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Welcome back! This week’s post started off as a very quick musing on something I became interested in during my thesis but had ended up as a dead end. So, I very quickly wrote a ‘short’ post on it, thinking I might just think through some of the issues. Of course, this short post is now a bit of a long read, as I keep thinking of further avenues to investigate and it’s turned out much longer and more intricate than expected. It is now something of a thinkpiece on my own history practices as well as a specific site. But I hope it’s enjoyable for its dive into mid-1800s Melbourne during the goldrush years, layers of urban history, and some of the sources that we look at when doing this type of research.

During the research and writing of my thesis, there were a few arcades that bothered me. With some I couldn’t figure out if they’d been arcades in the nineteenth-century or had been modified in the twentieth. Still others bore the name ‘arcade’ and were mentioned in the newspapers but I was uncertain, if there were no descriptions, that they were the type of arcade on which I was focusing: with shops running along a central promenade (and usually a glass roof). In colonial Australia, the word ‘arcade’ was used for these types of buildings but also others, including large furniture or mixed business shops and, famously, for the Coles Book Arcade in Melbourne.

And then there was the Victoria Arcade in Melbourne. Early on in the research I came across this beautiful image (above) in the State Library of Victoria, depicting a beautifully ornate arcade, with some inscriptions.

Victoria Arcade, now erecting in Bourke Street East

Wharton & Burns Architects & Surveyors
30. Collins Street Melbourne

John Black, Proprietor
J.S. Campbell & Co., Lithographers

It also has a small ‘handwritten’ signature identifying the artist: STG – for Samuel Thomas Gill – and the date [18]53.

ST Gill, Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street East, Melbourne, 1853. SLV, H2087

Three years later, ST Gill, would go on to do a small sketch of the Queens Arcade and was to become a well-known and prolific chronicler of goldrush Victoria, including its urban environments. Even later, he would do another lively street scene in front of the Royal Arcade, completed in 1870, also on Bourke Street.

Possibly a companion or slightly earlier piece to that of the Victoria Arcade is another lithograph by Gill (below), also dated 1853, of Black’s Tattersalls Horse Bazaar on Lonsdale Street.

ST Gill, Tattersalls Horse Bazaar, Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, 1853. SLV, H2156

These two artworks demonstrate a grandeur and elegance that Melbourne entrepreneurs and officials were at pains to emphasise during this period, as they tried to ‘improve’ and ‘civilise’ the fledgling city. In reality, Melbourne at the time was far from this, with a rapidly expanding population due to the goldrush. Many still lived in the tent encampment south of the Yarra and other temporary structures, as well as portable (kit) iron and wood buildings imported from England, were erected to provide residential premises; the city was a building site, as the construction tried to catch up with the needs of the population.

Seeking to take advantage of this was entrepreneur John Black, born in Lancashire of Scottish ancestry. He arrived in Australia around 1852, likely drawn by the lure of the goldrush. Having worked for a London merchant prior to emigration, he promptly set up carrying goods between the goldfields, Geelong and Melbourne (Gibson-Wilde, 25). An advertisement in Pierce’s Commercial Directory from 1853 shows that he also had ‘stores’ on the goldfields, likely supplying a wide mix of needs for miners including food and equipment.

Goldrush immigrants often made more from businesses such as this than they ever would from gold and it appears that Black made a solid fortune in a short time. On 1 November 1853 John Black (as well as a man named Edward Gilbert) obtained an auctioneer’s license in Melbourne, likely in preparation for his two new ventures: the horse bazaar and the arcade.

Pierce’s Commercial Directory, 1853. State Library Victoria
John Melton Black, c1866–1867? Townsville City Libraries via Flickr

Black probably commissioned Gill to make the images of Tattersalls and the proposed Victoria Arcade when one or both buildings were in the planning stages. The Argus reported on the completed horse and cattle bazaar on 14 November 1853, noting it was an arcade-like structure “used for an hotel, livery stables, auction mart, cattle-yards, coach-house, warehouse for vehicles &c” (14 November 1853).

An advertisement from the Argus on 4 November 1853 tells us that plans for the arcade were publicly displayed in the finished bazaar for prospective tenants to view.

VICTORIA Arcade.—Parties requiring Shops in the new Arcade, Bourke street, are requested to apply early. The plans are to be seen at Tattersall’s Bazaar. Lonsdale street east. (4 November 1853, 8)

The Illustrated Sydney News told readers in greater detail about this planned urban enterprise:

COLONIAL ENTERPRISE.—Spacious as Mr. Black’s new Tattersalls, in Lonsdale and Bourke-streets, undoubtedly is, and creditable alike to the proprietor and the colony, it will be thrown completely into the shade by a new arcade which the same spirited speculator is about to erect as a continuation of the new Tattersall’s.

