The Politics of the Visual: Immigrant Architecture in Melbourne’s Tourist Brochures

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates “immigrant architecture”¹ in Australia and argues that the reception of the “architecture of the other” is mediated by the visual appearance of this architecture. The paper investigates the politics of multiculturalism and migration in Melbourne, Australia, and more specifically its representation in Melbourne's tourist brochures. We argue that tourist brochures portray the image of the city to both national and international audience, and that the decisions around which architecture to include (and exclude) correspond with that image, and are hierarchical.

The inclusion and exclusion of Melbourne’s architecture in selected tourist brochures are central to this paper, juxtaposing the reality and diversity of Melbourne’s architecture, to the selection of architecture which is represented in the brochures. This corresponds with the collision of two different images of Australia as a nation, the first being the image of Australian as hegemonic and related to white, Anglo-Celtic culture, and the second as image of Australian culture as multicultural, diverse and in flux. The paper proposes that mainstream tourist brochures rely on out-dated colonial-settler narratives and selectively represent the contributions of Indigenous and minority ethnic immigrants to Australian society.

Introduction

This paper examines the ways in which architecture participates in tourist brochures, with a focus on the degrees to which “immigrant architecture” is represented, misrepresented, or absent from such tourist brochures. It argues the images in tourist brochures are significant media through which architecture is communicated and understood, and through which architecture participates in broader cultural production. The image becomes the interface between identity constructions and the built environment. This is, however, not simply the appearance of the architecture because images are subject to the mediation of perception, cultural codes and desire. Dominant narratives of national identity, along with a desire for cosmopolitanism and global tourist economies subject this imagery to pre-architectural framings. Images, loaded with political sentiment, precede architecture and also transmit the perception and value of the architecture. To capture this role of architecture as image the paper draws on the concept of “social imaginary,” proposed by philosopher Charles Taylor² and expanded upon by political theorist and sociologist Manfred B. Steger,³ to analyse images of architecture included in the selected tourist brochures.⁴ While acknowledging that tourist brochures are capitalist devices carefully tailored towards consumers (tourists), the paper also argues that the brochures are embedded with cultural and national coding. This paper sees them as media which both create and perpetuate the social and national imaginaries.

By approaching this question through a visual and textual analysis of tourist brochures, the paper brackets the larger scope of the research highlighting the careful selection and presentation of information or images as a medium through which the city is presented to tourists and visitors—national, local and foreign others. Printed brochures are selected (as opposed to online media) due to the carefully curated and succinct nature of printed media, and the narrative these construct from beginning to end. Representation in printed tourist brochures is understood as images, occasionally accompanied by text. Art historian Belting examined the difference between the image and the visual, arguing that the image is defined by more than its pure visibility—it is “invested, by the beholder, with a symbolic meaning and a kind of mental ‘frame.”’⁵ Belting also believes that the image is conveyed by a medium (or media).⁶ This paper borrows Belting’s definition, where printed tourist brochures are the medium which contain images (including those of built environment). Image is also understood here in its extended sense, as proposed by art historian W. J. Thomas Mitchell, where images can be in someone’s mind (their memory or imagination) and can also denote “getting the picture” of something in our mind.⁷

Notably, questions related to the images of national identity in this paper intersect with tourism, by which the audience of the brochures becomes important. Along with the main drivers behind visiting cities (often related to arts and culture, dining, shopping, etc.⁸) and imagery carefully tailored towards the average visitor, tourist brochures also represent how “we” (the residents) want to represent the city. Through a process of selective imagery, tourist brochures participate in the city’s branding, its desired representation, and also contribute to identity construction of a city.

Although the brochures do not focus in particular on architectural content, architecture participates in the visual mosaic which generates the image of the city. The images in tourist brochures include architecture and the built environment in two distinct ways—one with architecture as subject (with recommendation to visit), and another with architecture and urban environment as a background or more precisely the stage apparatus within which activities (dining, walking, shopping, etc.) take place. In both cases, architecture explicitly or implicitly participates in the hierarchies of importance and value, and its inclusion and representation reproduce the narratives around the dominant national identity and image.

The most comprehensive brochures as a measure of the amount of information on Melbourne as a whole, are the Official Visitor Guide⁹ and the International Student Guide¹⁰ and these are selected as a focus of the analysis (Fig. 2). The Official Visitor Guide was published by Destination Melbourne Melbourne’s Tourism Organisation, while the International Student Guide is produced by Insider Guides, both supported by the City of Melbourne. As these brochures however have very little representation of architecture of ethnic minority communities, the brochure sample was expanded by selecting two of Melbourne’s ethnically diverse suburbs with notable presence of immigrant populations—Northcote (the City of Darebin municipality) and Dandenong (the City of Greater Dandenong municipality) (Fig. 1).¹¹ Using these four brochures, two representing Melbourne as a city and two representing culturally diverse suburbs, the paper aims to examine the ways in which i) cultural diversity is portrayed, and the extent to which it is portrayed, and ii) architecture is incorporated as integral to the brochure agenda. In addition, this analysis aims to create a dialogue and a comparison between the representation of Melbourne as a city, and the representation of two ethnically diverse suburbs. Understanding that a two-way process operates between images of architecture and national narratives of identity, we claim that the architecture featured in the brochures participates a “social imaginary” creating a dominant identity of each of these places to the visitors, and a tension between the Melbourne city representation and representation of the two selected suburbs, which are in the broader precinct of Melbourne. These are mediated by national narratives and how Australia wants to be seen in both the national and international arena.¹²

Figure 1. Selected ethnically diverse suburbs in Melbourne. Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne and Visit Melbourne.

