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November 25, 2003
An interesting new online resource site without a weblog has been started up by Craig Bellamy. It is called Milkbar.com.au and is the product of humanities research by an independent postgraduate student at RMIT University. It fits into the ethos of the critical regionalism espoused by junk for code. Link courtesy of Creativity machine.
Craig works out of Melbourne and the milkbar is located in a virtual Fitzroy. The stories told in the milk bar will be about the history of the place, the effects of the post-industrialisation of the Australian economy, and the benefits and problems associated with globalization.
I know the place Craig lives in. In the early 1980s, when I worked as a conductor on the Melbourne trams, I lived just around the corner from the old Fitzroy town hall and the modernist housing estate.
 
The two story Victorian Terrace house I lived in was in Gore Street up next to Gertrude Street.
I loved Fitzroy. It was far more attractive than Collingwood or Richmond and had more soul than Carlton. Fitzroy was the gritty heart of Melbourne for me. From my perspective of working on the trams I pretty much constructed Melbourne as the Chicago of Australia. I loved the pub architecture  and the back lanes.
Fitzroy, especially Brunswick Street, has become a lot more colourful since the 1980s. There is a vibrant street life, but it is stunted by the dominance of the car. Melbourne, like Sydney and Brisbane, has done very little about rolling back the car to make spaces for people to play.
I was sad to leave Fitzroy in the 1980s for Adelaide to study philosophy. In some ways my heart still belongs in Fitzroy. I always go back there and walk around the streets when I visit. It is the colour of the street that I see when I return to Fitzroy Melbourne:
It was never so colourful in the early 1980s.
When living there as a Melburnite, I enjoyed walking the streets taking photos. I used to walk and play in Smith and Brunswick Streets and walked daily into the CBD past the state Parliament and Collins Street.
Milkbar.com.au is a research site whose theoretical concerns overlap with Philosophy.com Craig says he will use the weblog engage in electronic scholarship that would:
"...undertake a particular historical investigation. This investigation concerns the objectification and then the communication of the considerable historical changes occurring within an inner-city Australian community. As I will argue, these changes are in fact focussed local manifestations of larger and more distant globalisation processes...The analysis circulates around the ideas of the local and the global and the peoplecentred speculative encounters between the cause-and-effect of the two opposing discourses. Concisely, this project is an attempt to historically objectify the process known as globalisation in an inner urban community (in the developed world) using online interactive tools."
I would question the category "manifestation" in the sentence, "these changes are in fact focussed local manifestations of larger and more distant globalisation processes", but that debate is for another day. Globalization did have a negative impact on the old industrial suburbs of Melbourne and Adelaide in terms of unemployment and poverty. But citizens also responded to the forces of globalization on their place by modifying the impact, reshaping their lives, and experimenting with their situation.
I thought that milkbars were a part of the architecture of pre-1940s Australia? They became delis in the 1950s with the mass immigation from Southern Europe. As I remember it, working class Fitzroy was seen as an urban slum by suburban Melbourne and it was peopled by the immigrants who worked in the factories. The process of gentrification was under way by the 1980s.
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Craig has had this up for a while i think.