Ships, planes and automobiles – the perils and pluses of place - making in an outer Melbourne suburb

Building a new suburb is increasingly seen as creating a “place” as well as a set of houses and neighbourhoods. Developers view “place-making” as a way to differentiate one estate from another and to capture a market segment; planners see the practice as the basis of good master planning. Local governments too support the concept to give residents a sense of pride and identity. While usually seen as a contemporary exercise, imprinted on the blank slate of greenfield sites, the experience of at least one outer suburb suggests that place-making is as much historical as contemporary and may be both a welcome element of a community and a focus of disaffection. The example of Point Cook in Melbourne’s west offers a range of iconic “places” – historical and contemporary markers of identity and difference – which have formed both the basis of local pride but also tension. Thus the RAAF base, Point Cook Homestead and Werribee Mansion long pre-dated the expansion of the city but they have been embraced as centres of pride, historical achievement and as tourist attractions. In contrast, a massive pirate-ship playground built in the centre of a park by a developer as a marker of difference and centre of community attraction was widely appreciated before being burned to the ground! This paper will report on a sample of resident experiences of place-making in outer suburban Melbourne which highlights some of the local complexities of place-making.

Deep ecology and Australian suburbia: learning from Aboriginal Australia philosophy

Naess’ Deep Ecology [50] represents a fundamental philosophical and conceptual shift from the dominant Western thinking that can be traced back to the Greek and Roman Empires. Like all philosophy, Naess’ Deep Ecology was born of and is most relevant to a specific time and place being northern Europe. Although the fundamentals of the Deep Ecology philosophy were new to modern Western thinking, it is not new to traditional Indigenous cultures, including the world’s oldest culture, that of Aboriginal Australia. While the past four decades has seen an increasing recognition of Aboriginal philosophical approaches, there is very little understanding of what this philosophical approach is and means for the management of the Australian environment in which humans are a central part. Since European arrival, Australia has been one of the world’s most urban societies. Unlike northern Europe, urban Australia is low density and suburban, a legacy of British and North American influences. Nearly 90% of Australians live in detached houses surrounded by gardens. Managed by individual residents, this land use accounts for about 70% of the total area of cities like Melbourne. Deeply culturally embedded, the Australian desire for living in low-density suburbs is unlikely to change soon. Contemporary cities are widely recognized as causing severe environmental degradation and are not sustainable. Yet in Australia introduced philosophical and design approaches are still used to address the unsustainable impacts of urban forms introduced from another time and place. While impractical to remove the existing suburban form in Australian cities, there is a significant opportunity to retrofit them using Australian Aboriginal philosophical and land management understandings developed and tested over tens of thousands of years. This paper establishes a contemporary Australian Deep Ecology philosophical approach to sustainably living in the suburbs that recognizes and works with the legacies of Australian Aboriginal, English, North American and contemporary Australian influences.

Pavement cafes as the activity zone in the social life of neighbourhood centres

This paper reports the findings from a research project that examines the relationship between urban design and the physical environment, and aspects of social and communal life in suburbs. Australian suburbs are perceived to be lacking in vitality and sociability. To address this, three suburban commercial streets were selected for investigation. Through documents and maps of the residents’ activities and behaviour, this study aims to identify the popular zones of activity and investigate the physical characteristics that encourage a sociable atmosphere in activity zones. The observation of activities in the three streets has been registered in tables relative to the date and time of occurrence. According to the behavioural mappings, the zones of activity are mostly shaped around pavement cafes and popular everyday food stores. Since more than half the activities have been observed to be initiated from the pavement cafes, this paper will investigate how the physical qualities of commercial streets such as the width of the pavements, personalization, soft edges and greenery have contributed to the pavement café culture in the selected neighbourhood centres.

