The ‘zombie subdivision’ is a phenomenon identified by the Lincoln Institute as ‘once- promising projects’ now ‘distressed’, with the fulfilment of plans or visions for the site effectively stalled. Services such as water, electricity, and roads are often absent in these areas, leaving them partially-...

2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Richard Lowenstein’s acclaimed Dogs in Space, a fictionalized cinematic memoir of nominal bohemians in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. Set 6-8 years before the film’s release, Lowenstein utilised genuine participants in the events/milieu depicted, as well as key locations...

The origins of a conservation ethos in the urban Australia of the late 1960s and early 1970s is commonly assumed to stem from international influences. Yet there is also a local cultural element to this urban conservationism, the recognition, celebration and preservation of historic environments...

Melbourne group Boom Crash Opera’s 1987 single ‘City Flat’ is a musically exuberant (though according to at least one critic, lyrically ‘fairly bleak’) single celebrating a sparse inner-Melbourne lifestyle in which limited means enhance and highlight minor pleasures: coffee, kitchens, hanging out. Now just thirty...

In 2016, Melbourne tea and coffee merchant McIvers began selling Ruth Crow tea, a product with a ‘gentle smoked flavour infused with vanilla’. The tea commemorated Ruth Crow as a North Melbournian, as a campaigner with a legacy in ‘just urban planning’ and as a...