This Must Be The Place Podcast

work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things': fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I'm sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they're just interesting. I've picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs', ‘park benches', ‘playgrounds' and ‘billboards'. This final, fourth one, is ‘Billboards with Haruna, Ryall, and John. Join them discussing the history, impact and ubiquity of billboards and advertising space in cities. Listen to some children try to make sense of an ad for Bumble. Small correction here – what the first semester students missed here was the specific planning regulations around advertising signage of different types, sizes, illumination and so on. For the pedants amongst you, these are set out in the Victoria Planning Provisions at 52.05 ‘signs'. For everyone else, enjoy the podcast.

Here's a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things': fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I'm sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they're just interesting. I've picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs', ‘park benches', ‘playgrounds' and ‘billboards'. This third one is ‘Playgrounds' with Zara, Elicia, Julian and Nick. Join them in exploring the historical links between the arrival of cars and the emergence of the playground movement. Small proviso here – as a parent who takes a young child to playgrounds that are very well-used, I don't share the students' assessment as playgrounds as increasingly obsolete. I do agree children's independent mobility has fundamentally changed over the century or so since playgrounds first appeared.

Here's a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things': fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I'm sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they're just interesting. I've picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs', ‘park benches', ‘playgrounds' and ‘billboards'. This second one is ‘Benches' – or street furniture, with Eliza, Audrey and Daniel. Join them explaining the historical links between benches and public transport, and the recent emergence of ‘smart benches'.

Here's a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things': fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I'm sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they're just interesting. I've picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs', ‘park benches', ‘playgrounds' and ‘billboards'. This first one is ‘Dogs' – or ‘Dogs in Cities', with Benjamin, Bethany, Nick and Saeed. Join them in unpacking colonial dog nuisance laws; different cultural norms around relationships between humans and non-human animals; and visiting the soon to be lost ‘Lost Dogs Home' in North Melbourne.

“Things fall apart- it's scientific” is a line from the Talking Heads song “Wild Life”. Like most Talking Heads songs, including the one from which the This Must Be The Place podcast takes its name, the lyrics are a bit bookish. “Wild Life” seems to be a reference – one I haven't actually fact checked – to popular scientific accounts from the mid 20th century, theorising the trajectory of the universe and of life in it. Entropy, or the second rule of thermodynamics, refers to the “general trend of the universe toward death and disorder”. And in 1944's “What is Life”, Schrodinger put forward the idea that life itself is a kind of negative entropy machine, defined by a temporary state of order-from-disorder. Aside from sometimes passing on copies of our DNA, however, the ends of our lives are as apparently inevitable as that of the universe. Meanwhile and despite this cheerful thought, our lives are temporarily put together from bits and pieces, material and digital. People attempt at various times to curate, purge, hoard, systematise or selectively narrate piles of memories and things and files. Friends and relatives might do the same for us after we pass away. Music, and the changing technologies through which music is created and duplicated, forms one part of this. In “This is your Brain on Music”, Daniel Levitin writes about how music can connect people to times and places long after their more practical memories have faded. Side note – the music we remember the most vividly tends to be from when we are 14 years old. I was not 14 years old, but I remember the first time I heard the Talking Heads song “This Must Be The Place” because it was on the soundtrack to the film “Wall Street”, which I watched on a rented VHS tape in 2001 before I first travelled to the US. David Byrne of Talking Heads later discussed the effects of a century of music technology in “How Music Works”. The study of technology and media as part of the social and historical record is not new – in coining the term “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan in 1964 proposed “communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be primary focus of study”. Radio and records are central to Ken Burns' History of Country Music – previously, songs were reproduced and adapted through live performance. The Carter Family's early recorded songs were said to have been “captured, rather than written”. But what of the music so many people now record themselves, and which does not form part of the broader popular or cultural memory? How do people give order to their own songs and recorded music over the course of decades, during which mediums for recording and sharing music have come and gone, and changed fundamentally? The topic has been more in my mind and conversations of late in light of the recent death, from Motor Neurone Disease, of an old friend of my husband. Two decades ago, they and others spent years writing and recording music together in garages and warehouses. But you can't always find, let alone access old recordings. Listening to a song is one way of putting yourself into a place and time. Music is geography and is also technology. In the shift to digital, each new technology promises less physical stuff, less clutter, perhaps even a kind of longevity. It's an illusion – the archiving and curation of our own music is contingent on constantly changing technologies and media which are as fallible as the material world. There are extremes to navigate – you might have only one copy of a song, or you might have hundreds of copies of lurking old CDs. I've put together a rough chronology of different technologies for recording and sharing music that I've used, over the 1980s to 2020s. I've included example songs where I could find them – its own saga. Radio, cassette, VHS, studio and home recorded CDs, social media, digital releases, vinyl, the cloud, and back to a missing hard drive – and a song about the ephemeral artificial Lake Mokoan.

As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio, David Nichols of This Must Be The Place podcast interviews Sabina Andron - a cities scholar specializing in creative and transgressive public cultures, with a specific interest in the semiotics of urban walls and surfaces. Sabina is the author of “Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City”, to be published in 2024. Although graffiti (or “stuff on walls”) is shorthand to describe Sabina's research, it's not really a fair description – Sabina's interest is in documenting and understanding how urban culture articulates itself onto the visible surfaces of cities. In trying to understand cities by reading walls and surfaces, Sabina spends a lot of time walking around noticing the urban forms of relatively humble streets and walls, but more broadly studies both endorsed and illegal forms of markings as well as how surfaces are managed, regulated, maintained and cleaned. Sabina started in photographic documentary methods, but is also trying to pay attention in different ways of seeing urban surfaces, such as written note taking. She has recently filled a notebook with all the names mentioned in the Brunswick stretch of Sydney Road. Many of these are ubiquitous but unnoticed corporate and security signs – text that is permitted or sometimes required in urban space. People notice tags, but “there is so much of everything as well, we just don't question them – we should challenge that because it is about who has a right to be visible”. As well as international examples and context, Sabina offers observations on Melbourne – for example, its rich outdoor poster culture, it's laneways both touristed and otherwise, its pride in certain forms of street art but also its policies focused on order – Melbourne's Mayor, for example, holding a pressure cleaning to reassure people “how important it is to keep the city clean”. The discussion covers graffiti as cultural and artistic discourse, the relatively recent criminalisation of graffiti, David's short career in train vandalism at age 15, the material ecologies of things like posters (side notes – small birds seem to eat the paste, right? Or is it just Liz that thinks that?), murals versus graffiti, City Square's “graffiti wall” which was basically a whiteboard, photographic books of graffiti (including the popular 1970s Australian volumes of ‘witty' examples), the visual and cultural language of graffiti and how train tags came to be seen as an unsettling signal of decay, graffiti removal companies, coatings, designs that actively prevent damage from spray paints, and how Melbourne discourse, as in many places, tends to hate graffiti but love street art. Music venue The Tote in Collingwood has sound restrictions based on vibrations that might damage the paint on the Keith Haring mural next to it – a 1984 mural preserved at substantial cost, as a community symbol. Although Serena asks - why are some things symbols and for whom? “We should perhaps start valuing the collective meaning and force of our capacity to write on walls”. Also discussed is a recent Fitzroy residents' meeting about graffiti – how the vehement dislike of tagging uses the language of viral invasion, and of threat and disorder. David wonders whether Fitzroy residents still fear the sanctioned “white anting” of the Housing Commission and Freeway construction days of the mid 20th century. Sabina argues graffiti often is read as an invasive threat, as the sign of a disordered environment, but that there are other kinds of threats – to civic rights and access to space - from a clean and ordered environment. The discussion is about specific places and surfaces – but “I think we are a bit naïve if we think that the form is the most important aspect of this conversation. It's more about our right to occupy space”.

