This Must Be The Place Podcast

This episode of “This Must be the Place” is the first of our ‘walking tours’ – we are revisiting the walks of the 1980 book “Melbourne on Foot: 15 Walks Through Historic Melbourne”. This episode starts with David speaking with one of the authors of that book, Professor Graeme Davison of Monash University, about the genesis of the book in general. They are then joined by Elizabeth to discuss the Richmond tour specifically. (Confusingly this all takes place in St Kilda, ahead of a walking tour included in a later episode). Back in time, but later in the episode, Elizabeth and David retrace the 1980 tour of the inner suburb of Richmond.

While some things have changed since then (beginning with tram routes, and also a cable tram station that has since been swallowed up by Punt Road), many of the houses and landmarks of Richmond’s layers of history remain. The tour takes in Richmond’s genteel hill area (now home to many urologists and cosmetic surgeons), down to the flat and the mix of 19th century housing and factory buildings (many of them now disguising, ‘iceberg house’ style, James Bond style apartments behind), and the civic buildings and shops of Bridge Road. It also takes in what is now known as the Dogs in Space house (reference to the 1987 film), but in 1980 was noted as an unusually large house for such a small street.

Graeme had written ‘The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne’ while living in Canberra. On his return to Melbourne, some of the walks in the book originated as urban history material both for his students and for himself. They were also partly inspired by the book ‘Chicago on Foot’ and the Chicago school tradition of urban walking. Plus, they were also pitched at a wider readership. The authors – who comprised a mix of academics and of community activists - consciously did not pick (then) fashionable suburbs such as East Melbourne or Parkville, but instead encouraged readers to visit parts of the city that they perhaps overlooked or were reluctant to see historic merit in. Graeme’s 4th year dissertation was on Richmond and he was once picked up by the police there, for looking shifty with a bag. It was that kind of place then. Nowadays many of us probably couldn’t afford to live in places like Richmond, but you can still take a walk there. Or visit a urologist, as you see fit.

This installment of “This Must Be the Place” is a show and tell style assortment of reviews of some books and movies we’ve been reading, writing, and watching. Elizabeth presents two op-shop book finds – “Dinkum Dunnies” (a photo book of decaying Australian toilets, first printed 1972); and “The Road to Canberra” (by Warren Denning, a travel story meets colonial nostalgia story of a man riding his bicycle from Sydney to Canberra during the last throes of the second world war, published 1947). Also, a much more recent and less musty-smelling book – “Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation”. David discusses his new edited book, “Cultural Sustainability in Rural Communities: Rethinking Australian Country Towns”; Nick Dalton’s unpublished memoirs “50 bands” (life of a musical teenager in Canberra in the early 1980s); and some films from the current film festival including “Starstruck”. There’s no intentional unifying theme to the show but some themes that seem to thread throughout include: small towns, Canberra, Sydney, the past as a foreign country, progress associations, immigration and fear thereof, nostalgia, changing norms about children’s lives. Oh and toilets. Apologies for that incessant high pitched constant tweeting noise – it’s not your phone, it’s a light fitting or something in David’s office. I don’t know how he lives with it.

This fortnight's This Must Be the Place is a chat with Lachlan Denton, who's a key figure in the Ocean Party, a notable independent Melbourne group who - and this is why TMBTP is interested - tour​ places most of their cohort either have never heard, of or wouldn't set foot in in their wildest dreams. David and Lachlan went for a wild mexican feast in Werribee and afterwards they chatted over a herbal beverage. Nancy was on the table and her bell may be subtly audible around the 13 minute mark.

The Ocean Party's new album - their seventh - is called Beauty Point, and they kick off their tour on August 18 in Yass, NSW. And by the way Mackay to Alice Springs is about 2500 km.

