This Must Be The Place Podcast

In this episode of ‘This Must be the Place’, Elizabeth speaks to Meg Doller, President of the Elmore Progress Association and active in other volunteer organisations in the small town of Elmore, in northern regional Victoria. Elmore recently attained a ‘bricks and mortar’ library service. This outcome was not without its troubles and tensions and the library is, like most things in town, largely volunteer run. The progress association, the newsletter, the swimming pool, the museums including Campaspe Run, the famous ‘Elmore Field Days’, the schools and kindergarten and some of the town’s open spaces are run entirely or partly by community volunteers. There’s a recurring policy idea that population growth and pressures on infrastructure in big cities like Melbourne can be offset by enticing people to regional areas, either by improving the infrastructure, or by promoting the lifestyle. In this episode Meg and Elizabeth discuss some of the realities of such a move to small town life, in places where most community services rely on volunteer work, where change can be divisive, and where competition for bigger services like transport is in competition with the larger local government area. The status of small towns relative to regional centres like Bendigo is one of the long-term tensions leftover from local government amalgamations of the 1990s.

For this short ‘n’ arguably sweet instalment of TMBTP David mashes together recordings from three disparate sources to give a somewhat impressionistic (ie, amateurish) record of a field trip to Elster Creek / Elster Canal in late March 2017. It becomes clear how much of a morning person he is, and how much of a warm weather person he is not. He wants you to ignore possible misuse of the word ‘anathema’ right at the end with the excuse that he finished recording/editing this dog’s breakfast at 4 am…! Inbetween, observations are made regarding the arses of St Kilda cyclists, an ancient graffitist who can't form an M when trying to write 'Monkees', and... more. In fact, some things about the Elster Creek, too, which is an ongoing flood/swamp mitigation project that started long before the turn of the last century.

David and Elizabeth discuss two books - “The Life Project” by Helen Pearson, and “Detroit 67” by Stuart Cosgrove. “The Life Project: The extraordinary story of our ordinary lives” is about cohort studies in Britain - longitudinal studies that follow large groups of people over their life course – and about how “the simple act of observing life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent and die”. It’s also about postwar politics, entrenched inequalities of outcomes such as health and education, and the sometimes-fiendish processes of research and research funding. “Detroit 67: The year that changed soul” is framed around one iconic city, Detroit, in a time of both chaos (riots etc.) and creativity (Motown etc.). Like the Life Project it tells a story on interrelated levels: the city and its upheavals in politics and music, and also the lives of some extraordinary individuals living within these forces. It particularly focuses on Florence Ballard, of the Supremes. Both books are about understanding people in the contexts of their time and place (and vice-versa). We don’t really do book ‘reviews’ we just amble over some of the themes and our reactions to them. The Life Project: http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/195897/the-life-project/

Detroit 67: http://www.amazon.com/Detroit-67-Year-That-Changed/dp/0993107508

This week's TMBTP is an interview with writer Garry Disher, conducted by Elizabeth and David at Garry’s Mornington Peninsula home. We were interested to talk to Garry because his work has such a distinct sense of place and location – arguably even more than in most fiction (he’s probably best known for his crime fiction but not exclusively). We would direct you to Garry’s Wikipedia page but you’ll learn about 700% more about Garry from this interview than you will there, so just listen to it. Garry speaks quietly but in complete sentences. There is an unusual sound in the background that is either a robot bird or a machine delivering measured doses of something into someone’s veins at regular intervals, we’re not sure because we didn’t see anything or hear it at the time. David is mortified by the delay in bringing this to you and feels compelled to explain that he was almost complete with editing the interview when the whole file collapsed and he had to start again. Also, Wynona Rider is slightly misrepresented when used as an example but she's really great so probably won't mind. ​

http://www.garrydisher.com

From Viennese Avant Garde to Newlands Pizza Plus: an episode of This Must Be the Place that’s about two things: a place, and a person who was influential in making that place. The place is the Newlands Estate, an area developed by the Housing Commission in the 1940s and 1950s, in Melbourne’s north. The person is Ernest Fooks – to whom Newlands owes part of its design. Fooks was an avant garde European émigré architect and planner, and Newlands was one of his first projects after emigrating to Melbourne from the war in Austria. The Newlands estate – known for its parks, topography, mix of housing types, ubiquitous red brick, and community facilities – was the beginning of an influential 40 year career in Australia for Fooks, whose work went on to include numerous luxury modernist homes for the Jewish community, and Jewish institutional buildings. In this episode David interviews architect Catherine Townsend, a Fooks expert. And Elizabeth interviews Cate Hall, an active member of the Newlands community who has been involved in campaigns to save the Coburg Olympic Pool (in Newlands), and to regain a high school for the area. The heritage value of modernist design is part of the story, as is the politics of investment in community infrastructure.