Figure 2. Melbourne’s Official Visitor Guide,²⁷ and the International Student Guide.²⁸ Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne, Visit Melbourne and Insider Guides.

We argue that the distinction between Melbourne brochures (both visitor and student) and the suburb brochures in relation to representation of ethnic minority communities and their architecture relates to the collision of two distinct, but parallel visual identities of Melbourne and of Australia as a nation. The first is an image of Australia as hegemonic and related to Anglo-Celtic culture, and the second is an image of Australia as multicultural, diverse and in flux. More complex sensitivities are required to analyse the representation of Indigeneity, and are the subject of forthcoming work. This paper aims to expand the understanding of architectural representation and participation in the construction of dominant imagery of Australia with a focus on the representation of the architecture of ethnic minority citizens in Melbourne and in Australia. It equally emphasises the lack of representation of these communities and their architecture in the major tourist brochures, and raises the question—where does that leave immigrant architecture or multicultural Melbourne? We argue that the absence of representation of immigrant architecture in tourist brochures contributes to a discourse on the barriers to expanding the perception of Australian cultural identity.¹³

Image as Part of the Imaginary

Reyner Banham noted in his 1955 essay on New Brutalism, the image and visual for built architecture are as relevant as architectural structure and function.¹⁴ While explaining that this image is crucial in order for architecture to be “good architecture,” he described its function, including “memorability as image,” or architectural presence produced by the ability of architecture to create a “visual image.”¹⁵ In doing so, he acknowledged the relationship between architecture and a mental image of this architecture in the mind of the observant. In contemporary architectural literature, architecture as image is often considered within the framework of “iconic architecture,” or “starchitecture,” and is frequently explained as related to concepts such as architecture as brand, or “brandscapes.”¹⁶ This article instead argues that immigrant architecture can also be perceived as image, and examines these images as related to the concept of social imaginary. It argues that the city’s imagery is mediated by a social imaginary of what is understood as Australian. The relationship between images of immigrant architecture and an Australian social imaginary is an important ground for the analysis of the images in the brochures.

Social imaginary is explained by Steger as the mode that “provides the most general parameters within which people imagine their communal existence.”¹⁷ As Taylor also emphasises,

…The social imaginary is neither a theology nor an ideology, but an implicit “background” that makes possible communal practices and a widely shared sense of their legitimacy. It offers explanation how “we”—the members of the community—fit together, how things go on between us, the expectations we have of each other, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie those expectations.¹⁸

It is relevant to note that images thereby constitute a stratum of the social imaginary. One layer of that strata is the visual landscapes of built architecture as an “implicit” but significant “background.” Another layer is the imagery of that architecture and is arguably less a background and a more an active component of the social imaginary. Steger correlates the social imaginary with the ideas around the nationhood and outlines that the nation is the background to communal existence, and the national imaginary is an “understanding in which the nation…serves as the communal frame of the political.”¹⁹ This however does not mean that every part of the social imaginary fits neatly in that national imaginary. The overlapping notions of nation and social imaginary and what constitutes these for Australia remain open, complex, and conflictual questions, which intersect with the political. The imagery of tourist brochures is one layer of examination of the relationship between immigrant communities and the national imaginary (Melbourne brochure), and immigrant communities and social imaginary (suburban brochures). The brochures both represent and produce these imaginaries, and analysis of the difference between suburban brochures and Melbourne brochures speak to their distinct and parallel imaginary.

This paper asks how difference and variation in the representation of immigrant architecture and its link to diverse cultures illustrate whether and how it is present in the Australian national and social imaginary. The emphasis of this paper is on how narratives of cultural identity precede the image, making the image intelligible to the viewer and enabling the image to be shared and coded within a collective. The discrepancy between representations of national identity and immigrant presence in Australia creates a space for productive examination.

The Representation of the City of Melbourne

The framework through which Melbourne is discussed and presented in the Official Visitor Guide²⁰ and the International Student Guide²¹ relates to the outdoors, shopping, arts and culture, sport and food and wine. Such selection is related to what Anna Klingmann calls brandscapes, where she examines the role of architecture in the lifestyle and experience economy intended for consumption.²² Similarly, Hal Foster refers to city branding where contemporary cities capitalise on cultural centres, along with theme parks and sport complexes, in order to “assist in the corporate revival of the city—that is, of its being made safe for shopping, spectating and spacing out.”²³ Economic strategies are linked to cultural transformation of the city.²⁴ The cultural economy of Melbourne as a cosmopolitan city with a highly desirable lifestyle drives its representation in both brochures.²⁵ One target is international student enrolment in Higher Education in Australia which comprises 17% of the GDP and oscillates between the first and second most important economic item below mining.²⁶

Ethnicity appears specifically as Greek precinct and Chinatown in the section on Melbourne Precincts in the Official Visitor Guide 2019. These are spatially mapped (Lonsdale Street and Little Bourke Street, respectively) but spatial inscription is represented by cultural institutions (Hellenic Museum and Chinese Museum)²⁹ (Fig. 4) and is also present in diverse dining options (traditional Greek and Chinese food) (Fig. 3). Immigrant cultures are also represented in the brochures on the Immigration Museum and Melbourne Museum (Fig. 4).³⁰ Ethnicity is not discussed in other precincts, and the brochures include culture (exhibitions, bookstores), shopping, along with clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond the CBD, Lygon Street is featured as “Carlton’s favourite street” highlighting its traditional Italian dishes alongside the Readings bookstore and Jimmy Watsons, an iconic elite restaurant, as well as the Nova Cinema in Carlton.³¹ The brochures comprise photographs of people that can be read as ethnically diverse but omit the spatial inscriptions of ethnic minority citizens and their urban contributions. These include spatial practices of promenading and social gathering in urban contexts or table settings on the footpath, and their cultural histories.

