Join us online or in person for a seminar with Dr Fiona Gatt.
The forgotten class? Shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Melbourne
Shopkeepers played a vital role in the functioning of nineteenth-century Melbourne society. They owned the businesses where residents obtained goods, from basic daily needs to the flights and fancies of an emerging modern consumer culture. Echoes of their presence live on in the shopfronts and main shopping streets. This paper investigates and compares the shopkeepers who operated in three distinct, representative suburbs of nineteenth-century Melbourne: genteel Malvern, inner urban North Melbourne and industrial Footscray. In doing so it provides a genuine comparative cross-section of the urban retail trade in this period and reveals the subtle differences between these localities in terms of the prestige and identity ascribed to shopkeepers within the socio-economic fabric of these local societies. Yet across all three towns (or suburbs), shopkeepers held an important and unique role, one that cannot be understood through the same lens as the working class or middle class. This paper will argue that Australian historiography has not paid enough attention to shopkeepers, but through utilising the tools of what some might refer to as ‘new materialism’ techniques, they emerge as a distinct class.
11am, 21st August 2024
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC2.108
Zoom: Click here
Dr Fiona Gatt is a professional historian who works on commissioned histories for organisations such as the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation. She teaches history at La Trobe and Deakin universities and undertakes research for history projects at universities across Australia. Her particular areas of interest include urban history, class, migration, housing and First Nations history. Her work has been published in History Australia, Provenance, Postcolonial Studies, the Victorian Historical Journal, and shortlisted for the Victorian Community History Awards. She is a convenor of the New Housing History Network.