Projects & Work

Knowing your community’s history, and your place within it, promotes a sense of belonging and enables you to connect its significance to your own life. We love the challenge of researching and presenting the history of your neighbourhood, community group, institution, profession, organisation, school or family. These different types of communities have their own stories, inspirations and peculiarities – characteristics that together produce a sense of belonging and a shared enterprise. Exploring your history provides opportunities for a whole range of community activities such as: sharing successes, recognising mistakes, making amends, shaping values, making new decisions, understanding evolutions, providing legacies, intriguing outsiders, embracing insiders, and so on. We have worked with schools, professional associations, medical institutes, hospitals and corporate organisations and can bring to your project expertise in a range of historical methodologies and a deep understanding of communities that inform all our projects.

Natural and built landscapes, precincts and neighbourhoods, parks, streetscapes, industrial sites, institutions, private homes and gardens – they all have stories to tell. Whether you’re buying or selling, or embarking on a major new development, appreciating the architectural and social history of a place and its significance to the neighbourhood and community adds new dimensions to the experience of the place, to its interpretation, or to the memory of it. Our work can shed light on the place’s history and significance, reveal surprising stories, add new levels of appreciation, and provide evidence of its architectural and social qualities.

We do this through:

Having worked on a wide range of history projects we have strong knowledge of local and community history resources across Victoria’s public records and private archives, local historical societies and local history libraries

Often architects, builders, heritage experts, planners, interior decorators, artists and others who work with places can assist with expert advice and we have worked closely with colleagues in all these fields to understand the intricacies of a given place.

Spending time in discussion with property owners or other knowledgeable people can be very helpful. This certainly applies to projects about the ‘life story of a place’ but also for other types of place histories.

Tailored in style and form to suit the client and project purpose these may be presented as an expert witness report, heritage assessment, interpretation panel, paper based publication such as a booklet or coffee table book, a personal story (digital or analogue), an ebook, website, blog post etc.

• Interpretation

• Personal house histories

• Institutional histories

• Oral histories of places

• Histories, expert advice, assessments and decisions on properties undergoing heritage considerations or disputes

Collections

Exploring the breadth and depth of your collections with professional rigour can reveal their interpretive potential for custodians and the broader community alike. Applying sound principles and methodologies to help you with significance and preservation needs assessments, collection archiving, curation, management, conservation and interpretation enriches this potential enormously. Our team has extensive experience in all facets of collection work, in particular:

• Collection management, conservation and preservation

• Significance assessments

• Preservation needs assessments

• Collection policies and plans

• Interpretation

Some of our Collections work

• Collection archiving and curating

• Collection auditing

• Workshops, training and other activities

• Rehousing collections

• Valuing collections