As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio, Liz Taylor of This Must be the Place interviews Paul Long, Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and a recent arrival from one music city (Birmingham) to another (Melbourne). Birmingham in the UK is known for its connections to diverse genres of music - heavy metal, conscious reggae, grime, bhangra, dance. “Brum” is branded as the birthplace of Black Sabbath and heavy metal, as well as of such ubiquitous bands as UB40, Duran Duran and (previously unbeknownst to Liz) ELO. Birmingham has also been home to a widespread unlicensed radio scene. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, unlicensed or ‘pirate' radio served as voices (albeit periodically raided by police) for geographically and culturally specific groups such as Caribbean migrants, and as entry points for micro-genres and local scenes – broadcasting, for example, mobile phone numbers for dance party tickets. Here Paul reflects on the challenges of documenting and curating music cultures which are largely ephemeral, in places home to diverse communities and narratives, and in contexts where government intervention can be a virtue or its opposite –how “a place can take on these challenging narratives”. As both listener and historian Paul describes “going in search of radio”, “trying to find traces and put them back together”, and how different technologies and places interact over time. As well as contrasting the radio and audio landscapes of Birmingham and Melbourne, the discussion covers trade-offs between amateur and professional programming, national and local content, and between celebrating past hits and continuing in the present. As is often the case for musicians “the longer you go on, the more you're burdened with your own standards, your own repertoire”, and “the same happens to places”. Documenting music heritage in a music city like Birmingham involves, on the one hand, exhibitions and mythologies around famous bands. On the other are the more fleeting places, moments, and sounds which are nonetheless important to memory and identity – the value of “recognising not just the big names, but the also-rans, the never-rans, the thank god they never succeeded types - and thinking about what this means to people”. In the age of streaming and digital radio, Paul argues for tracing the origins of relatively recent music genres still matters - “learning about where this stuff came from, and preserving stuff that might otherwise disappear”. Links – Amplify - https://amplifies.blog/2023/09/27/pirate-radio-schedule/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/amplify-story-resistance-radio/id1704273057 Paul Long, Monash University – Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre - https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/paul-long Birmingham Music Archive - https://www.birminghammusicarchive.com/ Paul Long's RRR Brum-a gems playlist - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6pnFpV208Ve3LKqV4K4zO0?si=cddd34c664be4f81&nd=1

As part of Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio Liz Taylor of This Must be the Place talks with Shane Homan and Seamus O'Hanlon about their book “Music City Melbourne: Urban Culture, History and Policy” - looking back on Melbourne's music spaces from the 1950s to now. From town hall to stadium to pub, how have the physical spaces of popular music changed alongside a dramatically changing city? What are the ingredients of a music city, and what role does government policy have? Shane argues music cities are “a bit more complex than making sure you have enough live music venues in your city, add some funding and stir – each city as its own histories and settings”. The book starts with the arrival of rock and roll (and other transformative changes, like television) in 1956 after which Shane and Seamus chart the emergence and declines of different music circuits in Melbourne: e.g. drawing on interviews with musicians of Italian background who came to Melbourne in the mid 20th century and created their own Italian ballroom circuit across suburbia. These shows would attract thousands of people, playing hits from the Italian hit parade for local consumption. Another example is unlicensed discotheques of the 1960s – at one point there were 25 in the Melbourne CBD, such as Catcher in Flinders Lane which served as a space for late night jams. Not having liquor licenses, discotheques were hard to shut down, but police were in “a constant search for what we can do these venues for”. Seamus argues that as economic conditions change, new spaces become redundant, and “one of the really interesting things about music is that it's really good at taking over redundant spaces” – whether suburban theatres, boxing rings, hotels, and later warehouses. In Melbourne, culture and tourism became seen as sources of economic growth after the decline of manufacturing in the 1970s - “in the 1950s and 1960s it was all about factories and come and get a job. By the 1980s they were gone. It was all about, come and have fun instead”. Alongside these broader economic and social upheavals, beer barns and the pub rock scene come to prominence. Melbourne changed from an almost parochial but vibrant music scene, to a self-consciously globally connected city promoted for its local live music scene of smaller venues and sub-genres. Looking back on Melbourne's specific music scenes, Shane argues that what they have all had in common is a “do-it-yourself enthusiasm from communities finding their own members, with venues building from there”. Governments, generally, have tended to not notice them until years later when they're under threat. The interview covers liquor licensing, demographics, migration trends, noise complaints, moral panics, planning and policy settings like Agent of Change, broadcasting and the origins of community radio, Sydney and Melbourne rivalries, recording labels, publishing, and cultural policy; but also lands back on the inexorable pressures of housing and land costs. The contemporary challenges in Melbourne and other expensive and unequal cities are “how do you keep the small hole in the wall venues going?” and how do you create the conditions for new venues and opportunities to emerge? “Venues aren't just bricks and mortar, they have a heritage component in terms of memories of both fans and performers”. With music venues facing hostile conditions, new ideas and models include the Collingwood Yards precinct, and the Tote's latest iteration. But does place and live music still matter? You can record music to high quality on your phone, but “seeing it performed live- there's still something about it” – at least for now. Links – https://amplifies.blog/2023/09/27/pirate-radio-schedule/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/amplify-story-resistance-radio/id1704273057 https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/music-city-melbourne-9781501365720/

Urban Policy and Research – 40th anniversary journal party This episode of This Must Be The Place is a live recording from the party held for the 40th anniversary of the journal Urban Policy and Research, which took place at Melbourne University in early 2023. The episode begins with Liz briefly introducing the journal and its history – including one of the co-founders, Jeremy Reynolds - via an anecdote about Margo Huxley and her paper on chicken by-laws and the TV show “The Good Life”: (“In search of ‘the good life': Being a political economy of certain local government by-laws within the metropolitan area of Melbourne, Victoria” published back in 1985. - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08111148508522607). After that it's a largely unedited live recording of the anniversary proceedings – we hear from Crystal Legacy, Paul Maginn, MC Peter Phibbs, and co-founders Brian Haratsis and Marcus Spiller. There's two game shows including a “you can't ask that” panel of Emma Baker, Alexa Gower, Nicole Gurran, and Mike Berry. Plus a quiz where you have to guess the date of articles over the decades. Part of the theme of the proceedings is looking back at change and at non-change: at the sometimes frustratingly circular nature of debate, with some ideas coming around repeatedly without necessarily effecting good outcomes. It can be hard to pick which decade an editorial about ridiculous housing problems comes from. Having said that, “Housing policy in the 1980s” has a particularly dated ring to it. UPR was founded by a group of Melbournians in 1982 – and, as Marcus Spiller recalls, was actually launched by Gough Whitlam. Then as now, “the journal aims to disseminate information which is useful to Australian policy makers”. The recording has a few rueful laughs about trying to make that true, but also valuing the community of authors, reviewers and other contributors to the knowledge and influence of Urban Policy and Research. Most of the recording is a live recording, but with some light edits. There's a fair bit of room noise, clapping and familiar voices. Finishing with a cover of “Little Boxes”, by the Taylor Project, and part of the requested song “Ballarat”. Alas the recording cut out such that the very end of the night cut off from the recording. ANYWAY you should also check out the UPR back catalogue and consider contributing an article or debate piece!