Figure 3. “Melbourne Precincts” in Melbourne’s Official Visitor Guide.³² Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne and Visit Melbourne.

Figure 4. Individual brochures: Immigration Museum and Melbourne Museum.³³ Printed brochures. Courtesy: Creative Victoria.

Representation of suburbs outside of the Melbourne CBD including Prahran, Carlton, St Kilda, Fitzroy and Collingwood (once neglected working class suburbs, then reinvigorated by post-war immigrant communities), relate to the “Eat and Drink” section,³⁴ as inner-city suburbs espousing ethnic foods (Fig. 5). Thus, apart from the separate brochures of the Immigration and Melbourne Museums, the City of Melbourne’s tourist brochures feature ethnic diversity and multiculturalism mostly through food and ethnic restaurants. Our analysis reveals that the variety of restaurants and food displayed in the brochures are what anthropologist Ghassan Hage has called cosmopolitan multiculturalism.³⁵ Hage argues that this displaces the home-made multiculturalism linked directly to immigrant lives and their built habitats, and in our argument, implicates two divided social imaginaries—a “cosmopolitan” social imaginary of ethnic food tailored for the non-migrant (often critically called multiculturalism without migrants), and a “home-made” social imaginary of ethnic food created by migrants.³⁶ Important to our argument is that the architectural and urban transformation of Melbourne evolving since the post-war period and integral to the same immigration history as the diversity of Melbourne’s cuisine, is not part of the agenda or representation of the brochures.

Figure 5. “Eat and Drink” section in Melbourne’s Official Visitor Guide 2019. Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne and Visit Melbourne.

Migration scholars consistently argue that the multicultural society Australia was to become, was not part of the government strategy, policy or plan. Australia’s post-war immigrant recruitment campaign advocated the superiority of British culture and implemented strategies and hierarchical procedures of racialisation and ethnicisation.³⁷ Nonetheless, Australia’s foremost national agenda for economic growth was prompted by major industries who served as members on the CIPC (Commonwealth Immigration Policy Committee). Directors of BHP Steelworks influenced immigration recruitment towards southern European sources. In 1973 the Whitlam government put an end to the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act (better known as the White Australia Policy) and its racism which had been reinforced in the Migration Act of 1966. Multiculturalism which evolved in this new era of optimism had been preceded by a three-phase post-war immigration history—assimilation, integration, and multiculturalism. Governmental definitions of multiculturalism, its implementation, framings and practices strengthened in the 1980s and were supported by substantial academic research, but plummeted in the mid-1990s when the Howard government effectively eroded its infrastructure and developed an anti-multiculturalism national narrative.³⁸ Multiculturalism intermittently disappeared from discursive fields. First Nations initiatives about sites, histories, cultures and languages are reinvigorating the discursive fields of how Australia is narrated and represented providing openings for more sophisticated architectural historiographies related to race and ethnicity. This is also reflected in the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) requirements for cultural competencies, albeit with nascent beginnings.

Significant immigrant post-World War II spatial practices revitalised the deteriorated and neglected architecture of the inner-city suburbs of Carlton, St. Kilda, Fitzroy and Collingwood; their Jewish, European and southern European communities (Italian, Greek and Yugoslavian) shaped new urban cultures. The brochures do not reflect or represent the inheritance of a vibrant café and street urbanism and the legacy of post-war immigrant spatio-cultural remaking Melbourne, which contrasted the streets of Melbourne prior to the 1950s.³⁹ Traces of the aesthetic visual palette of the interiors and exteriors of restaurants, and urban spatial rituals or inscriptions, mingle with the aroma and the atmosphere of ethnic streets. The International Student Guide brochure features a brief history of Melbourne (in both text and imagery). In addition to arrival of first British colonial-settlers, it notes the gold rush but fails to note it attracted migration from non-British cultures to Australia, the Batman “treaty” of 1835, now recognised by many First Nations people of Victoria as a way to advantage the people of the Kulin nation. Racialisation and ethnicisation is central even in this stripped and diluted minimal form of ‘brochure’ history. A brief history of migration is note as chronological waves—Anglo-Celtic migration as the first wave, followed by migration from China, Italy and Greece. While the impact the latter had on streets and alleys around Little Bourke, Lygon and Lonsdale Street is mentioned, the cultural diversity of Melbourne urbanism is not, and no images are included however.⁴⁰ The iconic cafés and restaurants including Pellegrini’s and Campari opened by Italian immigrants and Little Reata opened by a Hungarian immigrant are also not mentioned. Integral to post-war Melbourne was the clothes manufacturing which created its own form of mobile urbanism as clothing was transported along the Melbourne lanes. By omitting such references, do the brochures misrepresent the socio-spatial histories of Melbourne?

The architecture directly related to the lives of immigrants (which produce those foods in the ethnic precincts), places of worship, market gardens, is not accommodated by the cosmopolitanism bias represented in the brochures. Does this omission reinforce the persistent representation of ethnic minority citizens as “foreign and other”?⁴¹ To what extent are these extant architectural contexts integral to the social imaginary of Melbournians, in addition to the visitors that the brochures are targeting? By investing only in the cosmopolitan bit of multiculturalism as a representation of ethnicity in the national imaginary, Melbourne’s brochures not only allocate a limited, flattened and reduced representation of ethnic minority citizens but also diminish the culturally diverse shaping and making of the city.⁴² Tourist brochures are undoubtedly not expected to present architectural histories, but the exclusions and inclusions of the brochures reiterate and construct the national and cultural coding and perceptions of the Melbourne, and by extension, Australian identity. Brochures are significant, especially as capitalist devices, representations of national and social imaginaries and as such communicate and perpetuate the city’s identity.

