Milkbar.com.au (Globalisation)

iii. Boom Town

Similar to other inner-urban areas, during the long post-war boom of the 1950s to the 1970s many of the residents of Fitzroy left and moved to the more affluent middle-suburbs.[1] By the 1970s, vast tracts of Fitzroy and other inner city communities were levelled because town planners thought that Fitzroy was a slum.[2] This was to make way for the building of large high-rise government housing for lower income groups that included new migrants to Australia.

In reflection, and as told by the many of the participants in Milkbar.com.au, this has probably been one of the great saviours of Fitzroy. Firstly, it keeps the district interesting as it allows for a much greater ethnic diversity; and secondly it keeps the rents in check for those of us who know that �market forces� are merely the ideological artillery of more economically dominant cultures.

In was in the 1980s and 1990s that Fitzroy became fashionable again, especially with a young moneyed crowd who wanted to escape the Australian suburbs. The inner cities became sites of converging histories of class, ethnicity, economies and lifestyle. The population increased, along with the housing prices and pressures to develop the suburbs.[3] Many of the participants in this study claim that this is now destroying what has subsequently become one of the city�s most vibrant districts of cultural production, activism, and community building.

The inner cities are for better or worse the post-industrial frontiers of our country; a country that is fragmenting along lines of income distribution, employment, and lifestyle. [4] Australia, like most Western countries, has moved from protecting the national industries of the �old economy� to the �competitive� economies of the post-industrial world. [5] By recording some of the characters, concerns and lifestyles of people within Fitzroy, then perhaps some of the local manifestations of post-industrial globalisation may be evocatively communicated. [6] more>>

[1] The middle suburbs are where masses of people settled during the long post-war boom from the Second World War to the early 1970s. The long boom, so well articulated by one of the great Historians of the 20th Century, Eric Hobsbawn, was a period of growth that the world had never known. The output of manufactures quadrupled between the early 1950s and the early 1970s and world trade in manufactured items grew tenfold. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes, Abacus Books, London, 1994, p295. During this time Australia became possibly the world's most middle-class society with over half our population situated in the middle strata. See Craig McGreggor, Class in Australia, Penguin Books, 1997, p16.

[2] For similar urban development stories see: Alan Mayne and Tim Murray (eds) The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

[3] Farah Farouque, �Australian�s Return to their Cities� The Age

<http://www.theage.com.au/news /state/2001/07/04/FFXTBWLZOOC.html> (Accessed 4 July 2001).

[4] Kevin O�Connor, et.al Australia�s Changing Economic Geography: A Society Dividing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.

[5] This has resulted in the rise of some of the largest and most-expensive bureaucracies that have ever existed (IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Ford, and General Motors).

[6] Professor Richard Langhorne (Director of the Centre for Global Change and Governance at Rutgers University) made a plea at the Australian Historical Association conference (Brisbane 3-7 July 2002) for Historians to link national and geographical histories to Globalisation and World History. Also see his book: Richard Langhorne, The Coming of Globalisation: Its Evolution and Contemporary Consequences, Palgrave, London, 2001.

Authored by Craig Bellamy� 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003

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