“Our Corner of the World”

Vernacular and idiomatic expression (surviving today in material forms, memory, and text) are powerful elements of place making and identity from the urban past, but historians have been slow to study these expressions comprehensively, and to develop appropriate conceptual approaches and research methods. This essay explores these propositions in the context of Australian urban history, and with an eye to their possible broader relevance. It also introduces the three essays that follow, each of which addresses the same broad themes but from very different perspectives.

The contributors to this Special Section of the Journal of Urban History have four key things in common. First, they are based in Australia. Second, and more importantly, they have a shared interest in exploring the shaping of what Gaston Bachelard called “our corner of the world.” ¹ I use the phrase not to justify this section’s “Down Under” character but to suggest that this perspective does usefully color broader historical consideration of Bachelard’s main interest: those interwoven material, social, and imaginary constructions of urban space that are most intimately connected to the experiences of people in the modern world. The explorations in this issue draw on examples not only from Australia but from North America and Britain. Thus, the Special Section highlights urban history from, rather than in, Australia. Third, the contributors emphasize “flow”: the movements and intersections of people, things, and ideas, and their effects on the making, unmaking, and remaking of urban habitats. A better understanding of these dynamics carries with it a fuller appreciation of whatever corners of the world we engage with as scholars or inhabitants. Fourth, and as a consequence of engaging with these two last themes, the contributors all probe the poetics of urban forms, that is, the study of form and structure, and the mediating influences that shape them. To study the poetics of urban space is to consider social space not simply as an envelope within which human action takes place, but as the medium for, and a key expression of, social identity and interaction. This approach alerts us to the multiple processes, and resulting frictions, by which social space is perceived and experienced, shaped and partitioned, contested, reconfigured, preserved, or forgotten. It also alerts us to the multiple scales of spatial arrangement and cultural referencing (e.g., a room, a neighborhood, or a network of towns and cities) through which such processes unfold.

The articles that follow encapsulate some of the most innovative elements in contemporary Australasian (a term encompassing Australia and New Zealand) urban history, and this Special Section therefore forms a companion piece to the Journal of Urban History’s “Cities Down Under” special issue that Graeme Davison edited in 1995. ² Davison drew attention to points of comparison between North American and Australasian urban history, and to the influence of American urban historians on historical practice on the Pacific Ocean’s other side. He expressed hope that scholarship from that other side might also resonate in North America and contribute to a broader “spirit of . . . cooperative, comparative urban history.” ³ That hope has been amply realized, as is evident in the trans-Pacific editorial collaborations that sustained the international scholarly forum H-URBAN during the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century. It is demonstrated here both in comparative analysis (see the articles by Graeme Davison and Tim Murray), and groundbreaking American research by Australasian scholars (see “Harlem in Black and White”).

However, Australasian urban history, in terms both of urbanization and its analysis, is also closely associated with Britain and with other British colonized territories such as India and South Africa. Davison and Murray refer to some of these associations here. The formal beginnings of British urban history as an academic discipline during the 1960s and 1970s established research agendas and frameworks of influence that shaped Australasian scholarship into the 1980s (which, as Davison demonstrated in 1995, had matured into broader collaborations and investigations), as well as lines of useful scholarly engagement that persist to this day. Especially influential in that formative period was the two-volume The Victorian City: Images and Realities and, among its multiple themes, that of “Shapes on the Ground.” ⁴ This influence can be seen in three long-running and successful traditions in Australian urban history: first, a critical engagement with urban architecture and material forms (evident, e.g., in the online resources maintained by pioneering Melbourne architectural historian Miles Lewis, and the Architecture Museum at the University of South Australia), ⁵ and with urban planning history (expressed in a series of conferences on both sides of the Tasman Sea since 1993, and a succession of influential publications); ⁶ second, economic history analysis of the processes of urban change (pioneered by Boris Schedvin and John McCarty during the 1970s, and showcased recently in a special issue of the Australian Economic History Review); ⁷ and third, a “history from below” style of interlocking social and cultural history that explores the kaleidoscopic qualities of urban society and especially its overlooked, quirky, and marginalized elements, an approach most recently expressed in dictionaries of Australia’s two largest cities. ⁸ All three strands of investigation are informed by the legacy of H. J. Dyos, the lead editor of The Victorian City, who as David Cannadine aptly remarked sought always to tease out the “feel” of urban life. ⁹

Unfortunately, interest in Dyos’s approach appears to have diminished among academic historians in Australia since the early 1990s, although it has been taken up with greater vigor and effectiveness by other academic disciplines and beyond the academy. Academic historians have paid insufficient attention to community history activities, and they have stalled in terms of conceptual development and methodological enhancement. These elements are essential if we seek, like Dyos, to identify the immediate things and associations that had importance in people’s lives, and link them to the activities by which people anchored themselves to the places they claimed as their own. Without them we are ill equipped to explain the evolving vernacular forms and idiomatic cultural overlays that expressed “our corner of the world” in the urban habitats of people in the past.

