The Archives of Wilfred Prest and Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

Gwynneth Thomas

On an autumn evening in the city, Tom looked sideways at other people’s lives
–The Lost Dog, p. 8

During this first year of my PhD candidature, I am learning how to ‘do’ graduate research. My peers and I frequently complain that this is a disorienting experience: we are each performing acts of intellectual dislocation as we learn to become better scholars. Many of us, including myself, are also experiencing a physical dislocation as we learn how to be in the University campus, the city of Melbourne, or the country of Australia.

My introduction to the University Archives through the papers of Wilfred J Prest has confronted me with both types of dislocation. First, the steep learning curve presented by unfamiliar methods of archival research. Second, the sense of physical displacement encountered when reaching back through the past via the archive to glimpse the city’s changing face.

To meet these challenges, I find myself looking inward – to the imagined spaces of my favourite novels – and outward – as I walk from an unfamiliar shared flat on the edges of Parkville to campus and start to place myself within the city of Melbourne.

Australian writer Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog is perhaps the digital humanist novel par excellence to aid me with this process of dis- and re-location. Its protagonist, Tom, is a scholar at an unnamed but unmistakeably Melbournian university. Tom walks the urban landscape:

From time to time, when he should have been at school, Tom wandered [the city’s] ruled streets: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth. Within a familiar history he was finding his place in a new geography. Sometimes he thought, No one in the whole world knows where I am.
– The Lost Dog, p. 59

Searching for an item in the Wilfred J Prest collection to hook me, I decide to focus my research on the Social Survey forms gathered from my new home of Parkville.

Tom avoided microfilm wherever possible; was grateful for the digital imaging that had replaced it […] Blurred columns of newsprint rolled towards him, the past advancing with speedy, futuristic menace as he tried to locate what he needed
–The Lost Dog, pp. 54-55

I skim 761 digitised pages of cursive scrawl from the Melbourne 15 series containing surveys from the municipality of Melbourne (today’s suburbs of Melbourne City, East, West, and North Melbourne, Carlton, Carlton North, Parkville, Flemington, Kensington, and Newport) to locate the forms I require.

While John Lack’s 1981 re-coding of a sample of Prest’s survey data identifies nine ‘cases’ from Parkville, I am only able to locate forms for seven households (Lack 1981). Three addresses are less than 500 metres from my own home.

In 1941, in a detached wooden house at 8 Church Street, there was a family of seven. Their 21-year-old son was a trainee with the RAAF. The house at 128 Flemington Road was owned by a 73-year-old widow who earned her income by renting the house next door: the interviewer notes that the widow ‘probably has other source of unearned income but [is] very vague’. Two ‘spinster’ sisters in their fifties lived at 15 Manningham Street. The eldest was a nurse and worked in Sunbury Mental Hospital.

I wonder if any of these homes exist unchanged since 1941 or if they have been demolished to make way for flats or high-rise apartments. Which have been included in other archives through heritage listing? Which have faded into obscurity?

The simple map shown in Figure 1, generated with Google MyMaps, brings archival records from the Social Survey into dialogue with the Victorian Heritage Database (VHD). None of the Parkville dwellings surveyed by Prest (indicated by red markers) are recognised as a place of ‘state-level cultural heritage significance’ by the Victorian Heritage Register, indicated by blue markers. However, Google Earth indicates that at least four, potentially six, of the original buildings remain. At two addresses, 53 Morrah Street and 38 Story Street, Prest’s interviewers stopped tantalisingly close to an address now listed by the VHD.

The memorials were puzzling in their arbitrariness, offering no indication why these places, dates and citizens had been singled out. Tom discerned the willed creation of a sense of the past: a municipal mythmaking […] They displaced history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze. A spectator might have their detail by heart and no inkling of the chasm that separated bark canoes and William Merton, bootmaker. The unofficial past flared more vividly, illuminated in matchlit glimpses.
–The Lost Dog pp. 53-54

The absence of duplicate addresses in these databases illustrates an essential truth of archival studies: “every archive is partial, and every partial archive has its anxieties’ (Jardine and Kelty 2016). It also demonstrates the advantages of cross-referencing digital archives to generate more complex understandings of our shared history. And the ‘unofficial past’ of the anonymous families who shared their lives through the University of Melbourne Social Survey suggests new ways by which to locate myself in relation to past and present.

References

De Kretser, Michelle. (2008). The Lost Dog. Allen & Unwin.

Lack, John. (1981). University of Melbourne Social Survey, 1941-1943: A 1981 Sample (Version V3) [dataset]. ADA Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.26193/0URT1Q

Prest, Wilfred, Melbourne 15 (1941-1942), [UMA-ITE-1973000200026]. University of Melbourne Archives, accessed 09/05/2024, https://uma.recollectcms.com/nodes/view/216437

‘Criteria for Inclusion in the Victorian Heritage Register,’ Heritage Council of Victoria. (n.d.). Retrieved 9 May 2024, from https://heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/heritage-protection/criteria-and-thresholds-for-inclusion/

Jardine, Boris and Christopher Kelty (eds.). (2016). ‘The total archive’. Limn, 6: 2-3.