iii.
Why Fitzroy?
The
geographical area that this study focuses upon, being Fitzroy,
is the archetype of a post-industrial Australian suburb.
As Manual Castells, the Economic Geographer Kevin O’Connor,
and a plethora of other authors argue, post-industrialism is
the underlying catalyst for the present globalisation process.
Inner
city Australian communities are experiencing rapid gentrification,
closing factories, rising rents and property values, and the
appropriation of the working class culture that originally defined
the suburbs. This is forcing out many of the long-term residents
in favour of an eclectic mix of wealth distribution, lifestyles,
and cultures.
Many
claim that Australia is now being defined less and less by our
historically definitive rural regions (as well as the great
material and social egalitarianism of our post-war middle suburbs)
and increasingly (for better or worse) by the culture of our
inner cities, the fringes of our cities, and our bay-side towns.
These
changes can in part be linked to some of the major structural
changes that are understood as globalisation. For instance,
Fitzroy is a suburb where the factories that used to make clothes
and confectionary now house the apartments of the new middle
classes. This is part of a larger global trend in developed
countries where the majority of the workforce has shifted from
the manufacturing industries into the service industries.
Fitzroy
is a suburb that has cultivated a large and vibrant artist’s
community which has now been branded and appropriated as ‘lifestyle’.
This is also part of a global trend where culture and meaning
increasingly circulate through consumerism and the brands of large
multi-nationals (or through the marketing tactics of local real
estate agents).
Fitzroy
is a suburb where ethnic diversity is both generally accepted
and celebrated and for many new Australians it is their first
encounter with an Australian community (although many new migrants
are now moving away because of rent increases). This is also
part of a global trend where the immense global economic inequalities
between nations, partly because of globalisation, have placed
enormous pressure on developed countries everywhere to welcome
increasing amounts of migrants and refugees into their local
communities.
The
approach that I have taken in testing and articulating some
of the concerns of globalisation is somewhat self-conscious.
This is because Fitzroy is the community in which I have lived
for a great deal of my adult life. The reason that I chose Fitzroy
for this study (rather than another community as an ‘objective’
outsider) is that I have an acute understanding of the suburb,
its identity, mythologies, and change over time. Moreover, my
experience of the suburb gives me contact with certain individuals
that others may not have access to.
I
do not cloak my subjectivity in this study, but rather celebrate
it, reveal it, and even record it as a component of the qualitative
argument that I am constructing. This ‘participant observation’
approach is well established in the social sciences, especially
through, for example, classic studies such as Goffman’s 1968
research in St Elizabeth State Mental Hospital in Washington
DC. Goffman spent a year in the hospital, immersing himself
in the life of the wards to evoke a picture of the relationships
between patients and staff.
Accordingly,
it is not as though I am unable to schematically contextualise
the world outside of this study. During the period of this research,
I have travelled to Thailand, India, Nepal, Japan, Vietnam,
the UK, the United States, Cambodia, the Netherlands and Austria.
I have been a research fellow at the University of Virginia
and before this project studied at four culturally disparate
universities in both Australia and the US.
My
education and proficiency with the Internet gives me contact
with larger national and international flows of ideas. This
in turn has influenced the way I appreciate some of the distinctive
links between the local and the global within the suburb.
Another researcher without this experience may have approached
the subject quite differently however it would be difficult
for other researchers not to discover the core mythologies and
values of Fitzroy as I have presented then within this electronic
form. This is because Fitzroy, unlike other Melbourne suburbs,
has an acute cultural identity based on its long history of
cultural and political activism.
During
the course of this study, I have also become involved with a
globalisation activist community, joined a research concentration
group, attended numerous civic protests and debates on globalisation,
and engaged with a highly active internationally networked community
of groups that publish about, resist and interpret globalisation. Through this experience, I tend to agree with many
authors on globalisation that global discourse tends to lack
an appealing attachment to place. It can only be enriched by
stories from more local sites of perception.
The
best way to accomplish this is through an evocative oral history
approach where individuals can be both seen and heard. They
can be seen and heard talking about the cultures that they identify
within the place where they live. Milkbar.com.au ‘streams’
more than twelve hours of interviews taken with forty-five people
in Fitzroy (both within the local section where the interviews
can be played in full or within the global section where
they are indexed within the four rudimentary frameworks of globalisation).
I
chose the range of people for this study on the basis of my
understandings of Fitzroy and within my understanding of globalisation.
Some of the people were individuals that I already knew, whilst
others were recommended by some of the suburb’s key political
and community leaders. I was never more than ‘two degrees of
separation’ away from the previous person thus linking my way
around a suburb laid-out in the Nineteenth Century like the
Nineteenth Century figure of the flâneur.
In
a traditional empirical community history, perhaps only the
older residents of the suburb would have been interviewed. But
with a methodology that seeks to tackle ‘the global’, a broader
approach was required. The senior residents of Fitzroy may not
have access to some of the contemporary cultures in the suburb
against which some of the diverse juxtapositions of historical
change over time can be surveyed. These juxtapositions are explored
through the capacities of the new media tools that I have chosen.
Fitzroy,
like the broader country in which it is situated, is a suburb
with many beginnings and stories of arrival. A visitor to Milkbar.com.au
is able to view a number of interviews within the four discursive
frameworks of globalisation and look for converging evidence
and trends from a number of different perspectives. This is
a methodology well established among oral Historians. The user
is not led to believe that there is a simple linear method by
which to advance historical knowledge or indeed understand globalisation.
Globalisation is an ongoing discursive debate between various
centres of power.
The
major outcome of this study is a critically applied example
of electronic scholarship which pursues this particular historical
question. The gathering of the footage, the construction of
the archive (within the analytical frameworks), the hypertextual
linkages and the mark-up of the site must be seen as part of
the study’s overall knowledge construction. I am constructing
an argument about globalisation through the application of online
new media technologies, within a medium that offers yet to be
explored opportunities for researchers everywhere.
This
exegetical-thesis is divided into three chapters that elucidate
Milkbar.com.au’s three major themes. Chapter One: Globalisation,
describes the methodological, geographical, and theoretical
positioning of the work in relation to its historical argument.
Chapter Two: Humanities, describes the decisions taken
in the production of this example of electronic scholarship
in relation to other forms of electronic scholarship in the
Humanities (especially within the field of Humanities Computing).
And Chapter Three: Techne, is the reflective part of
the work that subjectively assesses the opportunities and limitations
of electronic scholarship from the perspective of a post-graduate
student.
The
conclusion presents some fertile directions but monumental challenges
for post-graduate electronic scholarship in the Humanities based
on the experience gained in undertaking this research. more>>
