The secret history of stone

Chris Hatzis
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

The thousands of Melbourne commuters that walk our streets every day would not have a clue about the history of the ground beneath them. It would have several stories to tell, and not just the land, either. The buildings, the facades, the topography we’ve created for ourselves and changed so many times over the years would each have something to say about our identity and the way we see ourselves. Museums and galleries can go some way to explain to you what is and was here. But what about industrial ruins, older buildings, neglected tracts of land?

Dr Timothy Edensor teaches cultural geography at the Manchester Metropolitan University and is Principal Research Fellow at the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. He was recently a part of a symposium titled “Dubious Heritage”, which explored questions around the retrospective value of modernity. His varied career has taken him all over the world, where he’s studied tourism, national identity, light festivals, and Melbourne stone buildings, his current passion.

Dr Timothy Edensor caught up with our reporter Steve Grimwade in the middle of Melbourne, where else but outside the iconic Exhibition Buildings, to chat about his academic life, culture and identity through geography and the joy of simply walking around to get a sense of where, and who, you really are.

Steve Grimwade
If I imagine myself as an academic I suspect I think, I could only find myself following your path. This is not necessarily because of your research focus, which is interesting, but rather it's your scope. Over 20 years your publications have covered tourism, Braveheart and Scottish identity, national identity, industrial ruins and most recently light and darkness and well, stone. It looks like you're having fun.

Tim Edensor
I always have a kind of maxim and my job is shaped by this, which is to really be guided by my passions. So anything that I'm interested in I will follow. Of course, I don't necessarily stay on the same path. I might be looking at light and dark but then suddenly I'll be gripped by stone in Melbourne and then I just have to follow my nose and enthusiasm.

Steve Grimwade

Does that mean your Dean or Head of School just hates you?

Tim Edensor
I think luckily, because these enthusiasms lead to a great number of publications, they let me off the hook.

Steve Grimwade

Fair enough. Why, in the first instance, become an academic?

Tim Edensor
Yeah, it's really interesting because I was a - before I became an academic I did lots of less salubrious jobs shall we say. I was a postman, I worked in a foundry. I worked in a - plucking turkeys. I've done lots of really unpleasant and also more mundane office jobs. I think it occurred to me at one point that it would be really nice to do something that was a little more stimulating, where work wasn't simply a means to an end - a means to get a wage packet but actually where work could be a passion. So in the United Kingdom, I think you have it here, this marvellous institution called the Open University. So that was my way into higher education.

As I think with many people, as a mature student, when I started studying I prospered and I was very, very excited. When you're a student and you're 18 you go to university, there are other things that you're interested in, right? But when you're 28, maybe not, you've kind of done those things. So yeah, I was really into the study at that point and I just sailed through, got an Open University degree, master's in Sociology, PhD and went into academia. It still feels really odd to me to get up in the morning and go to work with a spring in my step. So work - it's actually quite hard sometimes for me to distinguish between work and leisure and that was never the case in the past.

Steve Grimwade
So you are quite a grounded man. But your area of interest - at first glance anyway - seems a little esoteric. I mean you're a cultural geographer.

Tim Edensor
Mm-hm.

Steve Grimwade
As such I guess is it right to say that you map our relationship to culture through space and place?

Tim Edensor

I think that's a really good way of putting it and I would add landscape in there as well. So landscape, space and place are absolutely critical to the way that we look at things. Of course, if you say that, if you start thinking about place and landscape especially, we all know them. We all are intimately familiar with different kinds of places and different kinds of landscapes, so it's actually not as esoteric as it first sound. Actually it's quite a grounded study. All places have particular qualities. All landscapes have particular features or are interpreted in particular ways, are used in particular ways. So in a sense, everything can be cultural geography since we live in a world and we inhabit place and landscape.

Steve Grimwade
Right now we're standing beneath the Royal Exhibition Building and actually an old - it looks like an old brick building or an old stone building but it's actually the oldest wooden building in the southern hemisphere, I believe. People can correct me later on that. To my - to the south I can see huge skyscrapers over the trees of the Royal Exhibition Gardens or the Carlton Gardens. Around the corner we have the new - well the relatively new - Melbourne Museum itself. So I mean every time we look around if we pay attention, we actually begin to get that sense of history and as you say, that sense of who we are in culture.

