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, which pre-dates the 1970s popular heritage movement.

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 years old, the song celebrates a cheap, recycled, ad hoc...

This paper uses contemporary documentation, interviews and maps to highlight the different types of music careers, and modes of “making it”, seen in the 1986 feature film Dogs in Space. The film concerns a fictional band of the same name, based on The Ears, a minor group active in the Melbourne band scene between 1979-1981...

The Anglo-Jewish community of Melbourne underwent radical change and massive growth from the 1930s with the immigration of those fleeing Hitler’s Europe. This paper will explore the making of modern Jewish Melbourne through an architectural and social history of the many institutional buildings constructed in the 1950s, 60s and 70s that gave form to this...

Djillong, the place where modern day Geelong stands, has been an urban centre for millennia. At the time of European colonisation, the traditional owners, the Wadawurrung, lived in low-density houses and gardens in settlements as large as most other sedentary communities across the world. Most of their basic needs (food, water, fibre, medicine, etc.) were...