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‘A Victorian community overseas’ transformed: demographic and morphological change in suburban Melbourne, Australia, 1947–1981
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2014
Abstract
One of the world's great Victorian-era suburban metropolises, Melbourne, Australia, was transformed by mass immigration and the redevelopment of some of its older suburbs with low-rise flats and apartments in the post-war years. Drawing on a range of sources, including census material, municipal rate and valuation books, immigration and company records, as well as building industry publications, this article charts demographic and morphological change across the Melbourne metropolitan area and in two particular suburbs in the mid- to late twentieth century. In doing so, it both responds to McManus and Ethington's recent call for more histories of suburbs in transition, and seeks to embed the role of immigration and immigrants into Melbourne's urban historiography.
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References
1 Briggs, A., Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth, 1968 edn)Google Scholar, ch. 7: ‘Melbourne, a Victorian community overseas’, 277–310.
2 Ibid., 280. The classic text on the rapid growth of Melbourne as a metropolis in the nineteenth century is Davison, G., The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne, 1978Google Scholar and subsequent editions). For a discussion of nineteenth-century Melburnians’ predilection for detached dwellings, see ch. 8: ‘A city of freehold homes’. On wider Australian preferences for suburban over urban living see his ‘Australia: the first suburban nation?’ Journal of Urban History, 3 (1995), 40–74. Also see Frost, L., The New Urban Frontier: Urbanisation and City Building in Australasia and the American West (Sydney, 1991)Google Scholar.
3 Statistics about population, birthplace, ancestry and dwellings in contemporary Melbourne come from Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Census 2011, Quickstats: Greater Melbourne www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/2GMEL?opendocument&navpos = 220, accessed 28 Aug. 2013.
4 The Migration Institute's figures can be found at: www.migrationpolicy.org/article/counting-immigrants-cities-across-globe, accessed 21 Jul. 2014. My thanks to Rachel Stevens for alerting me to this source, and to a number of other references to contemporary immigration issues in Australia and the USA used in this section.
5 Other than Davison's Marvellous Melbourne, other notable sources on the history of the nineteenth-century metropolis are Roe, J., Marvellous Melbourne: The Emergence of An Australian City (Sydney 1974)Google Scholar, and Turner, I., ‘The growth of Melbourne’, in McCarty, J.W. and Schedvin, C.B. (eds.), Australian Capital Cities: Historical Essays (Sydney, 1978)Google Scholar, 62–81. There is a long tradition of both academically informed and more antiquarian focused local histories of municipal districts and suburbs in Melbourne. For a discussion of these local histories, see Davison, G., The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Sydney, 2000)Google Scholar, especially ch. 11: ‘Community: the uses of local history’.
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8 On the late twentieth-century ethnic transformation of Los Angeles, see Davis, M., City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London and New York, 2006Google Scholar; first published 1990), especially ch. 6: ‘New confessions’. Also see Hayden, D., The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge and London, 1997)Google Scholar, especially ch. 4: ‘Invisible Angelenos’. For a more localized study of ethnic succession in Los Angeles, see Camarillo, A.M., ‘Black and brown in Compton, demographic change, suburban decline and intergroup relations in a South Central Los Angeles community 1950 to 2000’, in Foner, N. and Frederickson, G.M. (eds.), Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 2005), 358–76Google Scholar. On the impacts of mass immigration into Vancouver in recent decades, especially that of ‘visible minorities’ (mostly ethnic Chinese), see among others Mitchell, K., Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis (Philadelphia, 2004)Google Scholar. Also see Ley, D., Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines (Chichester, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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10 On the definitional and cultural meanings of the terms ‘city’ and ‘suburb’ in the Australian context, see Davison, ‘Australia: the first suburban nation?’ Also see his more recent ‘The suburban idea and its enemies’, Journal of Urban History, 39 (2013), 829–47, and ‘Suburb is not a rude word in Australia: a lexical tour of the Australian suburbs’, in R. Harris and C. Vorms (eds.), What's in a Name? Talking about Suburbs (Toronto, forthcoming, 2015).
11 The following information on Melbourne in 1947 is derived from the Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 30 June 1947, Part II: ‘Analysis of population in local government areas. Victoria’.
12 Until the passing of the Nationality and Citizenship Act (1948), people born in Australia or who had been naturalized were British subjects. See National Archives of Australia, Fact Sheet 187, ‘Citizenship in Australia’, available at www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs187.aspx, accessed 2 Sep. 2013.
13 On the post-war housing shortage, see Dingle, T. and O’Hanlon, S., ‘Modernism versus domesticity: the contest to shape Melbourne's homes’, Australian Historical Studies, 109 (1997), 33–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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16 The following information on Melbourne in 1981 is derived from ABS, Census of Population and Housing, 30 June 1981, ‘Persons and dwellings in local government areas and urban centres, Victoria’.
