Colonial Melbourne Research Articles

Historical settler interest in the use of fire to restore the degraded Indigenous vegetation communities of colonial Melbourne

Historical settler interest in the use of fire to restore the degraded Indigenous vegetation communities of colonial Melbourne

Men-Poodles in the Dress Circle: Competing Masculinities in Colonial Melbourne

ABSTRACTOne night in 1865, some men at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal created a disturbance by noisily paying court to married women in the dress circle. A journalist present that night subsequently attacked these “men-poodles” in print. This article examines the models of masculinity that lay behind the different actions and responses of the participants that evening—the normative, domesticated masculinity espoused by the journalist, and dissident models, such as the cavalier-servant, which may have inspired the men-poodles. The article proposes that the incident offers a rare glimpse of queer men creating and exercising a sociability beyond the criminal paradigm that dominates accounts of homosexuality in the colonial era.

‘Genus barracker’: Masculinity, Race, and the Disruptive Pleasures of Rowdy Partisanship in 1880s Melbourne

This article uses the emergence of the cultural category of barrackers in 1880s colonial Melbourne to examine the way a spectator sport became a site of intersecting discourses around emotions, health, science, class, citizenship, masculinity, and partisanship. Drawing on suburban newspapers it traces those aspects of barracking that were disturbing and thrilling enough to occasion the popularisation of a new noun and verb. The article also explores how barracking became a middle-class behaviour, as well as a middle-class concern, and the way popular reactions to barrackers in the 1880s differed to responses to another much more studied cultural category: larrikins.

Carlo Catani and Alexandra Avenue: The Making of a European Promenade in Colonial Melbourne

Alexandra Avenue, designed by Florentine immigrant Carlo Catani, was declared open in 1901 in Melbourne by the Duke and Duchess of York, as part of the celebrations marking the Federation of Australia. The ornamental boulevard was an object of wonder. Following the European tradition, counter to English ideas of propriety, it was to be a promenade where people would go to see and be seen. In the mould of American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Catani was an expert generalist, responsible for a wide range of landscape and engineering projects in Victoria, on whom little scholarship exists. The Avenue greatly influenced street aesthetics in inner Melbourne and was later used as an exemplar of urban streetscape at the inaugural Australian Town Planning Conference in 1918. It provides an insight into how urban landscapes were formed before specialist planners and demonstrates the way in which colonial cities such as Melbourne created an identity through their public spaces. This article enriches current scholarship on Catani – a significant influence on the city of Melbourne at the turn of last century.

‘The Chief Chinese Interpreter’ Charles Hodges: mapping the aurality of race and governance in colonial Melbourne

This article demonstrates the importance of aurality and speech in law and governance in Melbourne, the capital of the British settler colony of Victoria, Australia. It does so via tracking the role of England-born Chinese Interpreter, Charles Powell Hodges, across Melbourne spaces, notably the Supreme Court and the so-called ‘Chinese Quarter’. By examining Hodges’ involvement in the surrounding racial politics of urban labour, and of carpentry in particular, this article highlights the spatially dependent ways in which power was verbally negotiated in and between colonial state actors, Hodges, and the Chinese merchant and working classes. It further examines Hodges’ role as an advocate for Chinese interests in the context of the 1890s Depression. Hodges spoke against popular anti-Chinese sentiments at a time when white settler linguistic identity was being formulated, and in the lead up to the 1901 Federation of the Australian colonies. A focus on acts of speaking, hearing, and listening, I argue, is a way to deepen historical understandings of governance, and of resistance thereto.

A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700-2010 ed. by David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall (review)

