This Must Be The Place Podcast

Live recording of Midland Highway Revisited: A Low-fi Investigative Musical from a Haunted House

Live recording of Midland Highway Revisited: A low-fi Investigative Musical from a Haunted House. The performance was at the Motley Bauhaus in Carlton, Friday October 24th 2025. Written and performed by Liz Taylor and Sarah Taylor, with guests Ian Marks and Andrew Bonnici. Recording by Lia Knight and Kate Taylor.

Here’s a rough intro to Midland Highway Revisited: An Investigative Musical from a Haunted House

This Must Be The Place on the Midland Highway? Liz from This Must Be The Place podcast talks through some of the research, true stories and songs that are going into a project called Midland Highway Revisited: An Investigative Musical from a Haunted House. It’s a rough rehearsal intro here - the ‘In Real Life’ Version will have twin hosts (Liz and Sarah), songs, musical instruments, guests. A stage! Where we’ll spend an hour telling you 12 stories about a possibly haunted house on the possibly haunted Midland Highway. In this podcast intro, it’s not all-singing or all-dancing but Liz doodles on the piano and talks (at night in the Elmore house) – it gives an idea of the research and material, some of which overlaps with This Must Be The Place themes. Included here are versions of 4 stories (the upside-down house and the RSL guys, the haunted guitar, the local ghost folk song, and the ghost town theory).

Edit: just the upside-down house and the RSL guys, the haunted guitar. We’ll do the others properly in instalments later…

Midland Highway Revisited is a low-fi investigative musical exploring true-life stories with a mix of spoken word, pathos, humour and research, all signposted by original songs, and by songs that have been signposts.

The show will be on October 21st-25th 2025 at the Motley Bauhaus in Carlton –

https://soundcloud.com/david-nichols-738987609/heres-a-rough-intro-to-midland-highway-revisited-an-investigative-musical-from-a-haunted-house

https://www.eventfinda.com.au/2025/midland-highway-revisited-an-investigative-musical-from-haunted-hou/melbourne/carlton

In Castlemaine in Central Victoria, Liz from This Must Be The Place interviews Anitra Nelson about a new book, Post-Carbon Inclusion: Transitions Built on Justice. Anitra is one of the co-editors of the volume and contributed chapters on degrowth in the context of transitions to decarbonisation. The discussion introduces the principles of degrowth, and covers international and local examples of what are termed pre-figurative hybrids: people doing things now in ways that both imagine and build possibilities for a future world. These are local (a key term is ‘open localisation’) networks doing things that try not to suck for people or for the environment: which can be as simple as places to get your toaster repaired, or as fundamental as a establishing a different model for secure housing. Is it possible to imagine – and make – a better future without relying on unfair economic and political systems? Anitra explains how degrowth focuses on meeting people’s basic and varied needs rather than on new luxury commodities. It is about scaling out rather than up, horizontal rather than top-down, and quality over quantity. In terms of technology, for example, the emphasis is on convivial tools– accessibility, understanding how things work, durability, choice – in contrast to scaled up, top-down, disposable gadgets. Topics include personal and shared space, fashion and textiles, technology, ‘buying back’ your time (working only enough to buy the time back to experiment with your life), state versus local governance, land, the spatial aspects of degrowth, debt, transport and food. Examples include Cargominaia in Budapest, the House of Change in East Berlin, the Castlemaine Free University, Repair café, and central Victorian cohousing and eco-collaborative housing. Around housing in particular, however, planning and related regulations tend to disable rather than enable change – even or especially of the positive kind needed for transitions. We get into (not literally) composting toilets, gray water, parking (of course), and tiny homes. The book and this introductory discussion of it is about breaking open the landscape for some kind of post-carbon inclusion – imagining the possibilities before they are foreclosed. Castlemaine, by the way, is apparently known locally as Castlemania.

work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This final, fourth one, is ‘Billboards with Haruna, Ryall, and John. Join them discussing the history, impact and ubiquity of billboards and advertising space in cities. Listen to some children try to make sense of an ad for Bumble. Small correction here – what the first semester students missed here was the specific planning regulations around advertising signage of different types, sizes, illumination and so on. For the pedants amongst you, these are set out in the Victoria Planning Provisions at 52.05 ‘signs’. For everyone else, enjoy the podcast.

Here’s a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This third one is ‘Playgrounds’ with Zara, Elicia, Julian and Nick. Join them in exploring the historical links between the arrival of cars and the emergence of the playground movement. Small proviso here – as a parent who takes a young child to playgrounds that are very well-used, I don’t share the students’ assessment as playgrounds as increasingly obsolete. I do agree children’s independent mobility has fundamentally changed over the century or so since playgrounds first appeared.