As Mirjana Lozanovska notes, images of ethnic minority citizens and their architecture in Melbourne can be either intelligible or unintelligible to the reader or viewer.⁴³ The ways in which images are understood, comprehended, or perceived depends on what the viewer brings to the image, the collective narrative of its context, the familiarity of the image, as well as what the image represents. Images of the architecture of ethnic minority citizens and communities—including mosques, temples, migrant houses—can be missing an informed context, as they sit either outside the knowledge of the architecture discipline, or as stereotypical popular representations. This raises the question of reception and perception of imagery. The former results in a lack of context of the image such that reception of the image is limited to its graphic composition. The latter perpetuates the “accepted” image with all its problematic racial and cultural biases. Such an interface between an image of an unfamiliar subject (ethnic minority architecture) and a viewer thus results in a cycle of obscurity, dismissal and disinterest.

Images of prominent buildings such as the Shrine of Remembrance or Old Treasury building, but also architectural typologies such as Victorian terrace houses or workers’ cottages already circulate as part of the social imaginary. As a result, these bring an already familiar narrative to the reception of similar images. These also reinforce a dominant cultural legacy related to Anglo-Celtic Australian histories. Referring specifically to immigrant housing in Melbourne, Lozanovska argues the housing stories of immigrants, or the histories of immigrant houses are not part of a national imaginary of Australian housing.⁴⁴ The images of immigrant housing “rarely resonate with a national ‘we’ that is collectively pictured, narrated and represented. Instead, the images are cast as intrinsically controversial or confronting.”⁴⁵ Houses may rarely be the subject of the tourist brochures, nonetheless, as noted above, Victorian Terrace housing typologies are. More important is the omission or at best marginalisation of immigrant housing in Australian housing and architectural histories.⁴⁶ The lack of representation of immigrant housing thus circulates across media—formal architectural publication, and nation-wide narratives, as well as tourist brochures—as normative and integral to an exclusive social imaginary.

The brochures aspire to represent Melbourne as a cosmopolitan, progressive city. By mostly focusing on British and Anglo-Celtic heritage, this agenda has compressed the histories of both Indigenous peoples and non-Anglo-Celtic citizens. While the Shrine of Remembrance, Old Treasury Building, State Library Victoria, and Parliament house (Fig. 6) included in the two brochures are significant institutions, is their individual and collective reference to a dominant British heritage a problematic national narrative for Melbourne? Indigeneity and non-Anglo-Celtic migration are divided from the cosmopolitan representation of Melbourne reinforced by the separate brochures on Immigration Museum, Melbourne Museum and Aboriginal Heritage Walk, Walking Tours and Aboriginal Art. What could the brochures include to present a more complex, rather than hierarchical, representation of what Melbourne considers its cultural heritage? We argue a more inclusive open history may aim to build representation of diverse architectures including—culturally diverse spaces of worship, then and now photographs of the history and heritage of immigrant café urbanism, the street urbanism of annual festivity such as Chinese New Year.

Figure 6. Some of the architecture featured in Melbourne’s Official Visitor Guide 2019. Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne, Visit Melbourne and Insider Guides.

Outside the representations in tourist brochures, studies illustrate the reinvigorating architecture of “ethnic streets” and their transformation of urban street culture central to the contemporary lifestyle of Melbournians.⁴⁷ Melbourne is both distinctive as a city in Australia, but also paradigmatically metonymic of modern Australia as multicultural Australia. Australia is defined as an immigrant nation by politicians and academics, and yet it can too often be confined to chorus-like repetition, rather than a concerted effort to follow through with the understanding that immigrants have participated in the shaping of Australia.⁴⁸ In Melbourne, post-war refugees and immigrants from Europe and southern Europe have left a legacy of significantly changed built, urban and natural landscape environments. In an early publication, Sandercock⁴⁹ argued for the integration of multiculturalism in planning strategies. Internationally, Nina Glick-Schiller⁵⁰ argues for a diasporic cosmopolitanism to counter the dismissive operations of “cosmopolitanism” and links the concept of cosmopolitanism with cultural diversity within cities.⁵¹ This requires a social imaginary that accounts for the café and restaurant productivity of immigrants, its street vibrancy, urban promenading and interactive street culture of immigrants, and the continuing contribution and presence of ethnic minority citizens.⁵² In contemporary Melbourne, according to 2021 census, 37.7% of the population speak a language other than English at home.⁵³ What do we know about the architectures and the histories that accommodates this diversity—what and where is the architecture these millions of immigrants and their communities created and produced, and why is this architecture not represented? To what extent are these narratives of tourist values central to the ways Australia represents itself, and the way we perceive ourselves as a society?⁵⁴

In discussing the tourist brochures, it is necessary to bring into question the targeted audience as this further explains the difference between the tourist brochures of Melbourne city and of the City of Greater Dandenong (Dandenong) and the City of Darebin (Northcote). Melbourne had approximately 31.8 million domestic and 2.9 million international tourists visiting in the year before March 2019.⁵⁵ In 2018, most international tourists coming to Australia were from China, New Zealand, USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and India, respectively. The interface between the viewer and the visual content of the brochures becomes important: what are the cultural interests or agenda inherent in the production and producers of the tourist brochures? Considering that a large number of tourists are from Asia, what information is available about the interests or cultural backgrounds of these audiences? Can a “visual palette” respond to a more progressive approach about the representation of cities like Melbourne? Tourists mostly come for holidays, education, and to visit friends and family, while a smaller percentage are business visitors.⁵⁶ Considering the numbers of tourists, the representation of the city of Melbourne in its brochures contributes to the image the city portrays to both the international and national arena.