Tim Edensor

I think it's really true that. It's very important to think about space as not a fixed thing, space, place and landscape are continuously changing. They're endlessly dynamic and they change all the time. Often they're kind of contested, people think different things should happen there. So for instance, these very gardens, this will have been contested by people who want to maybe play sports in the park. But it's not really a park for that kind of thing, it's more about wandering round in a leisurely fashion. Consuming the fountains, smelling the flowers, living under - dwelling, having picnics under the shade of the trees and so forth.

So there's always a lot of contestation over places I think and they always change. Nowhere is static. That's what makes geography really interesting is that you can always find how places have changed. This is certainly the case when we look at the recent project that I'm doing around Melbourne stone which is just an incredibly volatile and exciting series of transformations that continue today.

Steve Grimwade
Let's talk a bit about stone. I mean so much of Melbourne's stone and what we see now was incorporated into our buildings and into our lives around the 1850s in the gold rush. At that point in time we were favourably compared to Chicago as being the great next city. I guess this becomes important for a new city, trying to establish itself on the world stage.

Tim Edensor
No it does and think what's really interesting there is that, as you say, Melbourne became very wealthy. But one of the big problems was, in the early years is that bluestone was widely available. But unfortunately the local sandstones from Barrabool and Bacchus Marsh for instance, were of very low quality and buildings were constructed out of those sandstones but those buildings fell apart very quickly. In point of fact, there's a more recent building, Newman College, which was built out of Barrabool Sandstone in the 1920s. I don't know why they didn't learn their lessons because that's been falling apart ever since.

But what's interesting about this of course is that Melbourne had aspirations to be kind of a grand city. Indeed, it was very wealthy but it couldn't build fine stone buildings should we say. It couldn't build neoclassical stone buildings without importing stone from elsewhere. In other words, without importing stone that could be easily fashioned but was also durable, namely sandstone. So it brought in supplies of Tasmanian sandstone. It brought in sandstone from New Zealand. But there was a huge surge on then to build the new parliament, the new parliament building that we all know now. Originally they sought high and low for some nice local or regional sandstone, couldn't find any and so they decided to import some sandstone from New South Wales, big mistake.

Many people, including many members of parliament, were very unhappy about this and said that this was ridiculous to have a Victorian parliament that wasn't built out of Victorian sandstone. Very luckily, shortly before this, they found a fantastic quality sandstone in the Grampians at Heatherlie Quarry. That was subsequently quarried and indeed did serve as the sandstone that now clothes the parliament building along with many other buildings in Melbourne. It's really, really high quality.

So fiercely did people feel about this that John Woods, a local MP at the time at Stawell, actually erected the sandstone pillar which is just along the road there outside the Royal Exhibition Centre, made out of this very stone, saying that this stone would last long after the exhibition building had fallen down, so durable was it. So this was his way of campaigning, for this stone to be used in the construction of the parliament building.

Steve Grimwade
How does history read these edifices?

Tim Edensor

I mean I think it's kind of interesting isn't it, is that now we wouldn't tend to be so interested in building - making a prestigious building in a neoclassical form. That would be seen as very outmoded but of course in the Victorian, Victorian era it was very important that neoclassicism was the hallmark of the prestigious. So nearly all town halls, government buildings, exchequers, banks, were built in this neoclassical form. Big pillars, porticos and pediments and so forth.

Now we don't do that and I think what's really interesting now is that new building techniques allow us to build in glass, concrete and steel as we can see all these huge tower blocks going up. These are the new prestigious buildings, these large corporate buildings. But if we do build out of stone, very often - or in nearly all cases, the stone is a very thin veneer and that stone can be imported from all over the word. Indeed in the case of Melbourne, these new buildings that are going up, they will have maybe - well the foyer for instance or the outside of the building where you enter will be clad in stone and very often that stone could come from Brazil, South Africa, India, China, from all over the world.

It's almost as if they have a catalogue of different marbles and limestones and sandstones from across the world and this gets imported in. So historical use of stone changes quite dramatically. Interestingly, now bluestone is being used, because now we have very high quality cutting technologies we can fashion bluestone in the most beautiful way. We can give it a very, very, smooth surface and we can mould it in all sorts of ways that would have been impossible 100 years ago.

Steve Grimwade

You've spoken about the internationalisation of stone use in modern buildings, what I've heard from you also is you have a distinct connection to place. You've mentioned Malmsbury stone and this suburb's stone and that stone. I guess as a cultural geographer, you get to know a place extremely well.