This retreat from urban history is not uniquely Australian. Across the field internationally, similar questions are being asked: What are the core activities of urban historians, and with what skill sets do they excel? Is the identifier “urban historian” still useful? Has the impetus in scholarly innovation shifted elsewhere? Are the specialist journals and discussion groups still needed? Within the academy, urban historians talk defensively, or worse, complacently among themselves. They engage only intermittently with allied academic fields such as anthropology, historical archaeology, cultural geography, architecture, and urban planning, and have even less to say outside the academy. Australia’s largest community history event, “History Month” in South Australia, comprised more than five hundred activities in 2011, most of them city- and town-based, which were presented by more than three hundred organizing groups. None of these groups identified themselves explicitly as urban historians, and none of the events were undertaken by university-based historians.

The discussions that follow, on suburban imagination, urban archaeology, and neighborhood place-making, suggest key points of common interest and shared engagement across the diverse fields of practice in urban history, and they reinvite investigators to seek out the “feel” of past urban life. In introducing these essays, it will be useful to elaborate on the concepts of intimate space, flow, and poetics.

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The phrase “our corner of the world” is a useful starting point from which to draw attention to the sensual immediacy for human occupants of what Bachelard called space that “has been lived in.” ¹⁰ The power of these associations is easily recognizable in our own lives, where they surround and condition our every move and thought. We shape and describe our surroundings (our “intimate spaces” as Bachelard described them ¹¹ ) in vernacular and idiomatic forms. Their textures are at our fingertips; they are between our toes; their dust and smells are in our hair; we trace them in our mind’s eye. The challenge for historians is to build such familiar associations into historical understanding, while remaining aware of the likely discrepancy between the present-day contexts that inform historical analysis and the past contexts that such analysis seeks to comprehend. The solution to this apparent impasse is to refrain from imposing present-day viewpoints on the past (empathy may result from historical analysis but is not an instrument of that analysis). Rather, interpretation of past human habitats must attempt to situate itself better in relation to those other forms and expressions, if it is to resonate with them and connect them to present-day understanding. ¹²

An excellent example of what I mean is Our Home in Australia, which reproduces a remarkable 14,000-word letter, composed in 1860, by which Joseph Elliott described his home and young family in Adelaide (founded in 1836 as the capital of the colony of South Australia) for his mother in England. ¹³ A lively first-person narrative, interspersed with evocative sketches and plans, affectionately describes in the minutest detail an imaginary guided tour through the cottage and garden: rooms, garden beds, furniture, carpets, ornaments and knick-knacks, books, utensils, and tools. These are the building blocks, material and emotional, of Joseph’s identity. Their immediacy for him is palpable, and the historians’ task is to recognize such intimate associations. The opportunities for doing so are explicit in Joseph’s case: his account has continuity because the manuscript was kept by the Elliott family, donated to the State Library of South Australia, and subsequently published with the proud endorsement of Joseph’s grandson. However, most evidence of place-making in the past is disconnected from the people who claimed such places as their own, and even in the case of the Elliott family the home that Joseph described no longer stands. Analysis of past urban habitats must strive for the immediacy of Joseph’s description in situations where no such explicit connections survive between people and places past and present.