Here’s a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This second one is ‘Benches’ – or street furniture, with Eliza, Audrey and Daniel. Join them explaining the historical links between benches and public transport, and the recent emergence of ‘smart benches’.

Here’s a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This first one is ‘Dogs’ – or ‘Dogs in Cities’, with Benjamin, Bethany, Nick and Saeed. Join them in unpacking colonial dog nuisance laws; different cultural norms around relationships between humans and non-human animals; and visiting the soon to be lost ‘Lost Dogs Home’ in North Melbourne.

“Things fall apart- it’s scientific” is a line from the Talking Heads song “Wild Life”. Like most Talking Heads songs, including the one from which the This Must Be The Place podcast takes its name, the lyrics are a bit bookish.

“Wild Life” seems to be a reference – one I haven’t actually fact checked – to popular scientific accounts from the mid 20th century, theorising the trajectory of the universe and of life in it. Entropy, or the second rule of thermodynamics, refers to the “general trend of the universe toward death and disorder”. And in 1944’s “What is Life”, Schrodinger put forward the idea that life itself is a kind of negative entropy machine, defined by a temporary state of order-from-disorder. Aside from sometimes passing on copies of our DNA, however, the ends of our lives are as apparently inevitable as that of the universe.

Meanwhile and despite this cheerful thought, our lives are temporarily put together from bits and pieces, material and digital. People attempt at various times to curate, purge, hoard, systematise or selectively narrate piles of memories and things and files. Friends and relatives might do the same for us after we pass away. Music, and the changing technologies through which music is created and duplicated, forms one part of this. In “This is your Brain on Music”, Daniel Levitin writes about how music can connect people to times and places long after their more practical memories have faded. Side note – the music we remember the most vividly tends to be from when we are 14 years old.

I was not 14 years old, but I remember the first time I heard the Talking Heads song “This Must Be The Place” because it was on the soundtrack to the film “Wall Street”, which I watched on a rented VHS tape in 2001 before I first travelled to the US. David Byrne of Talking Heads later discussed the effects of a century of music technology in “How Music Works”. The study of technology and media as part of the social and historical record is not new – in coining the term “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan in 1964 proposed “communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be primary focus of study”. Radio and records are central to Ken Burns’ History of Country Music – previously, songs were reproduced and adapted through live performance. The Carter Family’s early recorded songs were said to have been “captured, rather than written”.

But what of the music so many people now record themselves, and which does not form part of the broader popular or cultural memory? How do people give order to their own songs and recorded music over the course of decades, during which mediums for recording and sharing music have come and gone, and changed fundamentally? The topic has been more in my mind and conversations of late in light of the recent death, from Motor Neurone Disease, of an old friend of my husband. Two decades ago, they and others spent years writing and recording music together in garages and warehouses. But you can’t always find, let alone access old recordings. Listening to a song is one way of putting yourself into a place and time. Music is geography and is also technology. In the shift to digital, each new technology promises less physical stuff, less clutter, perhaps even a kind of longevity. It’s an illusion – the archiving and curation of our own music is contingent on constantly changing technologies and media which are as fallible as the material world. There are extremes to navigate – you might have only one copy of a song, or you might have hundreds of copies of lurking old CDs. I’ve put together a rough chronology of different technologies for recording and sharing music that I’ve used, over the 1980s to 2020s. I’ve included example songs where I could find them – its own saga. Radio, cassette, VHS, studio and home recorded CDs, social media, digital releases, vinyl, the cloud, and back to a missing hard drive – and a song about the ephemeral artificial Lake Mokoan.

As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio, David Nichols of This Must Be The Place podcast interviews Sabina Andron - a cities scholar specializing in creative and transgressive public cultures, with a specific interest in the semiotics of urban walls and surfaces. Sabina is the author of “Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City”, to be published in 2024.

Although graffiti (or “stuff on walls”) is shorthand to describe Sabina’s research, it’s not really a fair description – Sabina’s interest is in documenting and understanding how urban culture articulates itself onto the visible surfaces of cities. In trying to understand cities by reading walls and surfaces, Sabina spends a lot of time walking around noticing the urban forms of relatively humble streets and walls, but more broadly studies both endorsed and illegal forms of markings as well as how surfaces are managed, regulated, maintained and cleaned. Sabina started in photographic documentary methods, but is also trying to pay attention in different ways of seeing urban surfaces, such as written note taking. She has recently filled a notebook with all the names mentioned in the Brunswick stretch of Sydney Road. Many of these are ubiquitous but unnoticed corporate and security signs – text that is permitted or sometimes required in urban space. People notice tags, but “there is so much of everything as well, we just don’t question them – we should challenge that because it is about who has a right to be visible”.