Tim Edensor
You really do. I mean it becomes fascinating, you start to see places in a very different way. So you start to see the different ways in which stone is layered. So for instance, at the moment, I'm living in Carlton and I'm living right next to Curtin Square. Curtin Square, like nearly all the other parks were quarries at one point in time. Nearly every single park, from here going out to Campbelltown, for instance, will have been either bluestone quarries or pits for bricks.

So if we had an aerial photograph - of course we couldn't have done, but if we had an aerial photograph in 1880 or 1900 which hovered - was taken above Melbourne, the whole of the landscape would have been absolutely pitted with these quarries and clay pits and of course we don't see any of that now, it's all kind of filled in. But if you know how to read the landscape, then you can start to see little traces of where those quarries might have been.

Steve Grimwade
Speaking of reading the landscape, have you had a chance to interrogate the way Indigenous Australians read the landscape and affected the landscape?

Tim Edensor

It's really important to do this and I think it's incumbent upon all scholars and all cultural geographers to explore how that's the case. How - in fact the circulation in my case, the circulation of stone through Melbourne which is what I'm interested in, it doesn't just start when the British arrive. It actually has a history long before that and there are various ways in which we might think about this.

We can look at Mount William where greenstone was quarried for tools and axes. Those greenstones routes were traded right across the whole area that's now Victoria. There were huge routes of trading whereby this greenstone, these implements, tools and weapons, were traded between different groups, different mobs.

There's also interesting ways in which we can identify the river. If we look at the Yarra for instance, that used to be a crossing point, there were rocks that were scattered across the river where people used to fish and used to hang out. Of course, when the British came in, they blew all those up to create a deep water waterway. But of course there are still little vestiges of those rocks there. There's still a few at the side, so you get a sense of what that must have looked like and how it must have felt. Elsewhere in the city there are a few residues of the cliffs that would have been here but that were knocked down. I think some of those cliffs and some of those forms of stone would have had some sort of symbolic meaning.

It's kind of interesting in a way I think if you think about Aboriginal thought and cosmologies, in a way they were much more - we have no idea what lies beneath our feet now. As we clad the city in tarmac and grass and concrete. But the Aborigines would have had a sense of the land as a whole, they would have known what was below their feet. They would have been intimately acquainted with the rocks in the places that they lived and moved through. I think that's also the case in Melbourne.

So there's quite a lot of ways in which we might think about the different quarries, about the different trading routes, about the different symbolic uses of stone. I know - and the final thing that I'll say is that near Geelong there's a stone circle of course which is really interesting. There are archaeological interpretations of this as well. So this story of stone certainly doesn't just start with Australia's colonisation.

Steve Grimwade
I'll speak again about how stone almost always survives us, because just around the corner is what I thought was a public art installation but which I've been told is not. Maybe you can correct me.

Tim Edensor
Yeah, so round the corner there's a whole series of pediments, little fragments of columns and other bits of decorated stone that used to belong to the Colonial Mutual Building. That used to be in Swanston Street and was quite an iconic Melbourne building, a beautiful building in many ways until 1960 when Whelan the Wrecker were given the job of demolishing it. However, while they were given a substantial sum to demolish it, it was nowhere near enough because it took them a year to knock the thing down. So incredibly durable and hard was the structure with mortar containing lead, incredible lumps of bluestone and granite welded together and joined together with incredibly rigid steel cables, it took them an incredibly long time. People died during the demolition. It was an awesome feat to demolish this and they vowed never to take on any task like this again. Although of course there were no buildings of that substance in Melbourne after it was knocked down.

But I think people started to feel a little bit sad after it had been knocked down because it was a bit of a landmark. Now, it was knocked down because it had very high ceilings, the rooms were too big, they couldn't be adequately heated. They didn't serve the functions needed for modern offices and so the rooms couldn't be rented and so it lost its value. But when it was knocked down I think people were sad.

So, there are two vestiges of this, one is the large statue in the university grounds of - I can't remember, it's a Greek goddess shepherding two figures along and that used to stand on top of the doorway. But also, these fragments of the building that were retrieved and placed in front of the exhibition centre to kind of commemorate this fantastic building that is now lost and the workmanship of course that was required.

I think it's - the stone there are from a grey granite from Mount Harcourt, which is a well‑used stone throughout Melbourne. But much rarer, a pink granite from Cape Woolamai in - on Phillip Island. I think this was the only time that that stone was used and it's a beautiful pink stone that was transported by boat from there. If you go to the beach on Cape Woolamai today you will see fragments of the rock that was cut off - cut away from the quarry that existed then.

