Creative activation of the past: Mechanics' Institutes, GLAM, heritage, and creativity in the twenty-first century
- Authors: Tsilemanis, Amy
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This is an interdisciplinary, mixed-method thesis that explores contemporary curation as a means to creatively activate heritage collections and places. The central case study is Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute (BMI), in Ballarat, Australia, where practice and action-led research was undertaken by the curator over the three-year period 2016–2019. Creative connections between five interlinked areas are critically examined: heritage; curatorial practice, by which heritage sites, collections and experiences are managed; historic cultural organisations; their city contexts; and the ways in which such cultural work is valued. The framework for analysis encompasses museology, critical heritage, and approaches to cultural value. Contemporary urban Mechanics’ Institutes (MIs) are placed in the museum context both through historic parallels and their contemporary positioning in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) industry sector. This is in order to ask how heritage collections, and the organisations that house and present them, can creatively connect with the publics they serve with greater connectivity and relevance. Exhibitions and events held at BMI within Ballarat city are treated as case studies. Together with qualitative interviews with staff in the Ballarat GLAM sector and urban MIs, insights derived illuminate the role and challenges of such cultural organisations in the twenty-first century. It is argued that, when employing the practice and energy of the curator, creative activations have the potential to open new points of entry to, and provide alternative perspectives upon, heritage places and collections. This is achieved through arts practice, organisational thinking, and bringing to life the links between past, present and future. In this process, new and dynamic measures of value can be explored and create dialogic encounters between people, heritage and ideas.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Performing landscape : landscape as medium for placemaking
- Authors: Beer, Tanja , Campbell, Angela
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Placemaking Sandbox: Emergent Approaches, Techniques and Practices to Create More Thriving Places p. 53-69
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- Description: Ballarat is Victoria’s largest inland city founded on the wealth of the famous Victorian gold rush and has been celebrated as the ‘birthplace’ of democracy in Australia through the story of the Eureka Rebellion. The less well-known facets of Ballarat are the city’s multicultural and Chinese layers, its deep stories of Indigenous people, and its landscape and culture- a contentious history that is articulated and hidden in Ballarat’s grand Victorian architecture and streetscapes. This visual chapter explores a landscape approach to placemaking that acknowledges the multifaceted relationship of Ballarat’s past, present, and future. It focuses on the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, a 160-year-old reserve best known for its Victorian-style gardens located on the Western shore of the man-made Lake Wendouree. It examines placemaking approaches in the context of a landscape architecture studio (Performing Landscape), where the students took part in developing a hypothetical design and a realised event-space for the gardens by responding to the local needs, histories, and landscapes, and also explores the site’s potential and inherent challenges. The chapter uses a series of images to induce placemakers to reflect and examine ‘how place performs’ through the intersections across social, cultural, and environmental conditions. © The Author(s) 2020.
"My Country all gone the white men have stolen it" : The invasion of Wadawurrung Country 1800-1870
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred)
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book
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- Description: "The Wadawurrung are the Aboriginal people whose Country includes the cities now known as Ballarat and Geelong. Fred Cahir examines the contact history in the period 1800-1870 of the Wadawurrung and the ngamadjidj (generally translated as white stranger belonging to the sea). Divided into chronological and thematic section, the book chronicles three waves of invasion: the early invasion period incorporating trespassers predominately from the sea, the sheepherders or squatters who followed in their wake and usurped the Wadawurrung of all their Country for sheep runs, and the third wave of invaders - the gold seekers. This historical study is transformative as it presents a compelling argument of how the Wadawurrung were active agents of change and sought cultural enrichment in the midst of the frontier war on their Country." --back cover.
