amateur, empirical, often paternalistic: the social survey. This paper examines the intellectual origins of the survey tradition and its influence on Australian social research especially in the middle decades of the twentieth century, before its relative decline in the 1970s. Social surveys were an important phase in the political education of successive generations of idealistic middle‐class youth, a powerful instrument of social reform and publicity, a vehicle for academic empire‐building, and a significant conduit for the exchange of expertise between the universities and the wider community.

The Suburban Idea and Its Enemies

Late in the twentieth century public opinion began to turn against the Australian suburb, as its enemies began to outnumber its friends. For more than 150 years, Australia was itself a mental suburb of England, taking many of its ideas ready-made from the world’s metropolis, London. This article identifies the main ideological strands of the suburban idea as it first appeared in England—Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Sanitarianism, and Class Prejudice—and examines how they were reproduced, with occasional variations, in the colonial city. Critics of the suburban idea, it is argued, shared many of the tacit assumptions of its friends, differing only in the value they assigned to each component. Anti-suburbanism, even in its contemporary forms, continues to reproduce many features of its nineteenth-century antecedents.

The European city in Australia.

Visitors to colonial Australia were unanimous in recognizing the AngloSaxon character of its seaboard cities. “The first impression of Sydney was favourable,” wrote Nat Gould in 1896. “It reminded me of an English city transported to the other side of the world. There is an Old World look about Sydney that English visitors are, as a rule, surprised to see in Australia.” Richard Twopeny, author of perhaps the most perceptive account of Town Life in Australia (1883), made a similar but subtler point: “The first prevailing impression,” he wrote of Melbourne, “is that a slice of Liverpool has been bodily transported to the Antipodes, that you have landed in England again by mistake, and it is only by degrees that you begin to see that the resemblance is more superficial than real.” The Australian city, he went on to suggest, was a provincial adaptation of predominantly English styles and ways of life. Climate, local building materials, and the distinctive character of Australian social relations played a part in this process of adaptation, but the parent stock remained undeniably English. There is, however, a significant counterpoint to this theme in Australian urban development, muted for much of the nineteenth century but more insistent in the twentieth. This is the influence, both positive and negative, of the urban styles and traditions of continental Europe, especially of the cities of France and Italy, whose Mediterranean character was seen as offering a more appropriate model for Australia than the fog-bound and puritanical cities of northern Europe. Why, some observers asked, had London and Liverpool become the style setters for cities whose sunny climate and freer social relations made them potentially more Italian than British? As Australians had thrown off some of the archaic political traditions of England, could they also throw off some of the stuffiness of its social life in favor of a greater cosmopolitanism? In the eyes of other commentators, however, the continental city, with its squares, boulevards, arcades, cafés, and festive Sundays, was a negative model: a threat to Anglo-Saxon standards of cleanliness, spaciousness, and decency, a style of urban life to be avoided rather than emulated. The antithesis between Anglo-Saxon and continental models of urban development had been there almost from the beginning. In the 1970s, when

Rethinking the Australian Legend

Abstract Fifty years after its publication Russel Wards The Australian Legend remains the classic account of our national culture. It was shaped by a long debate, in Europe and Australia, about the cultural basis of national selfhood, as well as by the events of Wards own time: the 1930s depression, the popular front against Nazism and the early years of the Cold War. Russel Ward was a true believer in the bush legend as well as a critical interpreter of its origins, an ambiguity of purpose that reflected his shift from radical activist to academic, and from folklorist to cultural historian. In its preoccupation with ideas of national belonging it stands in a tradition that begins with the German Romantics and continues in contemporary interests in the Dreamtime.

Planning the New Social Order: The Melbourne University Social Survey, 1941-3

Between September 1941 and March 1943, while Australia’s young men were fighting their way along the shores of Tripoli and the Kokoda trail, platoons of young university women were tramping Melbourne’s back streets, knocking on strange doors and quizzing the bemused inmates about their household amenities, families, jobs and domestic finances. They were employed as part-time interviewers by the University’s Economics Department and were engaged on possibly the most ambitious social survey ever conducted by a non-government agency in an Australian city.

Ken Inglis: threads of influence

Abstract Ken Inglis is one of Australia’s most creative, versatile and influential historians. This article assesses his influence, relying on memory, reading and reflection. It traces the origins and impact of his most enduring historical interest, the study of Anzac as a ‘civil religion’. Like Charles Bean, the first historian of Anzac, Inglis has been keenly interested in how national history is made and communicated to a popular audience. As general editor of the Australian Bicentennial History Project, he led one of the largest and most ambitious ventures in collaborative national history-writing anywhere.

From Urban Jail to Bourgeois Suburb The Transformation of Neighborhood in Early Colonial Sydney

Early colonial Sydney was founded on convict transportation but by the 1820s was being transformed by free settlement in a developing market economy. Neighborhood relations in the town were shaped by these intersecting influences, the first dividing convict from free settler, the second dividing rich from poor. Descriptions of the town portray it as divided between a plebeian west and a respectable east, but analysis of the 1828 census reveals a more complex social geography where convicts, exconvicts, and free settlers met in individual households and neighborhoods. Court records reveal the tensions this created. The solution, for many of the urban elite, was urban planning that would create a uniform, clean, segregated, and disciplined community.