Steve Grimwade

It's probably easy now to segue from stone to ruins and you've spent a lot of time looking at industrial ruins in the north of England. Perhaps you'd like to tell us about, what do they say about us?

Tim Edensor
The ruins project was a delightful thing to be involved in and it's important to say that I carried out most of this research in 2002-2003 when if you went to most industrial cities in the length and breadth of Britain, you would find loads and loads of industrial ruins, foundries, mills, warehouses, all sorts of things that have been abandoned. Now if you go, regeneration has proceeded apace and most of them have either been demolished or have been turned into executive flats or offices. But at that time, they were everywhere.

So one of the things that I used to like about them is, you would walk into a ruin and you would come across all sorts of traces of the past. This was very different from going into a museum. If you go into a museum you'll see an artefact and it will be explained to you, usually by means of an inscription. But when you go into an industrial ruin there's no such things there but nevertheless the place seems absolutely populated with the ghosts of the workers who were once there. You can see their tools, maybe scraps of their clothing, their work benches. The football posters and the pop posters that they put on the walls, the art and slogans that they scrawled across space.

So it was an extraordinary feeling going into a huge shop floor for instance and meeting all these people who weren't there. Much more powerful I always felt encountering history in that way than going into a place where everything was explained to you and of course it set off your imagination, that's the point.

Steve Grimwade
When I think about industrial ruins I do think of almost child's play and actually - or maybe teenagers' play.

Tim Edensor
Yeah.

Steve Grimwade

But actually I just wanted to - I'm interested in the idea of where do industrial ruins intersect with heritage? When does one become the other?

Tim Edensor

Well, I think it's kind of interesting. I suppose industrial ruins are an unofficial kind of heritage. So industrial ruins exist before they become heritage. So industrial ruins can become heritage when they're cleaned up, when all the debris is taken away, when - you can go on guided tours and there are information boards to tell you what happened there.

So industrial ruins I always think of as a kind of pre-heritage. Or we might say an alternative kind of heritage where I think as I've said, an encounter with the past is all the more powerful for a sense of what the place felt like and how it might have felt to work there, the kind of tough industrial textures of everyday factory life.

Steve Grimwade

Who do you find makes the rules and actually says that one becomes history, actually enters the history books. Whelan the Wrecker was around for 100 years, so his or their story continues, but who decides?

Tim Edensor

I think it's a really, really important question actually is that of course it's kind of interesting you mentioned Whelan the Wrecker and I mentioned the Colonial Building, now there's no way that would be knocked down today, that would be seen as heritage. It would have been impossible, of course, in the 1950s and '60s people didn't value buildings in the same way. They thought that the past was obsolete, that things needed - that modernity and progress needed to continue apace and we needed to get rid of all this stuff so we could put up these, what people now describe as quite featureless rectilinear modern office buildings.

But at the time, of course, nobody was thinking about heritage or preserving these kind of things. Yes, medieval castles and palaces, they could be identified as heritage but industrial heritage wasn't really part of the ways in which people valued particular kind of buildings and spaces. I don’t think we can blame them. I mean it just wasn't in their minds then, they weren't thinking about that.

Now we feel - and I think a lot of people say this about Melbourne, is that enormous vandalism has been done to the fabric of especially the CBD where there were the most extraordinary gothic, 1930s buildings and all sorts of other fantastic things and they've gone. We feel a sense of loss there but it's only in retrospect that we value these buildings and we wish that they were still there.

Steve Grimwade

I think it's either funny or there's something - there's some irony here in progress. Because these buildings were being destroyed so we can put up brutalist car parks in the 1960s which are now heritage.

Tim Edensor
Yes, yes. No I mean actually it's kind of interesting the brutalist story because of course they were starting to be demolished, so vilified had they become. It's only recently that now some examples of brutalism, yes as you say, become kind of heritage. People get very passionate about preserving them.

Steve Grimwade
Preserve everything at all costs. So look, one of your earliest works, Touring the Taj, as in Mahal, seemed to throw the theory - the academic view of tourist studies on its head. No longer did you want us to look at tourism as purely a search for authenticity. Would you like to talk about that?