Exploring cultures of belonging in Darwin, Australia

This paper argues that the use of visual methods such as participatory video is crucial to co-producing sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in Australian cities. These knowledges of belonging that focus on affectivity and passion have the potential to expand the worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit, but contemporary urban research shows an overwhelming focus on ‘talk’. This paper therefore takes the risk by engaging in a research process that is experimental, flexible and adaptive to explore diverse sensory cultures of belonging through a focus on Darwin, a small north Australian city. This is a city with a polyethnic history where Indigenous-migrant-settler race relations are recognised as more complex in comparison to large south Australian cities. The paper draws on participatory videos of two eventsin suburban Darwin - a Vigil on the side of the road opposite Airport
Lodge, an asylum seeker detention centre, and an afternoon walk along Casuarina beach where Aboriginals who live ‘rough’ camp. Using short video clips, long-term residents, migrant newcomers and asylum seekers (on bridging visas) compose an expressive narrative of the road and beach in Darwin, as places where refrains of welcome expand worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit. Using digital technologies the flow and juxtaposition of video clips of these events provides the possibility to craft sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in a north
Australian city with a history of assimilationist and racially discriminatory policies.

Ethnic discrimination in private rental housing markets in Australia

Over the last two decades new and significant demographic, economic, social and environmental changes and challenges have shaped the production and consumption of housing in Australia and the policy settings that attempt to guide these processes. These changes and challenges, as outlined in this book, are many and varied. While these issues are new they raise timeless questions around affordability, access, density, quantity, type and location of housing needed in Australian towns and cities. The studies presented in this text also provide a unique insight into a range of housing production, consumption and policy issues that, while based in Australia, have implications that go beyond this national context. For instance how do suburban-based societies adjust to the realities of aging populations, anthropogenic climate change and the significant implications such change has for housing? How has policy been translated and assembled in specific national contexts? Similarly, what are the significantly different policy settings the production and consumption of housing in a post-Global Financial Crisis period require? Framed in this way this book accounts for and responds to some of the key housing issues of the 21st century.

In praise of the everyday

The following forgotten text is flawed. It is a failure. It has many mistakes but few regrets. It was written 20 years ago and first appeared in the Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter Issue 135 in May 1998, 25 years after I solarized my first 25 feet of 16mm film of the Carlton Cemetery fence, just down the road from Goodtime Studios and did my first bit of sepia toning in a Russian processing tank that still lies with its warped plastic spiral in my garage in suburban Melbourne. As Pearls Before Swine sang in one of their songs, a faint memory now; 'The More things change, the more they stay the same'. They were not the first to say this. Technology continues to develop massively and the rubble of its passing slowly recedes to invisibility. I continue to live through this conundrum every day. It sings me to sleep. It wakes me up.

Hien's shed: (re)framing images of female immigrant home-based clothing workers

Campaigns in support of home-based clothing workers (or ‘outworkers’ as they are more commonly known in Australia) deploy powerful images of the exploitative underside of fashion. The migrant woman huddled over her machine has become the quintessential image of campaigns directed against this exploitation. This article engages critically with the politics of such image-making. By examining how frames simultaneously shrink and magnify the image produced it raises questions about what these images exclude or expel and whether and how this matters. It also offers an alternative frame of the female immigrant outworker – an up-close portrait of Hien, a Vietnamese woman who works at home sewing clothes in her suburban shed. The article introduces Hien through a condensed collection of her self-narratives, before moving on to consider how a trade union and community-based movement against outworker exploitation mobilised images of suffering and injured Vietnamese women to promote its cause. It asks how these images speak for and represent women like Hien and suggests that their political ‘success’ relies to some extent on the women being ‘unseen’ and made to ‘unspeak’. Finally, through the metaphor of space, it proffers an expanded dimension to the already framed images invoking Hien’s shed as a space that both produces and disciplines her: ultimately, a ‘transitional space’ between the external and internal worlds that shape and constrain her.