In this summer instalment of erstwhile podcast This Must Be The Place, Liz Taylor (no, not the actor – who is dead by the way) talks with Brendan Gleeson (no, also not that other actor). Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy at the University of Melbourne and has had a decades-long career in publishing urban research. But since 2021 Brendan has for health reasons “stepped off the plate” from heading the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute – he hasn't read an academic theory text in over a year, and has instead been rescaling his focus to the local and the everyday of life in the Hotham Hill area of North Melbourne. Brendan's recent projects include setting up an independent press, Shiel Street Press (named for the North Melbourne street – also home of the Public Records Office), publishing a book of poems based on Gardiner Reserve in North Melbourne (“Records of the Loss Property Department of Gardiner Reserve”), and researching the life and times of a long-lived cockatoo (Cocky Duggan) who lived in a hotel in North Melbourne in the mid 20th century and was known for his “more than passable impersonation of men vomiting”. Gardiner Reserve is a place Brendan suddenly spent a lot of time in, living and observing at a walking pace, and the “Records of the Loss Property Department of Gardiner Reserve” book is a faux-corporate drama made up of pictures and poems, in large part inspired by items left behind in the park that Brendan's flat faces onto – beginning with the triggering sight of a set of sparkly children's shoes discarded (but neatly arranged) in a playground. From these lost and found items – shoes, toys, milk crates, crochet rugs, single crutches, the routine sadness of lost cat signs - the discussion gets on to themes of loss, grief, time, decay, children gone and grown, and the broader cultural fascination of discarded objects. Liz ties it into Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and his theories of modernity and decay, and to “Found Magazine” including Speckles the proto-viral “Loss Cat”. Also covered are municipal micro-regulations, public trees, Blue Lake, urban noises (lots of them are in the background), the anxiety of public toilet announcements (“door locked – your maximum use time is…”), North Melbourne Swimming Pool, and of course concluding with the tale of Cocky Duggan of the Court House Hotel. It was a long conversation and most of the background on Shiel Street Press has been cut but you find more information here - https://www.shielstreetpress.com.

In this episode of This Must be The Place Liz opportunistically interviews Associate Professor Jan Scheurer. Jan has been involved in public transport accessibility research for several decades and has a particular interest in comparing the performance of public transport between cities, as well as identifying changes in networks over time. From the basics of better bus network planning, to the more recent hype cycle of trackless trams, here Jan reflects on lessons for public transport and liveability in Australian cities. Jan nearly always travels by PT or bike - and on this occasion he joined us in small-town Elmore, arriving on the late train in mid-winter in time for a 3 course meal by the fire. Which sounds a bit like the opening to a murder mystery but instead the conversation covers: • The SNAMUTS accessibility model; • Comparing public transport between cities and over time; • Recent improvements in public transport in Auckland and Sydney; • Bus network changes and the latest in network planning; • Lags in public transport in growing Australian cities; • Limitations of political announceables and major infrastructure focuses; • What constitutes good, user-friendly public transport including frequencies; • Reflections on hype cycles and panacea solutions in public transport; • Trackless trams!; • What is a trackless tram? What is a tram? What is a bus? Also what is a monorail?; • (General discussion of linguistic and operational differences along this spectrum); • Where trackless trams might work – e.g. expanding outer suburbs, or regional cities (Bendigo!); • “As a transport researcher I see my role as mitigating both ends of the hype cycle”; • The costs of tracks and of trams themselves; • Regional cities and their transport opportunities and challenges – is the Sunshine Coast what the Gold Coast was like 20 years ago?; • Meanwhile in Elmore – ‘big' trains (18 services per week!), and the mini train; • Never having a driver's license; • Bike riding in Perth and Baja California; • Living in Barcelona and “it's true that living in Barcelona you often spend extended periods of time not even thinking about cars”; • Lessons for Australian cities: “Dare to be a public transport city, dare to be an active transport city”; • Improvement is a long process, but “the outcome is a more liveable and sustainable city and what's wrong with that?”.