Tim Edensor
Yeah, I found - it was interesting because that was my PhD study was the Taj Mahal and then it got turned into a book. I think I was very surprised at the tourist theory, or ways in which people had made sense of tourism at the time. What they tended to do was they would say, tourists are this. So for instance, tourists are searching for authenticity. Well I think we've all been tourists and we know that maybe sometimes we search for authenticity but most of the time we couldn't give a fig about authenticity and we're not thinking about it at all. We want to lie on the beach for instance, right? Or we want to go dancing or whatever it may be, but we're not looking for authenticity. So I found this singular explanation of what tourism was to be really curious.

So why I chose the Taj Mahal and why I thought that would be really useful to explore was because it was my idea that this is a global tourist site, everybody knows it. Loads of foreign tourists go there, particularly at that time lots of British and Americans and Europeans went. I knew that loads of backpackers would go as well but I also knew that most of the tourists who go to Taj Mahal quite obviously are Indian tourists. So what I wanted to do was to go to one site, this very famous site and I wanted to find out the different kinds of tourist practices that took place there. Of course, the backpackers, even if we just look at the western tourist, the backpackers do very different things to the package tourists as you can imagine.

Steve Grimwade
Two words for you, bhang lassi.

Tim Edensor
Absolutely, bhang lassi, yes.

Steve Grimwade

Perhaps we should explain what a bhang lassi is.

Tim Edensor
Yeah, so a bhang lassi is a yoghurt drink flavoured with potent amounts of hashish. So that it's a common leisure pursuit of backpackers, to have a glass of bhang lassi and then go into the Taj Mahal and they had all day, they could hang out there. But the problem for me as a researcher was they were very difficult to interview at the time. Obviously they weren't in the most - how can we put it, logical frame of mind. So I would say, what do you think of the Taj Mahal and they would say, man it's shimmering, it's multi-coloured, look at how it's moving. I'd have to say, mm yes, I see what you mean.

It was kind of interesting because they had all day whereas on the other hand the package tourists - many of whom are British as I've said - the whole reason for them coming to India on let's say a two week tour, was to go to the Taj Mahal. They weren't so interested in anything else. They really wanted to go to the Taj Mahal, they're very excited about it. As soon as they came through the gates of the Taj Mahal, out came the cameras and they would spend the time photographing furiously. But the problem was for them is that they were on guided tours, on a coach tour and the coach operators didn't want them to stay at the Taj very long. They wanted to get them out of the Taj and into a carpet shop or a marble factory. They wanted to get their commission from these tourists.

So the package tourists had come all the way to see this thing that they were so excited about and yet they couldn't stay there very long and they used to argue and kick up a big fight with the tour operators. But of course they were too frightened of being left behind so they would have to go back on the coach. It was really interesting, you'd talk to them afterwards, after they'd been on the tour and they were really, really upset that they hadn't had more time there. The other thing that was very interesting about the Taj is that lots of Indian tourists would go there and Indian tourists are more sociable than the western package tourist.

As I've explained, Western package tourists really want to photograph the Taj, usually by themselves. They want to stand there in splendid isolation. Maybe sit on the seat that Princess Diana sat on when she went there alone after she'd split from Charles. But they wanted to - what we say, kind of enact a romantic gaze. Gaze at it in solitude. The Indian tourist comes strolling in, chatting away, maybe eating, laughing and the English package tourist would get very frustrated. I remember one saying to me, this is terrible, you're trying to interview me but how can we do this, these Indian tourists are just crap. They have no idea how to be tourists.
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Steve Grimwade

Don’t they know how important this place is.

Tim Edensor
Yes, of course. So they were really outraged that these Indians themselves didn't acknowledge what they thought was this incredible site of beauty.

Steve Grimwade

Circling like a snobby shark around this idea of authenticity is perhaps the competition between tourists and travellers.

Tim Edensor
Yeah.

Steve Grimwade

I don't know where to stand on this, I think everyone has the right to tour as they want, but there is that idea that travelling is far better than being a tourist.

Tim Edensor

Absolutely. Backpackers use this all the time. They will say and you will interview them and you will say, so how do you feel being a tourist, and they will always say, we're not tourists, we're travellers, we're adventurers, we've come to see the real India.

Of course, they do have a point in a sense that the package tourists are somewhat shielded in their air-conditioned buses and luxury hotels and very rarely do they go - do they walk the ordinary streets of India. But on the other hand, backpackers tend to do the same kinds of things anyway. To congregate in the backpacker hotspots on the banana pancake trail, going to the same kind of restaurants. Maybe going to an ashram to practice a bit of yoga. Going to Goa to have a dance on the beach.