Immediately opposite, and running in a straight line, is the full acre allotment, the property of Mr. [O’]Sullivan, the timber merchant, and this gentleman has leased it to Mr. Black for eighteen years, at a rental of £3000 per annum. On this acre Mr. Black has bound himself down, in a heavy penalty, to erect an immense arcade, to consist of two-storied shops, forty feet high.

The two end buildings leading into Great and Little Bourke-streets, respectively are to be each four story houses; the whole is to be roofed with corrugated iron, and entirely finished by the 1st of April next. Every house is leased already at £250 a year (serving for both residence and business premises,) the tenants each paying down a bonus of £1000 on taking possession. This will probably be the most gigantic undertaking entered into by one individual south of the line. (26 November 1853, 4)

Until I found the Gill Victoria Arcade lithograph, my research suggested that no other building of this type was built in Melbourne between the Queen’s Arcade in 1853 and the Royal Arcade in 1869–1870 (one newspapers made a point of this lack when discussing the latter!).

An arcade named the Victoria – more properly the Victoria Arcade & Academy of Music – was later built on Bourke Street East in 1877, almost opposite the site slated for the 1854 Victoria Arcade. In addition to an arcade with shops, it included a theatre. This later became known as the famous Bijou, which ultimately had greater longevity than the arcade itself. While that is a story for another time, it confused me quite a lot when I found the 1853 Gill image. It was very common in nineteenth-century newspapers to not give a street address, so I wondered, was this an earlier iteration of that arcade? But it could not be as it was clearly identified as being on the opposite site of the street.

I then found a couple of newspaper reports in the 1850s that mention a Victoria Arcade as though it was completed: one year after it was first announced, we see a classified for a ‘Cook-shop to Let, with Fixtures Complete’ is identified as ‘next the Victoria Arcade’ (Argus, 10 November 1854, 3), while Chapman’s Music Warehouse is mentioned at Victoria Arcade a week earlier. Unfortunately, these seem to be simply mistakes of naming: Chapman’s, which was still in existence in the mid-1890s, was definitely located in the Queens Arcade, as many advertisements attest. It seems it would be an easy confusion, the Queen of the eponymous arcade of course being Victoria.

So what was happening here? Was the arcade built or not?

One fabulous source for identifying early buildings and their construction dates in Melbourne are the wonderful leather-bound volumes of building notices from the Melbourne municipal council, now held at Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV). They’re a little tricky to use and it doesn’t help that usually there often only a street name and not an address for these proposals, in the first two volumes at least.

When I delved into them (and it was wonderful!), I found some hints. In the first volume (1850–1853) I located a notice – 1118 for the year – ‘To build a Horse Bazaar’ on July 8 1853, with John Cotter named as builder for owner, John Black. On the next page, we are informed that works had commenced and the fee charged was £4.

John Black’s notice to build a horse bazaar, 8 July 1853. Public Record Office Victoria, Building Notices Register and Index (VPRS9289), VPRS 9289/P0001/1, 10/01/1850 – 18/08

But nowhere in late 1853 or early 1854 did I find a mention of a Victoria Arcade (although the Queens Arcade did appear in 1853). In the second volume, though, on 1 June 1854, Black’s name appears in the book at the head of another venture, with the notice of intent ‘to build a theatre’ on Bourke Street. This was the famous Theatre Royal, which opened very late in 1854, renowned in Melbourne until its last performance in the 1930s, but likely partly the causes of Black’s insolvency in 1855.

John Black’s notice to build a theatre, 1 June 1854. PROV, Building Notices Register and Index (VPRS9289), VPRS 9289/P0001/2, 18/08/1853 – 31/07,

Looking at other evidence, it becomes clear that the theatre was in fact built on the site slated for the proposed the Victoria Arcade in the Gill image, only 12 months after initially announcing the construction of the arcade.

An amazing c1860 map (known as the ‘Bibbs Map’) has been digitised recently in super high res and added to the City of Melbourne’s wonderful mapping site, with plans and aerial shots of the city layered over time. In it we can see that the Horse Bazaar and Theatre Royal ran in a straight line from Lonsdale to Bourke streets, just to the east of Swanston Street. We also know from the Illustrated Sydney News article above that the Royal was located on the the block of land where the arcade was to be constructed.

‘Bibbs’ map of Melbourne, c1860 (detail) showing Tattersalls Horse Bazaar at c222–230 (in blue) and Theatre Royal at c209–233 (in pink) Little Bourke Street. City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection, 1646167. This version is from City of Melbourne’s site maps.melbourne.vic.gov.au
‘Bibbs’ Map, c1856, showing Tattersalls and Theatre Royal. PROV, VPRS 8168/P3 Historic Plan Collection, Unit 46, MELBRL 12 Melbourne: [Melbourne. n.d.]

