Category: World War One

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Hi all! I’m back after a hectic semester of teaching at three different universities. It is always really rewarding but leaves little time for blog posts. I thought though that I’d jump online to plug a couple of recent publications on various aspects of urban history that I’ve had come out over the last year.

Late last year saw my book chapter in a collected edition released after a couple of years in the pipeline. International Migrations in the Victorian Era was edited by Marie Ruiz and published by Brill.  It features some fabulous articles by scholars on migration and the Victorian period from all over the world.

International Migrations in the Victorian era. Edited by Marie Ruiz (Leiden: Brill, 2019)

My chapter, ‘Transnationalism, the Urban & Migration in the Victorian Era: The Lives of Henry & Sophia Morwitch’ (Chapter Six, pages 156–186), traces the lives of the owners of the two Brisbane shopping arcades, the Royal Exhibition Arcade and the Grand Arcade, which I’ve written about on the blog previously.

The chapter looks at the various migrations throughout the British Empire (and beyond) that Henry and Sophia made over a fifty-year period. It examines their identities as both migrants and citizens of the different places within which they lived and how they worked to construct these within a variety of urban communities.

High Street, Dunedin, New Zealand, 1862. Showing the premises of HE Nathan & Co. Nathan was Sophia’s uncle, as well as an early Dunedin pioneer and successful businessman. Henry & Sophia married in Dunedin in 1864. Photographer: William Meluish. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 0.001627

I’d love to do a longer post on them soon looking at their lives and experiences – particularly as I’ve found quite a lot more out about Sophia since I wrote this book chapter three years ago. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, enjoy reading my chapter and several others from the book in Google Books.

Intersection of Pitt & King Streets, c1914–1917, showing Mayman’s Liverpool Arms Hotel, owned by Henry & Sophia since 1896, on the right. National Museum of Australia, 1986.0117.0541
The second, more recent, publication, released in April this year, was an article written with Professor Andy May at University of Melbourne  and George Vanags (MA2011) – ‘Returning to the city: World War One, the repatriation of soldiers and the shaping of Melbourne’. This was written for a special issue of History Australia ‘Coming Home’,(Vol. 16 No. 1), which focused on life after the end of World War One.
Welcoming returned wounded soldiers, Melbourne, 1918. Photographer Unknown. State Library Victoria, H29159
Our article examined the return of soldiers to Melbourne both during and after the war and how they assisted in shaping the postwar city.

In Melbourne, a city in which World War One permeated everyday life, programs for the reintegration of soldiers into the community characterised the home front and continued after war’s end. This article explores the manifestation of the returned soldier, utilising the city as a particular and novel frame to discuss the complex place of these men returning to a changing urban landscape that needed constant definition and renegotiation. It examines how the return of these men reshaped the city itself and contributes to our understanding of what it meant to be soldier, as well as a citizen, in the post-war period. (‘Returning to the City’, 132)

Although this is a little removed from my PhD thesis, I’ve been exploring the impact of war on the city of Melbourne for several years in a number of related projects with the Melbourne History Workshop. This has included the online exhibition The Everyday War, which displays of hundreds of digitised records from the City of Melbourne, held by Public Record Office Victoria, that show the way that the war was intertwined with the everyday life of the city.
I’ll also be exploring the idea of the war and its relevance to the arcades in my thesis a little. It’s interesting to note how much urban spaces were layered with activities that were related to World War One, including fundraising efforts, parades for departing and returned soldiers, patriotic imagery, and even anti-war protests. The arcades in a number of cities were intertwined with these events and experiences of war and I’ve got a wealth of information there to share at a later date.