The Representation of Multiethnic Suburbs: Dandenong and Northcote

In the images in tourist brochures of the two selected ethnically diverse Melbourne suburbs, the concept of ethnic diversity is expanded. Although the tourist brochures of these suburbs do not target the same visitors as Melbourne’s brochures, the tourist brochure framework remains the same, and is related to art, culture, food, shopping and outdoors.

The City of Greater Dandenong’s brochures present the area explicitly as multicultural, with the slogan “Travel the world without a passport!” (Fig. 7). It organises its tourist offer through a framework of “see,” “do,” “eat,” and “shop” sections.⁵⁷ The images representing this framework include exotic food options and ethnic clothes. With a reference to cultural precincts of, for example, Little India and the Afghan Bazaar, Dandenong’s tourist brochure capitalises on the area’s diverse ethnic history, culture, art, and food, highlighting it is home to more than 150 nationalities. The brochure which focuses on food also emphasises the ethnic diversity of the population; some of the diverse food options include Polish, Afghan, Lebanese, Uyghur, Indian, modern Australian, Iraqi, and Persian (Fig. 8). City of Greater Dandenong brochures take the diversity of its inhabitants and food as a subject and build an image of the suburb around it.

Figure 7. The City of Greater Dandenong brochures; exotic food and clothes. Printed brochures. Courtesy: City of Greater Dandenong.

Figure 8. Focus on ethnic food and diversity in Dandenong’s brochures. Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Greater Dandenong.

The City of Greater Dandenong is the most culturally diverse area of Melbourne, and one of the most diverse in Australia.⁵⁸ Around 64% of the residents were born overseas, majority coming from Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and China. Around 69.1% of the residents speak a language other than English at home, which is more than double of the average of Victoria (30.2%).⁵⁹ The tourist brochures of the City of Greater Dandenong include the representation of the diversity and thereby correspond with the diversity of the population. These brochures however depart significantly from the selected brochures of the City of Melbourne in terms of representation of immigrant cultures. The images which would represent the City of Greater Dandenong as cosmopolitan are not present in its brochures. These take its diversity as a focus, while the brochures of the city of Melbourne focus on images of cosmopolitan lifestyle, along with cultural institutions and architectural history dominated by British heritage.

The suburban brochures are also limited in their value and representation of immigrant cultures. Largely recorded by David Beynon, expert scholar on Asian immigrant architecture in Melbourne, major landmarks in places like Springvale include Buddhist Daoist temples and the Enterprise Migrant Hostel through which large majorities of immigrants passed. Beynon notes:

If you want to see a concentration of Melbourne’s most culturally radical public architecture, take a trip down Springvale Road, Springvale. As you motor along you’ll pass the elaborate gates of the Hoa Ngheim Vietnamese Buddhist temple, the guardian figures of the Khmer Buddhist Centre of Victoria, the semi-completed mass of the Brigh Moon Buddhist Society’s new temple, and behind it, the golden finials of Wat Buddharangisi.⁶⁰

In addition, Dandenong is home to the Albanian Sakie Islamic Society Mosque and Emir Sultan Mosque. Another phenomenon most visually explicit in Keysborough (within municipality of Dandenong) is a precinct, once a semi-rural zone, comprising a number of religious buildings from different communities: “amongst others, these include a Sri Lankan Buddhist temple, a Turkish Mosque/School and Community Centre, a Polish Catholic Church and a Serbian Orthodox Church.”⁶¹

According to the Tourism Research Australia, the domestic daytrip visitors to the City of Greater Dandenong in 2019/20 were 1,165,021, which is 2.1% of Melbourne’s domestic daytrip visitors, and 29,727 international visitors, which is 1% of Melbourne’s visitors of the same type.⁶² As the City of Greater Dandenong Tourism Strategy & Action Updated Plan 2020–2024 outlines, safety needs to be strengthened in the area in order to attract further visitors and create a sense of place.⁶³ The perceived lack of safety arguably contributes to the general negative perception of the area by the potential visitors. The general low percentage of the visitors may not be surprising, also considering the relative distance from the Melbourne CBD (approximately 31 km). Integral to this paper is the question/conjecture—what if this Dandenong was mentioned as a destination to visit in Melbourne’s tourist brochures, and its tourist online sites—would this engender a different social imaginary about where Melbourne begins and ends, spatially and historically?

The City of Darebin brochures advertise Darebin as “the place to live.”⁶⁴ Representation is complex and mixed, including Darebin Parklands and Bundoora Park, along with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Recognition and Discovery Map, events directory for elderly citizens, and activities in the Darebin libraries and Darebin Intercultural Centre, such as Refugee Week 2019 (Fig. 9). Northcote (a Darebin suburb) is suggested in the Melbourne’s tourist brochures as one of the recommended suburbs outside of CBD, as a relevant area for shopping. Northcote, as the most gentrified suburb of Darebin, thereby fits in the proposed framework of Melbourne’s brochures related to shopping, arts and culture, food and wine (Fig. 10).⁶⁵ In contrast to this focus on Melbourne designer-maker shopping, the brochure of Darebin presents images illustrating its ethnic diversity, suggesting the diverse character of the suburb. The brochures equally do not feature images which suggest a cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Figure 9. City of Darebin’s brochures presenting Darebin as “the place to live;” representation includes different ethnicities, Indigenous artwork and Darebin landscape. Printed brochures. Courtesy: City of Darebin.