Clifford Geertz suggested that the way to work through this relativist headache is to build interpretation from the tangible things that survive from the people we study, striving to contextualize them in order to puzzle through to our subjects’ own idiomatic points of view:

We cannot live other people’s lives … [;] it is with expressions, representations, objectifications, discourses, performances … that we traffic. … Whatever sense we have of how things stand with someone else’s inner life, we gain it through their expressions, not through some magical intrusion into their consciousness. ¹⁴

There is a long tradition in Australian urban history of attention to the localized vernacular forms of human habitats, and thus to the varied lifestyles that shaped them, from the prefabricated or rough-built structures of the early colonial period to the intricately varied styles of the contemporary suburban house (with its auxiliary elements of car parking, shedding, and gardens). Although much of this research has focused on the more accessible elements of bourgeois and elite lives, ¹⁵ sustained attention has also been paid to marginalized people and places destroyed. ¹⁶ Researchers have sought to unravel the palimpsest of colonizer place-making on well-established Aboriginal territories, ¹⁷ and have explored the social landscapes of convict society, ¹⁸ frontier-zone goldfield towns, ¹⁹ and non-English-speaking immigrant settlements and neighborhoods. ²⁰ Interest has extended to reinterpreting socially disadvantaged city districts that were demonized by outsiders as slums, ²¹ and such research (some of which is reported in this issue by Murray) has resulted in useful collaborations with North American, British, and South African scholars. ²²

This attention to buildings, neighborhoods, and towns highlights the methodological strength of what is loosely called microhistory, and also links with historical interests in the general community. Davison considered the complex relationships between such strands of academic and public history in The Use and Abuse of Australian History. ²³ Microhistory carries the risk of conceptual and methodological insularity, and may result in narrow urban biographies of place whose rich local detail is presented with little regard for its wider significance. This parochialism can be transcended by slotting analysis of small events and places into the broader flow of human activities, as Davison shows in the following paper. Davison, whose earlier article “Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” is among the most read contributions to the Journal of Urban History, ²⁴ expands on that theme here in “Suburbanites: The Suburban Idea and Its Enemies,” where he explores the “cultural logic” of the intertwined ideological strands that sustained suburbanization, and the gradual unraveling of those strands during the second half of the twentieth century. His analysis ranges from England, where the modern suburb originated early in the nineteenth century, to North America and Australia, where suburbia was adapted and amplified as a result of the British diaspora. Davison uses this three-way comparison to argue that as the physical expressions of suburbanization came to dominate urban society, the original ideological core of the suburban idea gradually ossified.

Davison’s article provides a convenient lever by which to switch my discussion from “our corner of the world” to broader considerations of “flow.” When bubonic plague was detected in Sydney in 1900, the U.S. Consul reported that Sydney’s harbor “is lined with wharves, and is one of the most crowded shipping ports on the globe,” and he drew attention to the subsequent risk plague posed “to our people of San Francisco, who have steamer communication direct.” ²⁵ Australasian urban history has always been sensitive to human movement and to the enveloping contexts within which city- and nation-building took place. This preoccupation is evident in the attention paid to the global systems, and relationships of cores to peripheries, which shaped the course of Australian urbanization. Thus, a key theme in Australian history has been the colonizers’ efforts to overcome the “tyranny of distance” between Australia and their homelands, and within the continent as a far-flung urban network took shape. ²⁶ Historians have emphasized the gate-keeping role of coastal cities in channeling people to new regions of settlement, and funneling back the rural products of “staple industries” such as mining, pastoralism, and agriculture to world markets. ²⁷ They have also drawn attention to the growing interdependence between inland towns and the capital cities, and to the internal dynamics of city-building, social life, and collective behavior. ²⁸

These interests in movement and interaction have encouraged sensitivity to broader contexts and comparison, in relation not only to the subjects of inquiry but also to the modes of analysis, as is demonstrated in this issue by Tim Murray in “Expanding Horizons in the Archaeology of the Modern City: A Tale in Six Projects.” Murray describes the achievements of more than 20 years’ cross-disciplinary collaboration between archaeologists and historians in Australian urban studies, and proposes future directions for this collaboration. In doing so, he engages with the interplay between different scales of analysis: for example, between analysis of particular artifacts from specific sites in one city, and the broader knowledge bank of artifact types from other cities in regional, national, and international settings. Such work contributes to a longstanding thread of ethnographic history in Australia, which—in terms of place and belonging—was most famously applied to the United States by Murray’s colleague, the late Rhys Isaac. ²⁹

As historians like Isaac have demonstrated, the flows of human movement and achievement that conventional historians equate with progress and modernization, and that are inseparable from urbanization, industrialization, and colonization, also generated huge frictions. In Australia, Geoffrey Blainey’s Tyranny of Distance (1966) fostered historical interest in the technological, economic, and demographic challenges of sustaining the flow of European settlement in a distant continent. That interest broadened during the 1970s and 1980s to include the social inequalities and class frictions generated by urban change. ³⁰ It has subsequently widened further to embrace (especially through the prism of gender, race, and ethnicity) the study of cultural transmission, exchange, and adaptation. ³¹ In recent years, concerns about environmental degradation and climate change have stirred historical interest in the human footprint of urbanization and in sustainable urban systems. Cross-disciplinary work has been produced, for example, on the ecological history of Adelaide, which is often described as “the driest city in the driest state in the driest continent of Planet Earth.” ³²