An earlier version from c1856 above, is also available in high resolution at Public Records Victoria, showing both buildings in greater detail, and its history is discussed in my colleague Barbara Minchinton’s article in PROV’s journal, Provenance.

I’ve not yet located any article that indicates that any decision was made to abandon the arcade nor construct the theatre. Perhaps these will turn up one day – I’ve not given up searching but it’s highly likely Black did not want to make a pronouncement about the change in his plans.

One advertisement for the sale of a partially completed ‘New Theatre’ in October 1854 is likely the Theatre Royal, as is the call for tenders for the completion of a theatre in early December. But the first mention of it definitely as Theatre Royal that I’ve found so far in the papers is the announcement on 22 December for its opening the following day.

On 23 December the theatre opened but in an incomplete form, with just the entrance buildings and promenade entry completed. That day the Argus advertised the ‘GRAND OPENING of the Lower Saloons and Superb Entrance Hall to the New Theatre Royal, Bourke-street east’, featuring performers such as Mrs Hancock, Miss Octavia Hamilton and infant pianist Miss Minnie Clifford, and performances continued in the promenade – Black perhaps needing to recoup some of the money already outlaid on his building ventures.

Theatre Royal, Melbourne, c1859? Photographer unknown. Copied? by Sears’ Studios, 1933. State Library Victoria, H20742

Looking at commercial directories is also a way to trace the development of buildings in the city. State Library of Victoria (SLV) and University of Melbourne have the well-known Sands & McDougall directories online for a selected number of years from 1857 to 1974 but all are too early for this conundrum.

So, I visited SLV and the helpful staff in the Newspapers & Family History Reading Rooms to investigate the earlier directories – held on microfiche. In Joseph Butterfield’s directory for 1854 (which would have been prepared in late 1853 or early 1854), there was no evidence of Tattersalls or an arcade. But the former appears in the same directory for 1855, named Tattersal’s (sic) Repository and Tattersalls Hotel, as does the Theatre Royal at 73 Little Bourke Street East as ‘New Theatre and Hotel Building’.

It was in fact not until mid-1855 that the theatre was fully completed and finally opened on 16 July. A large article singing its praises appeared in the Argus the week before:

As this magnificent Temple of the Drama is announced to be opened for the first time on Monday evening next, a narrative embodying the history of the edifice, and a description in detail of what has already been effected, may be interesting. … Mr John Black … notwithstanding many impediments which have periodically opposed themselves to the work he took in hand, has now the satisfaction of seeing his design practically carried out. (10 July 1855)

The article praises Black’s vision for the theatre – completely omitting that the site had once been slated for an arcade only 18 months previously. It tells in detail of the architecture and fittings and compares the building to London’s Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres and the expenditure of £60,000 in its construction (an amount equating to perhaps 9-10 million Australian dollars today).

So, why abandon the arcade idea? Did the cost of the building proposed in the first Gill image prove prohibitive? Did a theatre seem like a more secure return for Black’s outlay? Perhaps with the opening of the Queens Arcade in December 1853, there was insufficient interest in another similar edifice? Ultimately, it was probably a sound decision; the Queens was not a huge success and was converted to a hotel and dining rooms by around 1860, while the theatre lasted in some form for another almost 80 years.

Much of documentation related to the parcel of land since 1851, several years before Black built the theatre, are preserved in the Coppin Collection at State Library Victoria (SLV). Possibly one of the most famous nineteenth-century Australian actors and theatre entrepreneurs, George Coppin, took over the Theatre Royal from Black in 1856. The collection include leases and mortgages, not just for the theatre but also for the lots on which Tattersalls stood.

Prior to March 1854, fellow auctioneer Edward Gilbert took over Tattersalls from Black, possibly to free up funds for Black to build the theatre, and documents related to a mortgage between the two for that land and the Tattersalls business is also contained in this collection. They also show a number of varied interests in the theatre by a number of other Melbourne businessmen. These documents show and intricate and complex shuffling of money to try and finance new buildings in the rapidly growing city.

While the theatre itself was long-lasting, the financial woes of the colony likely caused issues for a number of those invested in both it and Tattersalls, including Black. The same article that praises the new building goes on to indicate that the financial troubles over the past year had made the work difficult. Following the exuberance of the first years of the Victorian goldrush, in 1854 a recession hit, causing significant unemployment (Broome 1984, 87), and this downturn seems to have been blamed for the slow construction of the theatre. As Dorothy Gibson-Wilde notes, several days later, Black was accused by letter writers in the Argus of underpaying workers and owing money to contractors (Gibson-Wilde, 2009, 108). But this was the least of Black’s troubles.

