I have placed my paper from the other night on the list for merciless interrogation…


On one level my project is simply a history of milkbars in Australia in the post war period. But hopefully it’s a little bit more than this. At the moment I am in the process of selecting a number of milkbar sites and using them as a vehicle and metaphor to analyse the definition and effect of ‘globalisation’ in the Australian context. Now globalisation is a pretty ugly word as it reeks of short-sighted journalese and cliché, but I still think that there is something there, there is something unique about our particular time in history in terms of a globalising process …this is opposed to (as Geoffrey Blainey recently remarked in The Ages Globalisation forum) …say the years from 1840 to 1910 that formed a remarkable period of globalisation. This period was spurred on by the gramophone, the wireless, the automobile, movies and other goodies form the industrial revolution. But this of course all came to a rapid halt in 1914 and World War I, a time when Europe through its colonies and dominions controlled over 80% of the world’s land mass.

What I am particularly interested in is if the Internet is employing or idealising some of the contemporary claims of globalisation and actually trying to define what the term means in the Australian context. Is the Internet really the chief actor in the global theatre, or is it something more simple say the long period of peace that we are going through or the dismantling of cold-war barriers..
Now I chose milkbars as a focus of study to explore globalisation for a number of reasons. In terms of a new-medium, what I see as the inclination of the web, and indeed our interface with information technology in general, is a tendency toward the iconic, the metaphorical and the visual. Thus the humble Aussie milkbar lends itself well towards this because it is a visually charged spatial site and is iconic. The milkbar is a icon of ‘Australianess’ in a nation that has its identity so inextricably entwined with consumerism. (And consumerism is now of course one of the driving forces behind Internet research and development). The milkbar is a welcoming, familiar and accessible vehicle to explore other more serious historical questions such as globalisation and its impact upon smaller community interaction .

I could address a question such as this from a plethora of ‘sites’ within our culture by, for instance, crawling through the national archives or engaging with the leaver-pullers in the bureaucracy . But I prefer the much more subaltern or even banal approach that explores the richness of the everyday, the local, the small, and that particular set of values and insights that one can only gain within the actual fabric of how many Australians are living or have lived their lives. This is often positioned as the opposite to globalisation. This approach is already established in Australian intellectual culture through individuals such as Meaghan Morris in her seminal work The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988) and the more recent Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (1998). (Some one yesterday from Cinemedia also made me aware of someone who had researched the history of Sheds in Australia as a site for the exploration Australian masculinity)

The milkbar within Australian society is a dying icon perhaps relegated to the nostalgic yearnings of a past when our notions of community were stronger. It was one of the centres of a community, a hub, a distribution point, a place where information was gathered in the form of newspapers, gossip was exchanged, food was procured, credit was negotiated, and rewards in the form of chocolate freckles, frogs, green snakes and warm meat pies were given to young people after they mowed the lawn or washed the birdshit off the family car. Although not uniquely Australian, as the milkbar has parallels in other Western cultures like the French Patisserie or the German corner shop (Tante Emma Laden)there is a characteristically definably local definition that can be utilised as an anchor, a measuring stick and metaphor to view the present global discourse and how it is impacting upon all of our lives.

In the post-war period, the rapid massification and standardisation of Australian society due to our slavish embrace of American styles of modernity have caused the milkbar to become less monumental than the shopping mall or quickimart. The ownership of milkbars, usually a family who live on the premises, has been seriously challenged by large multi-national franchises that offer 24 hour convenience and a tank load of petrol. This is perhaps a reflection of the changing work patterns in Australian society and our greater dependence on the automobile as our means of transport. The changing ownership of milkbars perhaps also signifies our differing demographic from a predominantly Anglo and Celtic society to a southern European and Asiatic society. Much of who and what we are and how this is intersecting with the rest of the world can be defined and evaluated by recording the history of this remarkable Australian institution.

As with any form of academic enquiry, one must forge a tenuous balance between the big questions being addressed and a more specific focus. At this stage, I prefer a qualitative approach, perhaps concentrating on a few milkbar sites within the suburb where I live, being Fitzroy The broader theoretical device of ‘globalisation’ could then be applied to these sites. Fitzroy has an active historical society and historians such as Tony Birch and Janet McCalman have undertaken much work in the area. It is Melbourne’s first suburb and has witnessed dramatic shifts in recent years that reflect some of the extremes in our society such as inner-city gentrification, drug abuse and distribution of wealth. Our own Simon Pockley has also offered the old milkbar where he lives in Northcote as a site of research as he told me it was for a long period of time a centre of the Italian community and distributed all the pasta and olive oil in Melbourne and was a sort of half-way house for a number of new Italian migrants. Other sites that interest me include the very famous Niagara Café in Gundaghi, which is a sort of road-side café half way between Sydney and Melbourne. This café is 98 years old and is partly made famous by an event, being the surprise midnight visit by John Curtin, the war time Prime Minister, and the later Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who stopped for a cup of tea on the way to Melbourne to raise funds for the war time effort.

Another example of a site of interest is the Wilmot General store which is a few kilometres inland from where I grew up on the North West Coast of Tasmania. General stores predate milkbars, in that they were more diversified and self-contained stores before retailing became more specialised and the advent of supermarkets. This store was the first shop owned by GJ Coles, and we all know what he became. This store is of political interest as it was used by Robin Grey, the W’s conservative leader of Tasmania in his “You Can Make it in Tasmania” campaign. The truth is that GJ Coles senior sold his store in Tasmania and his son George Jnr. moved to the greener pastures of Victoria where he started his empire. It is ironic that yesterday governmental regulatory capping of the market share that our larger retailers are allowed to exploit was removed further threatening the survival of milkbars. Much of the material that I gather through this study will in itself will form a valuable historical record of Australian milkbars before it is lost forever.

For the actual presentation of the project I will most likely use on-line digital video which in three years time, when I actually present, will be a little more appealing through the progressing compression and delivery standards. I could then use the interview footage and archival evidence that I gather in a authoritative and narrative form. I am particularly impressed by David Blair’s WAXWEB approach where the film is the actual interface and the user can interact with the film at any point. Historians are storytellers and the best way to tell a story is through narrative that has characters and plot development. Through creating a typical historical-documentary, the story of milkbars could be told that alludes to other stories and evidence beneath the surface. This is after all, what academic knowledge is supposed to be: this is the seeking of truths and a deeper meaning under the bigger ‘meta-narratives’ that we often take for granted. The user will be able to interrogate this work, check how the sources be linked, make their own links and narrative diversions and make new relationships that may reveal new stories. In this way the audience is not led to believe that there is a simple linear method to advancing historical knowledge.

I suppose that to summarise, my key questions are for this study are How is the Internet’s development changing Australia’s relationship with more powerful or less powerful nations? How is this effecting our notion of community and the local metaphor of the milkbar? Is the Internet fostering new types of community, or destroying them? How is my particular presentation of this thesis enhancing our understanding of new-media historical practice with its inherent historiographical ramifications.