The Houses That Cried

Encountering Imagery

One hundred and fifty years ago, on a sandstone cliff high above Sydney Harbour, Australia, a number of individuals began carving the rocks and making their mark upon the land. The people who made these inscriptions were amongst Australia’s first migrants and free settlers who were put in quarantine. The Quarantine Station was established in 1828 to manage and control the spread of infectious diseases in the nascent colony of New South Wales. Who were these people and why were they compelled to mark their presence in stone here? In this paper we explore the words and images inscribed at the North Head Quarantine Station. They are, we suggest, an historical archive of passengers, ship’s names, and ports of origin as well as markers of passage and acts of memorialisation. An evocative testimony to lives held in suspension, we discuss also the profound effect of seeing these inscriptions and realising that for some of their makers the journey remained unfulfilled.

Although residential mobility has been studied at length, residential immobility has been addressed comparatively rarely. In this article, we draw on interviews conducted with 35 participants aged 38–39 in 2012 in Victoria, Australia, in which they were asked to reflect on their lives over the previous 20 years, focusing specifically on those who have remained in or returned to the areas in which they grew up. We focus on the role of nostalgia in the participants' experiences of and relationships with place, finding that far from signifying a purely, or even predominantly, melancholic experience their expressions of nostalgia held the power to enliven the present, even while anchoring them to the past. We contend that nostalgia can form an integral part of practices that reconcile continuity and change and produce feelings of familiarity and comfort, which buffer individuals against the uncertainties associated with wider contexts shaped by rapid social change.

Australian Historical Studies, 2018

Australian Historical Studies, 2017

Impact Journal , 2020

In Visualizing home in Australia, I describe my studio research and how I develop my artworks in relation to my experience of migration, displacement and my idea of home. Being an Iranian in Australia, my experience of displacement does not cause me to think of returning to my homeland in the future. Instead, being a migrant here evokes the idea of home, and brings my attention to my everyday life and how repetition in daily household tasks can bring the idea of home into practice. I refer to the use of handwriting and screen-printing in my artworks to reflect my idea of the physical impact of displacement on my ideas and personality. Through analyzing my artworks, I explain that my engagement with the process of screen- printing and handwriting reminds me of the early days of settling into life in Australia and learning English, and how these two expressive tools brought my attention to something still, a personal silence, determination and satisfaction in exploring and finding my ideas. In this article, I aim is to suggest that physical engagement with the process of screen-printing can be likely a metaphor for repetition in everyday domestic household tasks.

From the early nineteenth century many of the ships arriving in Port Jackson, NSW were required to undergo quarantine at North Head, Manly. Thousands of people passed through this site during its 150 year history. Historic inscriptions remain as one of the most intriguing archaeological legacies of this period. In this paper we revisit recordings of these inscriptions and consider what they may tell us about the people who inhabited the site. Using contemporary theories on the material culture of travel and memorialisation we explore the inscriptions as commemorative gestures, or mementoes of passage. In the process we reflect on our own professional ties to the past.

2012

EACH time I cross the Victoria Bridge at the top end of Queen Street I see, in an involuntary flash of memory, the Little Lampshade Ladies who used to stand there long ago, awash in brilliant sunlight, waiting for a tram. It was the mid-1960s and these elderly ladies were a distinctive feature of the Brisbane landscape, as distinctive, they seemed to me, as the giant fig trees that punctuated the suburbs and created mysterious deep-green grottoes in the city's very heart. They were ladies by virtue of the fact that their flat Australian manner had been softened by training in Victorian gentility and suburban respectability, Lampshade Ladies because of their invariable dress: a floral frock worn well below the knees, neat white gloves, handbag over the right arm, sensible shoes, and a large, head-encompassing hat woven in the exact shape of an old-fashioned lampshade. The ladies' common devotion to this style expressed, I presumed, fidelity to standards of dress and decorum instilled in their youth, which must have occurred some time around the Great War. Their steadfast resistance to change across half a century made them seem terminally quaint amidst the garish innovation of the sixties. To a self-obsessed, present-obsessed generation they were simply harmless relics, easily overlooked, a compliment the ladies returned with their blithe indifference. But for me, recently down from country Queensland, their manner of perfect belonging in the great sunstruck city seemed reassuring. Brisbane, viewed in imagination from the Darling Downs, had loomed as a bustling metropolis of intimidating dimensions and rampant crime, but I could hardly feel unsafe when the Little Lampshade Ladies navigated it with such calm self-possession. In fact the city proved surprisingly amenable, with the incomparable advantage of a cinema in every suburb. A compulsive cinephile, I frequented its many 'picture houses' even to the remotest reaches of the bay, and it was largely because of this abundance that Brisbane remained in my imagination great. Not until I'd travelled to Sydney and Melbourne (even better provided with cinemas) did I begin to look at its low-built skyline, dominated by a handsome but modestly proportioned City Hall, and see just a big, sprawling, country town.

Journal of Urban History, 2002