A humorous cartoon from Melbourne Punch, 2 August 1855 depicts the Theatre Royal box office, as ‘Mr Fastemanne’ invites two ladies to the theatre. Drawn at the same time many associated with the Theatre were in financial trouble, this perhaps was also a subtle hint at those problems. Artist: Nicholas Chevalier. Engraver: Frederick Grosse. SLV, MP00/00/56/73

We can see from the documents at SLV that huge sums of money were involved in developing both Tattersalls and the Theatre Royal, and that they inevitably bankrupted several people involved with them. The original mortgage above, was in the amount of almost £35,000 that Gilbert would owe to Black, who had spent considerable money on the Tattersalls buildings, and the theatre purportedly cost £60,000.

Gilbert almost immediately tried to lease and then sell the Horse Bazaar and, by June 1855, its abject failure resulted in his insolvency. Losses on the Bazaar totalled over £13,000. In one insolvency hearing in November that year, the Commissioner noted:

the insolvent had placed the whole of his capital in the speculation of Tattersalls, which speculation had unfortunately turned out an entire failure. (Argus, 12 November)

At the same time, Black was also declaring insolvency. While this has been blamed on the expense of the building the theatre and the fact that Black probably wasn’t the best theatre manager, it certainly should also be attributed to the economic downturn. Gilbert’s insolvency report in fact made specific mention of

the period when the insolvent took possession of Tattersall’s Horse Bazaar. The colony at that time was in the very height of prosperity. Speculation and enterprise were driving men on to undertakings of inconceivable magnitude; and there is no doubt that the insolvent was inoculated with the spirit of the times, and with his capital at hand aspired to become the master of a building which presented at that moment a princely fortune. (Argus, 23 August 1855)

But it also seems that those with vested interests in the business blocked him from selling it to Coppin earlier, when he might have broke even. For several years, the shadow of the failure of Tattersalls and Theatre Royal, followed others – also resulting in the insolvencies of Gilbert and Black’s solicitor, Frederic Bayne, who had taken on Black’s interests following the latter’s insolvency, and of John O’Sullivan, to whom Gilbert’s mortgage from Black had been transferred in 1854 (and who is listed as Tattersall’s proprietor, together with E Gregory, in the directory mentioned above).

Black himself got back on his feet, becoming manager of the new Princess Theatre on Spring Street for several years. Later, he moved to Queensland, where he became the founder and first mayor of Townsville, before returning to England in the late 1860s and dying wealthy man in London in 1919 (Gibson-Wilde 1982, 2009).

One of the documents related to the mortgages for the Theatre Royal. Between John Black, John O’Sullivan and Richard Rastall, 3 July 1854. State Library Victoria, Coppin Collection, MS SEQ 8827 BOX 13/3

Despite these beginnings, George Coppin was to make a great success of the Theatre Royal. He put on successful entertainments there for the rest of the nineteenth-century. Although the 1854/5 version was destroyed by fire in 1872, Coppin rebuilt a newer and even more impressive edifice immediately after and the theatre remained a popular Melbourne entertainment spot until its demolition in 1933.

Reading between the lines of these articles, and their silences, does make me wonder if the façade buildings of the theatre were, in fact, originally intended as the front of the arcade, although with modifications to the design. If we look at the images of the original theatre, we see that similar arched windows/entries planned for the arcade are also seen in the theatre entrance building. The centre entrance to the vestibule also mirrors that of the arcade, but with a square rather than curved arch. It also has not only wooden doors on the vestibule entrance but iron gates similar to those planned for the Victoria Arcade and which were common to buildings of this type.

I’ve been pondering this possibility for a long time and have really not come to any concrete conclusions. There were always more and better documented arcades to discuss in my thesis. But this is another rabbithole that I’ve jumped into the last couple of weeks and has led me down an archival adventure to be sure!

Perhaps other sources will also give an idea, such as diaries or letters from the period. I’ll also potentially do a systematic read through the newspapers for this year, rather than simply doing keyword searches in Trove. A few issues arise with searching online newspapers that mean you’ll never be quite certain to capture everything. One is that you inevitably come up with thousands of many options when searching, especially for the word ‘arcade’ or ‘Victoria Arcade’ or even ‘Victoria Arcade’, ‘John Black’, ‘Bourke Street’. Another issue is that often the quality of the printing of some original papers means that the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) doesn’t recognise everything accurately (hence Trove has an army of volunteer editors to correct the final results).

So, that’s where I’m at with it right now with this work-in-progress. When I do a bit more digging, I may have an update.

