This video project has been a collaboration between Public Record Office Victoria and the Melbourne History Workshop team in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne. The project focuses on music-related industries in Melbourne from around the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. It is a case study in the prehistory of Melbourne’s status as a musical hub in the generations before rock ‘n’ roll, indie record stores and the DIY music community.
Public Records Office Victoria (PROV) has an amazing Mapwarper platform which displays historic maps collections online and offers an annotation tool for marking up the maps with historical context.
https://mapwarper.prov.vic.gov.au
Mapwarper contains roughly an astonishing 11,000 historic plans from the State’s archival collection and of those around 7000 maps have been rectified, positioned with geospatial latitude and longitudinal location markers which can accurately overlay the historical maps over a contemporary map. A special thanks to the work of many volunteers!
Mapwarper contains two significant historic map/plan collections searchable by digital map, contemporary location, or historic parish name:
1. The Historic Plan Collection (Victorian Public Record Series VPRS 8168)
These historic surveyor plans span from 1836 to 1984 and were produced for many different reasons, from agriculture or coastal surveys, to geographic boundaries and mining maps.
2. Parish and Township Plans (VPRS 16171, 16306)
These plans often trace the evolving growth of towns over time, detailing allotment numbers (known as the ‘Crown Description’), property sizes, boundary specifics, names of initial occupiers, and often updates with later owners, major roads, and watercourses.
We’ve used Mapwarper and the collections’ potential to animate the rectified maps across time to create a video which brings to life the musical history of Melbourne. This video focuses on specific industries related to music, mainly within the Hoddle grid. We were interested in identifying music related industries prevalent over time from roughly 1850 to 1930. We hope you enjoy it!
https://figshare.com/s/9adeb12c918d8e15ea65
Project Team
Dr Henry Reese
Dr Mitchell Harrop
Dr Nicole Davis
Prof. Andy May