17 Burnley, I., ‘Immigration: the postwar transformation of Sydney and Melbourne’, in Davidson, J. (ed.), The Sydney–Melbourne Book (Sydney, 1986), 119–34Google Scholar.
18 See Davison, G. and Dingle, T., ‘Introduction: the view from the Ming Wing’, in Davison, G., Dingle, T. and O’Hanlon, S. (eds.), The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (Melbourne, 1995), 1–17Google Scholar. Also see T. Dingle, ‘People and places in postwar Melbourne’, in the same volume, 27–40. On the emergence of the private car as the main mode of transportation in Melbourne, and its effects on the physical size of the metropolitan area in the post-war years, see Davison, G., Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities (Sydney, 2004), 74–7Google Scholar.
19 Other southern Europeans moved further afield to middle-ring suburbs such as Brunswick and Northcote to the north, both of which attracted Italians and Greeks, and what used to be called Yugoslavs. Further west Sunshine and Ardeer became home to sizable populations of Maltese as well as Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Ukrainians. On southern European immigrant settlement patterns in post-war Melbourne, see Burnley, I., ‘Southern European populations in the residential structure of Melbourne, 1947–71’, Australian Geographical Studies, 14 (1976), 116–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On eastern Europeans, especially Displaced Persons from the former USSR, see Morrow, D., ‘Ardeer: a postwar Ukrainian suburban village’, Australian Historical Studies, 42 (2011), 390–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 On industrial and population decline in inner Melbourne in the 1970s, see Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW), Melbourne's Inner Area: A Position Statement (Melbourne, 1977). Also see O’Hanlon, S., Melbourne Remade: The Inner City since the Seventies (Melbourne, 2010)Google Scholar.
21 On the HCV's slum reclamation and redevelopment activities, see Tibbitts, G., ‘The enemy within our gates: slum clearance and high-rise flats’, in Howe, R. (ed.), New Houses for Old: Fifty Years of Public Housing in Victoria 1938–1988 (Melbourne, 1988), 128–37Google Scholar. Also see P. Mills, ‘Refabricating the towers: the genesis of the Victorian housing commission's high-rise estates to 1969’, Monash University Ph.D. thesis, 2010.
22 These figures are derived from the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 30 June 1961, vol. II: Victoria, Part III: ‘Analysis of dwellings in local government areas and in non-municipal towns of 1,000 persons or more’, and ABS, Census 1981, ‘Persons and dwellings’.
23 For a detailed breakdown of the major locations of flat development across Australia in the 1960s, see O’Hanlon, S., ‘The reign of the “six-pack”: flats and flat-life in Australia in the 1960s’, in Robinson, S. and Ustinoff, J. (eds.), The 1960s in Australia: People, Power and Politics (Newcastle, 2012), 33–50Google Scholar.
24 On the history of St Kilda, see Butler Cooper, J., The History of St Kilda: From its Settlement to a City and After 1840–1930, 2 vols. (Melbourne, 1931)Google Scholar, and Longmire, A., St Kilda. The Show Goes On: The History of St Kilda, vol. III: 1930 to July 1983 (Melbourne, 1989)Google Scholar.
25 While these high numbers reflect the fact that throughout the post-war years the council of the City of St Kilda adopted the most liberal attitude towards flat development of any municipality in the Melbourne metropolitan area, the demographic make-up of the suburb – immigrant, young and transient – provided the demand for these types of dwellings. Whether supply or demand was the major driver of the market is of course open to dispute. The argument for the former is provided by A. Longmire in St Kilda: The Show Goes On, 195–9, while the latter is argued in a report on flat development in Melbourne in the 1960s by the development lobby's Housing Industry Research Committee (HIRC), a committee of the Housing Industry Association. See HIRC, Flats . . . A Study of the Market in Flats – 1958 to 1965 (Melbourne, 1966), 7.
26 The houses and lives of East St Kilda's nineteenth-century colonial elite are depicted in the semi-autobiographical ‘Langton’ series of novels by local author, and scion of one of these elite families, Martin Boyd. For a discussion of these novels, see MacFarlane, B., Martin Boyd's Langton Novels (Melbourne, 1980)Google Scholar. For a group biography of the various branches of the Boyd family – and the houses in which they lived – see Niall, B., The Boyds: A Family Biography (Melbourne, 2007)Google Scholar.
27 Population statistics for Melbourne's pre-war Jewish community are drawn from figures compiled by the Yiddish Melbourne Project at Monash University. See www.arts.monash.edu.au/yiddish-melbourne/statistics. Figures for contemporary settlement patterns come from Markus, A., Jacobs, N. and Aronov, T., Jewish Population Survey 2008/9: Preliminary Findings, Melbourne and Sydney(Melbourne, 2009), 43Google Scholar.
