The Melbourne Story at the Melbourne Musuem follows the development of Melbourne in the past few centuries.

The exhibit was fascinating. Most interesting to me was being able to see familiar places, such as Collins St or Luna Park, and how they looked in the past. The museum works to recreate the atmosphere of these places too, such as through the inclusion of a virtual ride on Luna Park’s roller coaster.

However, while the exhibit was interesting, it did seem to be lacking some important stories. Indigenous peoples were hardly mentioned, and migrant cultures (such as the Chinese) were glossed over.

I also found the exhibit to hard to follow in places. While signs tell visitors what decade they are ‘in’, the exhibit didn’t seem to flow in a completely logical way.

One of my favourite aspects of the exhibit was the video and audio stories from real Melbournians. These first hand accounts gave a vivid picture of what Melbourne was like in the past.

While I do think that the Melbourne exhibit could be more inclusive, it is overall a great way to get to know the city.

While travelling to the public records office proved to be somewhat of a difficult feat, getting there was nothing compared to how daunting navigating the public records is.

Row ow upon row is filled with information, from births, deaths and marriages, through to maps of sewerage systems.

We made the journey to North Melbourne to see how the records office worked, as well as to discover any information they may have about our RMIT buildings.

While the stacks of information is daunting, the staff are helpful and it is well catalogued.

By far the most interesting part of our trip to the office was seeing the artificacts kept from old court cases.

In The Influence of Place, J.E Malpas talks of the human connection to place. Malpas talks of Aboriginal Australians, poets and writers who have formed deep connections with place.

While there are still indigenous groups, writers and dare I say it, hippies, that feel an overwhelming connection to place, I wonder if over time this romantic connection has been lost.

I have lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne my whole life. While I can see the difference between my suburb, Mitcham, and a suburb such as Camberwell, I do feel as if my home could be lifted and out down in any suburb of any Australian city and I would live a very similar life to the one I do now.

I do not feel a connection to place. I am fond of my home, of my quiet street and the parkland I am surrounded by, but there is no deeper connection. When I have travelled I have felt that I would like to live in certain cities, but it has never been more than ‘I would fit in with the culture here’.

Malpas mentions that a modern connection to place may stem from our interactions with the world around us, people and things. Every place I have been, that I have yearned to go back to, has been human made. New York, the city I stayed in when I did an exchange in Germany. While I love nature (I am a hiker), I have never felt a connection to a purely natural place. Sure, they’re beautiful and peaceful and unique, but a national park does not hold the same appeal for me.

Maybe I am the exception, but human connection with place, in the modern world seem to stem from humans and human made things.

As part of today’s class we each recorded the sound in the buildings we have chosen to focus on. For me this is Building 20. Apart from being asked if I was lost when I was with other classmates, my experience was very quiet and uneventful.

I decided to set myself up in one of the corridors outside the offices and courtrooms inside the building. I sat on the bench and recorded continuously for 25 minutes. While I recorded I tried to be as quiet as possible so that I wouldn’t interfere with the sounds around me. In the corridor I could hear the traffic noise from La Trobe street as well as some louder voices of people walking along the footpath.

Listening back to the recording I can hear the traffic noise, but not the voices. The recorder picked up the footsteps of people walking past, as well as the footsteps of people in adjoining corridors (particularly the sound of heeled shoes on concrete flooring). The recording captured one short conversation between myself and Jackie as well as snippets of talking between people in their offices. However the recording is mostly silence and white noise, with the frequent sound of cars accelerating up the road.

While my recording didn’t yield many interesting sounds, and makes for very boring listening, the exercise did get me thinking. As I sat in the corridor, I hardly noticed the traffic noise after a while; it just became part of the silence. However, listening to the recording, I feel as if I am forced to hear the traffic noise. The fact that I am listening to a recording makes me listen harder. I feel as if there is something important to be heard, even when I know that there is not.

I do feel that my recording quite accurately portrays the feel and mood of Building 20. It is silent, and any noise is almost jarring. When you walk through the building, you are very aware of the noise of your footsteps, of how loud your breathing is and especially how loud you might be talking. These sounds, when listened to on the recording, seem out of place, which I believe effectively captures the feeling of not belonging that is strong in Building 20.

Whether it is an ad in the paper, or in an email sent to me from a travel company, images of popular tourist destinations cross my path everyday. From the Hollywood Sign to the Egyptian Pyramids, tourist icons are everywhere we look. So why is it that we still want to visit these places, see them in the flesh, when we can already view them so easily?

In chapter 5 of Curating Site, Shelley Hornstein notes that with the introduction of photography, ‘a vast public was suddenly captivated by the widespread and seductive images [of place]’. Hornstein argues that photographs play a role in the creation of place. Before visiting a site, we already have formed an opinion and understanding of said site through the photographs and other media we have seen.