The past, potential and perils of swimming in urban rivers. After quite a long dormancy period, in this episode of This Must Be The Place Liz has a follow-up discussion with a researcher she met recently while speaking at an MPavilion event (“Time Travel: Can Inspiration from our past save our holiday future?”). Loretta Bellato is a PhD researcher based in the Swinburne Centre for Urban Transitions, whose work crosses over with some of the topic Liz spoke about at MPavillion – particularly the historical origins of Victoria's imperilled public swimming pools in river enclosures/river pools. Loretta's research is focused on the potential of regenerative tourism, including a case study of efforts to regenerate the Birrarung (Yarra River) into, amongst other goals, a swimmable urban river. Relatively few people now would brave Melbourne's brown “upside down” river – at least not in its lower urban reaches – but in this episode we hear about some of the people who are working to make the Birrarung swimmable; and about people who already swim in it including at the longstanding swimming hole Deep Rock. The discussion ranges from pollution and perception; what regeneration and regenerative tourism mean; transitions theory; ‘Wild Swimming' and the UK's legal history; other examples of urban rivers being made swimmable again; Melbourne's river pool locations of the 20th century; and the demise of river pools - many of which were diverted into/replaced by the concrete post-war Olympic pools that are themselves now fast becoming obsolete. Liz has spiels about the role of health regulations, insurance, signage and fences as applied to open water swimming locations. Featuring Deep Rock, Warburton, the Thames, Copenhagen, Hepburn Pool, Kyneton, Shepparton, the Campaspe, Buchan Caves pool, and Bondi's poopy past amongst other stories. If you're interested in participating in Loretta's PhD research, she can be contacted at lbellato@swin.edu.au . The song ‘Swimmers” by Taylor Project is stuck on the end for good measure.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from Launceston, Tasmania, from the Urban History Planning History conference. (Listeners should also note the earlier interview with Alysia Bennett at the same conference, offering a very different take on how to pronounce ‘Launceston'). As well as hearing from the UTas historic tram that periodically trundles through the expansive campus car park, (and from some local windiness), in this instalment we hear from Professor Nicholas (Nick) Phelps of the University of Melbourne. Nick describes how he went from being an economic geographer studying Croydon in the UK (“the butt of jokes”) and its attempts to fashion itself as an ‘edge city'; to a general interest in suburban settlement patterns and identities. His talk at UHPH - Centering the Periphery: The Real and Imagined Centres of Casey, Victoria – centred (pun intended) on Casey, a suburban local government area in the south east of Melbourne. Casey is a geographically huge area (which Nick compares in scale to Metro Miami), and Nick and co-authors (including erstwhile TMBTP host David Nichols) were interested in Casey's efforts at fashioning ‘centres' in the context of incremental largely residential growth. Part of the presentation included revisiting Casey's earlier history as the City of Berwick, which in the 1970s pursued what we would now consider ‘futuristic' (as in, an imagined future we now scoff at) plans for a ‘metro city' of 100,000 people with its own green belt and (as was the style of the time) monorail. That city-shaping plan was shelved, although similarly huge scales of growth have since nonetheless occurred. Incidentally, some parts of Casey apparently still have a reservation for a monorail. As in Hugh Stretton's Ideas for Australian Cities, we discuss the idea there are two broad aspects to people's lives, with one secluded and quiet (the traditional function of a residential suburb – at least for certain people/men), and the other the outward facing connected ‘buzz' generally the function of a city centre. Nick considers whether and how suburban areas like Casey create the second kind of place. The discussion compares places like Casey to those of British New Towns under Development Corporations. For example Milton-Keynes, designated in the 1960s while passing through phases of mockery, is now the fastest growing city in the UK and an attractor both of new residents and new industries. We also discuss the prevalence of projects like monorails in edge city plans around the world in the 1970s – Nick suggests the ways we now scoff at such plans reflects a larger shift in planning, away from a belief in “thinking about the future in quite grand terms”. Part of the ensuing reticence is an aversion to some of new town planning's architectural dagginess, implausibility and paternalism. But there are trade-offs: planners have also tended to lose the capacity to have positive, large scale-discussions about the future, as well as some practical mechanisms for timing and delivery of new settlements. These include the use of land values toward supporting some notion of a shared public good, like providing facilities or shaping centres longer term. The episode also ranges from land acquisition and developer contributions, to national settlement patterns, local governments, 1970s economics, TV, Albury-Wodonga, green belts and how to pronounce names like “Launceston”, “Traralgon”, “Leicester” and “Gloucester”.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from Launceston, Tasmania, from the Urban History Planning History conference. (Listeners should also note a subsequent TMBTP interview with Nick Phelps at the same conference, who offers a different take on how to pronounce ‘Launceston'). As well as hearing from the UTas historic tram that periodically trundles through the expansive campus car park, in this instalment we hear from Alysia Bennett about her conference presentation and ongoing work on ‘right sizing: addressing housing challenges through activating marginal spaces, conditions and rules'. Right sizing, a concept Alysia and others have been developing, refers to working within existing houses to enable upsizing and downsizing simultaneously. Without necessarily creating a new fabric, ‘right sizing' is about creating small and large dwellings at the same time, with houses that can switch between the two. Part of this is historically grounded - looking at how parts of Australian cities are already being used as forms of covert density, for example with the integration of secondary dwellings, dual occupancies and subtly-tucked apartments into historic areas like Battery Point in Hobart. These include additional dwellings that ‘stealth' themselves as garages in terms of their presentation to the street, exploiting the fact that garages and parking spaces tend to be invisible to and automatically accepted by both people and planning rules. Alysia's work has shifted from looking at ways to increase density through apartments (the predominant policy interest in density in Australian cities), toward finding existing examples of density within low-rise urban and suburban areas – looking for design and regulatory opportunities that build on better elements of what people are currently doing incrementally. We hear ideas about who might benefit from right-sized housing; how house layouts can work with alignments of things like doors and wet areas; the role of monetising housing space; and models of ‘plug-in' ageing-in-place facilities like accessible bathrooms. Alysia is a Lecturer at MADA, Monash University. The Right Sizing project is ongoing and also involves Professor Dana Cuff of UCLA and Damian Madigan of UniSA.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from Launceston, Tasmania, from the Urban History Planning History conference. (Listeners should also note the earlier interview with Alysia Bennett at the same conference, offering a very different take on how to pronounce ‘Launceston’). As well as hearing from the UTas historic tram that periodically trundles through the expansive campus car park, (and from some local windiness), in this instalment we hear from Professor Nicholas (Nick) Phelps of the University of Melbourne. Nick describes how he went from being an economic geographer studying Croydon in the UK (“the butt of jokes”) and its attempts to fashion itself as an ‘edge city’; to a general interest in suburban settlement patterns and identities. His talk at UHPH - Centering the Periphery: The Real and Imagined Centres of Casey, Victoria – centred (pun intended) on Casey, a suburban local government area in the south east of Melbourne. Casey is a geographically huge area (which Nick compares in scale to Metro Miami), and Nick and co-authors (including erstwhile TMBTP host David Nichols) were interested in Casey’s efforts at fashioning ‘centres’ in the context of incremental largely residential growth. Part of the presentation included revisiting Casey’s earlier history as the City of Berwick, which in the 1970s pursued what we would now consider ‘futuristic’ (as in, an imagined future we now scoff at) plans for a ‘metro city’ of 100,000 people with its own green belt and (as was the style of the time) monorail. That city-shaping plan was shelved, although similarly huge scales of growth have since nonetheless occurred. Incidentally, some parts of Casey apparently still have a reservation for a monorail. As in Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities, we discuss the idea there are two broad aspects to people’s lives, with one secluded and quiet (the traditional function of a residential suburb – at least for certain people/men), and the other the outward facing connected ‘buzz’ generally the function of a city centre. Nick considers whether and how suburban areas like Casey create the second kind of place. The discussion compares places like Casey to those of British New Towns under Development Corporations. For example Milton-Keynes, designated in the 1960s while passing through phases of mockery, is now the fastest growing city in the UK and an attractor both of new residents and new industries. We also discuss the prevalence of projects like monorails in edge city plans around the world in the 1970s – Nick suggests the ways we now scoff at such plans reflects a larger shift in planning, away from a belief in “thinking about the future in quite grand terms”. Part of the ensuing reticence is an aversion to some of new town planning’s architectural dagginess, implausibility and paternalism. But there are trade-offs: planners have also tended to lose the capacity to have positive, large scale-discussions about the future, as well as some practical mechanisms for timing and delivery of new settlements. These include the use of land values toward supporting some notion of a shared public good, like providing facilities or shaping centres longer term. The episode also ranges from land acquisition and developer contributions, to national settlement patterns, local governments, 1970s economics, TV, Albury-Wodonga, green belts and how to pronounce names like “Launceston”, “Traralgon”, “Leicester” and “Gloucester”.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from Launceston, Tasmania, from the Urban History Planning History conference. (Listeners should also note a subsequent TMBTP interview with Nick Phelps at the same conference, who offers a different take on how to pronounce ‘Launceston’). As well as hearing from the UTas historic tram that periodically trundles through the expansive campus car park, in this instalment we hear from Alysia Bennett about her conference presentation and ongoing work on ‘right sizing: addressing housing challenges through activating marginal spaces, conditions and rules’. Right sizing, a concept Alysia and others have been developing, refers to working within existing houses to enable upsizing and downsizing simultaneously. Without necessarily creating a new fabric, ‘right sizing’ is about creating small and large dwellings at the same time, with houses that can switch between the two. Part of this is historically grounded - looking at how parts of Australian cities are already being used as forms of covert density, for example with the integration of secondary dwellings, dual occupancies and subtly-tucked apartments into historic areas like Battery Point in Hobart. These include additional dwellings that ‘stealth’ themselves as garages in terms of their presentation to the street, exploiting the fact that garages and parking spaces tend to be invisible to and automatically accepted by both people and planning rules. Alysia’s work has shifted from looking at ways to increase density through apartments (the predominant policy interest in density in Australian cities), toward finding existing examples of density within low-rise urban and suburban areas – looking for design and regulatory opportunities that build on better elements of what people are currently doing incrementally. We hear ideas about who might benefit from right-sized housing; how house layouts can work with alignments of things like doors and wet areas; the role of monetising housing space; and models of ‘plug-in’ ageing-in-place facilities like accessible bathrooms. Alysia is a Lecturer at MADA, Monash University. The Right Sizing project is ongoing and also involves Professor Dana Cuff of UCLA and Damian Madigan of UniSA.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies' selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip' bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia's Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. Because Liz collected too much info, this digital death trip podcast is in 3 parts. This is the 3rd and final episode. Listen to 1 & 2 first! Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies', so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement' and ‘selections', later ‘soldier settlement', as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system's administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father's right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns' that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. This is the last instalment of 3. We return to hear a few updates Liz could not help researching further. It includes specially written Taylor Project song Ghost Upon the Hill: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train, even when you close your windows, it comes back again, there's a ghost upon the hill”. Further post-script: Robert Mueller, youngest son, survived and moved to Germany. He married there in 1925. Also, re: the early ‘cinematograph' the children went to at the Athenaeum. Most cinemas in early Australia were in inner city theatres. Each reel was about 3 minutes, usually a short documentary display: boxing, footy, horses. The show would have included magicians. Mueller's servants took the children to this new popular entertainment spectacle. And while they were out, Mueller made preparations to kill everyone.