Ghosts on the Goldfields : Ballarat as a haunted city
- Authors: Waldron, David , Waldron, Sharn
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Supernatural cities : Enchantment, anxiety and spectrality Chapter 11 p. 229-248
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- Description: The history of Ballarat, situated at the heart of the goldfields of central Victoria, Australia, is closely tied to the colonial experience. As the site of the Eureka Stockade rebellion, its history is linked to the foundation myths of Australian democracy. It boasts both the Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka (M.A.D.E), situated on one of the suspected sites of the rebels' stockade, and Australia's premier open air museum, the theme park of Sovereign Hill, which re-enacts life on the goldfields of the 1950s and 1860s. In Ballarat itself many of the businesses utilise symbols of the goldfields in their advertising and trademarks, as do many of the street names, festivals and public events. The Victorian architectural heritage is highly prized and showcased to the thousands of visiting tourists on Sturt and Lydiard Streets, and particularly those who come each year for Ballarat's Heritage Weekend festival held in May. Yet there is a dark side to this history. The prosperity of the gold was built on the land of the Wathawurrung Aborigines who were displaced and marginalised, and suffered under the weight of colonial occupation and environmental devastation. Likewise, despite the prominence of stories surrounding those who became wealty on the goldfields of central Victoria, many who came to Ballarat during the Victorian era found themselves displaced and living in extremen poverty, facing disease, hunger and vulnerability to crime, prostitution and dangerous working conditions. It is these stories from the underbelly of Ballarat's heritage that form the fodder of a thriving dark tourist industry, expressed in popular ghost tours and supplemented by a rich heritage of ghost stories in folklore and popular culture. In the tension between these two discordant narratives Ballarat has become, in popular imagination, a haunted city.
Histories of the Ballarat District Orphan Asylum, Ballarat Orphanage and Ballarat Children’s Home, 1866-1983
- Authors: McGinniss, David
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: The thesis outlines the development of three children’s residential institutions on the site of 200 Victoria Street, Ballarat East: the Ballarat District Orphan Asylum (1866-1909), the Ballarat Orphanage (1909-1968), and the Ballarat Children’s Home (1968-1983). These institutions are the historical precursors to the contemporary community service organisation now known as Child and Family Services Ballarat, or simply Cafs. The thesis focuses particularly on the shifting cultures of these institutions, to identify waves of change, surging and receding to form long patterns of alternating reform and repose. Established ways of operating overlapped with new and developing ideas, to create a dynamic environment constantly negotiating its relationships with government, communities and of course the families and children who came to rely on them. As a result, when transformative change occurred, it was difficult for leaders and policy-makers to recognise it as such at the time, as it was often experienced more as crisis and response. This provides a useful set of historical examples for current leadership and practitioners to learn from. Most critically, however, it locates the thousands of children who were institutionalised - eating, sleeping, playing, learning and working – as central to the narrative formation of identity for the historic institutions themselves, the contemporary organisation they have become, and the communities of Ballarat and beyond. Children were sent to these institutions from all over Victoria and Australia and made their homes in many different places when they left. Nevertheless, the stories and lives of the children from these institutions and the adults they have become are a key part of contemporary collective identity. The institutions are remembered with complex and contradictory mixtures of regret, loss, trauma and fondness, reflecting the mixed legacies that these institutions have left in contemporary Ballarat and beyond.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
How to make an entrance: Piranesi comes to Ballarat
- Authors: Coleridge, Edward
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Forum article
- Relation: Before/Now : journal of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 5-10
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- Description: "The inside front cover of this publication carries an image of CRCAH's front door, the main gateway to the former Ballarat Gaol. It is a magnificent example of nineteenth century masonry work. The massive bluestone blocks were carved and chiselled into a grand classical edifice, making a fitting southern finale in scale and significance to the great range of buildings on either side of Lydiard Street. The remarkable architectural statement of a confident gold rich city runs from the ostentatious neo-classical railway station at the northern end past the Art Gallery, the Mining Exchange, the palatial former Post Office (now housing the studios of the university Arts Academy) and on along the facades of banks, hotels, theatres and churches, in a melody of styles from palladian to gothic (with some 20th century intrusions) down to the suitably 'redbrick' buildings of the Ballarat School of Mines. Here the road swings round to the west so the range of prison buildings bookend the whole composition with a dramatic solemn coda " -From forum article
Avenue and Arch : Ballarat's commemoration. How are community attitudes to war and peace reflected in the civic management of the Avenue of Honour and the Arch of Victory?