Summer reading series #2 : seeing eye to eye

Martin Rumsby’s Eye I Aye (2007) appears a straightforward, almost naive film. A camera is zoomed into a flat image of a community bench in front of a shop, with cars and some pedestrians passing by. It could be any suburban street. At times the de-facto main characters Dida and Erana or their surrogates are seated there, both are of mixed race from Māori and Pākehā parents and the soundtrack frames their ‘history’. This meditation is interrupted by the weather, with sheets of raindrops caught by the camera’s autofocus, patterning the window, wiping out the outside scene. Later Rumsby also inserts his body and face between the camera and window, his eyes in shot re-securing the camera’s position. This technical tampering registers as unsettling and suspicious.

Schooling for self-determination through a justice politics of Indigenous representation

This paper presents data from a study of secondary school for girls, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous Australian. ‘Gamarada’ High School is located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia) and was established to provide quality education for disadvantaged girls. The paper draws on student and teacher interview data from a broader study that was concerned with examining how the school addressed the economic, cultural and political dimensions of Indigenous girls’ disadvantage. The focus here is on issues of political justice in relation to Indigenous representation and, more specifically, how such representation at the school supports the key Indigenous equity priority of self-determination. Feminist post-colonial theories are drawn on to argue the importance of educators engaging with a politics of representation that initiates theory from the social location of Indigenous experience, reflects an anti-racist/anti-colonial agenda and recognises and values the central role relationality plays in Indigenous lives.

Mobilising spaces of agency through genealogies of race and gender: issues of indigeneity, marginality and schooling

This article presents data from a case study of a non-traditional secondary school for Indigenous girls located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia). The focus is predominantly on the identity and practices of Nicole who is one of the school’s teachers. Nicole’s identity as an Indigenous woman and teacher and the school’s approach to supporting its marginalised students are theorised in relation to particular elements of feminist genealogy. These elements are associated with the possibilities for agency opened up through the subject’s critical reflection on, and resistance of, the discursive relations that constitute the self. The article draws on feminist theories to explicate the potential of such reflection and resistance to disrupt and transform gendered and racist norms and to legitimise alternative constructions of female indigeneity – to that represented in dominant colonial discourse.

‘Much more than a basic education’: supporting self-determination and cultural integrity in a non-traditional school for Indigenous girls

This paper presents data from an interview-based case study of a secondary school located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia). The school is a non-traditional education site designed to support disadvantaged girls, many of whom are Indigenous, and is highly regarded for its holistic approach to gender and cultural inclusion and equity. Through lenses that align Nancy Fraser's theories of redistributive and recognitive justice, with Indigenous feminists' equity priorities, the paper identifies and analyses the structures and practices at the school that support the girls' capacities for self-determination and their sense of cultural integrity. The paper is an important counterpoint within the context of mainstream gender equity and schooling discourses that continue to homogenise gender categories, sideline the multiple axes of differentiation that interplay to compound gender (dis)advantage and deflect attention away from marginalised girls. In particular, it provides significant insight into how schools can begin to reconcile the double bind of racism and sexism that continues to stymie the schooling and post-school outcomes of Indigenous girls.

The relationship between house prices and demographic variables: an Australian case study

Purpose – The process for examining the value of house prices in an urban city has given limited attention, if any, to demographic variables associated with urban geography. Although the disciplines of property/real estate and demography have moved closer, little progress has been made when modelling house prices using population-related data in the field of urban geography to explain the level of house prices.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes an innovative model to examine the influence of population variables on the level of house prices. It used a two-stage approach as follows: principal components analysis (PCA) identified social dimensions from a range of demographic variables, which were then retained for further analysis. This information was sourced from two Australian Bureau of Statistics censuses undertaken involving all Melbourne residents during 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011; multiple regression analysis examined the relationship between the retained factor scores from the PCA (as independent variables) and established residential house prices (as the dependent variable).

Findings – The findings confirm the demographic profile of each household, which is directly related to their decisions about housing location and house prices. Based on a case study of Melbourne, Victoria, it was demonstrated that households with specific demographic characteristics are closely related to a certain level of house prices at the suburban level.

Originality/value – This is an innovative study which has not been previously undertaken for an extended period of time to facilitate an analysis of change over time.