In this installment of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David give a post-film review, along with Rebecca Clements (and also a bit of help from Trent and Casper), of the Jane Jacobs documentary “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”. As is discussed, the film features a fantastic variety of archival footage and also has very high production values. It tells the iconic mid-20th century story of battles over freeways, slum clearances, high rise housing towers, the ‘cancer’ analogy that propelled urban renewal projects, and the frontlines between grassroots activism and top-down planning orthodoxy more broadly.

Perhaps for planners there isn’t so much to learn from the film – Elizabeth and David to this end use the word “undergraduate” in the same sniffy way that chilled Elizabeth long ago (hearing Virigina Woolf describing James Joyce’s Ulysses, and wondering how hard someone would have to work to be so far up themselves). But there are several interesting insights into Jacobs’ background as a journalist, and it’s also worth revisiting her ideas afresh rather than tending to rely on what these ideas have been distilled into over the ensuing decades. The film celebrates – sometimes with a heavy, sappy hand – the inherent value of people and community, and makes a strong case for political engagement. To quote Jacobs, “I think it’s wicked, in a way, to be a victim”

Also discussed in the review: pre-war Robert Moses as ‘bully for the people’; issues with looking at public and high-rise houses only from the outside; OTT choices of music; the Pruitt Igoe myth; gentrification (not, notably, discussed in the film); differences between preservation and life; Jacob’s glasses (I think – well we should have); and the challenge of accommodating nuance in a film while still making it compelling. Also some other stuff – part of which is set to the slightly distracting “ears on the street” soundtrack of Federation Square of a Friday evening.

“Citizen Jane” is currently showing at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. It’s great to watch and also an excellent curiosity builder for a general audience. And if you’re a planner, you’ll no doubt see several people you know in the audience.

In this episode, Elizabeth talks with RMIT PhD student Luisiana Paganelli Silva. Luisiana previously worked for the planning authority in Curitiba, Brazil- a city that enjoys a semi-legendary status in transport literature on account of its rapid bus infrastructure and the visionary land use planning of the 1960s that facilitated it. Luisiana outlines the key people and plans that went into creating the city’s structure and transport systems. She also discusses some new challenges that Curitiba faces - shifts in local and broader politics, increases in population, escalating car use and congestion, violence, and competition between public transport planning and policies subsidizing car use. Also discussed are the research questions that bought Luisiana to Melbourne to study transport (incentives and disincentives and their effects on different transport modes); institutional differences between Melbourne and Curitiba; minimum parking policies (of course); and the relative safety of cycling in Curitiba, Sydney and Melbourne.

In this episode of TMBTP, David takes a Sunday morning trip to Mentone to see the site the famed entrepreneur, land subdivider, novelist and aviator C J De Garis visited on 4 January 1925 to commit suicide by drowning. Once there, he contrasts his expectations of the site with the real place - as it presently exists. He entertains you with a draft first chapter of his biography of De Garis and if you listen carefully you can hear a dog barking on cue towards the end. Edited out: various ruminations/rants on mosquitoes, reflections on the genesis of the biography, etc etc etc all for the best.

Our review of the film “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer”. Due to crossed wires, David watched it at a cinema in Elsternwick and Elizabeth watched it at Cinema Nova in Carlton. The film is resolutely set in New York City. Norman, the title character (played by Richard Gere), spends almost the entire film walking the streets and occupying the semi-public ‘third spaces’ of Manhattan – department stores, train stations, coffee shops. Many of the scenes of his seemingly endless, blustering mobile phone conversations contrast his presence in the wintery streets with the calm power of the homes and offices of the powerful people who he (much to the discomfort of these characters, and of the audience) seeks connections with. The film highlights the importance of urban space - but also the differences between physical proximity and the channels through which business connections really work. Norman works at connecting from the busy streets and into the networks of financial, cultural, and political power of Jewish New York businessmen and Israeli politicians. Briefly, he does, and then (as the name suggests) this unravels.