Because Liz collected too much info, this digital death trip podcast is in 3 parts. This is the 2nd episode of 3. Listen to episode 1 first! This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies' selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip' bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia's Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies', so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement' and ‘selections', later ‘soldier settlement', as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system's administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father's right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. Pre: Family Law Act custodial grievances, we hear Lang killed his family partly from a vendetta against his former father in law, Sergeant Frank Jordon (of East Malvern!). The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. Rumours of “certain allegations” were one reason given to explain Lang's violence, otherwise attributed (as with Mueller) to a fit of mania. Jordon, meanwhile, seemed to know what was coming but be powerless to stop it. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. Police suspect Krystal was killed by the father of her unborn child, and that people in Pyramid Hill know what happened but are not coming forward. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns' that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. Factoids of early railways, cinemas, mobility scooters, migrants, TB, police filing systems. And a specially written Taylor Project song, closing with: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train…” This is the 2nd episode of 3, where we return to the 1900s to hear more about Lang, Mueller, and their contexts.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies' selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip' bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia's Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. In this instalment, Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies', so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement' and ‘selections', later ‘soldier settlement', as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system's administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father's right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. Pre: Family Law Act custodial grievances, we hear Lang killed his family partly from a vendetta against his former father in law, Sergeant Frank Jordon (of East Malvern!). The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. Rumours of “certain allegations” were one reason given to explain Lang's violence, otherwise attributed (as with Mueller) to a fit of mania. Jordon, meanwhile, seemed to know what was coming but be powerless to stop it. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. Police suspect Krystal was killed by the father of her unborn child, and that people in Pyramid Hill know what happened but are not coming forward. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns' that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. Factoids of early railways, cinemas, mobility scooters, migrants, TB, police filing systems. And a specially written Taylor Project song, closing with: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train, even when you close your windows, it comes back again, there's a ghost upon the hill”. Because Liz collected too much information, this digital death trip podcast – Pyramid Hill and East Malvern - is in 3 parts. This is the 1st episode of 3.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies’ selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip’ bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. Because Liz collected too much info, this digital death trip podcast is in 3 parts. This is the 3rd and final episode. Listen to 1 & 2 first! Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies’, so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement’ and ‘selections’, later ‘soldier settlement’, as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system’s administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father’s right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns’ that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. This is the last instalment of 3. We return to hear a few updates Liz could not help researching further. It includes specially written Taylor Project song Ghost Upon the Hill: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train, even when you close your windows, it comes back again, there’s a ghost upon the hill”. Further post-script: Robert Mueller, youngest son, survived and moved to Germany. He married there in 1925. Also, re: the early ‘cinematograph’ the children went to at the Athenaeum. Most cinemas in early Australia were in inner city theatres. Each reel was about 3 minutes, usually a short documentary display: boxing, footy, horses. The show would have included magicians. Mueller's servants took the children to this new popular entertainment spectacle. And while they were out, Mueller made preparations to kill everyone.

Because Liz collected too much info, this digital death trip podcast is in 3 parts. This is the 2nd episode of 3. Listen to episode 1 first! This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies’ selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip’ bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies’, so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement’ and ‘selections’, later ‘soldier settlement’, as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system’s administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father’s right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. Pre: Family Law Act custodial grievances, we hear Lang killed his family partly from a vendetta against his former father in law, Sergeant Frank Jordon (of East Malvern!). The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. Rumours of “certain allegations” were one reason given to explain Lang’s violence, otherwise attributed (as with Mueller) to a fit of mania. Jordon, meanwhile, seemed to know what was coming but be powerless to stop it. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. Police suspect Krystal was killed by the father of her unborn child, and that people in Pyramid Hill know what happened but are not coming forward. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns’ that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. Factoids of early railways, cinemas, mobility scooters, migrants, TB, police filing systems. And a specially written Taylor Project song, closing with: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train…” This is the 2nd episode of 3, where we return to the 1900s to hear more about Lang, Mueller, and their contexts.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is part of the Digital Death Trip segment, where we investigate geographically themed ‘tragedies’ selected at random by the custom-coded ‘Digital Death Trip’ bot. The code uses the API to the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it. It compiles a case file, then Liz follows up with some research about the incident, its place and time. In this instalment, Digital Death Trip has picked two random and distant Victorian locations, and two random tragedies: The 1902 East Malvern Tragedy and 1906 Pyramid Hill Tragedy. Both are ‘triple tragedies’, so run in parallel. They also end up connected in ways that start to seem not quite random. On November 14th 1906, in a murder-suicide reported as The Pyramid Hill Tragedy, Constable Oliver John Lang killed himself and his two daughters (Olive and Doreen) at Pyramid Hill, an agricultural town in northern Victoria where Lang had been stationed for 5 years. Noting Constable Lang had repeatedly spoken about shooting himself and his family, an inquest found that “a heavy responsibility lies on those hear such words”, especially threats made by “anyone holding a public position such as that of a constable of police in whose hands are often the property liberty and perhaps the lives of others”. In 1902, in a murder-suicide reported as The East Malvern Tragedy, German merchant Arthur Mueller killed himself, his wife (Cecile) and one of his children (Willy) in a prestigious eastern suburb of Melbourne. Themes include police and law in settler-colonial contexts: the roles of police stationed in rural areas, and the fragile line of law. Also Land Law. Land Acts facilitated ‘closer settlement’ and ‘selections’, later ‘soldier settlement’, as tools of colonial expansion. Through land titles, Pyramid Hill was made into a late 19th century agricultural settlement, and police had a vital role in the system’s administration. Fathers and family law: fathers and grandfathers, and inheritances (good and bad) are key. We discuss custodial law in 19th and 20th century Australia, and the legal principal of “father’s right” through which fathers were always granted custody of their legitimate children. Pre: Family Law Act custodial grievances, we hear Lang killed his family partly from a vendetta against his former father in law, Sergeant Frank Jordon (of East Malvern!). The stories share knowledge and lies: advanced lying skills central to traditional morality and legitimacy, unnoticed patterns, unknowing, and what you can or should do with knowledge. Rumours of “certain allegations” were one reason given to explain Lang’s violence, otherwise attributed (as with Mueller) to a fit of mania. Jordon, meanwhile, seemed to know what was coming but be powerless to stop it. There are echoes through to a recent mystery in Pyramid Hill, the disappearance of heavily pregnant intellectually disabled woman Krystal Fraser in 2009. Police suspect Krystal was killed by the father of her unborn child, and that people in Pyramid Hill know what happened but are not coming forward. A final theme is cultural references to ‘ghost towns’ that seem isolated not only in space but in time. Wake in Fright, Twin Peaks, The Shining, 100 years of Solitude, Blazing Saddles. And country song Long Black Veil: “nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me”. Featuring a wintery visit to the Pyramid Hill op shop, cop shop, abattoir, and cemetery. Factoids of early railways, cinemas, mobility scooters, migrants, TB, police filing systems. And a specially written Taylor Project song, closing with: “on the hill there is a lookout, I can see that long dark train, even when you close your windows, it comes back again, there’s a ghost upon the hill”. Because Liz collected too much information, this digital death trip podcast – Pyramid Hill and East Malvern - is in 3 parts. This is the 1st episode of 3.