Steve Grimwade

I think you just described my holiday in 1997.

Tim Edensor
Yeah. There were quite a few of us.

Steve Grimwade

In a recent interview, you spoke about wanting to move away from the enormous ethnocentricity of geographical social theory.

Tim Edensor

Yeah.

Steve Grimwade

What on earth do you mean by that?

Tim Edensor
What I mean is that I really kind of just - related to what I was just saying about tourism being a search for authenticity, well this theory was made up by a middle class, white American who I think really was talking about himself and his mates. So in other words, theory tends to be located. People make these assumptions about what everybody does from what they and their friends do.

If we think about this more extensively, we can think about the way that colonialism, for instance, produced authoritative forms of knowledge whereby Indigenous Australians, Africans, Indians, were characterised and classified by Western scholars without ever being involved with asking those people about how they interpreted themselves.

So, in one sense, ethnocentrism refers to the way in which all kinds of knowledge come out of particular geographical locations. Now we live in a globalised world, it's really important to think about how we might make sense of let's say tourism or place or landscape from local perspectives, from local theories, from the kind of concepts that kind of local people use. So what's really good about being in Australia actually now you mention this, is that - especially geographers and other scholars as well - are now taking seriously the way in which Aborigines conceptualise the land that they move through and live on.

They have - they mobilise a completely different theoretical set. A whole series of different concepts which is neither no better or no worse. But the idea of Western theory coming in and being used to interpret how everybody else makes sense of the world, seems to be an absurdity. So that ethnocentrism certainly continues and most theories in academia tend to be those that have been articulated by the most influential theories of the West, but nevertheless, these are starting to be challenged.

Steve Grimwade

So how hard is it to see orthodoxy in thought and how hard is it to crack it apart?

Tim Edensor

I mean it's very difficult isn't it, because we all consume those orthodoxies of thought. They become - I suppose the best way of saying it is that they become habitual. They're part of our habitual way of thinking. So we're not even aware actually of the orthodoxies that we ourselves articulate a lot of the time.

But I think the key thing to do is to start to reflect upon that and to think - question everything. I mean one of the things about cultural geography that I love is that we are entreated to question everything. There's no such thing as common sense, it doesn't exist, right. So we've got to interrogate everything, all the ways in which we make sense of the world. Even the most mundane ways in which we make sense of the world. The ways we eat, the way we dress, the ways we catch the bus in the morning, the ways we go to school, all those things are worth exploring.

Steve Grimwade

It must make you very self-conscious.

Tim Edensor

Most of the time. You avoid those kinds of ideas but sometimes, yes.

Steve Grimwade

Your most cited work is National Identity, Popular Culture in Everyday Life. Sorry to ask you this question, but in general, how does national identity get shaped?

Tim Edensor
I think in the 19th century, national identity was shaped by an elite who handed down authoritative knowledge, systems of law, education systems and curricula. They identified national canons of literature. Folklore, the great - they would set up national galleries and identify the best pictures that have been painted by nationals.

So there was this kind of authoritative idea that we would all know certain kinds of poems. If you're English you know the paintings of Constable and Turner and these are the things that evoke Englishness more than anything else. But I think now we live in a world where information is proliferated and we live in a world where popular culture is much, much much more powerful than any elite culture that was handed down to us by the authoritative.

I think that national identity now seethes through popular culture. It's much more contested, it's focused on things like television, film and obviously sport for instance. The recent Ashes test gives us a really good example of the ways in which Englishness and Australian-ness are articulated through cricket. How people comment on that, how there might be typical Australian players or typical English players or whatever.

But I also think it's articulated in our everyday habits. It's articulated - for instance in Britain I'll give you an example - through getting a pint of milk on the doorstep delivered every day. Then getting that pint of milk, taking into the kitchen and making a cup of tea. Then drinking that cup of tea and then getting on the double decker bus to work every day. All these very, very mundane things.

We might say that Australian identity the habits - you've certainly taken on board some of those English habits, but for instance one of the key things about coming to Melbourne - and I think this is a sort Australia-wide practice, is the love of coffee. The importance of the coffee and the importance of quality coffee as well. So these things become really, really important.

