Windows Onto Hume demonstrates the benefits collaboratively and creatively tackling gaps in local community archives. The project illuminates the importance of ongoing community engagement and inclusion and the neceesity to keep adding to archives in order to track, document and accurately represent the expereince of communities through time.

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The overall impact is a visually pleasing and approachable display, critically engaged with the notion of community, the idea of inclusion, and the meaning of connection to place, to people, to past and future.

 

We teamed up with heritage consultants, History at Work to produce this tendered project in a turnaround time of 7 weeks.

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Windows Onto Hume (2024) A small space with lots of perspective 

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About Hume

Spanning a total area of 504 square kilometres, Hume City in the North-west of Melbourne is built around the established suburbs of Broadmeadows, Tullamarine and Gladstone Park in the south, the growing suburbs of Roxburgh Park, Craigieburn, Greenvale, Mickleham, Kalkallo in the north-east and the township of Sunbury in the north-west.​

 

The municipality is made up of a new and established residential areas, major industrial and commercial precincts and expanses of rural areas, conservation assets and parkland.

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It's one of Australia’s most culturally diverse municipalities, with Hume’s residents coming from 156 different countries and speak over 150 languages.

 

However, Hume City has a significantly hight SEIFA schor comparted to the Greater Melbourne Average, Indicating a higher level of socio-economic disadvantage. The mediam personal income in Hume is lower than average, unemployment is higher than average and a lager percentage of Hume residence experience rental stress.

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Project Aim and Challenges

The brief was to develop a heritage display for the new Council Chambers at the Hume Global Learning Centre at Broadmeadows, with the intended purposed of furthering Council’s commitments under its, Creative Community Strategy 2020-2025, Civic Collection Policy, Creative Places and Spaces Arts Infrastructure Plan and George Evans Spaces Review. The objective was to produce a display of objects representing the diverse heritage and identities across Hume City, including First Nations and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Narratives, with Council's preference to showcase the existing Hume Civic Collection and the George Evans Collection.​

 

But the existing community archives lack representation of Indigenous and more recent migrant community perspectives. It also lacked depth in the experience of lower socio-economic neighbourhoods such as Jacana, Dallas and Banskia Gardens.​

 

The exhibition was mindfully constructed to take advantage of it's physical positioning, which made it visible, from one side, by the community, and the other, to Hume’s Councillors in the chamber room where they make decisions on behalf of their constituents.

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The Process

Community engagement the the generation of new artifacts were the only ways to ensure the display met the intended goals with integrity and accuracy.

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We called for residents and community organisations to donate everyday objects that reflected their lived experience. Presented as artifacts wooden toys from the Men's Shed, Car Parts manufactured by past residents at the Ford Factory, Volcanic rocks from local parklands and a memorial plaque commemorating the activism of local residents are now proudly curated beside, and in equal standing to - the 'official' civic collection. This helps to merge the past into the present, while also drawing attention to the gaps in official records.

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Arc Up produced a photographic survey and a collection of digital stories for the exhibition. Thirteen residents provide QR-coded critical digital stories and portraits taken in the community highlight the challenges, assets and beauty within. To keep costs within budget, some of these stories were re-editted from previously produced material, while others required us to interview and film.

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Displayed together, these living histories remind Counsellors of the enhanced capacity of their privileged position as leaders in one of Melbourne’s most disadvantaged but culturally, and environmentally diverse communities, while also offering the community an incluvise interpretation that reflects placemaking as an ongoing process.

 

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