|
Melbourne icons - artistic as well as sporting - will be featured in the new encyclopaedia. |
With the new millennium close at hand, Monash historian Dr Andrew Brown-May decided it was a good time to delve into Melbourne's colourful past and take stock of what had given the city its distinctive character.
As a result of Dr Brown-May's painstaking work, little-known facts about Melbourne - as well as much that had been forgotten - began to surface, captured for the record in the massive Encyclopedia of Melbourne book and CD-ROM project.
"Historically, it's an interesting time to do a bit of navel-gazing about our city and where we've come from," he says of the project, an Australian first and one of the new breed of city encyclopedias.
Similar works were published in the 1880s and 1890s and there was an encyclopedia that came out soon after 1900. However, these were much more grandiose in their attitudes. Dr Brown-May sees the current encyclopedia very much as a civic project.
When it is completed, the encyclopedia will have just under a million words and 2000 text entries, more than half of which have been submitted. "It took New York 13 years to do their encyclopedia," says Dr Brown-May. "But we plan to get ours out in 2001."
Working groups of both academics and non-academics worked tirelessly to establish lists of entries that warranted inclusion.
Each entry is cross-referenced to at least one other entry and there are no biographical entries, as this information can be found in biographical dictionaries. Melbourne icons like Barry Humphries would be found under the heading of comedy or theatre.
Headings such as sport contain about 100 entries, with subjects ranging from women's sport, sporting clubs, Melbourne's sporting image, Australian Rules football, the Olympic Games in Melbourne and horse racing, to the city's sportsgrounds and venues.
Dr Brown-May is writing about 50,000 words for the project and he and the other 350 writers are constantly doing original research, as many of the subjects have not yet been documented.
A prototype of the CD-ROM version has now been developed. "The book is the fundamental part of the project but the possibilities of multimedia are very exciting for historians, " he said.
Exploring the Melbourne grid will be easy, as the CD-ROM will have a browser environment to enable people to view historical multimedia presentations, revealing Melb-ourne's many changes and transformations.
The project is being chaired by Monash's Dr Graeme Davison, an eminent urban historian of Melbourne and co-edited by Dr Shurlee Swain of the Australian Catholic University.
A comprehensive new book and multimedia project about Melbourne is being prepared by a group of Monash-led academics. Peta Kowalski reports.
The Monash Mt Eliza Business School and Monash Arts faculty offer a new MBA/MA in arts administration. For more details call (03) 9215 8150 or email genmba@mteliza.edu.au