The "Living in the Music City: If you've got a spare half a million" event was held at the Toff in Town in Melbourne as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. It was co-sponsored by Monash Urban Planning and Design, along with the Henry Halloran Trust, and the University of Sydney, and by the City of Melbourne as part of their Music Plan 2018-2021. The Festival aims to raise the debate about urban health, and other key topics. “Living in the Music City” combined a panel discussion of policy and research issues around live music in cities, followed by a performance of songs. Both sections examined the past and future of Melbourne's live music venues in the context of the city's housing pressures. The name for the Music City event comes from a research project several Monash University academics are involved in, “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The subtitle – “If you've got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston'. This episode is the recording of the second half - the musician part. The musicians are: Frank Jones (https://www.frankjones.com.au) Sarah Taylor (of Taylor Project www.taylorproject.com.au) Brett Lee / Pirritu (@pirritumusic, Instagram: @pirritumusic, YouTube: https://youtu.be/7w7kXZV1Pgg) Liz Taylor (senior lecturer in urban planning and design at Monash University, also playing violin on some songs here). Songs: My Brown Yarra (by Frank Jones, performed with others) Ngurrampaa (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Buddy could you spare a dime (Sarah Taylor, cover of Yip Harburg song) Greenacres Lane (by/performed by Frank Jones) Secret Shape (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Slow Tram Comin' (by/performed by Sarah Taylor) For Barry Dickins (by/performed by Frank Jones) Time I Spoke (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Detroit (by/performed by Sarah Taylor) Pine Cone (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Suburban Rendezvous (by/performed by Frank Jones) DePreston (by Courtney Barnett, performed by all).

The "Living in the Music City: If you've got a spare half a million" event was held at the Toff in Town in Melbourne as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. It was co-sponsored by Monash Urban Planning and Design, along with the Henry Halloran Trust, and the University of Sydney, and by the City of Melbourne as part of their Music Plan 2018-2021. The Festival aims to raise the debate about urban health, and other key topics. “Living in the Music City” combined a panel discussion of policy and research issues around live music in cities, followed by a performance of songs. Both sections examined the past and future of Melbourne’s live music venues in the context of the city’s housing pressures. The name for the Music City event comes from a research project several Monash University academics are involved in, “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The subtitle – “If you’ve got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston’. This episode is the recording of the second half - the musician part. The musicians are: Frank Jones (http://www.frankjones.com.au) Sarah Taylor (of Taylor Project www.taylorproject.com.au) Brett Lee / Pirritu (@pirritumusic, Instagram: @pirritumusic, YouTube: http://youtu.be/7w7kXZV1Pgg) Liz Taylor (senior lecturer in urban planning and design at Monash University, also playing violin on some songs here). Songs: My Brown Yarra (by Frank Jones, performed with others) Ngurrampaa (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Buddy could you spare a dime (Sarah Taylor, cover of Yip Harburg song) Greenacres Lane (by/performed by Frank Jones) Secret Shape (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Slow Tram Comin' (by/performed by Sarah Taylor) For Barry Dickins (by/performed by Frank Jones) Time I Spoke (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Detroit (by/performed by Sarah Taylor) Pine Cone (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu) Suburban Rendezvous (by/performed by Frank Jones) DePreston (by Courtney Barnett, performed by all).

“Living in the Music City: If You've got a Spare Half A Million” will be held at Melbourne's Toff in Town on September 2nd as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. The idea of the event is to look at how live music and the night-time economy are shaped by the cost and availability of housing. The first half of the title, the Music City, derives from a three-year research project “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The second half of the title – “If you've got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston'. The song's lyrics refer not only to the spatial dynamics of the cost of housing in Melbourne, but to migration and change in the city generally. The event will look at housing and music through a combination of academic panel discussion, and live song performances. It includes both panel discussion and music partly because it's more fun, and partly because it's always strange to talk about music without including music, as in a 1979 quote best attributable to comedian Martin Mull, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (but – why not?), or an older quote, from a 1918 New Republic article, that “writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics”. There might be a bit of the latter, “singing about economics”, because both now and in 1918, singing about economics does happen, and you don't have to look far for songs with words like “money”, “dollar” or “rent” in them. For this episode I've looked back over 2 years of This Must Be The Place podcasts to find some episodes where we've talked about aspects of live music and its relationships to place. The episode comprises 7 relevant clips from previous episodes – these are compiled here kind of as re-runs. Or a nicer wording might be that they're ‘curated' selections, a ‘best of' or ‘hits out' collection, of This Must Be The Place talking music and place. Including: • Interview with Seamus O'Hanlon, Author of “City Life – the new urban Australia” • Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting • Revisiting “Melbourne on Foot” (1980 book): St Kilda walking tour with Prof Graham Davison (also Richmond walking tour) • Dogs in Space to Olives in Toolleen: Small bands, small farms with Charles (‘Chuck' Meo) and Ceilidh • Visit to Clunes Booktown Festival: Incl. David's Talk on “Dig: Australian Rock & Pop Music, 1960-85” • Lachlan from the Ocean Party on why hotel hell is actually pretty swell Register for the Festival of Urbanism events here: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/living-in-themusiccity-if-youve-got-a-spare-half-a-million

“Living in the Music City: If You’ve got a Spare Half A Million” will be held at Melbourne’s Toff in Town on September 2nd as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. The idea of the event is to look at how live music and the night-time economy are shaped by the cost and availability of housing. The first half of the title, the Music City, derives from a three-year research project “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The second half of the title – “If you’ve got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston’. The song’s lyrics refer not only to the spatial dynamics of the cost of housing in Melbourne, but to migration and change in the city generally. The event will look at housing and music through a combination of academic panel discussion, and live song performances. It includes both panel discussion and music partly because it’s more fun, and partly because it’s always strange to talk about music without including music, as in a 1979 quote best attributable to comedian Martin Mull, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (but – why not?), or an older quote, from a 1918 New Republic article, that “writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics”. There might be a bit of the latter, “singing about economics”, because both now and in 1918, singing about economics does happen, and you don’t have to look far for songs with words like “money”, “dollar” or “rent” in them. For this episode I’ve looked back over 2 years of This Must Be The Place podcasts to find some episodes where we’ve talked about aspects of live music and its relationships to place. The episode comprises 7 relevant clips from previous episodes – these are compiled here kind of as re-runs. Or a nicer wording might be that they’re ‘curated’ selections, a ‘best of’ or ‘hits out’ collection, of This Must Be The Place talking music and place. Including: • Interview with Seamus O’Hanlon, Author of “City Life – the new urban Australia” • Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting • Revisiting “Melbourne on Foot” (1980 book): St Kilda walking tour with Prof Graham Davison (also Richmond walking tour) • Dogs in Space to Olives in Toolleen: Small bands, small farms with Charles (‘Chuck’ Meo) and Ceilidh • Visit to Clunes Booktown Festival: Incl. David’s Talk on “Dig: Australian Rock & Pop Music, 1960-85” • Lachlan from the Ocean Party on why hotel hell is actually pretty swell Register for the Festival of Urbanism events here: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/living-in-themusiccity-if-youve-got-a-spare-half-a-million