28 On the difficulties faced by historians in seeking to enumerate and document definitively the extent of boarding in the Melbourne context, see O’Hanlon, S., ‘All found they used to call it: genteel boarding houses in early twentieth-century Melbourne’, Urban History, 29 (2002), 241–3Google Scholar.
29 On Jewish ownership of Melbourne's pre-war flats, see O’Hanlon, S., ‘Dwelling together, apart: the Jewish presence in Melbourne's first apartment boom’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 19 (2008), 237–47Google Scholar.
30 On the role of Leo Fink in the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund, see Benjamin, R., A Serious Influx of Jews: A History of Jewish Welfare in Victoria (Sydney, 1998), 202Google Scholar. Fink's biography can be found at: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fink-leo-10183.
31 This and the following information comes from City of St Kilda Rate Valuation books which are not yet in the public domain. This means that for privacy reasons the names of most developers, individual owners and their tenants cannot be divulged here. Information about the ownership and development activities of these individuals and companies has been cross-tabulated with other sources such as Building and Construction and Cazaly's Contractor Reporter and where appropriate names divulged in these publicly available sources have been used below. More often, though, individuals and companies have been given pseudonyms. My thanks to Kay Rowan of the City of Port Phillip for providing access to this material.
32 On the appeal of multi-unit and co-operative dwellings to Jewish Americans, and the tendency for many of these developments to have a predominantly or majority Jewish resident profile, see Lasner, High Life, 128.
33 Seamus O’Hanlon, ‘A little bit of Europe in Australia: Jews, immigrants, flats and urban and cultural change in Melbourne, c. 1935–1975’, History Australia (forthcoming).
34 As these rate records are not yet in the public domain, in order to comply with privacy regulations the name of this company and its owners are pseudonyms. Henley's records can be found in ‘defunct companies records’ available at the Public Records Office Victoria (PROV) VPRS 932/1/3322. Information about the two owners’ birthdates, previous nationalities and their arrival dates in Australia can be found at National Archives of Australia, Melbourne office, item numbers 30126747 and 4801341 respectively.
35 Building and Construction and Cazaly's Contract Reporter, 14 Jul. 1964, 30 Aug. 1966, and 6 Aug. 1968.
36 J. Lack, ‘Footscray: an industrial suburban community’, Monash University Ph.D. thesis, 1976. Also see his A History of Footscray (Melbourne, 1991).
37 Lack, A History of Footscray, 120.
38 As with those for St Kilda above, the following figures are derived from the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 30 June 1961, vol. II: Victoria, Part III: ‘Analysis of dwellings in local government areas and in non-municipal towns of 1,000 persons or more’, and ABS, Census 1981, ‘Persons and dwellings’.
39 Lack, A History of Footscray, 120.
40 Ibid., 192.
41 This information comes from City of Footscray Rate Books held on open access at PROV VPRS5642/P1/80 Central Ward 1934/35.
42 The material in this and the following paragraph comes from City of Footscray Rate Valuation books which, as with those from St Kilda used above, are not yet in the public domain. Again, in order to comply with privacy regulations information that may identify living individual owners and companies cannot be publicly divulged here. These records have thus been de-identified. But again as with the St Kilda records above, information about the development activities of these individuals and companies has been cross-tabulated with other sources such as Building and Construction and Cazaly's Contractor Reporter, and where appropriate names divulged in these publicly available sources have been used below. More often, though, individuals and companies have been given pseudonyms. My thanks to Veronica Tancredi of the City of Maribyrnong for access to this material.
43 As with the Westbury Street case-studies, in order to comply with privacy regulations the names in italics in this paragraph are all pseudonyms. Records of the Sabatello family's arrival in Australia can be found at National Archives of Australia, item nos. 5911144, 5911145 and 5911146 ‘Application for registration as an alien under Aliens Act 1947–1952’, 25 Oct. 1962, 4 May 1965 and 11 Dec. 1958 respectively.
44 On the importance placed on property ownership and therefore financial and tenure security among post-war Italian immigrants to Australia, see Pulvirenti, M., ‘Unwrapping the parcel: an examination of culture through Italian Australian home ownership’, Australian Geographical Studies, 35 (1997), 32–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Lasner, High Life, passim.
46 On suburban flat development in Sydney in the 1960s, see Butler-Bowdon, C. and Pickett, C., Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Australia (Melbourne, 2007)Google Scholar, especially ch. 6: ‘A series of three-storey buildings: suburban and seaside apartments’. On the development of apartments in inner Toronto's Parkdale at this time, see Whitzman, C., Suburb, Slum and Village: Transformations in Toronto's Parkdale Neighbourhood, 1875–2002 (Vancouver and Toronto, 2009), 145–8Google Scholar. On Johannesburg's 1960s flats, see Murray, M.J., City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg (Durham, NC, 2011), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.