A postscript though: there is a twist in the fate of the site itself that might have had Black wryly shaking his head. After the Theatre Royal was demolished in 1933, the valuable site saw the construction of the large Mantons department store in modern Art Deco style. This business was eventually taken over by GJ Coles in the 1950s. The facade of Mantons was covered over and it was occupied by a succession of variety stores owned by the parent company of Coles-Myer : Coles Variety, then Target and, in 2021, KMart.

At some point during these changes, probably around 1994, renovations to the building included the formation of an arcade running through from Bourke to Little Bourke and, although modern and utilitarian, it runs just slightly to the left of where the promenade of Black’s planned arcade would have.

Exterior, Manton’s drapers, 226-236 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Lyle Fowler, c1952 H92.20/4125
Kmart Centre arcade looking from Little Bourke Street end, 2024. The Royal Theatre (and site of the Victoria Arcade) would have been where the main Kmart store is now. Photographer: Nicole Davis
Sign on KMart’s entrance about the site, 2024. The image is actually incorrect. This is not the Theatre Royal but the adjacent Hoyts Esquire/Deluxe movie theatre, later Mantons department store. Mantons later bought the Theatre Royal site to extend their store and built the the new Deco facaded building next to this Federation edifice. (Cooper 2020)

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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!

Working away at Royal Historical Society of Victoria on Melbourne laneway histories with very old and very modern sources!
Exploring Melbourne’s lanes on foot is rewarding … but gosh my feet get sore! Amazing mural by Gadigal artist Jeswri (Jesse Wright) in Equitable Place.

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!

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.

Queen Victoria Markets Building (now, QVB), 1898. Photographer: Charles Kerry. City of Sydney Archives, SRC18023

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.

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.


Earl of Hopetoun, Governor-General of Australia, unfurls the Flag at the opening of the Townsville Municipal Buildings, 16 September 1901. The building’s arcade is under the dome at right of image. Photographer: WJ Laurie. Citylibraries, Townsville. 

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!

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Rundle Street, Adelaide, looking east, 1888. The Adelaide Arcade with its great dome can be seen at right centre. Photographer unknown. State Library, B2898

The arcades were a significant component of the leisure and commercial life of the nineteenth-century Australian city. In Adelaide, an adjoining complex of two arcades was constructed in 1885: Adelaide Arcade and Gay’s Arcade. These still exist today and have become an iconic part of the city’s urban environment.

Adelaide Arcade, Rundle Street Mall, 2023. Photographer: Nicole Davis

Last October I travelled to Adelaide for research as one of the fortunate recipients of a 2023 Jack Cross Fellowship from the Friends of South Australia’s Archives (alongside Robyn Dunlop from University of Newcastle). The organisation inaugurated the fellowship in 2022 in honour of Jack Cross, their longest-serving President. This post is an edited version of the article I wrote for their December 2023 newsletter, which explained that the ‘Fellowships are awarded annually to support researchers of South Australian history to pursue research in archives, with a focus on the use of South Australian resources.’

Architectural Plan for Adelaide Arcade, 1885, Withall & Wells Architects. State Library of South Australia, PRG 1431/1/2

As part of my 2022 thesis on Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades, I did some extensive research into these buildings but in-person archival research was stymied by COVID-19. The generosity of the FSAA gave me the opportunity to begin to undertake an initial scoping visit, which will add nuance to the book I’m writing based on my thesis.

 Cost sheet for Adelaide Arcade, with estimate of total cost of buildings (30,000 pounds), with price of fixtures, architectural fees and estimates of rent, 1885. State Library South Australia, PRG 1431/2/1

During the visit I examined the resources available in some of the Adelaide archives, which will allow me to further explore the histories of this site and those who were connected with it – architects and owners, shopkeepers and workers, shoppers, and other visitors – during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its businesses and the goods and services traded within. 


Cash books relating to the management of Adelaide Arcade by Bullock & Wilkinson, Land Agents, 1924–1927. State Library of South Australia, BRG 64/23/1 & 2

Although this was intended as a scoping visit, it was a very fruitful and yielded a rich range of material. I spent a week in Adelaide, visiting State Library South Australia, the City Archives, the Architecture Museum at University of South Australia, and special collections at University of Adelaide. During my visit, I was able to digitise a large amount of primary manuscript and published material relating to the long history of the sites, including original plans, images, letters, and other sources not available online. I also accessed a wide range of publications from the twentieth century to today that revealed the importance of this heritage site to Adelaide, its history, and present day placemaking.

Newsclippings from The News, 10 July 1935, showing impression of the proposed remodel of the Adelaide Arcade, with new shopfronts replacing the nineteenth-century originals. Architecture Museum, University of South Australia, GRIGGS, Harold Thomas COLLECTION S167/4241

Although time did not permit me to visit State Records South Australia, I plan to return in 2024 to examine their small collection of related records, as well as to delve further into the City Archives, which has a large amount of material but requires some intensive investigation and sifting through indexes and boxes to find the relevant information. Also, the National Trust of South Australia, while they did not have any records of relevance, suggested that I visit the South Australian Heritage Council, which will also be in the plan for next visit.