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Liz and Laura are joined by Monash Urban Planning and Design students Lachlan Burke, Sylvia Tong and Will McIntyre to share perspectives on whether and how urban planning can work across borders. They first talk about MAPS (Monash Association of Planning Students); how they gravitated to studying urban planning (from biology, environmental engineering, development studies and philosophy); and the upcoming MAPS 2019 Festival of Urbanism Commuter Race including how a MELWAY (the iconic street directory) will help with navigating it. Lachlan and Will then reflect on lessons learned across their planning studies and the international development projects they've been involved in, from Midigami (Sri Lanka) to Mongolia. Lachlan discusses two aid projects he's been part of in Sri Lanka, including post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Midigami - the subject of a presentation by Sri Lankan researcher Dr. Rangajeewa Ratnayake at this year's Festival of Urbanism. Will shares insights from a lifetime of exposure to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary development projects, including those that formed his father's work for the Asian Development Bank. It was while working on green infrastructure projects in Mongolia that Will first became interested in the broader scale and context of urban planning -“I realised you need to know how the city works in order to be able to implement anything”. The episode reflects on the challenge of development projects maintaining long-lasting outcomes. For example, new elevated housing built outside of tsunami buffer zones suffer longer-term from water pressure issues. Wells dug without adequate hydrological analysis (or evaluation) suffer from repeated contamination and collapse. Across the examples run questions of accountability and evaluation, and the need for greater community ownership (versus issues of donor fatigue). And the borders of communication and translation, broadly understood – how to bridge planning words and knowledge across languages and cultures, and across disciplinary boundaries. “There are different ways of doing things that we've never considered, and you've never considered, but let's work together to discover those”. Mentioned in this episode: • TED video about public spaces that was Sylvia's motivation to study Urban Planning: https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work/transcript?language=en • Engineers Without Borders and human-centred design: https://www.ewb.org.au/blog/implementing-a-human-centered-approach • Planning Institute of Australia members and academic subscribers can access this paper by Ian Woodcock documenting a local example of interdisciplinary and human-centred planning for railway station design: Woodcock, I. (2015) The design speculation and action research assemblage: ‘transit for all' and the transformation of Melbourne's passenger rail system, Australian Planner 53(1), 15-27, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2015.1135818 • Festival of Urbanism- Donor-driven Tsunami Housing in Sri Lanka: Resident Outcomes and Experiences: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/donor-driven-tsunami-housing-in-sri-lanka-resident-outcomes-and-experiences • Festival of Urbanism- Quick MAPS: Monash Association of Planning Students Commuter Race: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/7/29/quick-maps-monash-association-of-planning-students-commuter-race . Anyone can register to take part in the Quick MAPS race to 3 landmark pubs in Melbourne's CBD ,with only a MELWAY (or other non-phone map) for navigation. Saturday 7 September. • If you sign up for the MAPS Festival of Urbanism Race you can get 25% off the Melway 2020 edition! Liz's life circa early 2000s was confined largely to page 29.

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Liz and Laura are joined by Monash Urban Planning and Design students Lachlan Burke, Sylvia Tong and Will McIntyre to share perspectives on whether and how urban planning can work across borders. They first talk about MAPS (Monash Association of Planning Students); how they gravitated to studying urban planning (from biology, environmental engineering, development studies and philosophy); and the upcoming MAPS 2019 Festival of Urbanism Commuter Race including how a MELWAY (the iconic street directory) will help with navigating it. Lachlan and Will then reflect on lessons learned across their planning studies and the international development projects they’ve been involved in, from Midigami (Sri Lanka) to Mongolia. Lachlan discusses two aid projects he’s been part of in Sri Lanka, including post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Midigami - the subject of a presentation by Sri Lankan researcher Dr. Rangajeewa Ratnayake at this year’s Festival of Urbanism. Will shares insights from a lifetime of exposure to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary development projects, including those that formed his father’s work for the Asian Development Bank. It was while working on green infrastructure projects in Mongolia that Will first became interested in the broader scale and context of urban planning -“I realised you need to know how the city works in order to be able to implement anything”. The episode reflects on the challenge of development projects maintaining long-lasting outcomes. For example, new elevated housing built outside of tsunami buffer zones suffer longer-term from water pressure issues. Wells dug without adequate hydrological analysis (or evaluation) suffer from repeated contamination and collapse. Across the examples run questions of accountability and evaluation, and the need for greater community ownership (versus issues of donor fatigue). And the borders of communication and translation, broadly understood – how to bridge planning words and knowledge across languages and cultures, and across disciplinary boundaries. “There are different ways of doing things that we’ve never considered, and you’ve never considered, but let’s work together to discover those”. Mentioned in this episode: • TED video about public spaces that was Sylvia’s motivation to study Urban Planning: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work/transcript?language=en • Engineers Without Borders and human-centred design: http://www.ewb.org.au/blog/implementing-a-human-centered-approach • Planning Institute of Australia members and academic subscribers can access this paper by Ian Woodcock documenting a local example of interdisciplinary and human-centred planning for railway station design: Woodcock, I. (2015) The design speculation and action research assemblage: ‘transit for all’ and the transformation of Melbourne's passenger rail system, Australian Planner 53(1), 15-27, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2015.1135818 • Festival of Urbanism- Donor-driven Tsunami Housing in Sri Lanka: Resident Outcomes and Experiences: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/donor-driven-tsunami-housing-in-sri-lanka-resident-outcomes-and-experiences • Festival of Urbanism- Quick MAPS: Monash Association of Planning Students Commuter Race: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/7/29/quick-maps-monash-association-of-planning-students-commuter-race . Anyone can register to take part in the Quick MAPS race to 3 landmark pubs in Melbourne’s CBD ,with only a MELWAY (or other non-phone map) for navigation. Saturday 7 September. • If you sign up for the MAPS Festival of Urbanism Race you can get 25% off the Melway 2020 edition! Liz’s life circa early 2000s was confined largely to page 29.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is a bit different – normally I talk to people, but in this episode I (meaning Liz Taylor, Monash University) actually just read out an essay I wrote recently about my experience of living in a building with combustible cladding. Also about reading Kafka (and Graeber) and…well that's the basic premise. I've called it Trial by Cladding. “I recently finished reading Franz Kafka's 1925 novel “The Trial”: the unsettling, absurd story of a young middle-class man suddenly caught up in a farce of bureaucracy. The protagonist Joseph K spends a year fighting charges which are never named, but of which he is presumed guilty. He is increasingly consumed by obscure court proceedings which, officious lawyers assure him, are very serious, but that he need not dare try to understand. Disbelief ebbs into resignation. Weekends disappear with worry, and inconvenient appointments see him start to slip up at his job at the bank. The fact he doesn't know what he is accused of, or whether or not he did something wrong, becomes irrelevant even to himself. “My innocence doesn't make the matter any simpler”, K reflects: “I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up”. I started reading “The Trial” after my apartment building's last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque', and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding. Like most people I knew Kafka was shorthand for absurd situations - famously “Metamorphosis” begins with the character waking up as a giant insect. From its popular usage I understood ‘Kafkaesque' to mean a comically complicated process – which the situation with combustible cladding certainly already was. But I think “The Trial” had also once been mentioned to me in passing by a Croatian colleague who described her suspicion of cheerful government descriptions of policies. To her, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia, these inevitably signalled something cruelly incompetent going on in the background. Like in “The Trial”, she said. In the confusing boredom of an Owners Corporation meeting concerned with the strange details of the urgent need for us to remove chunks of our building, I was drawn to finally reading “The Trial”. At the least, I thought it might provide a lighter perspective on our situation. Like tens of thousands of others in Victoria, I own and live in an apartment in a building containing combustible cladding - similar materials to what fuelled the 2017 fire at London's Grenfell Towers, in which 72 people died. In the wake of the Grenfell fire and of a 2014 fire at the LaCrosse Building in Melbourne's Docklands, Victoria's Cladding Taskforce determined that the presence of combustible cladding, including aluminium composite panels, on high rise buildings is unsafe and non-compliant. Perhaps surprisingly, the onus for rectifying non-compliant cladding in Victoria has been placed with apartment owners. Not with the builders, developers and other professionals who specified and used the materials and sold the apartments; not with the insurance agencies fond of advertising how awful it would be if a random problem were to happen to your house and ‘won't you be glad you had insurance' when it does; nor the local and state government regulators (and private building surveyors who replaced council building inspectors from the 1990s) who signed off on the buildings. Instead, owners who bought purportedly compliant apartments are compelled to fix an urgent problem created by government and industry, and facing bills of typically $40,000 to $60,000 per apartment to do so. In most cases they are poorly equipped to navigate the financial and broader costs. But as Joseph K reflects, “innocence doesn't make the matter any simpler”…[more in episode]

