excerpts from Eric Eklund’s article on approaches to reading the past in a streetscape
Eklund, E. ‘Representing history in the Main Streets of New South Wales’, Locality,
Centre for Community History UNSW, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1998
In popular understandings of history, and still in some sections of the history profession,
national history and national events are seen as the locus of worthy history, even in
apparently more progressive histories influenced by social, feminist and labour history.
Under this rubric the 'local' is dismissed as too specific, contingent, bounded, and
therefore not historically important.
But there is another way of looking at the 'local' and key sites of local life like main
streets that reintroduces it into the centre of any historical investigation. We all live
somewhere, and we all have a relationship to our immediate environment, no matter how
mediated. In this sense the 'local' is a widespread even universal experience, and in the
small to medium-sized towns in Australia the local environment meets the everyday
needs of most people. This was especially the case prior to the Second World War and
the rise of consumer culture and the mass media. Later, from the 1960s, the growth of
major shopping centres threatened the commercial viability of many older main streets.
The outdoor socialising characteristic of main streets became internalised into the malls
and enclosed shopping centres of post-war society, while the face to face interaction of
shopping and the exchange of information were (and still are) increasingly being replaced
by the privatised recreation and consumption of leisure and foodstuffs occurring within
the home.
But historians should be wary of taking an overly elegiac tone in their comments on the
fate of main streets and the communities that supported them. Broad patterns of historical
change have made these sites less important, yet beneath the nationalising and globalising
forces spaces open up for new understandings and relationships to the local. This can be
seen, among other things, in recent heritage-related interest in main streets and malls. A
1996 National Trust of Australia publication, Streetwise, highlights the contemporary
interest in main streets and heritage-related commercial development noting 'an
emergence of a new and exciting Australian street culture…’ In places as diverse as
Maitland, Millers Point and Morpeth redevelopment has proceeded with a heritage
flavour, while from the mid-1990s there have been a number of main street heritage
studies of potential and actual commercial precincts with an 'historical' theme in the main
streets of Wallsend, Broken Hill, and Glebe Point Road in Sydney, to name a few. This
hardly supports the claims of some sociologists and media commentators that the local is
no longer relevant, although the articles presented here are critical, to varying degrees, of
the particular way that history and heritage are mobilised in these local contexts.
The following articles on Broken Hill, Lithgow and Timbertown, as well as the evidence
from Port Kembla and Wollongong, suggest that key aspects of local history and
experience are being neglected, or even actively suppressed. Visitors and locals alike are
being presented with seriously-flawed visions of a town's history. The central role that
main streets played in everyday life, and in moments of political tension, is lost in overly
commercialised, sanitised and conservative views of a town's past. Townspeople in these
localities vigorously sought local development hounding Councils and State
Governments for many years over issues like drainage, road building and water supplies.
Local development was not simply passed down to local communities by benevolent
authorities. It was the result of political action and political campaigns, often finding
expression in action in the main streets. Moreover, local labour movements also used
main streets as key sites of political mobilisation during strikes, protests or annual labour
day marches. Main streets were in some ways obvious forums for political expression —
this was the most effective way to reach the majority of residents — but occupying a
main street was also a highly symbolic act. It placed an issue at the literal and symbolic
centre of a community. One could imagine the protests from townspeople if they learnt
that this heritage of political action was being so comprehensively ignored by
contemporary town planners, historians and architects.
reproduced with permission of the author, Eric Eklund.