It's also finally tuned by the kind of vegetation, by the bird noises that we hear, by the kind of sensations, by the chocolate bars that we eat, by the television that we watch. All those kind of things I think endlessly contribute to the sustenance of national identity which certainly isn't as fixed as it used to be when the elite used to disseminate their authoritative ideas. But I think now it's much more contested, it's much more complicated, it's much more dynamic. It's much bigger, it's much vaster. It takes on board many, many more elements.

Steve Grimwade

If popular culture is shaping our lives, is it a mirror or can it be a progressive force?

Tim Edensor

I think it can be a progressive and a regressive force. I mean, for instance, one of the key elements about popular culture in the United Kingdom - which you also have to certain extent here, but nowhere near as notorious - is the tabloid press which is an aspect of popular culture. Some aspects of the tabloid press or large aspects of the tabloid press in Britain, are solely concerned with stirring up fear.

Usually the fear is about those who are not us. Refugees, migrants and those who might be seen as an enemy within. Single parents, the feckless and the work shy. So there's this endless kind of construction of national identity by identifying us and by identifying those who are not us and that takes place in a popular culture forum. This isn't fine, thought out, articulated intellectual politics, this is prejudice and it finds its location in popular culture.

But in the same way, there are elements of popular culture that act against that. So for instance, we might talk about the ways in which certain forms of media produce these exclusive ideas of Britishness, that Britishness is white, that Britishness is kind of traditional. But then on the other hand, you have lots of bands forming now in Britain made up of young people who are absolutely and utterly multicultural and the music is multicultural, it takes its influence from all sorts of places. But it's British, that distinctive mix is British. So it's not - popular culture is both regressive, it's both progressive and much more besides.

Steve Grimwade

It's often commercial, so how does this have an impact? Does economics reinforce aspects via popular culture?

Tim Edensor
No, I think economics certainly does. I mean - and businesses latch onto those ideas that are popular, latch onto those ideas that seem to attract people. Of course that cuts right across the political spectrum if you will. But popular culture isn't only commercial, it's also about people in Britain taking care of an allotment, going to church, joining the Boy Scouts, playing football on a Sunday. These are not economic matters really. I mean you've got to pay a little bit to do these things but they're not really about - fashioned by a commercial profit seeking motive.

Steve Grimwade

We've talked about your past work, let's just move into some of your more recent studies which have focused on light. I was delighted to hear that this intense academic study was borne from a love of chav bling. I think you're got to probably describe what chav bling is and what it's meant to you.

Tim Edensor
Yes, okay. So this really started off when me and a colleague, Steve Millington at Manchester Metropolitan, we were driving around Manchester near to Christmas and we were driving through an area of state housing or of low cost private housing and we noticed that a lot of the houses were adorned with these very bright, highly colourful, sometimes quite silly animated lights that covered them celebrating Christmas. Every time we'd go past one of these houses, one of us would always say, wah-hey, we were pleased, it made us happy, it's festive. We thought this would be a really interesting topic for research.

So when we got back to our offices we went on the internet to find out what we could find and all we came across were opinion pages, letter columns, websites in which the people who made these Christmas lights, who arranged these Christmas lights on their houses, were absolutely vilified as feckless, disgusting, hideous, wasteful. I won't - chavs. Chavs meaning a real low class working class person. A lowly member of the working class with no taste whatsoever. We were a bit shocked by this. We thought, why are people getting so upset by what after all is just a festive celebration.

Of course, the more that we looked into it, the reason was that these people were committing the greatest sin that anybody can commit in contemporary Britain, at least for some sections of middle class I guess, which is to commit a crime against good taste. So they hated these things, they hated these Christmas lights. Then, interestingly, we went to interview the people who put the Christmas lights up and actually they were all really community spirited, generous, charitable people. Many of them had collection boxes in the gardens for those who were looking at the lights. They said, give - throw a few coppers in and we'll put it to the local hospital. Some of them wanted to stop putting the Christmas lights up but the neighbours put a lot pressure on them to put them up because they liked them so much and it brought so much joy to the area and to their kids.

So we found there was a complete mismatch in the way in which these people were portrayed and the ways in which they actually were. It was quite shocking and of course what it brought home to us was just how alive and well class politics are in Britain today. They're not articulated through necessarily industrial action or strikes or pay but they're articulated around matters of taste and what is believed to be good taste.

But of course, Christmas lights aren't really about good taste. Nobody puts them up wanting to make an impression about how artistic they are. They don't want to do that, they want to have fun. They want to be silly, they want to be festive, they want to put up bright, cheerful colours. It's not about taste.

