Molly Mckew

Molly Mckew, ‘Remembering the Counterculture: Melbourne’s Inner-Urban Alternative Communities of the 1960s and 1970s’ (PhD in History, 2019)

In the 1960s and 1970s, a counterculture emerged in Melbourne’s inner-urban suburbs, part of progressive cultural and political shifts that were occurring in Western democracies worldwide. This counterculture sought to enact political and social change through experimenting with the fabric of everyday life in the inner-urban space. They did this in the ways in which they ate, socialised, lived, related to money, work, the community around them, and lived – often in shared or communal housing. The ways in which they lived, loved, related to the community around them, and found social and personal fulfilment was tied up with a countercultural politics. My thesis argues that these inner-urban counterculturalists embodied a progressive politics which articulated and enacted a profoundly personal criticism of post-war conservatism.

Supervisors: Kate Darian-Smith, Kat Ellinghaus, Mary Tomsic (SHAPS) and David Nichols (ABP)

Publications:

• ‘Share houses and women’s liberation: a forgotten history‘, The Conversation, 17 October 2017
• (with Katherine Ellinghaus), ‘”Someone’s Been Fucking Using This for Meat Again”: 18 Berry Street and Melbourne Sharehousing in the 1970s and 1980s’, in David Nichols and Sophie Perillo (eds), Urban Australia and Post-Punk: Exploring Dogs in Space (Basingstoke & Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
• Worco: Community Work Society Co-operative Limited: A History 1979–2019 (Preston, Vic.: Community Work Society Co-operative Limited, 2019)
• ‘Community, sharehousing and the counterculture in 1970s Melbourne‘, Overland, 26 November 2020