Organisation
Australasian Urban History Planning History Group
Conference paper
Making something of a hole in the ground
Quarrying is a noxious industrial activity necessary for the provision of stone and clay, utilised predominately in building activities as the city grows. In post-industrial Melbourne, the extraction of these materials has left a pock-marked landscape, reflecting the fact that the city was settled upon an opportune juncture of sand-and-clay, basalt, and mudstone fields.
Conference paper
Home economics: semi-legal catalysts for regional city regeneration
The Post War expansion of onshore manufacturing created nationally significant industrial precincts in regional Australia, each surrounded by large swathes of suburban housing to accommodate their blue-collar workforces. However, a shift towards offshore manufacturing over the past decade led to the closure of many Australian manufacturing precincts and the substantial economic decline of many regional...
Conference paper
Urban Aboriginal identity: “I can’t see the durt (stars) in the city”
The contemporary Melbourne landscape is usually defined in a physical sense. The complex cultural landscape, however incorporates not only the physical, but also what’s beneath, on and above the surface, including the sky and the cosmos. These cultural landscapes form essential components of a Wurundjeri person’s identity and connection to ‘Country’, the Traditional Custodians of...
Conference paper
Labs and slabs
The nearly two-decade long creation of the medical/health research precinct at the University of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s transformed a previously unused part of the Parkville campus into a showpiece of modernist planning and architecture. This paper outlines the strategic colocation of a series of high-rise slabs containing laboratories and teaching spaces that...
Conference paper
What the stones tell us?
This paper considers the interconnection of Aboriginal stone sites in the Wadawurrung Country, as to their landscape relationships and land use planning contexts. With colonial pastoralism and land exploitation by European, and more recently suburbanisation encroachment, a large portion of the pre-colonial tangible landscape has been erased, disfigured and or transformed.