Steve Grimwade

Light festivals can be large and small, they can express the vernacular and the primal and high art. How do we evaluate light festivals and their place in society and how do you measure success?

Tim Edensor

It's really - that's a good question, that's a really difficult question as well because they're so varied now and also because they're increasing at such an exponential rate so light festivals are emerging all over the world now, they really are. As you say, they range from the very small, from the community lantern parades and things like the Gertrude Street festival, the projection festival which is a local festival, of course, to gigantic things like Sydney's Vivid and Melbourne's White Night. So it's hard to compare them in many ways because they do different things. Certainly, the larger festivals are about producing spectacle and about getting people out.

My view is that those festivals as well can be quite enchanting because they always change the feel and the meaning of the city, if only for a night. Some people talk about how these large festivals simply produce passive spectatorship. People just sit there stunned by the projections on the exhibition building for instance and they don't think about it, they're - it's not a critical or challenging work of art. I don't think that matters, I think in some ways it is, because it challenges the way in which you perceive the building. The building looks totally different to the ways in which you're used to seeing it.

So I think it also produces a particular kind of atmosphere where people are at liberty to wander a street that's usually clogged by trams and cars for instance. So it transforms the meaning of the city. So the ways in which things look are transformed. I think the smaller festivals are really important for producing a sense of community. They're usually much more locally involved. Often the work will relate to particular aspects of local identity. So the Gertrude Street certainly does that. It will talk about the history of Aboriginal activism in the area for instance. Or the activism carried out by women in the 1920s seeking the vote. So all those sorts of things are important. They're more nurtured and more cared for, smaller scale, more intimate festivals.

So the point is I think that in both these cases, light transforms the world. Light makes the world look weird. It makes you look at things differently. It makes you look at things again. Light also carries with it all sorts of moods and feelings as well. So the world after dark becomes utterly transformed, if only for a few hours in quite magical ways. I think both in terms of large festival and small festival that can help to foster a deeper sense of place, a deeper sense of belonging to a city or a locality.

Steve Grimwade
We started off talking about how you seem to be having fun with your work and following your passions, is there any particular advice that's been useful to you and is there any particular advice that you'd pass on to up and coming students and researchers?

Tim Edensor

I mean it's a difficult one this because I think we all tend to get caught up in university politics. I mean to be blunt, a lot of the - universities have it very difficult these days. They have to fashion policies that may be the higher ups don't necessarily agree with. But of course…

Steve Grimwade

What no bhang lassis?

Tim Edensor
Yeah, for instance. So I think that's quite difficult. So we sometimes live in a difficult situation. So university policies of course impact upon staff. But I think what I would say is that I think some people get completely demoralised by those practices. What I would say is, really after all being an academic is a fantastic job. We get the chance to explore and teach about things that we find really interesting. I mean that's an amazing job to have, just that alone.

So people can sometimes get demoralised and they lose sight of the richness and the kind of pleasures of academia I think. So despite what kind of policies might be taking place - and these may not be particularly positive experiences, but I think we always need to retain an understanding of what knowledge - of what being involved in the kind of knowledge industry is. How pleasurable it is and how valuable it is as well and how enriching it is not only to us but to our students and to the wider academic community and beyond.

Steve Grimwade
Finally, what do you do first when you find yourself in a new place?

Tim Edensor

Okay, what I do when I've - the first that I did when I came to Melbourne, because I came in the summer, was to buy a hat.
[Laughter]


That was absolutely critical. In England we don't need to worry about this kind of heat at all. We're not going to - our heads aren't going to be ravaged by the sun in quite the same way. But apart from that, the thing that I always do when I go to a place is I walk. I don't - I still walk but I think actually getting to know a place, the best way you can do that is to walk. Not necessarily walk anywhere but just wander around and pick up vibes, pick up feelings, trying to work out how things work and to - of course invariably you come across all sorts of surprising things as well. So I think walking is probably the best thing to do whenever you go to a new place.

Steve Grimwade
Tim Edensor, thanks very much for joining us.

Tim Edensor
Thank you very much.

Chris Hatzis
Thanks to Dr Timothy Edensor, teacher of cultural geography at the Manchester Metropolitan University and Principal Research Fellow at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on March 1, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.

Audio engineering by Arch Cuthbertson. Co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall.

Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes and check out the rest of the episodes in our archive.

I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.