Objects in the museum, Adelaide Arcade, 2023. Photographer: Nicole Davis

Two other valuable contributions arose from the work. The first was the ability to (finally!) visit the arcades in-person for the first time since the very beginning of my thesis. I closely observed the architectural details, the changes made to the site over the years, and some of the similarities with one of Melbourne’s (sadly demolished) arcades, the Eastern on Bourke Street. Experiencing the site in person provided a more complex understanding of its place in the city and also allowed me to view the museum, which has printed material and objects related to the arcade, the latter of which are often very difficult to find or identify.

Adelaide Arcade viewed from upper level at Rundle Street end, c1885 (probably opening day, 12 December 1885). The man at right is likely the Arcade’s caretaker, Francis Cluney, who died in 1887 in the arcade in an industrial accident. Photographer: Samuel White Sweet (arcade tenant). State Library South Australia, B7496
Central promenade of Adelaide Arcade, 2023. Note the gallery/balcony, added during renovations during the 1960s. Photographer: Nicole Davis

It was also great to see what shops are there today and notice the people enjoying the building. Secondly, I met library and archives staff who were wholly generous with their time, expertise, and knowledge of the city. They picked out material and publications for me to view that I hadn’t already identified and were really valuable to the research. It was also really fantastic to immerse myself for almost a week in the lovely city that is Adelaide!

The disused basement, formerly tearooms, still visible through glass, Adelaide Arcade, 2023. Photographer: Nicole Davis

From here, I intend to further explore this topic and analyse the large amount of material that I collected while in Adelaide, which will contribute to my book on Australia’s arcades, as well as an online exhibition and website project that I hope to produce in the next year. The research conducted in Adelaide will also likely provide evidence to support a larger application for funding to delve further into the history of the arcades and the next phase of research to be conducted in 2024.

Adelaide Arcade, Rundle Street Mall, 2023. Photographer: Nicole Davis

I am greatly appreciative to the Friends of South Australia’s Archives for the Jack Cross Fellowship and will keep you up to date with further work on my research and, in the future, you’ll see an article on the arcades and their history right here.

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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.

The amazing Great Blasket Centre, a museum in Dingle, Ireland, about the now largely abandoned islands just off the coast. Probably one of my favourite museums ever. So well designed and curated, with stories and objects that really get to your heart, especially if, like me, you have family connections with the region.

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. 

Inside courtyard of Leicester’s wonderful fourteenth-century Guildhall

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.

The luckiest shot ever. Torridon Estate, a National Trust for Scotland natural heritage site. There is a deer park and museum there but this was in a random carpark I pulled in to so I could take a photo of the mountains. This deer was VERY comfortable with cars and people!
The fabulous 1879 Royal Arcade in London. Less well-known than the nearby and much older Burlington, it’s nevertheless also spectacular and really reminds me of some of the aspects of both the Block and Royal in Melbourne

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.

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

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Feature image: celebrating 130 years of the Block Arcade, while lining up to buy Easter treats at Haighs, April 2023

The blog is back! I’ve been on hiatus for the past couple of years with posting to the blog and working on the website. Like everyone, I’ve had a crazy ride since the last time I posted here. So what’s been happening? Here’s a quick rundown, along with some photos of life over the last few years.

In March 2020, I was living in Thailand where I’d been living since late 2019 and expecting to stay for another six months. My thesis writing was going really well and I’d expected to finish it in the time I had left in Thailand. But, in the end, I rushed back to Australia on the last day that Singapore Airport was open before COVID-19 closures.

My office view on Koh Phangan in 2019. It was tough, I’m telling you!
My 2020 office view in Melbourne during my quarantine. This doesn’t show the bed taking up most of the rest of the room 😀

Over the next two years I kept working on the thesis in lockdown in Melbourne while doing other history projects, having a part-time university job, and doing some university marking. We moved twice from a tiny one bedroom into ultimately a two bed plus study, where we both had a study to do our online teaching/meetings and work-from-home. Having an outdoor space finally after years also meant LOTS of pandemic-gardening-PhD-procrastination times!

In 2022, when everyone was slowly emerging from lockdowns, I was still hunkered down finishing the thesis. I did my completion seminar (sort of like a viver or defence but less scary I think!) in May, which went really really well (I might post the text of that sometime soon). Then in July I went to a big in-person history conference, caught up with friends, and promptly caught COVID.