The National Gallery of Victoria - Design Week - will host a Fooks exhibition and open house in March 2017:

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/the-house-talks-back-fooks-exhibition-and-open-house/

Here's some heritage info on Newlands:

http://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/places/56082

And here's the Newlands community news blog:

http://newlandscommunitynews.blogspot.com.au

Episode 5 of This Must Be the Place features an interview by David (a self-confessed Finnophile) with Lieven Ameel at the University of Tampere in Finland, last September when David was a visiting scholar. They discuss Lieven’s book about literary representations of urban life in Helsinki in Early 20th Century Finnish Literature ("Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940" http://blogs.helsinki.fi/urbannarratives/publications/). Finish literature from the early 20th century tends to have been threaded through with unease about urban life – lots of farm girls getting exploited etc., perhaps because “it’s so easy to use a city is a metaphor or allegory of the human capacity for good and evil”. Apparently there was a rich body of urban literature from Finland, but this has largely been forgotten and not translated – even works by authors whose rural-based work is better known. In Finland, seemingly universal anxieties about cities and change were amplified by the fears of a newly formed country that defined itself in rural terms. Also, if you listen right to the end there’s us discussing Fawkner cemetery, Beechworth asylum, unmarked graves at Sunbury asylum, and more. Note - in the podcast we wonder aloud - when did cremation become legal in Victoria? The answer seems to be: 1903.

This must be the place episode 4 – an interview with Dr Chris McConville. Chris McConville was one of the speakers at the “After the Carlton Inn: Heritage Protection in a Development Boom” event a couple of months back. We took the opportunity to follow up with him about his experiences in, and perspectives on, Australian urban history. Chris is currently a lecturer at Victoria University, and has worked widely in the areas of popular culture studies, the politics of memory and environment, and heritage planning. He’s published on topics ranging from pubs to sports and racecourses, to heritage protection, dams, goldfields, Chinese migration, union and labour history. He’s also “probably spent as much time not working in universities and doing things like heritage studies, walking tours, freelance history, and working in politics”. In this interview Chris overviews his experiences in the establishment of urban history in Australia in the 1970s –back when “history was just this cavalcade of explorers heading off to the Blue Mountains, and there was this huge disconnect with the life you were living in suburban Melbourne”. We discuss history as a research and teaching topic, the use of digital resources, the relevance of the city to history (and vice versa - “we’re having this argument about the future of Melbourne but we’re not actually talking about Melbourne, it’s not anchored in a sense of what the city is and where it came from”), pubs, hanging rock, and the shifting fates of both history and the urban.

This must be the place episode 3: everything I needed to know about life I learned from an old British comic strip. Actually it’s an interview by David in Helsinki at the International Conference on Urban History with Lucie Glasheen, a PhD student at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University at London. Lucie’s research looks at the representation of children in urban environments in British children’s comics of the 1930s. The episode also features an intro with Elizabeth discussing, with her sister Sarah Taylor, what was to be learned from an early over-exposure to British comic strips like Dandy and Beano.

This Must Be The Place bonus episode: a planning-oriented review of “The Founder”, the cinematic story of Ray Kroc and the origins of the formidably successful McDonald’s. We’ve done some research into the built form outcomes of fast food restaurants - see our 2016 paper, “No Maccas in the Hills! Locating the planning history of fast food chains” – here: http://www.griffith.edu.au/conference/uhph2015/papers. Also Elizabeth’s paper on Fast Food Planning Conflicts in Victoria here – http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2014.950677.

Note: During the discussion the Ray Kroc autobiography “Grinding it Out” is incorrectly referred to as “Selling them by the Sack” (which is actually, and tellingly, the White Castle story). Another warning: Elizabeth uses the word ‘genuine’ at least 4 times.

The article Elizabeth refers to on Australian McDonald’s (which arrived in 1971) is, “Hamburger Millionaire” which neatly ties in with the university discussion – “Donn Wilson, a former Dean of the “Hamburger University”, USA, is here to set up a chain of restaurants”. Australian Women’s Weekly, October 20th 1971.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article43201788

In Episode 2 of “This Must be the Place” David interviews Professor Miles Glendinning, of the University of Edinburgh, about his comparative research into public housing blocks (or ‘mass housing’). Miles was one of the authors of “Tower Block: Modem Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland” (1994) and is now researching an update/extension of that work. Provisionally titled “The hundred years was: A global History of Mass Housing”, Miles is documenting the global history of public social housing in multi-storey blocks over the ‘long 20th century’. As part of that project Miles recently visited Melbourne, was shown around some of our public housing tower blocks by David, and was interviewed for “This Must be the Place”. The episode is also preceded by us rambling up at David’s Dad’s place in the country (Mt Camel) where we recorded the intro, with ants and dogs. There’s also an anecdote about council housing in Battersea. Corrections to the audio: Buckley the little dog was not irritating really. And David only says “interesting” twice I think.

Interview by David Nichols, with Miles Glendinning. Edited by David Nichols (interview) and by Elizabeth Taylor (the rest). Recorded by David Nichols (interview) and by Andrew Bonnici (the rest). More info on Miles Glendinning:

http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/miles-glendinning(7626e5d5-e455-4746-a9af-1d89cebf5a6a).html

‘Tower Block’ is now available free online:

http://www.c20society.org.uk/2012/02/28/free-access-to-tower-block/