Nicole Davis
Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023) ‘Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation’
This thesis explores the social and spatial histories of Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades from their beginning in Melbourne in 1853, with an emphasis on their first half century of development. It explores the retail, leisure and business activities they hosted and the lived experiences of the people who worked and played in these spaces. The thesis explores their current place in the Australian urban imagination and how the historic representation of the arcades shapes our present-day understanding and perceptions of these buildings.
The work examines how the arcade form was idealised in print and visual culture to represent particular notions of civilisation, progress, modernity, and cosmopolitanism in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth-century. Undertaking close analysis of a wide range of sources, it works to challenge and disrupt nostalgic perspectives that developed during this period and that continue to influence our perception in the present day. It argues that the histories of the arcades in Australia (as elsewhere) are far more nuanced than has previously been understood. Rather than rarefied sites of leisure and pleasure for the middle classes, they were sites where Australians from all walks of life played, worked and experienced the diversity of urban life and what urban life had to offer.
The thesis breaks down dichotomies of metropole and periphery that often characterise Australian urban spaces in juxtaposition to the metropoles of Britain, Europe or North America. To do this, it locates the Australian arcades within a transnational context, seeing them as nodes within global networks of exchange: of ideas, people, and things. Further, it explores the arcades not only of the coastal capitals but also considers those constructed in regional areas with a view to broadening our understanding of what it meant to be urban in this period in Australia.