A bit of a holiday from thesis writing. The Australian Historical Association Conference 22 in Geelong. Which was fabulous but ended up giving me COVID 😀
A quick whip through the Sydney Arcades on a last-minute research trip in November 2022. This is the Queen Victoria Building, ostensibly built as a ‘market’ in 1898, but always intended as a grand arcade.

Despite it really knocking me around, I spent the next six months working hard and finishing my thesis, which I handed in on 14 December! It was such an amazing feeling after all that time working on it. While I hadn’t and still haven’t lost passion for the subject itself, I was very keen to be actually finished the thesis. It was so amazing to have a Christmas break without working on (or feeling guilty about not working on) my thesis.

So, in early March, after less than three months, I got the results back as a pass with no changes! Though I did have to do some typo corrections and proofs, there were no substantive changes to the content. This is so pleasing when you know, yes, you’ve done a good job, but your examiners might feel you need to do a bit more.

Exhausted but happy after thesis submission on 14 December. I’d had about six hours sleep in 48 hours at this point. I also couldn’t stand my office anymore so moved into the loungeroom for the final couple of weeks. This image largely hides the mess!
Getting to enjoy the Brunello my parents bought in 2007 and saved for my PhD graduation. It was sublime. So amazing to actually fully enjoy Christmas with my thesis out of the way.

In early April, I got the okay to submit the final version to our university repository and the thesis should be conferred (I officially became a Doctor of Philosophy) in mid- to late May. My graduation’s likely set for early August and I can’t wait to wear the funny hat 😀 Meanwhile, I’m heading off to the UK to be on a panel at the Journal of Urban History 50th anniversary conference in July and then head to some archives for research in England and Scotland, with a quick side trip to Ireland.

Depositing the final version of the thesis in April 2023.
Urban wanderings in Sydney again after the final version submission, April 2023. QVB featuring again, together with the new Sydney trams/light rail.

This blog is going to be more regularly update from now on with topics from the thesis and things that I didn’t really get to go into much detail on or had to leave out all together due to work length, including more biographies; individual histories of arcade buildings; some reminiscences from the experience of thesis writing and research; and more discussion on what was sold in the arcade shops and the experiences of those that worked and visited. I’ll be redesigning the site and hopefully adding some sort of virtual exhibition space, as well as digital humanities/visualisation work that I’d like to do in the coming year.

Please keep posting comments and tell me more about what you’d like to learn on the site.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Facebook, as well as taking note of my business website, Epigraphein, where I offer professional history research and writing, editing and proofing..

So stay tuned and glad to be back!

Feature image: celebrating 130 years of the Block Arcade, while lining up to buy Easter treats at Haighs, April 2023

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I’m doing a LOT of travelling as part of my research for my thesis. Recently, I did a trip to Queensland to look at the history of the nineteenth century arcades there. It was a fruitful journey that answered a number of questions that couldn’t be resolved through online research.

It allowed me to visit the sites & understand their location and placement within the cityscape of both the nineteenth century & today, and I also collected reams of information, images, plans, maps, directories, council records and other resources that will assist with my research.

Additionally I was able to gain valuable information through direct contact with the staff of the archives and libraries there that yielded some revelations. Some of the information was contextual and this was vital. Despite growing up in Brisbane, I knew comparatively little about its history compared to Sydney & Melbourne, as that has been  where my history and heritage work has focused up until recently.

There were four arcades constructed in Queensland prior to 1901 – while I say nineteenth-century a lot,  my study actually extends to 1901, in order for me to consider one of these specific Queensland sites, constructed in the year of Federation and on the cusp of the new century that brought great changes to the Australian urban landscape.

Two were constructed in Brisbane and both were the brainwave of enterprising businessman Henry Morwitch, who lived a truly international life throughout the British Empire and beyond. Born in Poland, he migrated to England, then Victoria, followed by New Zealand, back over to Brisbane (with a sojourn in Gympie), then to Sydney and, at the end of his life, returning to Britain. His two arcades were built on the busiest commercial street in Brisbane, Queen Street, in close proximity to each other.

These were the Royal Exhibition Arcade, constructed in 1877 and demolished in the years around World War I, and the Grand Arcade (fronting Queen and Edward Streets), built in 1885 and demolished in parts between the mid 1920s to late 1930s.

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Grand Arcade (front right) & Royal Exhibition Arcade (fourth building from rh corner), both featuring wrought iron verandahs, Queen Street, Brisbane, c1908, State Library Queensland.

Both sites are now taken up by commercial buildings featuring similar tenants, although certainly on a different scale. The Royal Exhibition Arcade was on the site of Macarthur Central, a large, recently constructed, shopping centre with diverse shops and eateries. As for the Grand, the Tattersall’s Arcade, part of the Tattersall’s Club buildings constructed between World Wars I and II, sits on the exact footprint of the Grand Arcade.

