Seamus O'Hanlon

Becoming Post-industrial: Victoria Street, Fitzroy, c.1970 to Now1

This article provides a historical approach to the study of deindustrialisation and re-use of former industrial spaces in Melbournes inner city Fitzroy. Essentially a biography of the formerly industrial, now residential, educational and ‘creative’ northern side of Victoria Street, it is argued that chronology must be included alongside the spatial in analyses of urban change. It is asserted that there is a need for more historically informed studies of the local impacts of recent economic, social and cultural change in inner cities worldwide

Community: Building Modern Australia

and reasonable’’ wage. However, this line from him, mixing biblical imagery with class analysis, also ranks as a kind of poetry: ‘‘The war between the profit-maker and the wage earner is always with us’’ (137). Higgins’ son died fighting in World War I. Higgins’ niece, writer Nettie Palmer, writes after receiving the news that ‘‘it was five hours ago that I heard the news and ever since then I have been almost howling. To think of those bonzer people Uncle H and Auntie M is just ghastly’’ (165). Here the authors both chart and utilise the inner space of Australian experience, allowing it to comment on the forces that are shaping and shifting it, and which, in turn, it will try and alter. Two clear errors: Curtin’s turn to America was a printed article in the Melbourne Herald, not ‘‘the most famous speech’’ of his political career (203), and the Melbourne property boom didn’t collapse in 1888. It peaked then. The collapse began in the second half of 1891 (122). These serve to emphasise the difficulties implicit in a project that tries to cover so much ground. However, the overall effect is illuminating. It is to be commended. The material is skilfully selected and tightly woven, serving to bring the reader closer to a sense of the lived experiences of the nation’s history, even the experiences that weren’t ‘‘actual’’ but simply imagined, fantasised, or feared. New ground is broken for a history of a nation, which should prove useful and stimulating for interested students, researchers, scholars, readers, and imaginers alike.

‘“All found” they used to call it’: genteel boarding houses in early twentieth-century Melbourne

This paper investigates genteel, or middle- and upper-class boarding houses in Melbourne in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that urban historians have neglected boarding as a facet of Australian city life, preferring instead to use a limited range of statistical sources to focus on the importance of nuclear families, suburbia and home ownership as defining features of the Australian city. Utilizing archival, literary and oral sources, this paper re-creates daily life in a variety of these genteel boarding houses and calls for a more ethnological approach to uncovering the urban past.

Modernism and prefabrication in postwar Melbourne

(1998). Modernism and prefabrication in postwar Melbourne. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 22, Urban cannibal: Romancing the Australian city, pp. 108-118.

From Water Engineers to Financial Engineering: Water Provision in Australia’s East Coast Capital Cities, 1945-2015

This article analyzes the provision of urban water in Australia’s three east coast capital cities—Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne—from the big dams of the post–World War II years to recently completed desalination plants. We trace how major statutory authorities and their engineers built up both their organizations and their water storage and distribution assets in the Fordist 1950s and 1960s, before these bodies were restructured under the guise of neoliberal notions of accountability and profitability. In their quest to break apart the key institutional pillars of the mid-twentieth-century city, some Leftist critics of the Fordist state may have inadvertently sown the seeds of the neoliberal city of the early twenty-first century. We conclude that the new market-driven organizations are just as interested in their own survival as were their predecessors, and demonstrate even less trust in the general public’s knowledge and practice around water use and conservation.

Leisure space: The transformation of Sydney 1945–1970

Contributors Introduction 1 Leisure in Sydney during ‘the long boom’ 2 The changing face of travel: The modern tourist office 3 Double modernity: The first international hotels 4 Motels: The ‘ultra modern’ experience 5 Sky-high ambitions: Sydney’s restaurants 6 Architecture, coffee and cocktails 7 ‘Big, bright, beautiful’: The new shopping centres 8 The rise and fall of the Sydney drive-in 9 Golf: A changing landscape 10 The leagues club: A workingclass palace 11 Ethnic clubs: ‘The dream of tomorrow’ 12 Informal modern: Holiday houses Notes Acknowledgements Index Special 20% discount offer when ordering from www.newsouthbooks.com.au

A little bit of Europe in Australia: Jews, immigrants, flats and urban and cultural change in Melbourne, c.1935-1975

In common with most Australian cities, Melbourne experienced a rapid build-up in flat and apartment numbers in the second third of the Twentieth Century. This article traces the involvement of immigrant communities, especially the Jewish community, in this process as architects, developers and residents of these new flats. It goes on to argue that along with other immigrant communities in this period, the Jewish community was part of a broader economic, social and cultural change that saw parts of the city move away from its British-derived suburban dwelling and cultural traditions towards a more high-density European-inspired sensibility. The article argues that like the cafes, restaurants and other sites that are increasingly recognised as symbols of the emergent multicultural city, these flats and apartments should be recognised as an important part of this process of economic, social and cultural change. This article has been peer-reviewed.