Reviewed by: A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700-2010 ed. by David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall Deborah Seiler Barrie, David G. and Susan Broomhall, eds, A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700-2010, New York, Routledge, 2011; paperback; pp. 303; 4 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £29.99; ISBN 9780415696616. This edited collection on how masculine ideologies have shaped, and were shaped by, policing both culturally and institutionally, is a joy to read. Chronologically, the contributions range from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, taking Britain, Europe, America, and Australia into consideration. When read cover to cover, the consistencies and differences in masculine ideologies within a policing framework clearly come across, though the coherency and cogency of the first few chapters is not sustained to the last three. While the volume works well as a whole, with each chapter clearly having similar theoretical priorities, the chapters also stand well alone. The footnotes and bibliography are comprehensive, making the collection ideal for both scholarly and student readers of both gender and criminal justice history. The collection argues that conceptions of masculinity were, and are, central to how policing systems were created and maintained. If, as editors David Barrie and Susan Broomhall state in the Introduction, gender is made the central focal point when analysing policing history, the 'conceptualizations of "old" and "new" police models cannot be sustained' (p. 6). They note that there is strong evidence against criminological scholarship that makes the British Metropolitan model the defining feature of policing; instead, Barrie and Broomhall propose that systems evolved not only in relation to each other, but also in relation to indigenous social and gender norms. Given the central tenet that men were seen to be responsible for social order and coherence, this translated not only to how policing systems were created and maintained, but also to how the men within those systems behaved, and were perceived by the public. Thus, Australian, American, British, French, and Italian systems were all shaped not only with the awareness of each other but also within their own native societal and cultural contexts. Policing in Australia, for example, was informed by both its frontier status and its British history. As the editors note, a consistent theme - both chronologically and geographically - for the men engaged in policing was the need for physical and emotional control. Concurrent research on men in governing positions in the early modern period has shown that control over one's body and emotions was seen as necessary for a man with responsibility over his social subordinates. While the volume's contributions demonstrate the importance of this control over mind and body within a policing framework, they also show the varied nature of how it was expressed among men. It differed [End Page 207] along lines of class (Broomhall and Barrie), race (Gerda W. Ray), and even geographical location (Dean Wilson). A number of articles warrant special mention. In his contribution, Wilson, discussing masculinities in colonial Melbourne from 1853 until the early twentieth century, finds that physicality was essential for men - both as a representation of social civility and of colonial power. The restrictive nature of this type of masculinity is clear from his examples of how the policeman's body was regulated - through dress, free time, and even sleeping and meal times. David Garrioch shows how masculine ideals in the Paris police of the eighteenth century were formed through perceptions of the king. His research illustrates that perceptions of the king changed how the police then acted amongst themselves and towards the public - as the king was perceived in a less paternal light, so, too, did the men of the Parisian police force act in a less paternal manner. Broomhall and Barrie's article is of note for its close and nuanced analysis of periodicals detailing court events in the early part of the nineteenth century in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Their research not only confirms that a sense of the paternal seemed to be an intrinsic aspect of men in positions of power, but they also note that the relationship with the public determined how they were viewed as men. That is, an officer dealing with gangs was seen...

Counterpoints of care: two moments of struggle

This paper examines the history of care in modern society and seeks to expose how deep transformations in care arise from wider social relations. From historical survey we may discern a series of transitional points, where the practice and the experience of care was greatly, sometimes suddenly, redefined. Each betrayed deeper political and ethical struggles that went to the core of social relations, and which weren't merely therapeutic in nature. This paper explores two such 'moments'. I first examine the emergence of a new institutional landscape during the middle industrial era, in the wake of a series of legal and political reforms that sought to settle a social order uprooted and distressed by raw modernisation. I provide a composite, yet incomplete view, of how this transformation proceeded in one urban setting, colonial Melbourne. In the second instance, I review the ambitions and process of deinstitutionalisation in the late 20(th) century. Ostensibly, this reform sought, inter alia, to collapse the great division between 'fit' and 'unfit' established in 1834. Again, empirical reference is made to the reconstitution of care in Melbourne, Australia, this time during its late 20th experience of institutional reform. The focus in this case is the process of downscaling and closure for a major congregate facility, Kew Cottages. The major conclusion is that periods of intense transition in the ideology and mode of care are reflective of wider social transformations not merely of therapeutic or institutional shifts.

Melbournes Sites of Reading

This paper investigates the representations and experiences of white women readers in colonial Melbourne by locating them particularly in two literary sites: the Public Library and Mullen’s Bookshop and Circulating Library. Reading, and the search for reading material, placed colonial women in the street as well as the home, taking them into metropolitan places, libraries, shops and restaurants. The physical presence of female readers challenged the gendered spatial demarcations of Melbourne society, and made the readers themselves objects of inspection and subjects of discussion. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Review of *Marcus Clarke's Bohemia* by Andrew McCann

Publishers details for: Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, by Andrew McCann, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. $49.95.

Choral Concert Life in the Late Nineteenth-Century ‘Metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’

This issue of the Nineteenth-Century Music Review is devoted to Australia and more specifically to music-making in colonial Melbourne. The colony of Victoria was acknowledged as the cultural heart of Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Melbourne hosted two International Exhibitions in the 1880s and welcomed innumerable travelling musicians to its shores, where significant amounts of money could be made. Because of Melbourne's standing and cultural significance at the time and the extensive body of material available for study, the articles in this journal focus on this ‘metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’. However, the activities discussed here can all be found, to varying degrees, in other parts of Australia as well. Liedertafels, for instance, were very prominent in Adelaide and its surrounding areas (and indeed still exist today), because of the significant German migration there. Philharmonic choirs were also widely established.

Women and Australian rules football in colonial melbourne1

Women and Australian rules football in colonial melbourne¹

Marcus Clarke and the Society of the Spectacle: Reflections on Writing and Commodity Captialism in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne

Marcus Clarke was fascinated not only with the public spaces of the nineteenth-century city, colonial Melbourne in particular, but with the increasingly commodified, spectacularised forms of cultural production that inhabited these spaces. In both his fiction and journalism the crowds that mill through city streets, arcades and cafes are always, it seems, collections of potential consumers awaiting writers, impresarios or showmen offering various forms of sensationalised entertainment. In these urban tableaux there is an implicit critique of both populism and mass culture; the public's thirst for curious, grotesque or morbid spectacles is a sure index of its gullibility and lack of enduring moral and political conviction. The arrest and public vilification of the accused murderer Rufus Dawes, in His Natural Life, is the occasion of just such an attack on popular culture-consumption.