Macarthur Central, 255 Queen Street Brisbane. Site of the Royal Exhibition Arcade. Nicole Davis, 2014. Macarthur Central, site of the Royal Exhibition Arcade & several other buildings, 255 Queen Street Brisbane. Site of the Royal Exhibition Arcade. Nicole Davis, 2014.

Southeast corner of Queen & Edward streets. The Grand Arcade wrapped around the large corner block. © Nicole Davis, 2014.
Tattersalls Arcade, Edward Street, site of the Grand Arcade. © Nicole Davis, 2014.
Tattersalls Club & Arcade, Queen Street, site of the Grand Arcade. © Nicole Davis, 2014.

The other two arcades that were built in Queensland were in seemingly unlikely locations, but at the time of their construction represented the progress and modernity of two regional towns that were booming, both economically and in terms of population.

The first was constructed in Charters Towers, nearly 1400 km from Brisbane, in the mining country of Far North Queensland. In 1888 the town was a city with a rapidly expanding population, drawn by rich lure of its gold discoveries and usurping the land of its traditional owners. By 1899 it had a population of 25,000 and was one of the biggest cities in the Australian colonies.

Entrepreneurs in Charters Towers used the gold wealth to create a European-style city, commissioning architects, often from the cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, to design buildings in the manner of the high boom metropolises far to the south. One of these was the Royal Arcade, today known as the Stock Exchange Arcade, constructed in 1888 for businessman Alexander Malcolm and designed by Sydney architect Mark Cooper Day. It was never completely finished due to Malcolm becoming insolvent, and today the back remains open to the land and laneway at the rear. It’s the only remaining arcade from the nineteenth century in Queensland and both it and the town, with its mining history and several heritage sites, are fantastic spots to visit.

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Charters Towers Stock Exchange building (former Royal Arcade), c1890. Photographer unknown. State Library Queensland

The last site I visited was in Townsville, 140 km east of Charters Towers on the coast. It’s a quite expansive city of 170,000 people. In 1901, the year of Federation, the Earl of Hopetoun, first Governor-General of Australia, opened the large municipal civic buildings constructed on Flinders Street. The structure, which took up a significant section of the block, included a Town Hall, a theatre, a licensed hotel, a market and a shopping arcade.

Unfortunately, not much survives in records nor in the collective memory about this arcade and before I arrived I doubted that it even was a real arcade in the sense that I was defining them. But I found some tantalising evidence in the Townsville City Library that did confirm it was an ‘authentic’ shopping arcade. This photocopy of a cross-section came from the original plans, which certainly existed in the 1990s, but now appear to be lost.

Town Hall, Flinders Street, Townsville, 1914. Photographer: W.J. Laurie. City Libraries Townsville, 315258. The Arcade entrance is below the tower.
Arcade building and premises of Brownhill, Kirk and Company, Market Reserve Building, Flinders Street, 1913. Photographer unknown. City Libraries Townsville, 323846.

This amazing collection of buildings, built during a period of intense change for Australia, were unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1978 and today, the current municipal buildings, a typical example of 1980s civic architecture, stand in its place.

Despite the fact that the majority of these arcades no longer exists, seeing the sites on which they stood (and still stand, in the case of the Royal Arcade), allowed me to better understand their placement within the urban environment that no amount of looking at images or maps can provide. I also feel much more illuminated as to their place within the history of the cities in which they were built and the overarching historical narrative of those places.

The experience of road tripping to Charters Towers in particularly was fascinating as the bitumen road from tropical seaside Townsville took me to the dry almost outback of western Queensland and allowed me to understand the true feat of what was constructed in this now small town in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

I’m currently collating all the material and information gathered and this will figure in a longer case study of specific arcades that will contribute to my thesis.

This trip was made possibly by a Graduate Research Arts Travel Scholarship from the University of Melbourne. Lastly, a big shout out to those who assisted so much in my research on this whirlwind two week trip:

Brisbane City Archives

State Library of Queensland

Trisha Fielding and all the staff at Townsville City Libraries (Trisha, a historian, also has a fantastic North Queensland history blog in which she discusses the Town Hall buildings)

James Cook University Special Collections

Charters Towers & Dalrymple Archives Group, especially archivist and curator, Michael Brumby, who was excessively generous with his time and resources, and was willing to have great long chats about history with me.

Charters Towers Library

National Trust Queensland volunteers at the Stock Exchange Arcade and Zara Clark Museum in Charters Towers and the Hou Wang Temple in Atherton

The Stock Exchange Arcade Gallery (which allowed me to see the upstairs of the Royal Arcade)

And to the Royal Hotel and the Stock Exchange Arcade Cafe in Charters Towers, for giving me a luxurious place to lay my head and excellent coffee to fortify me!