School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemRemembering the counterculture: Melbourne’s inner-urban alternative communities of the 1960s and 1970s( 2019)In the 1960s and 1970s, a counterculture emerged in Melbourne’s inner-urban suburbs, part of progressive cultural and political shifts that were occurring in Western democracies worldwide. This counterculture sought to enact political and social change through experimenting with the fabric of everyday life in the inner-urban space. They did this in the ways in which they ate, socialised, lived, related to money, work, the community around them, and lived – often in shared or communal housing. The ways in which they lived, loved, related to the community around them, and found social and personal fulfilment was tied up with a countercultural politics. My thesis argues that these inner-urban counterculturalists embodied a progressive politics which articulated and enacted a profoundly personal criticism of post-war conservatism.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSuburban war: the Carlton Association and their campaign against slum reclamation and urban renewal, 1969-1975( 2015-11-13)Between 1969 and 1975 the resident action group the Carlton Association played a defining role in ending the Housing Commission of Victoria’s slum abolition program. This thesis will look at the evolution and activities of the group during this period, a time when Carlton and Carlton North would be threated first by the slum reclamation of the ‘Lee Street block’, and from 1972 by the Commission’s proposal to develop 200 acres of Central Carton through urban renewal. One of a number of Resident action groups to form in the period, this thesis will argue that it would be the activities of the Carlton Association, who with 2000 members by 1973 was the largest of these groups, which would play the most important role in both ending the HCV’s slum reclamation agenda throughout the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but in influencing the Victorian Government to adopt new planning processes to allow public participation. Additionally, this thesis also looks at the demographics of the Carlton Association in an attempt to deconstruct the dominant historical labelling of it as a ‘middle-class’. This argues that while the leadership of the association was indeed dominated by middle-class, tertiary educated males, it would continually attempt to engage with the wider community, and that woman, students and migrants would all play an individual role in the resident action group’s success. As a result of the divisions within the group, and to an extent between the Carlton Association and the wider community, it will be argued that the leadership would be largely motivated by its own interests, such as conservation and property values. Finally, this thesis explores the transformations which Victoria’s planning and heritage laws underwent between 1950 and 1975, and how the Carlton Association’s public relations campaign can be seen to have led to changes to these policies from 1972.