RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

The forgotten class? Shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Melbourne
Shopkeepers played a vital role in the functioning of nineteenth-century Melbourne society. They owned the businesses where residents obtained goods, from basic daily needs to the flights and fancies of an emerging modern consumer culture. Echoes of their presence live on in the shopfronts and main shopping streets. This lecture investigates and compares the shopkeepers who operated in three distinct, representative suburbs of nineteenth-century Melbourne: genteel Malvern, inner urban North Melbourne and industrial Footscray. In doing so it provides a genuine comparative cross-section of the urban retail trade in this period and reveals the subtle differences between these localities in terms of the prestige and identity ascribed to shopkeepers within the socio-economic fabric of these local societies. Yet across all three towns (or suburbs), shopkeepers held an important and unique role, one that cannot be understood through the same lens as the working class or middle class.

RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

The Melbourne Maritime Heritage Network is presenting this fascinating lecture at the RHSV. Speaker: Daryl Karp, Australian National Maritime Museum’s Director and CEO Ms Karp has worked in the broadcast and cultural industries for over 20 years. Prior to her appointment as Director and CEO of ANMM, she  was the Director of the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) at Old Parliament House from 2013 to 2022 establishing a strategic direction that focused on ‘the spirit of Australian democracy and the…

RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

In 1886 gentlemen from Victoria's Royal Society and Geographical Society formed a joint Australian Antarctic Exploration Committee. With the ear of the Premier and his Agent General in London, they energetically pursued a joint whaling and scientific expedition. They came tantalising close to their goal and helped inspire the first landing and the first overwintering on the Antarctic continent. Through both published and unpublished items from the RHSV, join librarian and author Andrew McConville to explore this and other stories of early Antarctic exploration.