Cultural History
This node draws together insights from those working in cultural and media studies, anthropology, public history and sociology to explore culture as both a subject of history and an approach to historical practice.
It aims to open up many aspects of ordinary life and everyday experience to historical understanding. The participants employ innovative theoretical and methodological perspectives to explore how people have participated in and made meaning of their world, especially in relation to social change across space and time.
We focus on memory as a cultural process and social experience; and the interplay between the individual and the collective memory of communities and groups. Our projects engage with media or popular cultural forms as a vehicle for collective memory and the mediation of everyday life.
TfC is strongly committed to cross-boundary, interdisciplinary work, and most of our research projects relate to other program areas, and to TfC Events.
Current TfC projects in this area include:
A History of Australian Television
The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu / The Jews of Shanghai
This Mongrel Breed: crises in the Australian empire project
Places of the Heart: memorials in Australia after 1960
Selected completed TfC projects in this area include:
A History of Australian Television
Researchers: Liz Jacka, Paula Hamilton, Nick Herd
Partner: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Currency House, Screen Sound
This cultural history of Australian television begins just before the first television broadcast in 1956 and ends in 1992, with the emergence of multi-channel broadcasting. It concentrates mainly on commercial television but within a broader media environment. Television contributes to a sense of ourselves as part of a nation, helps to situate us in a globalised world, gives us images by which we interpret the unfamiliar, is an ingredient in democratic discourse and fosters creative expression. Using these terms, this study attempts to understand the cultural significance of the "golden age" of free to air television in Australia.
"Shanghai residence permit for Polish refugee, Halina Jakubowicz, issued by Japanese Occupation Authority, c.1943"
Document held by Andrew Jakubowicz
The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu / The Jews of Shanghai
Writer and Producer: Andrew Jakubowicz
Creative Director: Tatiana Pentes
Partner: Carnivale, Sydney Jewish Museum, National Maritime Museum, Touring Australia
Shanghai during and after the Second War was a multicultural city - among its diversity were Jewish communities from Europe and Asia. This project comprises a series of exhibitions and a website about the Shanghai Jews and the implications of their experiences for understanding the construction of 'race' in periods of social conflict. The exhibitions and performances have been held at Sydney's Performance Space and Jewish Museum, at the National Maritime Museum, as a visiting exhibition at regional museums all over NSW and Victoria. The website explores the experiences of seven families - from Austria, Poland, Iraq, Russia and Manchuria whose paths crossed in Shanghai, and whom this project brought together in Sydney in 2001. The project continues through regular updates and discussions of new material discovered in Shanghai, and in academic papers analysing the dynamics of diasporic communities. Documentation includes video and photographic records of historic and contemporary events.
"The Madonna of Coogee Holy Post, with the memorial to the Eastern suburbs residents killed in the Bali bombing of October 2002, Dolphins Point, Coogee."
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
This Mongrel Breed: crises in the Australian empire project
Researcher: Andrew Jakubowicz
Most discussion of Australian modernity utilises ideas about nation and identity. However these approaches miss a number of critical analytical insights - that Australia is a cultural empire project having to manage three imperatives of external competition, subjugation of indigenous peoples and normalisation of diverse populations. This systematic exploration of the empire project proposes four thematic problems - culture as an arena of contestation in defining modernity; the challenges of holding the empire; narrating the empire; and the challenges of internal diversity. Specific areas for examination include the culture wars, multiculturalism and racism, gender and representation, and community agendas in political Islam. Research data is drawn from interviews, original documents, media accounts and academic debates.
Places of the Heart: memorials in Australia after 1960
Researcher: Paul Ashton, Paula Hamilton
This project investigates the proliferation of non-war war memorials in Australia within the framework of an emerging culture of commemoration from the mid twentieth century. It explores important shifts in the purpose of memorials and their role and meaning in Australian society, particularly the move towards a more democratic and personal expression of mourning in public arenas. The project assesses the cultural significance of particular sites through a nationally devised schema, which takes accouint of their place in the landscape, their form and materiality and will contribute to contemporary heritage conservation research, policy and practice.
Sydney / Australian Suburbia
Researcher: Paul Ashton
Suburban development from the close of World War One and throughout the 1920s was both striking in its extent and profound in its implications. Post war reconstruction secured an inheritance that was to pass to Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies and, at the close of the twentieth century, to John Howard. The sun still rises on the picket fence. But historians and others have accorded suburbanisation scant consideration. This project scrutinizes the deeper ideologies and aspirations underpinning the suburb and its dreamtime. What drove this posturing world - real or imagined or both - of church halls, progress associations, golf clubs, free weekly local newspapers, neat hedged perimeters and service clubs?
Sydney's Italian Fruit Shops
Researcher: Paul Ashton, Paula Hamilton
Food and the localities in which it is grown, distributed, purchased and consumed are a fundamental part of a community's history. In Sydney the Italian community has been an integral part of this city's history through its fruit shops, delicatessens and restaurants.
This project is examining the history of Sydney's Italian fruit shops in collaboration with the Italian community group CoAsIt. The title of the project, Daylight to Dusk, is how one veteran Sydney fruiterer, Tom Cincotta, describes the daily routine of fruit shop life. It also encapsulates the trajectory of this important part of Sydney's urban heritage and social history from its establishment in the late 1800s to its decline in the last twenty years. The project uses oral histories, heritage photographs and items of material culture to document the experiences of Italian fruiterer families. To date the project has collected over forty oral histories and 150 photographs.
Particular Pasts
Researcher: Katrina Schlunke
This is a connective heading that brings together my interest in how massacres of Indigenous Australians have been understood through non-Indigenous mimetic silences, story-telling, memorialisation and popular erasure. The particular sites of these massacres are within the broad region of New England NSW and include the Bluff Rock Massacre outside Tenterfield and the Myall Creek Massacre outside Bingarra.
Selected completed TfC projects in this area include:
Australians and the Past
Researcher: Paul Ashton, Heather Goodall, Paula Hamilton, Jane Connors, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Partners: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, New South Wales History Teachers' Association, Tranby Aboriginal College, the Powerhouse Museum, Museums Australia
The Australians and the Past Project conducted a national survey to investigate the way Australians learn about the past, value it and act on their knowledge.
Despite the high public profile of debate over history and rising political concern over the role of history in national consciousness, there is surprisingly little known about the way ordinary Australians learn about and value the past. Australians have an avid interest in the past but they may learn more about it from their families, from films and television, and from public institutions such as museums than they do from formal education or official occasions.
The project investigated these and other questions with a national phone survey which drew on randomly selected households. There was a smaller series of face-to-face interviews conducted with members of groups whose views may not otherwise be reflected in the random phone survey. These groups include young people in urban and rural locations; members of the Vietnamese communities in Melbourne and Sydney; members of the Aboriginal community in rural, remote and urban situations; and residents in areas served by community museums.
The outcomes have been a qualitative, searchable database of interview transcripts and related material, coded in QSR NUD*IST; an edited volume of articles analysing aspects of the data; a radio program produced by Dr Connors and Ruth Balant; and articles by each of the Chief Investigators. Analysis of the data is continuing.