The frictions that were generated as diverse people fashioned habitats for themselves across overlapping urban spaces are explored in this issue by Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White in “Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s.” There are indirect echoes here of Ashis Nandy’s studies in South Asia of prickly multicultural coexistence that could at any time burst into communal violence. The authors probe everyday cross-racial interaction in Harlem, revealing a pervasive white presence that in some of its expressions existed in relative harmony with the community’s black majority, but in others (notably policing) provoked friction and conflict.

The authors of “Harlem in Black and White” use digital mapping (and encourage readers to do likewise, using their Digital Harlem website to test and extend their analysis) in order to link together diverse, fragmentary, and underutilized data so as to search for hidden and often small-scale coherences and dynamic relationships. Murray likewise discusses e-research innovations in historical archaeology with similar aims. Their approaches complement my final theme of the poetics of urban form, the study of which is necessarily linked to the locales with which people identify and with the flows and frictions of human interaction.

In studying the poetics of past city habitats, one engages explicitly in the relativist task of gleaning human immediacy and “feel” from strangers’ places, and places that have been reconfigured, eroded, or erased. The dynamic qualities of place-making in the past, and the multiplicity of human interactions and outcomes, cloak human habitats in complexity and ambiguity. Whose past do we prioritize in our interpretations, at whose expense, and by disregarding what other transformative processes of change? As British anthropologist Christopher Tilley puts it, “What space is depends on who is experiencing it and how.” ³³ Ambiguity, strangeness, contradiction, discontinuity, the apparently unfathomable, the seemingly irrelevant: these are crucial (though often discounted) elements in historical analysis as it attempts to situate the meaning of past human artifacts and activities within the particular temporal and spatial contexts of their production, rather than appropriating them heavy-handedly into our own present-day frameworks of comprehensibility and normalcy. Acknowledging ambiguity is not an impediment to analysis of the past but is its key, because it complicates historical understanding. By identifying disjunctions in our knowledge base, recognition of ambiguity gives us the opportunity to reformulate and extend our understanding of the past. Ambiguity thus becomes the starting point for setting aside our own assumptions and attempting to make sense of things, as Geertz was fond of saying, “from the native’s point of view.” ³⁴

This approach requires us to be fully sensitive to the “situatedness” of ourselves in relation to the things we study: our position as interpreters on the sliding scale of familiarity and unfamiliarity with the relics from the past that we seek to understand, coming as they do from the contexts of other times and habitats. As Robert Darnton said, “the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling.” ³⁵ It is precisely when we cannot understand, that we are onto something. Chipping away at ambiguity—whether in an expression, a document, an object, or a landscape—provides openings for interpreting cultural worlds that are distant and probably different from our own. The key to such understanding is, as Geertz says, “found in translation.” ³⁶ Translation reconfigures our understanding of habitats that later thinking may have dismissed as inconsequential (vernacular architecture, for example), or that hegemonic constructs in the past have presented as dysfunctional or marginal places.

Melbourne’s “Little Lon” district, discussed by Murray in this issue, was regarded as Australia’s most notorious “slum.” Police Commissioner John Sadleir commented in 1874 that it “always has been a low neighbourhood,” and in 1882 Senior Constable Patrick Drum called its inhabitants “a low rough lot of people.” ³⁷ It was a rowdy and rule-breaking community, and after decades of calls for it to be resumed and demolished, it was compulsorily acquired by the federal government in 1948. However, archaeological and historical research has pinpointed the sites of homes and neighborhoods where, notwithstanding outside stereotypes of crushing poverty and behavioral abnormality (and unambiguous corroborating evidence of cramped houses surrounded by noxious industries, and of heavy drinking, prostitution, and hardship), residents worked, saved, acquired possessions and decorated homes, and bequeathed these assets to their next of kin. ³⁸

