Margaret Bester, "Patterns of Keeping: Places in the Past," Patterns of Keeping, (26 October 2015)

Margaret Bester, "Tearing Up Tombstones: What Lies Beneath the Picnickers at Camperdown Rest Park?" Patterns of Keeping, (26 October 2015)

Margaret Bester, "A Chase, A Death, A Chimpanzee: The Curious Case of a Chimp in the Nighttime," Patterns of Keeping, (26 October 2015)

Margaret Bester, "Enmore Theatre: The History within the Walls of one of the two Surviving Art-Deco Theatres in Sydney," Patterns of Keeping, (4 November 2015)

Margaret Bester, "Addison Road Military Depot: Military Depot / Site of Protest / Community Hub," Patterns of Keeping, (17 November 2015)

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Patterns of Keeping

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My experiences of observing the “heritage watch” discussions of the Marrickville Heritage Society, and of interacting with visitors to the society’s stall at the Marrickville Festival illustrated that while ‘history’ in its strictly academic sense might not be significant to many living in the Marrickville LGA, a sense of the past is certainly valued. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen similarly observed in their study of popular understandings of history in America that “the past” as a term evoked a richer range of responses from interviewees than the term “history” which connoted formality, analysis, and distance.[1] My involvement with the Marrickville Heritage Society highlighted in particular that this sense of the past can often constitute more than simply a suite of recollections, but can instead be embedded in a specific place. 

I chose to interrogate this sense of the past within particular places in my major project, which has taken the form of a blog on the WordPress platform. The blog, titled ‘patternsofkeeping’, is themed around places in the Marrickville region. Current posts explore the histories of local churches and public buildings, and notable sites such as Camperdown cemetery, Addison Road Community Centre, and Enmore Theatre.

Patternsofkeeeping is formed with the aim of meeting three key purposes, based on what I perceived to be potential avenues that the Marrickville Heritage Society had not yet explored in their efforts to promote research into, and monitor changes to, the built environment of the Marrickville area:

1.     To engage visitors to the blog in thinking about, and interrogating, the history of their local built environment. This draws upon the idea raised by Bruce Baskerville in his lecture to HSTY3902 that the landscape can be conceived of as an archive that needs not only to be conserved, but also read, and understood.

2.     Prompt readers to consider what elements of the built environment have been preserved, altered, or altogether lost over the decades – and from this perhaps stimulate discussion about what aspects of this landscape Marrickville residents consider worth preserving.

3.     To expand the discussion about heritage preservation to a younger audience. Currently, mature age groups predominate in discussions about Marrickville’s heritage, leaving perhaps a lack of awareness about how heritage conservation operates among younger generations.

Sources/evidence used in the blogging process:

Several primary sources were harnessed in the research process to illuminate how history is lodged in places of the Marrickville region. Extracts from newspaper articles, sourced from Trove, provided primary examples of how contemporary audiences interacted with, and valued certain sites and buildings. Photographs, sourced from the State Library of New South Wales, the Marrickville Council Local History Picture Database, the Australian War Memorial and the City of Botany Bay Library and Museum were used to situate places in the historical landscape, and to illustrate change and continuity. Photographs taken personally on my explorations around Marrickville were used to engage readers with historical buildings in a more immediate, everyday sense. The Sands Directory, a digitized directory of the Sands stationary company, proved useful in tracing information about the ownership/occupants of a particular site over the years.

Oral and written histories of past and current Marrickville residents were also incorporated into the blog, largely to generate a sense of the personal connections people have felt towards their local environment. These recollections were sourced from a publication of the Marrickville Heritage society titled Marrickville Remembers, and from Meader, Cashman and Carolan’s book Marrickville, People and Places.[2]

Presentation:

The blog-style format of my major project most strikingly influenced the way in which I wrote about history. Shrugging off an academic writing style is central to creating an engaging blog post, and is fundamental too I believe in realizing a blog’s potential to reach, and engage, a broad range of readers. The blog-style presentation also helped to realize the main aims of my project (of broadening readership, stimulating discussion, and promoting inquiry into the history of the built environment) through 1) being an interactive medium, 2) possessing searchable “tags” and 3) providing a discussion space.

The interactive nature of a WordPress blog serves on one level to entertain readers - as they watch video clips embedded in posts, or toggle through a series of photos – and on another to facilitate further independent research. Each source that I reference in a post is presented as a hyperlink, which when clicked leads the reader to that particular source from which they can conduct their own research if they would like to. ‘Tags’, comprising words such as heritage, history or Marrickville, make it possible for posts to be searched on engines such as Google. Finally, the comments section after each post opens up the possibility of a dialogue between readers.

Significance, getting the blog ‘out there’, and sustainability:

As previously alluded to, many individuals in the Marrickville region possess an interest in the past, and in the history of places around them. However, during my own research process I found that sources pertaining to Marrickville’s history are largely scattered among different databases and are quite time-consuming to locate. Patternsofkeeping is thus significant in that it brings together strands of history about Marrickville’s built environment in an accessible, integrated form. It also provides access to sources directly from which readers can then conduct further research on their own.

The blog’s relevance to history groups has so far been illustrated by the NSW and ACT Association of Family History, the Wyong Family History Group, and the Liverpool Genealogy Society sharing my post “Tearing up Tombstones” on their respective Facebook pages.

The project will potentially be sustained by the Marrickville Heritage Society themselves after my involvement with them.

— MARGARET BESTER

NOTES

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[1] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6.

[2] In 1995 the Marrickville Heritage Society engaged in an oral history project, collecting the memories of individuals who lived in the Marrickville area during the Second World War: Angela Phippen and Harold Welsh, eds., Marrickville Remembers 1939 – 1945, (Marrickville: Marrickville Heritage Society, 1997).

Chrys Meader, Richard Cashman and Anne Carolan, Marrickville, People and Places, (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1994).