A couple of things on the location aspect of the film – why didn’t they go to Israel? – in an interview about “Norman” Richard Gere said “my thing now is I'm not going to work outside of New York. That's why all these movies are set in NY. My son is 17 years old, I don't want to miss the next few years of his life”. Another observation in that interview, which we don’t pick up on in the review, is that part of what makes Norman both uncomfortable and compelling is that most people identify with part of his awkward, outsider status - “at the same time, he is a completely universal character. We all know what it's like to be on the outside wanting to get in."

Also in this episode, we hear about how David has moved house (to Albion – a suburb “near Sunshine” but whose naming remains to be explained). And how David is not so keen on the upcoming Jane Jacobs movie, although it sounds like we are going to watch it anyway.

This episode of “This Must Be The Place” features discussions about two upcoming urban-themed events to be held in Melbourne: first, Elizabeth speaks with Dr Ian McShane about the Australasian Urban History Planning History (UHPH) conference. The theme for the January 2018 instalment of this conference series, to be hosted by RMIT, is “Remaking Cities”. One aspect of “Remaking” is the process of settler colonialism on Indigenous lands: the shadow cast by which challenges us to imagine how cities can be re-made in a just future, and the role of planning within this. Which leads (we hope) into the second interview, where Elizabeth interviews Associate Professor Libby Porter about the “Whose Land is it Anyway” symposium. To be held in November 2017, the symposium is focused on rethinking the role of property and belonging in contemporary cities. Topics include indigenous socio-cultural practices in cities; informal property practices; and housing and squatting movements. Speakers will include Professor Raquel Rolnik of the University of São Paulo. In the process of discussing each event you can hear a bit about Ian and Libby’s own research – although there’s a lot more where that came from. To find out more about the two events (and it’s not too late to submit an abstract to either) have a listen, and/or visit:

http://www.remakingcities-uhph2018.com/ and

http://www.whoseland2017.com/

In this episode of “This Must Be The Place” David and Elizabeth visit the small Goldfields town of Clunes for the annual Clunes Booktown Festival. As you may pick up from the introduction, Elizabeth was slightly confused about the distinction between “Booktown” and “Booktown Festival”. Whereas (she realised later) “Clunes is a Booktown all year round”, the weekend Festival in May is in addition to this appellation and sees the town taken over by book stalls, author talks, and book-related seminars. The festival attracts around 18,000 visitors to Clunes – a town of largely intact Goldfields-era heritage you may recognise from such films as Mad Max and Ned Kelly – as in “Mad Max”, and “Ned Kelly”, although “Mad Max and Ned Kelly” might have a certain appeal in the style of “Alien vs Predator”. The Booktown/Festival can be characterized as a revival effort for the town. Other big changes in Clunes over the past decade or so have been the return of the passenger train service, and the arrival of the Wesley College Clunes campus. Amongst the features at this year’s festival, David was invited to speak on his book “Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music, 1960-85”. The episode features David’s author interview, undertaken on a chilly outdoor stage with Professor Keir Reeves of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History at Federation University.

In this episode of This Must Be the Place we have a double whammy re: screen representation. David talks to Nigel Giles, author of the new book on the groundbreaking 70s TV show Number 96, set in a mixed use block of flats in bohemian Paddington, Sydney. (“Number 96, Australian TV's Most Notorious Address” by Nigel Giles‎, Melbourne Books). Then, in what promises to be a compelling regular feature looking at cities in film (specifically films found on DVD in op shops), Elizabeth and David review the Olsen twins’ New York Minute (2004), a film which – although your mature and responsible reviewers refrain from hanging shit on a dog – really goes a lot longer than anyone’s idea of a minute. Perhaps more of a Milwaukee Minute (reference explained if you hang in to the end). Footnote – the part where Elizabeth is wondering about whether New York has more films because of some policy supporting films being made there, she was thinking of “movie production incentives” or “tax credits” which were, as David correctly guesses, introduced to stem the tide of US film productions going to Canada.