When I visited New York, I was worried that my expectations were too high. In my head, New York was the ultimate city. Always busy, filled with a diverse range of people and with everything from the best food to the best shops and the best museums, New York was already perfect in my mind. Despite being able to sit at my desk and watch any number of TV shows with New York as the backdrop, or view millions of photos of the city, I wanted to experience it for myself. I think the reason we (or at least I) visit places we can virtually visit online is that we want to make sure that it is real. We want to see just how big the pyramids are for ourselves. We want to place ourselves in the perspective, to see how the places are with us the perspective. Most of all, I think we just want to feel included in something that is bigger than us.

Trips into Melbourne’s CBD were a special occurrence when I was a child. They usually meant going on the train to work with Dad on a Saturday because he’d left his phone behind. Dad worked (works still) at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court as a court registrar. Despite me being too young to remember when my dad worked at the old Magistrates’ Court on the corner of Russell and La Trobe streets, he has given me guided tours of the building numerous times.

This week, for the first time, I explored this building alone. The building is quite beautiful, featuring architecture and design that is older than the norm for Melbourne. From the both the outside and inside the building gives of a feeling of grandeur (image in google drive folder (K.J Halla, 1972)). That is until you see an image like the one below that pits the building against the dome of the State Library.

Elevated view of the State Library of Victoria (Sear’s Studio, 1933)

A newer building as seen from Building 20

The first thing that hit me as I walked through the building was how quiet it was. Most RMIT buildings that I am familiar with are constantly buzzing with people, but Building 20 seems almost empty. This eerie barrenness made me feel as if I was trespassing, despite the building being part of the RMIT campus. I felt almost as if I was disturbing the people working in their offices, despite the fact they probably had no idea I was there.

The second thing that I noticed walking into the building was the high ceiling with windows at the top that allowed the light to flood in. I didn’t expect to find such a nice feature in an RMIT building, probably because most other buildings on campus have been modernised or built fairly recently. Another architectural feature that caught my eye was the staircases within the building. These two features however, were overshadowed by how dark the building felt. Everything seemed to be dark. The doors, ceiling, windows and furniture were all dark brown, and a lot of the flooring was in dull colours. This darkness, coupled with the silence, seemed to create an almost sullen mood within the building. Though maybe this mood stemmed from just knowing that the building was a functioning court for so long, and knowing that courts are, overall, sullen and gloomy places.

High Ceiling with windows

Dark colours run throughout the building

More dark colours

As I made my way through the building, I felt a mixture of nostalgia and curiosity. The courtrooms I visited reminded me of playing in ones similar when I was a kid, pretending to be a judge or a lawyer, despite not really knowing what those two titles actually meant. But I also wondered what had happened to the other courtrooms, the ones that had been converted into offices. I wondered if they had kept any of the original features, and if they felt like converted rooms inside. I didn’t find the courage to disturb the people working in them to find out.

The conversion of the old court into an RMIT building has meant that old dissects with new in many places throughout the building. A lot of the photos I took demonstrate this. The bright, white RMIT signs sit above old, brown wooden benches. Original doors have been fitted with automatic locks. Old key holes have been replaced with new, silver locks. Large flat screen televisions stand in the hallways.

A modern TV sits beneath an original staircase

New and old locks.

RMIT signs sit above old wooden pews.

Modern features

Original doors that have been modernised for RMIT

Most interesting to me though, was trying to figure out which courtroom my dad had been sitting in at the time of the Russell Street Bombing in 1986. I’ve heard him tell the story countless times. He was the court registrar in Court 3 when a huge explosion blew out every window. My dad always mentions how the bomb was programmed to go off at 1.00pm, right as all the people working in the judicial precinct would be coming back from lunch. However, it was the day before a long weekend, so the court had decided to sit through lunch in order to clear the lists and allow everyone to go home early. As I walked through the building I tried to find something that would tell me which courtroom was number 3, but there seemed to be no signs. Despite not finding exactly where I was looking for, it was still interesting and sobering to think about what happened that day, and how chaotic the quiet building around me must have been.

The former Melbourne Magistrates’ Court s a building that has and will always interest me. Like a lot of people, I wonder what my parents’ lives were like before they had children, and this building offers a tiny a bit of insight into my dad’s former life. The building is the setting for so many interesting stories, and the old ‘if these walls could talk…’ saying comes to mind. Contrasts of old and new mean that the building’s former use is never forgotten and history is preserved while not going to waste. Building 20 is one of RMIT’s most interesting places, even without having a personal connection to it.

Building 20 today.

Melbourne Magistrates Court and Russell Street Police Headquarters from La Trobe Street (1920-1945)

Reference List

K.J Halla, 1972, Russell Street West, photograph, viewed 12/03/2015, http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=1047678.xml&dvs=1426116425984~720&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true

Sears’ Studio, 1933, Elevated view of the State Library of Victoria, photograph, viewed 11/03/2015, http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=3036961.xml&dvs=1426069142867~286&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true

Unknown, 1920-1945, Melbourne Magistrates Court and Russell Street Police Headquarters from La Trobe Street, photograph, viewed 12/03/2015, http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=240899.xml&dvs=1426121436886~37&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true