- Authors: Roberts, Philip
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This thesis examines the importance of memory, commemoration, heritage and militarism in relation to Ballarat’s Avenue of Honour and Arch of Victory. Inspired by Ken Inglis and other historians who have analysed war commemoration, the thesis argues that, led by the Lucas clothing company, Ballarat civic leaders and community members commemorated the war service and sacrifice of local soldiers, airmen, sailors and nurses by planting the 22-kilometre Avenue during 1917–19 and by constructing the prominent Arch in 1920. Although Ballarat voted against conscription in 1916 and 1917 and was a ‘divided’ society, the Avenue and Arch were able to unite members of the local community. From the 1920s, through memory and mythology during the civic maintenance of the Avenue and Arch, Australian community attitudes to war and peace were reflected, and a determined effort was made to remember the service and sacrifice of military personnel for all Australian wars. Discussion of the need for peace remained in the background until recent years. Important influences on the civic management were the collective memory of the so-called Lucas Girls, a group of former female employees of the Lucas clothing company, and of the members of the Arch of Victory/Avenue of Honour Committee. Increasingly, the embracing of the Anzac legend and an emphasis on loss and grief was reflected in the civic management. By 2017 the Avenue and Arch were in pristine condition and, through the Garden of the Grieving Mother, had transformed to symbolise the importance of remembering the sacrifices and grief of war and the need for peace. The project was based on documentary research and oral history, using an examination of newspaper and other documentary accounts from 1917–2017, a study of Arch of Victory/Avenue of Honour Committee papers and conservation management plans, research of relevant books and articles, landscape fieldwork and interviews with 26 people.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
James Curtis and spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat
- Authors: Young, Gregory
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This thesis is about the origins, growth, and decline of spiritualism in nineteenth- century Ballarat. It gives special attention to Rustlings in the Golden City, the religious confessions of James Curtis, a notable Ballarat pioneer and the city’s most active and prominent spiritualist believer and evangelist. In Ballarat, spiritualism was commonly regarded as little more than entertaining humbug, usually derided by the press as delusive nonsense. Though clerics occasionally condemned it as heretical and dangerous, few people took spiritualist ideas and practice seriously. Even so, Ballarat had its small core of devout believers. For these, spiritualism provided a route to direct, intuitive, knowledge of the destiny of the spiritual self, comparable to gnostic liberating self-discovery. Rustlings in the Golden City stands as a classic statement of Victorian-era spiritualism and James Curtis has claim to be regarded as Australia’s greatest nineteenth-century spiritualist. While the commitment of many prominent Australian spiritualists of the period was compromised by credulity, bad faith, and self-interest, James Curtis was guileless and sincere. His writings open a window on a neglected area of nineteenth-century Australian social and religious history. The historiography of the thesis is realist and empiricist, with the predominant methodology critical text-analysis. Its chief source is contemporary newspapers and journals and the publications of spiritualists and their opponents and critics.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
The legend of Lalor's arm : Eureka myths and colonial surgery
- Authors: Cousen, Nicola
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 88, no. 2 (2017), p. 212-234
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- Description: The history of the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat on 3 December 1854 remains highly contested, and details of what happened to the injured stockade leader, Peter Lalor, together with the events surrounding his arm amputation, are particularly contested. Closer investigation of this medical emergency in 1854, the myths associated with it, and the doctors involved provides new and expanded insight into Eureka, colonial medicine and the role of doctors in colonial Victoria.
Dr Fanny Reading : 'A clever little bird'
- Authors: Debney-Joyce, Jeanette
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This thesis is the biographical study of the ‘transnational’ life of Dr. Fanny Reading (1884-1974). Dr Reading came to live in the Ballarat area c. 1888 when she was four years old. Originally she was born in Karelitz near Minsk, Russia as Zipporah Rubinovitch. The thesis tells the story of her transformation and also the story of her family members because they were a close-knit orthodox Jewish family. Reading’s biography is of a migrant woman who belonged to a persecuted minority group, and who through force of character rose above the challenging circumstances of her birth. It serves to redress the fact that historically she has been overlooked. It confirms that at a grassroots level she mobilised the Jewish women of Australia and was a significant Jewish leader. As a transnational figure of considerable stature, Reading’s biography contains themes of place, class, gender, ethnicity and diaspora that are woven throughout the thesis. It covers her early childhood and adolescence in Ballarat, then her move to Melbourne early in the twentieth century where she became involved in Jewish youth activities and taught Hebrew at the St Kilda Jewish Congregation. The family name was changed to Reading about 1919. Reading entered the University of Melbourne firstly to study music and then medicine (M.B., B.S.1922.) After graduation, she went into general practice with her eldest brother, who was also a doctor, in Sydney. Inspired by a Zionist emissary Bella Pevsner, Reading founded the Council of Jewish Women in 1923. This organisation became the National Council of Jewish Women in 1929. Reading had a keen interest in the health and education of women and girls, the Hebrew language and Israel. She was held in high regard in both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities and received an MBE in 1961.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
The night Dixie came to town : The Shenandoah and the American Civil War in Ballarat
- Authors: Moll, Nicholas
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 116-129
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- Description: That the American Civil War occurred exclusively within North America and affected specifically United States affair is a common misconception. Whilst the majority of the infantry conflict occured within and between the United and then Confederate States of America, the clash was such that it and its effects spread accross the globe. Also engaged in the American Civil War were Prussian military observers; political entanglements with the United Kingdom and Russia; Canadian volunteers within the Union army; smuggling and blockade running from the Bahamas into the Confederate States; cotton shortages in French industries that were heavily reliant on raw materials imported from the southern states; merchant raiding in the Pacific and Atlantic; along with countless other entanglements to Europe and their colonies into the conflict through one means or another. The tyranny of distance notwithstanding, Australia was no exception to the overflow of conflicts and consequences that resulted from the American Civil War.
