The forgotten class? Shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Melbourne
Shopkeepers played a vital role in the functioning of nineteenth-century Melbourne society. They owned the businesses where residents obtained goods, from basic daily needs to the flights and fancies of an emerging modern consumer culture. Echoes of their presence live on in the shopfronts and main shopping streets. 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. Yet across all three towns (or suburbs), shopkeepers held an important and unique role, one that cannot be understood through the same lens as the working class or middle class.

Passing without fanfare or public ceremony, at midday on Sunday 15 June 1924, electricity from the new Yallourn Power Station first reached Melbourne when the State Electricity Commission switched on the high voltage transmission line linking Morwell and the Yarraville distribution terminal. The event marked the culmination of a five-year project to develop Victoria’s first baseload power station in the Latrobe Valley and the greatest single public infrastructure project the nation had seen. It was proclaimed by the press as “the cessation of Victoria's subservience … to the coal mines of Newcastle”, and would provide the foundation for the State’s industrial, economic and social prosperity over the following decades.