Figure 10. Northcote included in the “Shop” section of Melbourne’s Official Visitor Guide 2019, recommended for shopping in the suburbs. Printed brochure. Courtesy: City of Melbourne and Visit Melbourne.

In the City of Darebin, 33% of people were born overseas, and in 2021, 37.5% spoke a language other than English at home.⁶⁶ The number of international visitors are on a continuous rise in Darebin, with the number of international visitors being 1.3% of the Melbourne’s international visitors (42,769 in 2018/19). For the same period, Darebin had 1.2% of Melbourne’s domestic overnight visitors (179,076), and 1.5% of the Melbourne’s domestic daytrip visitors in 2017/18 (432,744).⁶⁷ It is notable that the vast majority of the tourists and visitors to Darebin are domestic, however the comparison with the overall Melbourne’s tourists remains small at 1.2–1.5% in all visitor categories. A small percentage of Melbourne’s tourists, despite being relatively close to the CBD, might explain different image in its brochures, or why the hierarchies of taste are not as pronounced in its tourist brochures.

The history of Northcote illustrates part of the concern of the representation of Melbourne: Northcote has one of the largest Aboriginal communities in Victoria (known for the treaty signing by John Batman in 1835). Large flows of Macedonian, Greek and Italian immigrants settled in the area now known as Darebin in the 1950s and 60s and transformed the architecture, urbanism and neighbourhood character. This is notable in post-war immigrant housing, pasticceria and delicatessen stores, Italian shoe stores, espresso bar and ethnic clubs; together with Bocce, soccer and picnics in the parks; piperki, zucchini, eggplant planted by the Merri Creek and prickly pear by the railway lines. Likewise, southern European immigrants queueing to see foreign films screening at Westgarth cinema, and dances and weddings at the Regal ballroom on “High Street;” all the previous radically altered the area into a Mediterranean-inspired environment.⁶⁸

In examining facades, the outdoor terraces and gardens of immigrant housing, Lozanovska presents the problem of analysing culturally specific aesthetics, arguing that aesthetic differences are embedded in an “an unresolved matrix of taste.”⁶⁹ The variety of details which pertain to immigrant dwellings form what is described and named as “diaspora aesthetic.”⁷⁰ In Northcote (as well as Preston, Thornbury and Reservoir), post-war immigrant architecture and spatial inscriptions “expanded the image and the aesthetic spectrum of what it is to be Australian,”⁷¹ thereby altering the social imaginary of the neighbourhood and the suburb (Fig. 11). Immigrant architecture generated greater interactivity between the inside and outside of the house and created a different relationship between public and private.⁷² This aesthetic was in juxtaposition to Edwardian and Victorian cottages in Northcote,⁷³ creating the competing and mixed identities of the suburb. Diversity of these suburbs is however not represented in the brochures of the city of Melbourne, and neither of the brochures feature immigrant architecture.

Figure 11. Mirjana Lozanovska and Victoria Gantala, 2009a, Northcote Enclave Study (2019). Migrant housing in Northcote, details. Photos. Source: Mirjana Lozanovska, Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration. (Routledge: London, 2019), 90.

How can this heritage and legacy of a multicultural immigrant urbanism of Northcote be integral to its current representation as a “go-to” destination in the Melbourne brochures? Do the Melbourne brochures perpetuate a division between “cosmopolitan” and “immigrant” multiculturalism, by representing the very limited cultural contributions of the immigrants to the area? The comparison between the Melbourne CBD and suburban brochures corresponds with the two different images of Australia: the dominant image (represented by the brochures of CBD and inner-city suburbs) related to British heritage and Anglo-Celtic culture, and the other image related to ethnic-minority citizens, their cultural diversity and the nation as a culture that is in-flux (notable in the suburban brochures). While the difference in representation is motivated by the tourist numbers and the perceived income from the tourists, it also conceals and suppresses the anxieties around the national identity. Rather than two different images and representations of Melbourne and how they might reveal the complexity of Australian social imaginary, the dominant representations are mediated by the hierarchies of taste and nationalist narratives, displacing and marginalising a more complex and open social imaginary of Australian identity.

Expanding on Pierre Bourdieu’s examination of the cultural meanings inscribed in a traditional house published in 1973, we argue architecture is never only physical or material, “but always the conduit of cultural meaning.”⁷⁴ Although different cultures are present in, for example, multicultural festivals, immigrant houses and ethnic-minority architecture are rarely included as a part of Melbourne’s history.⁷⁵ Overall, the lack of immigrant architecture in the examined tourist brochures illustrates that the representation of immigrants and ethnic-minority cultures is not integral to the national narratives of Australian culture and identity. A hierarchy of taste has resulted in the exclusion of the architecture associated with immigrants.

Contemporary artefacts, tourist brochures reiterate narratives about Melbourne and Australia as nation and culture. The brochures reinforce a hierarchical discourse about the value and legacy of the city⁷⁶ rather than an open and inclusive representation of the culture of Melbourne to visitors. In effect, this representation elides the multiplicities of architectures and the many diverse communities that have made Melbourne the dynamic city it is. As visual artefacts, the brochures establish the perception of the city’s cultural identity and its tourist value along a trajectory of the Anglo-Celtic culture and its British origin. These tourist brochures participate in a politics dominated by nationalist narratives, casting “out-of-sight” the complexities that actually create the worldliness of a city like Melbourne.⁷⁷ The public representation persistently diminishes and disavows the many diverse, Indigenous and ethnic histories of how the city evolved into the cosmopolitan city it is today. In contrast, the brochures of the suburbs of Dandenong and Darebin represent the diverse communities. A politics of the visual is revealed in the ways the ethnic-minority citizens shown in the suburban brochures are displaced from a dynamic contemporaneous visibility of Melbourne.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Mirjana Lozanovska, Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (Routledge: London, 2019).