Work, travel and home : a study of remembrance activity
- Authors: Winter, Caroline
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Current Issues in Tourism Vol. 19, no. 6 (May 2016), p. 590-604
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- Description: A quantitative study conducted in the Australian regional city of Ballarat resulted in a sample which had a high proportion of people with a personal connection to war and remembrance through family. This connection was reflected in higher levels of visitation to local, state and overseas war memorials. A factor analysis suggested that some kinds of remembrance could be grouped into a three part structure based upon creative activities of Work such as writing history, volunteer and paid military work and collecting, Travel to overseas and domestic memorials and informal appreciation of artefacts at Home. The Home group represents the most frequent form of remembrance, practiced at a social scale and which results from the creative activity of individuals. The study therefore supports the notion that individual and social remembrance and memory are closely linked and can be identified with patterns of travel. A potentially large group of people who appeared to have little interest in war remembrance was also identified.
A tour of the mines - An anthology of travel accounts and reminiscences of Ballarat, 1851-1901
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Book
- Relation: Vol. Volume One : 1851-1861
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- Description: This anthology is a trove of impressions of Ballarat and its environs. The visitors come from all walks of life - journalists, politicians, royalty, actors, artists, and clergy including an Aboriginal evangelist. Many perspectives are represented including Indian, Canadian, American, Swiss, Hungarian, French, English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German, and Viennese. This is Volume One covering the decade from 1851 to 1861. Ballarat in its first decade as a centre of gold mining is very much the story of the invasion of the gold diggers, and the conflict at the Eureka Stockade in 1854. Aboriginal people are present in this anthology as the Wathawurrung Aboriginal people of the Ballarat district and the policing by the Native Police Corps are discussed by numerous writers.
Mullawallah : The last King Billy of Ballarat
- Authors: Newton, Janice
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Book
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- Description: The story of Mullawallah (the last King Billy of Ballarat) brings together excellent research and a sensitive and passionate approach to this early period of Ballarat's seldom-told history. It spans the life of one Wathaurung man, Mullawallah, known as King Billy. Janice Newton shows a thoughtful approach to the difficult subject of early contact and of the relations between Aboriginal leaders and Europeans. Images rarely seen before enhance the pages of this well research text. (From back cover).
"The old vexed question" : Divergent attitudes and practices in the sacred music of early Ballarat
- Authors: Doggett, Anne
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Religious History Vol. 33, no. 4 (2009), p. 401-417
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- Description: When gold was discovered at Ballarat in 1851, the peaceful pastoral community was transformed into a rough mining camp. People from all parts of the world came in search of wealth, bringing with them a diversity of cultural and spiritual affiliations. As the musical life of the various denominational groups developed according to specific doctrinal principles and local influences, strong opinions were expressed in the community regarding the place of music in worship. This article looks at the developments in sacred music during the two decades that saw Ballarat transformed into a major city. The strong differences in discourse and practice that were evident between and within particular religious groups form a background for reflecting upon contemporary perceptions of the function of music in worship.
Between the winter and the dog trap
- Authors: Griffin, Tony
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
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- Description: This research is concerned with a visual exploration and recording of that small area of the Golden Plains Shire on the outskirts of the Western Victorian city of Ballarat. Specifically I have investigated aspects of change as witnessed in the landscape within walking distance of my home between the Winter Creek and the Dog Trap Creek. The nature of change is significant as it shapes the physical, social and spiritual narratives played out before the frequent visitor.
