Hi everyone. Well, it’s been a crazy busy few months. When is it not?

So much has happened that I want to quickly tell you about.

Well, I had my first holiday in about five years, when I travelled to Ireland, Scotland and England in July. I mostly did lots of hiking, did some pilgrimages to places where my family emigrated from and looked at many many many museums and built and natural heritage sites, which was really inspiring for my thoughts on, practice in and teaching for that space.

I also presented a paper at the fiftieth anniversary conference of the Urban History journal, The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future, in Leicester. Invited to be part of a panel on Globalising Australian Urban History, I presented some work from my thesis research that didn’t quite make it into the thesis in much detail.

It was fantastic to speak about new work along with other historians of Australian urban landscapes: Simon Sleight, James Lesh, Anna Tenby. Most of us stayed onsite and agreed that it was one of the best conferences we’d been to in a long time. My paper, ‘Arcadian Dreams: Regionalising Australian Urban History’, examined nineteenth-century Australian urbanity through the lens of the arcades, often viewed as a symbol of urban life throughout the globe during this period.

It explored several case studies of these buildings constructed in towns and cities outside the colonial capitals in this era, including their architecture, the shops and other businesses they contained, and the language that surrounded them in print media. I ask in it if, by looking at and comparing these sites across the regional/metropolitan divide, we can gain a better and more nuanced understanding of what it meant to live and be urban in nineteenth-century Australia. 

After the conference we also got to have a little tour around Leicester on the final day and see their amazing fourteenth-century Guildhall (and the carpark where Richard III’s remains were found, which is a site of pilgrimage itself). After that, I had a well-deserved six weeks off and largely spent my time hiking in the Scottish Highlands, followed by a few days in London, and one little visit to the archives in Bedford to research for a paper I’m giving in October.

In August I also presented a longer version of the Leicester paper for the University of Melbourne, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies Brown Bag Seminar Series, and am currently working on it for a journal submission. I also presented a new paper in September, ‘One of the Sights of the Colony: Australian Ninteenth-Century Arcades’, at the European Association for Urban History Online Symposium, Exchanges: European Cities and the Wider Urban World. Based on one of my thesis chapters, this is coming out soon as an article in the History of Retailing and Consumption journal special issue on Australian retail history. It looks at how the arcades were represented in the print media in the nineteenth-century as sites of progress and civilisation in settler colonial Australia.

In other exciting news, at the end of June, Temporality, Space and Place in Education and Youth Research, a co-edited collection, produced with Julie McLeod, Kate O’Connor and Amy McKernan, released! A fantastic group of articles from scholars globally, ‘it explores the everyday ways in which time marks the experience of education as well as the concerns and methods of education and youth research’. We are having a launch on 26 October in Melbourne and would love to see you there. Details and bookings can be found on Eventbrite.

In the same month, a project that for which I was a research assistant, including deciphering the handwriting of some early nineteenth-century clerks in the Ordnance Survey Offices, culminated in a book publication. Isabella Alexander’s Copyright and Cartography: History, Law & the Circulation of Knowledge ‘explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries’. I also did the copyedits for this publication and it was such a pleasure to see it come to fruition after being involved with it for several years.

The biggest news though, is probably, GRADUATION! That’s right. All that hard work culminated in a fantastic ceremony at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, where I got to wear the funny hat and celebrate with friends and family. It was really quite special not only graduating but in a building that is intimately related to the topic of my thesis on the arcades.

On that note, signing off for now! I’ll have some actual history writing on the arcades for you very very soon.

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Feature image: Night of the referendum on Federation of Australia, Charters Towers, 1900, with Royal Arcade at far left. Marion Photos. State Library of Queensland, Negative number: 25141