RHSV Drill Hall and online, Tuesday 28 May 2024, 6.30pm AEST
The 2024 Weston Bate Oration will present Fiona Gatt’s research findings as Historian in Residence at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 2023–2024. This lecture investigates and compares the shopkeepers who operated in three distinct, representative suburbs of nineteenth-century Melbourne: genteel Malvern, inner urban North Melbourne and industrial Footscray. In doing so it provides a genuine comparative cross-section of the urban retail trade in this period and reveals the subtle differences between these localities in terms of the prestige and identity ascribed to shopkeepers within the socio-economic fabric of these local societies.