2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), and Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

3. Manfred B. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global war on Terror (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4. Taylor, A Secular Age, and Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary.

5. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 9.

6. Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 10.

7. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Preface, XIV. See also Sanja Rodeš, ”On the Image of the Hurricane Katrina and the Rebuilding of New Orleans,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 4 , (December 2021), 337.

8. For additional analysis, see pages 9‒11.

9. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide: Melbourne Autumn 2019 [brochure] (Melbourne, VIC, Australia). Collected in June 2019 at Melbourne Visitor Hub.

10. Study Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and City of Melbourne, The International Student Guide: Melbourne. A Guide by Local Experts 2019 [brochure] (Melbourne, VIC, Australia. Collected in July 2019 at Melbourne Visitor Hub, 2019).

11. City of Darebin, City of Darebin [brochure] (City of Darebin, VIC, Australia. Collected in June 2019 in Darebin City Council, 2019); City of Greater Dandenong, City of Greater Dandenong [brochure] (City of Greater Dandenong, VIC, Australia. Collected in June 2019 in Dandenong City Council, 2019); David Beynon, “Edge of Centre: Australian Cities and the Public Architecture of Recent Immigrant Communities,” in: M. Lozanovska (ed.) Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (London: Routledge, 2015): 29‒42; David Beynon, “Centres on the Edge: Multicultural Built Environments in Melbourne,” in: Proceedings of the Everyday Multiculturalism Conference of the CRSI—28–29 Sept. 2006 (Macquarie University, Sydney, N.S.W.): 1‒10.

12. Sally Winkler “Cultural and Place Identity: A Study in Melbourne’s Western Suburbs” (Master Thesis, Deakin University: Geelong, 2009).

13. Mirjana Lozanovska and Cameron Logan (eds.) “Aesthetic Anxiety,” Fabrications, 30, issue 2 (August 2020): 149‒275.

14. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” The Architectural Review (27 July 2010), available at: http://www.architectural-review.com/essays/1955-december-the-new-brutalism-by-reyner-

banham/8603840.article, accessed 7 September 2022, first published in December 1955.

15. Banham, “The New Brutalism.”

16. Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002); Hal Foster, The Art‒Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011); Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Oxford: Routledge, 2006); Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Anthony Vidler, Architecture between Spectacle and Use (Williamstown. New Haven: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Distributed by Yale University Press, 2008).

17. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 6.

18. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2, 23‒26; Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 6.

19. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 9.

20. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide (Autumn 2019), 5.

21. Study Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and City of Melbourne, The International Student Guide (ca. 2019).

22. Klingmann, Brandscapes.

23. Foster, The Art‒Architecture Complex, 41.

24. Klingmann, Brandscapes.

25. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide; Study Melbourne and City of Melbourne, The International Student Guide.

26. Tim Dodd, “Education exports are worth $28 billion a year, nearly 20pc more than we thought,” Financial Review, 8 October 2017, available at: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/management/education-exports-are-worth-28-billion-a-year-nearly-20pc-more-than-we-thought-20171005-gyvc8v, accessed 7 September 2022.

27. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide.

28. Study Melbourne and City of Melbourne, The International Student Guide.

29. Creative Victoria, Immigration Museum Brochure, (Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Creative Victoria, 2019); Creative Victoria, Melbourne Museum Brochure, (Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Creative Victoria, 2019). Collected in June 2019 at Melbourne Visitor Hub.

30. Creative Victoria, Immigration Museum Brochure.

31. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide, 16‒17.

32. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide.

33. Creative Victoria, Immigration Museum Brochure, (Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Creative Victoria, 2019), and Creative Victoria, Melbourne Museum Brochure, (Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Creative Victoria, 2019).

34. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide, 70‒85.

35. Ghassan Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, ‘Ethnic Food’ and Migrant Home-Building,” in: G. Grace, G. Hage, L. Johnson, J. Langsworth and M. Symonds (eds.) Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Annandale: Pluto Press, 1997), 99‒153.

36. Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West.”

37. Stephen Castles, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope and Michael Morrisey, Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Pluto Press (UK), 1988).

38. Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Stephen Castles, Immigration, Ethnic Conflicts and Social Cohesion, Australia Bureau of Immigration Research (Canberra, ACT: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1991). Sneja Gunew, Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1994); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 1998).

39. Rosemary Hanscombe, “Café Culture,” Museums Victoria Collections, 2009, available at: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/articles/2933, accessed 7 September 2022.

40. City of Melbourne, The International Student Guide, 96‒97.

41. Tariq Modood, “Multiculturalism as a New Form of Nationalism?,” Nations and Nationalism, 26, issue 2 (March 2020): 308‒313; Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West.”

42. Ian Woodcock and Jan Smitheram “Relational Place-Identities in Multicultural Melbourne: from Federation Square to Sydney Road,” in: J. Capo and V. Gulin-Zrinič (eds.) Mjesto, Nemjesto: Interdisciplinarna Promišljanja Prostora I Kulture [From Place to non-Place: Interdisciplinary Considerations of Space and Culture], (Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2011).

43. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 14.

44. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 14.

45. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 15.