- Description: Master of Arts
Beyond gentility : Women and music in early Ballarat
- Authors: Doggett, Anne
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: History Australia Vol. 6, no. 2 (2009), p.
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- Description: This article examines the variety of women’s performance of music in the respectable middle and working-class world of colonial Ballarat, in the decades following the gold rushes. For many women, music was far more than a genteel accomplishment. Through music women achieved personal, social and aesthetic rewards. They gained public approval and made a real difference to their community. Within the context of performance, women used music to situate themselves at the forefront of activity, and in positions of power. This article has been peer-reviewed.
The true story of the Pikeman's Dog at the Eureka Stockade : The rebel's dog with the royal award
- Authors: Williams, Paul
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Book
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- Description: The faithful dog has the ability to become an Australian legend, as has Simpson's Donkey of Gallipoli. The true, heartrending tale of a devoted terrier's reaction to the death of his master, a pikeman at the ill-fated and brutal Eureka Stockade, is what legends are made of.
- Description: 2003008030
Women in 'Ballarat" 1851-1871: a case study in agency
- Authors: Wickham, Dorothy
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This thesis argues that European women exercised agency in mid nineteenth century Ballarat. It develops an understanding of women as active agents who engaged with, and negotiated, relationships of power. It highlights the fluidity in gendered roles, the blurred lines between the public and private domains, and the complexity of colonial life and relationships. This social and feminist history situates women within the system of patriarchal power which systematically and overtly benefited men. It reveals the complex operation of patriarchal power in which women accepted, challenged, and resisted social values and constructs. Such a consideration of the structure of power dislodges the notion of women as oppressed bodies who passively accepted universal and monolithic patriarchal values, and instead highlights diversity within gendered power structures. Drawing on public documentation, narrative, biographical, and statistical information from a diverse, extensive, and comprehensive range of archival sources, this thesis utilises a form of microhistorical methodology to detail and analyse the ways in which colonial women helped to shape society. It then draws a broader interpretation from such analysis to locate this thesis among other feminist and goldfields discourses. Through the central themes of health, birth, death, marnage, family, law, religion, temperance, philanthropy, work and public protests, this study_ identifies strands of agency exercised by Ballarat' s colonial women during the city's metamorphosis from the heady early days after the official discovery of payable gold in 1851 and the subsequent expansion of colonial settlement, to the consolidation of the City of Ballarat in 1871. Women predominantly acted as domesticating, nurturing and civilising agents, their actions deriving legitimacy from patriarchal values and endorsed by men. Women also contested, challenged, negotiated, manipulated, resisted and rejected socially accepted values, while playing out their lives within the colonial society in which they lived.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
A public want and a public duty [manuscript] : The role of the Mechanics' Institute in the cultural, social and educational development of Ballarat from 1851 to 1880
- Authors: Hazelwood, Jennifer
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: Mechanics’ Institutes were an integral element of the nineteenth-century British adult education movement, which was itself part of an on-going radicalisation of the working class. Such was the popularity of Mechanics’ Institutes, and so reflective of contemporary British cultural philosophy, that they were copied throughout the British Empire. The Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute, established in 1859, instilled a powerful, male-gendered British middle-class influence over the cultural, social and educational development of the Ballarat city. The focus of this study is to identify and analyse the significance of the contribution made by the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute to the evolving cultural development of the wider Ballarat community, with a particular emphasis on the gender and class dimensions of this influence. This is done within the context of debates about ‘radical fragments’ and ‘egalitarianism’. Utilizing a methodology based on an extensive review of archival records, contemporary newspapers held at the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute, and previously published research, this study was able to show that, during the period from its inception in 1859 to 1880, the Institute became a focal point for numerous cultural, social and educational activities. As one of the few institutions open to all classes, it was in a position to provide a significant influence over the developing culture of the Ballarat community. The study has also identified the use made of the Institute’s School of Design by women and the contribution of these educational classes to preparing women for employment outside their traditional roles of wives and mothers. The thesis argues that despite some early radical elements, the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute initially espoused liberal egalitarian values. By 1880, however, the Institute was more readily identifiable as reflecting British, male, middle-class values.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy