School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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‘These children have been born in an abyss’: slum photography in a Melbourne suburb

Birch, Tony ( 2004)

This article is concerned with the role of photography as an agent of ‘social truth’, with a particular interest in the way that the technology was used by slum reformers in Melbourne from the 1930s into the postwar era. The article focuses its attention on the streets and people of the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and two ‘crusaders’, F.O. Barnett (founder of the Methodist Babies Home) and Father Gerard Tucker (of the Brotherhood of St. Laurence), who would use the propagandist value of the photograph to influence their social and moral interventions into the lives of Fitzroy’s poor.
The best TV reception in Melbourne: Fitzroy 'low-life' and the invasion of the renovator

Birch, Tony (University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association, 2003)

In the 1960s the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy began a process of economic and social change, resulting in the dislocation of many long-term residents. Some people were shifted out of the suburb as a result of government ‘housing reforms’. Others were more gradually dislocated. It was the renovator’s paint-brush and the commodification of Fitzroy’s ‘diversity’ that would eventually transform the suburb into the place that it is today; a place of ‘real delis’, ‘taste’ and ‘fashion sense’. This article engages with some of these Fitzroy narratives.