46. Some of the publications which exclude immigrant architecture in Australia are Graeme Davison, Tony Dingle, Seamus O’Hanlon (eds.), The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (Monash University: Monash Publications in History No. 19, 1995); Richard Apperly, Robert Irving, Peter Reynolds, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1989). Robert Irving (compiled by ed.) The History and Design of the Australian House (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985). L. Paroissien, M. Griggs, (eds.) Old continent New Building: Contemporary Australian Architecture (Sydney: Design Arts Committee, Australia Council, 1983). R. J. Unstead, W. F. Henderson, Homes in Australia (London: A & C Black Ltd, 1969). Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Peter Cuffley, Australian Houses of the Forties and Fifties (Knoxfield: Five Mile Press, Knoxfield, 1993), and Jennifer Taylor, Australian Architecture since 1960 (Canberra: RAIA National Education Division, 1990).

47. Ian Harry Burnley, The Impact of Immigration on Australia: A Demographic Approach (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001); Brian Murphy, The Other Australia: Experience of Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW, 1993); Ian Woodcock, “Doing Everyday Multiculturalism in Sydney Road,” in: Lozanovska M. (ed.) Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (Routledge: London, 2016); Leonie Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 1998).

48. See, for example, SBS Series, Immigration Nation: The Secret History of Us, Documentary Series, directed by Ben Shackleford, written by West and Sara Tiefenbrun, Produced by Alex West, Lucy Maclaren and Jacob Hickey, 2011, and David Malouf, (presenter) “The Island” ABC Radio National, 15 November 1998; also available in David Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of the Australian Consciousness − 1998 Boyer Lectures, (Sydney: ABC Books, 1998).

49. Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century (London, New York: Continuum, 2003).

50. Nina Glick-Schiller, “Diasporic Cosmopolitanism: Migrants, Sociabilities and City Making,” in: Glick-Schiller N. and Irving A. (eds), Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2015): 103‒120.

51. Glick-Schiller, “Diasporic Cosmopolitanism.”

52. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 56.

53. “Greater Melbourne, 2021 All persons QuickStats,” Australian Bureau of Statistics, available at https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/2GMEL, accessed 30 March 2023.

54. Suzanne M. Hall (eds.), The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

55. Budget Direct, “Melbourne Tourism Statistics 2020,” 2021, available at: https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/travel-insurance/research/melbourne-tourism-statistics.html, accessed 7 September 2022.

56. Business Victoria, “Tourism Industry Resources. International Research,” 2021, available at: https://www.business.vic.gov.au/tourism-industry-resources/research/international-research, accessed 7 September 2022; Business Victoria, “Tourism Industry Research,” 2021, available at: https://business.vic.gov.au/business-information/tourism-industry-resources/tourism-industry-research, accessed 7 September 2022.

57. City of Greater Dandenong, City of Greater Dandenong [brochure]; City of Greater Dandenong brochure, 7, and “Our Place-Our Community,” Greater Dandenong, City of Opportunity, Remplan, 2021, https://app.remplan.com.au/greaterdandenong/community/summary?state=n8Q9SvQ28TMb4DOIQ46LPyI1tKtAm9, accessed 7 September 2022.

58. City of Greater Dandenong, brochure, 7.

59. “Greater Dandenong, 2021 All persons QuickStats,” Australian Bureau of Statistics, available at https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/LGA22670, accessed 30 March 2023.

60. David Beynon, “Melbourne’s ‘Third World-looking’ architecture,” in Suburban Fantasies Unmasked, (Australian Scholarly Publishing: Melbourne, 2005), 69.

61. David Beynon, “Centres on the Edge: Multicultural Built Environments in Melbourne,” Everyday Multiculturalism Conference Proceedings, S. Velayutham and A. Wise (eds.) (Macquarie University 28‒29 September 2006) 4.

62. “Parks Victoria, Economic Profile; City of Greater Dandenong,” Idcommunity, Visitors and nights Parks Victoria | economy.id, accessed 20 April 2023; Business Victoria, “Tourism Industry Resources. International Research,” 2021, available at: https://www.business.vic.gov.au/tourism-industry-resources/research/international-research, accessed 7 September 2022, and “Tourism Industry Research,” Business Victoria, 2021, available at: https://business.vic.gov.au/business-information/tourism-industry-resources/tourism-industry-research, accessed 7 September 2022.

63. “City of Greater Dandenong Tourism Strategy & Action Updated Plan 2020–2024,” Greater Dandenong City of Opportunity, available at https://www.greaterdandenong.vic.gov.au/_flysystem/filerepo/A7143523, accessed 20 April 2023.

64. City of Darebin, City of Darebin [brochure]; City of Darebin, Tourism: A destination plan for Darebin. Strategy 2016‒2021, available at: www.darebin.vic.gov.au, accessed 7 September 2022.

65. Destination Melbourne, The Official Visitor Guide, 65.

66. “Darebin, 2021 Census All persons QuickStats,” Australian Bureau of Statistics, available at https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/LGA21890, accessed 30 March 2023.

67. City of Darebin, City of Darebin [brochure]; IdCommunity, “City of Darebin, Economic profile,” n.d., available at: https://economy.id.com.au/darebin/tourism-visitors-nights?Tourismtype=2andBMID=20, accessed 7 September 2022.

68. Burnley, The Impact of Immigration on Australia, and Murphy, The Other Australia.

69. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 81.

70. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 80, 95.

71. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 97.

72. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 216.

73. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 82, 87.

74. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Berber House,” in: M. Douglas (ed.) Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge (Harmondsworth, London, Penguin, 1973), 98‒110; Sarah Lynn Lopez, The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); M. Lozanovska (ed.), Migrant housing, 74; Christien Klaufus, “Arquitectura De Remesas,” in: Lozanovska M (ed) Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (New York, NY, Routledge, 2016), 99‒114.

75. Lozanovska, Migrant Housing, 95.

76. Smith, Uses of Heritage.

77. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).