This episode of This Must Be The Place is a bit different – normally I talk to people, but in this episode I (meaning Liz Taylor, Monash University) actually just read out an essay I wrote recently about my experience of living in a building with combustible cladding. Also about reading Kafka (and Graeber) and…well that’s the basic premise. I’ve called it Trial by Cladding. “I recently finished reading Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel “The Trial”: the unsettling, absurd story of a young middle-class man suddenly caught up in a farce of bureaucracy. The protagonist Joseph K spends a year fighting charges which are never named, but of which he is presumed guilty. He is increasingly consumed by obscure court proceedings which, officious lawyers assure him, are very serious, but that he need not dare try to understand. Disbelief ebbs into resignation. Weekends disappear with worry, and inconvenient appointments see him start to slip up at his job at the bank. The fact he doesn’t know what he is accused of, or whether or not he did something wrong, becomes irrelevant even to himself. “My innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”, K reflects: “I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up”. I started reading “The Trial” after my apartment building’s last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding. Like most people I knew Kafka was shorthand for absurd situations - famously “Metamorphosis” begins with the character waking up as a giant insect. From its popular usage I understood ‘Kafkaesque’ to mean a comically complicated process – which the situation with combustible cladding certainly already was. But I think “The Trial” had also once been mentioned to me in passing by a Croatian colleague who described her suspicion of cheerful government descriptions of policies. To her, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia, these inevitably signalled something cruelly incompetent going on in the background. Like in “The Trial”, she said. In the confusing boredom of an Owners Corporation meeting concerned with the strange details of the urgent need for us to remove chunks of our building, I was drawn to finally reading “The Trial”. At the least, I thought it might provide a lighter perspective on our situation. Like tens of thousands of others in Victoria, I own and live in an apartment in a building containing combustible cladding - similar materials to what fuelled the 2017 fire at London’s Grenfell Towers, in which 72 people died. In the wake of the Grenfell fire and of a 2014 fire at the LaCrosse Building in Melbourne’s Docklands, Victoria’s Cladding Taskforce determined that the presence of combustible cladding, including aluminium composite panels, on high rise buildings is unsafe and non-compliant. Perhaps surprisingly, the onus for rectifying non-compliant cladding in Victoria has been placed with apartment owners. Not with the builders, developers and other professionals who specified and used the materials and sold the apartments; not with the insurance agencies fond of advertising how awful it would be if a random problem were to happen to your house and ‘won’t you be glad you had insurance’ when it does; nor the local and state government regulators (and private building surveyors who replaced council building inspectors from the 1990s) who signed off on the buildings. Instead, owners who bought purportedly compliant apartments are compelled to fix an urgent problem created by government and industry, and facing bills of typically $40,000 to $60,000 per apartment to do so. In most cases they are poorly equipped to navigate the financial and broader costs. But as Joseph K reflects, “innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”…[more in episode]

"In every instance ... the user is paying. They're either paying by getting up early, by walking much further, or they're paying in frustration in looking for the perfect park and there's a time penalty you can translate directly into dollars”. Who pays for transport, and who benefits from it? In this episode of This Must Be The Place, Liz is joined over lunch by transport researchers Laura Aston, Nicholas Fournier and Knowles Tivendale to discuss equity in transport pricing. Lunch isn’t free, but getting around sometimes is – or at least it seems to be, for some people. Talking tickets, tolls and time are Laura Aston (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/research-students/laura-aston/): a PhD Candidate from Monash’s Public Transport Research Group. Nick Fournier (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/staff/nick-fournier/) is a research fellow at PTRG who recently moved to Melbourne after finishing his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on multi-model travel decision making and equity. Knowles Tivendale is Director of consulting firm Movement & Place (http://www.movementandplace.com.au/), and a lecturer and associate of PTRG. Why was congestion charging successful in London but not Manchester? Why was congestion pricing so appealing in Stockholm that the public voted for it at a referendum after a successful trial? Why do Melbourne’s toll-roads differ in their model of who pays? Are transit users the only beneficiaries of public transport infrastructure? The episode ponders the principles and practicalities of how mobility costs and benefits are distributed, and what this might mean for Colac (a town that, for some reason, comes up a lot). Re: parking, Knowles suggests “there are times when the demand is so light that free access is fine…but when things get very congested, that’s clearly a time to ration the resource”. He questions whether rationing parking based on availability in time (rewarding those who get up early) is the best way to ensure fair access to the train network. Regarding CBD congestion, Nick suggests “you can move 1000 cars per hour per lane..if you’ve got more people than that moving through, then they probably shouldn’t be in cars, they should be walking”. Nick also brings a US perspective, highlighting some surprising differences in the way the US funds highways, contracts public transport, manages congestion and deals with commercial vehicles. Nick argues transport pricing needs to be nuanced, offer alternatives and “not just gouge people”. Fallout over taxi medallions: http://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyc-news-taxi-medallions.html 98 per cent of U.S. commuters support other people using public transportation: http://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favor-public-trans-1819565837. The Swedish Congestion Charges: Ten Years On: http://www.transportportal.se/swopec/CTS2017-2.pdf. US highway trust fund: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-trust-fund-and-how-it-financed Laura and Knowles are active twitter users: @laura_aston and @knowles_tiv Note/ apology: This episode is recorded over working lunch, and contains much ambient restaurant noise.