I still have a bunch of three-quarter drafted posts, which are actually about the history of arcades, but thought today I’d give an update on research life lately.

I’ve been working hard with my fellow authors, Richard Broome, Andrew J May and Helen Stitt on a thirtieth anniversary edition of Weston Bate’s Essential but Unplanned: The Story of Melbourne’s Lanes, which will be released later this year by Royal Historical Society of Victoria and State Library Victoria. Bate also included the city’s arcades, many of which join up with the lanes, an essential part of the way we move through and experience the city.

For me, this has involved two seemingly diametric activities. Often it has consisted of sitting at a desk staring at directories, maps, and spreadsheets to work on tracking the histories of the lanes. But it also means extensive walking around Melbourne’s CBD to see if certain lanes actually still exist in our rapidly changing cityscape or determining some other aspect of their location past or present. On those days, my 10,000 steps are easy to achieve!

It’s been really amazing discovering unknown corners of Melbourne, as well as seeing the history of its arcades: from the long-gone 1853 Queen’s Arcade to the most recent iteration, the Melbourne Walk, a combined arcade and laneway complex, which should open towards the end of 2024.

The book is accompanied by an exhibition at RHSV, Melbourne’s Storied Laneways, curated by David Thompson, which opens 11 April. Further details can be found on the RHSV website.

There’s actually an important story for me with this book, but I’ll reveal that when we launch!

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In other exciting news, my latest journal article came out! It was submitted in October 2022, prior to my PhD being finalised, and is actually based on one of the thesis chapters. ‘”One of the Sights of the Colony“: Australia’s Nineteenth-Century Arcades’ appears in History of Retailing and Consumption. This is part of the new special issue on Australian retailing, edited by Matthew Bailey, one of my colleagues at Macquarie University. It is not open access but people can contact me for an author’s digital print of the article if they don’t have university or other library access. The abstract gives you an idea of the focus:

The arcade is a nineteenth-century architectural and social form long associated with industrial modernity and consumer culture. Better known in the British and European urban landscape, they were also significant in the Australian colonial context from 1853 onwards, in numbers rivalling those in the so-called ‘metropole’. Australian entrepreneurs, architects and shop owners utilized what was seen as a very European form to represent the progress and civilization of the Australian colonies and their urban spaces, both in capital cities and smaller regional centres. The arcades, including their presence in the landscape, their architecture, and the commodities and leisure activities found within, were regularly invoked by boosters in order to demonstrate the sophistication of these colonial urban spaces. This article briefly discusses the history of the nineteenth-century Australian arcades, the boosterish discourse that promoted them, and how their representation was a way to express the place of the Australian colonies within a transnational milieu.

It was wonderful participating in this special issue with Matt and other colleagues who work on shopping, retailing and business history. Matt also gave a great overview in the introduction to the special issue of all the authors’ work, which is well worth reading too.

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Another publication also hit the virtual shelves in December 2023, a book chapter also written with colleagues, this time from my other life working on the history and sociology of education. Although it seems somewhat different, for me all these topics tie into aspects of my wider interest in urban history, just from slightly different perspectives. This is, wonderfully, open access and represents just one of the outputs from an ongoing transnational collaboration, Connecting History of Education, involving academics from all over the world and led by a team in Spain.

Julie McLeod, Nicole Davis, Kevin Myers and Helen Proctor, ‘Mapping connections across fields of knowledge and international networks in the history of education: Australasia, Northern Europe and the United Kingdom’ in Andrés Payà Rico, José Luis Hernández Huerta (eds.), Conectando la historia de la educación Tendencias internacionales en la investigación y difusión del conocimiento (Octaedro, 2023). Our chapter

takes up the invitation to map the development of the history of education as a disciplinary field, traced through the activities of discipline associations and journals in two contrasting regions, Australasia and Northern Europe. Defining and putting parameters around these regions is of course a problematic endeavour, replete with longer geopolitical and imperial histories, including the positioning of some regions, such as Australasia, as somewhat peripheral or marginal to developments in northern metropolitan centres. While a full consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the chapter, we note them at the start in order to signal the larger contexts both framing and unsettling these mapping exercises. There is also considerable heterogeneity within these broadly defined regions. Even so, looking at them side by side has revealed some common concerns and also some important differences in how the journals conceived of their mission in relation to issues of national histories and international outlooks.

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More exciting things have been happening too but I’ll just mention one. Last year I was awarded a 2024 Visiting Fellowship with the Harry Gentle Resource Centre at Griffith University, Brisbane.

Harry Gentle was a Griffith University alumnus who studied politics and history in the 1980s at the Griffith School of Humanities. He left a generous bequest upon his death to support the study of Australian colonial history. The Harry Gentle Resource Centre (HGRC) at Griffith University was established to promote the study of the peoples and lands of Australia, with an initial focus on the area that became Queensland and its borderlands in the nineteenth century.

Harry Gentle Resource Centre: Visiting Fellowships

My fellowship is taking my thesis work a bit further, in preparation for writing a monograph on Australia’s arcades.

The project will explore the experiences and networks of nineteenth-century Queensland businesswomen. It examines establishments owned or run by women, and commodities or services they provided, in four arcades built during this period – in Brisbane, Charters Towers and Townsville. Sometimes disguised behind male relatives acting as faces of the businesses or historiography overlooking their participation, these women played a vital role in the Australian colonial economy and represented significant networks in global exchanges of goods, ideas and people.

I’m excited to be heading up there next week to begin my first couple of weeks of research. It will be great to meet the team at the centre and also catch up with friends and family in Brisbane.

I’ll likely be reporting on the fellowships a bit on my Instagram and Facebook page, so follow me and see what I discover!