The Moloney household (immigrant Irish laborers), for example, which was reconstructed from probate records, registers of births, deaths and marriages, municipal ratebooks, and some 2,500 domestic artifacts excavated from a former cesspit on their home site, attests to subaltern adaptability and continuity within a supposed slum. Here was a family with minimal formal education and trade skills, and low wages, who nonetheless bought a small weatherboard house, rebuilt it in brick when it was condemned as “unfit for human habitation” by municipal officials, accumulated household ornaments and chinaware, and maintained their homeplace for more than fifty years, from the 1850s until early in the twentieth century. Their children secured careers in the skilled trades and the professions, and bought homes in the suburbs. ³⁹

In 1880 Thomas and John Moloney, though barely literate, added their names to a petition by local residents complaining about brothels in their neighborhood:

These houses are inhabited by the lowest class of abandoned women who congregate on the footpaths using the most disgusting language openly and boldly soliciting prostitution from passers-by and rendering it unsafe and annoying for any of us to leave our residences during the evening.

We would earnestly beg that … some strict measures be adopted with these abandoned creatures. ⁴⁰

John and Thomas’s sister, Margaret, on her death in 1901 left £10 in her will “to the Dean [of] … St Patrick’s Cathedral Melbourne for masses for the repose of my soul.” ⁴¹ Importantly, though, it was not only the quasi-respectable and modestly successful Moloneys who upheld ethical standards and pursued commonsense strategies for living in Little Lon. So did the “deviant” rule breakers who outraged respectable opinion within and beyond the neighborhood. In 1905, for example, another local resident explained—in response to objections by neighbors like the Moloneys—that she operated a brothel because of “having a large family to support and my Husband lying in a dying state in the Hospital.” ⁴² This line of investigation merits further sustained attention by historians, whether applied to contentious city districts such as Little Lon and their modern-day equivalents, or more generally to urban youth culture, for example, or racial minorities, or illegal immigrants and refugees, or the informal settlements of the urban poor in the “developing world.”

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The poetics of poor city neighborhoods such as Little Lon, or for that matter Harlem, or indeed the middle-class suburban landscapes discussed by Davison and Murray, which are considered here in terms of the transmission of ideas, archaeological analysis, and digital mapping, are all grounded in the varied local horizons of their residents, animated by local differences of experience and action, and knowable today through comparisons across time and place. There are many other “corners of the world” that a “Down Under” Special Section might usefully discuss with an eye to their resonances with the wider field of urban history practice in the early twenty-first century: immigrant neighborhoods in the big cities, for example; country towns in New South Wales and Queensland that have been affected by climate change and fluctuations in global commodity and money markets; the mining towns that service the massive resources boom in Western Australia, or the Aboriginal settlements that ring Outback towns in the Northern Territory such as Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, and Borroloola; the Aboriginal homelands townships such as Ernabella in South Australia. For historians, the poetics of all these places provide opportunities for analysis that are compellingly complex and open ended.

The shapes left on the ground by human place-making, and their shadows in our minds, comprise the core interests of urban historians in Australasia today. These interests have evolved and matured considerably since they were sparked during the 1970s by the “Images and Realities” theme that underpinned Dyos and Wolff’s The Victorian City. Their continuing vitality, expressed in interpretations of the urban past that challenge conventional wisdom and reposition the fundamental terms of analysis, encourage innovative collaborations across academic disciplines and with community history groups and activities.

Especially important is attention to the vernacular forms of, and idiomatic associations with, things and places that had immediacy in daily social interactions in the past. ⁴³ There are continuities here with long-established and widely practiced applications of what is often called “history from below.” However, equally important are two more recent developments (evident in, but by no means peculiar to, urban history analysis in Australasia). First, recognizing that in striving to understand the intimate associations that others felt for their surroundings, we must work our way into the past rather than assume that we can build analysis from “the bottom up” or “from the inside out.” We cannot rely on intuition to assign significance to the subjects we study, and to attribute meaning to past contexts and associations that are necessarily unfamiliar to us in the present day. We need to remind ourselves that places and behaviors that might seem alien, insignificant, or quaint were familiar and valued by some of the people we study. Second, recognizing that in translating for the present the intricacies of other people’s complicity with their surroundings, we address multiple, and often disconnected or contested, pasts. The local knowledge of one group may have been shaped and expressed differently by others at the same time, and by others still over time. These acknowledgements assist nuanced historical interpretation rather than limit it. They alert us to the complicated poetics of urban habitats and to the “feel” of past places as others experienced them, not we ourselves.