Monash Magazine

Telling the full story

A new online guide aims to put Australian towns and suburbs squarely on the map. Fiona Perry reports.

Open a traditional tourist guide and you'd be forgiven for thinking Australia consisted only of capital cities and their CBDs, with a couple of larger regional centres thrown in for good measure.

Even an entry on Melbourne might contain only cursory references to inner-city suburbs like Collingwood and Toorak, banishing the rest of the metropolis to anonymity.

Southbank factories, Melbourne circa 1900, with the Snowden Gardens in the foreground and the sign for the Glaciarum ice rink on the skyline.

With the centenary of Federation almost upon us, Australian Places will be the first online guide to more than 6000 inhabited Australian cities, towns and suburbs.

A work in progress, the project is the brainchild of Professor Peter Spearritt, director of Monash's National Key Centre for Australian Studies.

It is the first comprehensive historical, sociological and cultural study of all significant settlements in Australia, according to Professor Spearritt.

Southbank, circa 1970. An office building replaced the factories, and the Robin Boyd fountain became a feature of the Snowden Gardens.

"There is a real need for this guide -- none of the existing tourist information systems take suburbs and smaller country towns seriously, and yet these places are just as important to our culture and identity. Without them, we're only telling half the story," he said.

The guide brings together information on the location of a place; the origin of its name; the history of its settlement, growth and development; its historic features, events and prominent citizens; and changing population.

Fascinating insight

Each entry draws on information gathered by project director, researcher and former City of Melbourne town clerk Mr John Young, and is designed to meet the needs of a wide cross-section of the community -- students, researchers, the business community and the general public.

Australian Places project director Mr John Young, left, and Professor Peter Spearritt.

Excerpts from historical gazetteer entries, local histories and newspapers, old and recent photographs, historical illustrations and maps, virtual tours, cultural and heritage information and census and federal statistics give the reader a fascinating insight into towns as old as Euroa and suburbs as new as Roxburgh Park.

The Victorian component of the site has been completed, with a total of 1500 entries, including local government areas. Gippsland entries were written by staff at the Monash Gippsland Studies Centre.

"Reading the histories of some of these places that are so familiar to us is like stepping into another world," Mr Young said.

"The Melbourne suburb of Sandringham was first known as 'Gypsy Village', after a fishing community which occupied the coastline around Pic-Nic Point. It was only in 1888 that it became known as Sandringham. At that time, a horse-tram service ran from Beaumaris to Sandringham. And the name of the Melbourne suburb Tullamarine was probably derived from the name of a small boy of the Wurrundjeri tribe, Tullarmareena.

"It's the greatest adventure in history and geography anyone could ask for.".

You can find Australian Places at www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/
multimedia/gazeteer/ For details of how you can help the project, contact Professor Peter Spearritt on +61 3 9905 5241.