As well as international examples and context, Sabina offers observations on Melbourne – for example, its rich outdoor poster culture, it’s laneways both touristed and otherwise, its pride in certain forms of street art but also its policies focused on order – Melbourne’s Mayor, for example, holding a pressure cleaning to reassure people “how important it is to keep the city clean”.

The discussion covers graffiti as cultural and artistic discourse, the relatively recent criminalisation of graffiti, David’s short career in train vandalism at age 15,

the material ecologies of things like posters (side notes – small birds seem to eat the paste, right? Or is it just Liz that thinks that?), murals versus graffiti, City Square’s “graffiti wall” which was basically a whiteboard, photographic books of graffiti (including the popular 1970s Australian volumes of ‘witty’ examples), the visual and cultural language of graffiti and how train tags came to be seen as an unsettling signal of decay, graffiti removal companies, coatings, designs that actively prevent damage from spray paints, and how Melbourne discourse, as in many places, tends to hate graffiti but love street art.

Music venue The Tote in Collingwood has sound restrictions based on vibrations that might damage the paint on the Keith Haring mural next to it – a 1984 mural preserved at substantial cost, as a community symbol. Although Serena asks - why are some things symbols and for whom? “We should perhaps start valuing the collective meaning and force of our capacity to write on walls”.

Also discussed is a recent Fitzroy residents’ meeting about graffiti – how the vehement dislike of tagging uses the language of viral invasion, and of threat and disorder. David wonders whether Fitzroy residents still fear the sanctioned “white anting” of the Housing Commission and Freeway construction days of the mid 20th century. Sabina argues graffiti often is read as an invasive threat, as the sign of a disordered environment, but that there are other kinds of threats – to civic rights and access to space - from a clean and ordered environment. The discussion is about specific places and surfaces – but “I think we are a bit naïve if we think that the form is the most important aspect of this conversation. It’s more about our right to occupy space”.

As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio, Liz Taylor of This Must be the Place interviews Paul Long, Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and a recent arrival from one music city (Birmingham) to another (Melbourne). Birmingham in the UK is known for its connections to diverse genres of music - heavy metal, conscious reggae, grime, bhangra, dance. “Brum” is branded as the birthplace of Black Sabbath and heavy metal, as well as of such ubiquitous bands as UB40, Duran Duran and (previously unbeknownst to Liz) ELO. Birmingham has also been home to a widespread unlicensed radio scene. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, unlicensed or ‘pirate’ radio served as voices (albeit periodically raided by police) for geographically and culturally specific groups such as Caribbean migrants, and as entry points for micro-genres and local scenes – broadcasting, for example, mobile phone numbers for dance party tickets. Here Paul reflects on the challenges of documenting and curating music cultures which are largely ephemeral, in places home to diverse communities and narratives, and in contexts where government intervention can be a virtue or its opposite –how “a place can take on these challenging narratives”.

As both listener and historian Paul describes “going in search of radio”, “trying to find traces and put them back together”, and how different technologies and places interact over time. As well as contrasting the radio and audio landscapes of Birmingham and Melbourne, the discussion covers trade-offs between amateur and professional programming, national and local content, and between celebrating past hits and continuing in the present. As is often the case for musicians “the longer you go on, the more you’re burdened with your own standards, your own repertoire”, and “the same happens to places”. Documenting music heritage in a music city like Birmingham involves, on the one hand, exhibitions and mythologies around famous bands. On the other are the more fleeting places, moments, and sounds which are nonetheless important to memory and identity – the value of “recognising not just the big names, but the also-rans, the never-rans, the thank god they never succeeded types - and thinking about what this means to people”. In the age of streaming and digital radio, Paul argues for tracing the origins of relatively recent music genres still matters - “learning about where this stuff came from, and preserving stuff that might otherwise disappear”.

Links –

Amplify -

https://amplifies.blog/2023/09/27/pirate-radio-schedule/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/amplify-story-resistance-radio/id1704273057

Paul Long, Monash University – Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre - https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/paul-long

Birmingham Music Archive - https://www.birminghammusicarchive.com/

Paul Long’s RRR Brum-a gems playlist -

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6pnFpV208Ve3LKqV4K4zO0?si=cddd34c664be4f81&nd=1