Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Life

The editors of Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures of Everyday Lifeareinviting you submit a research article, essay, creative work, poetic or other creative work reflecting the diversity of ways in which lived experience and material culture can be explored.

Each contribution should focus on a specific Australian place—Country, a city, suburb, town, region, or site—and engage critically, reflectively or creatively with the themes of lived experience, memory, and material culture outlined below. Contributors are encouraged to include images, or visual materials (with appropriate permissions) or their own photographs or own artwork that enrich the analysis or creative aspect.

This collection aims to embody diverse and inventive approaches to representing lived experience and material culture in Australia. It will operate within a different scholarly paradigm—one that permits creative freedom and intellectual experimentation beyond conventional academic constraints.

All chapters will undergo editorial review, with opportunities for feedback and development before final publication.

Book Overview and Key Aims

Australia from Below: Lived Histories and Material Cultures in Australia explores how ordinary places are lived, remembered, and made meaningful through everyday practices. Each contribution will be grounded in one Australian city, town, region, or suburb, and will take seriously the proposition that place is not abstract but historically and materially constituted.

By situating analysis in coastal suburbs, regional towns, inner-city communities, rural landscapes, and Indigenous Country, the collection demonstrates how lived experience, memory, and material culture are central to understanding the histories of place and the people who inhabit them. This approach recognises that places are dynamic, constructed through relationships, conflicts, and negotiations, and that the everyday is a powerful site for revealing how nation, identity, and belonging are made and remade.

Drawing on traditions of history from below, cultural geography, and material culture studies, Australia from Below re-centres the study of place through the lens of ordinary lives, everyday practices, and the material traces of experience. It resists heritage’s institutional focus on monuments and elite culture, instead uncovering the vernacular, ephemeral, and affective textures through which people build attachments to place.

The collection recovers the voices of those marginalised in dominant narratives of nationhood and heritage: working-class communities, migrants and refugees, queer and trans people, Indigenous custodians, the disabled, and neurodivergent folk. It insists that place is never neutral—it is inhabited unevenly, contested continuously, and re-made through social and material practices.

Australia from Below argues that to understand Australia as a lived place requires attention not to curated heritage or monumental architecture, but to the everyday and contested sites where memory, material culture, and identity intersect.

Aims and Significance

The book’s contribution lies in three interrelated aims:

1. Extending “history from below” into the study of place, moving beyond nation-building historiography to examine the textures of lived and material environments.
2. Foregrounding marginalised voices within Australian cultural history and memory studies, challenging institutionalised narratives of progress and belonging.
3. Modelling reflexive, collaborative scholarship, where contributors’ positionalities and connections to their chosen places form part of the interpretive framework.

Each chapter may employ empirical, creative, or reflexive methodologies, and all will treat material culture as central. Everyday artefacts—ephemera, domestic objects, tools, food or clothing—serve as mnemonic devices and carriers of social meaning, illuminating histories that might otherwise be lost. Below are some suggestions:

Everyday Landscapes

Built environments:

• Shopping malls, supermarkets, and retail strips as social and economic hubs.
• Public transport stations, bus stops, and car parks shaping movement and connection.
• Suburban streets, cul-de-sacs, and driveways as sites of neighbourly interaction and surveillance.
• Schools, hospitals, libraries, and community centres as anchors of civic life.
• Cafés, pubs, and take-away shops as informal meeting points that structure social rhythms.

Natural and semi-natural settings:

• Beaches, parks, walking tracks, and nature reserves as leisure spaces.
• Gardens as micro-landscapes of care, belonging, and ecological negotiation.
• Rural towns, roadside stops, and regional service centres as intersections of community, labour, and memory.

Indigenous Country:

• Everyday landscapes exist within Indigenous Country—living, storied ground holding ancestral and ecological knowledge.
• Many urban and regional sites overlay traditional campsites, ceremonial grounds, or trade routes.
• Recognising Country reframes the everyday as an ongoing encounter between Indigenous and settler geographies.
• Acts of walking, gathering, and caring for place become dialogues with Country, acknowledging histories of dispossession and resilience.

Lived Experience

• Uneven belonging: Landscapes are inhabited differently—by class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. For some, a place embodies home; for others, exclusion or danger.
• Intersecting inequalities: Geography mirrors power through housing access, environmental quality, and infrastructure investment.
• Gendered and racialised spaces: Beaches, bars, sports grounds, and shopping centres encode social hierarchies and forms of surveillance.
• Disability and accessibility: The built environment includes and excludes through design; spatial justice demands rethinking access and inclusion.
• Regional precarity: Labour, drought, and economic dependency shape who remains and who departs.
• Postcolonial habitation: Indigenous experiences of Country resist colonial mapping, asserting presence through ceremony, story, and walking.
• Affective geographies: Place is lived through the senses—heat, noise, smell, and rhythm become emotional and cultural imprints.
• Resistance and reclamation: Protest, art, and everyday care reclaim excluded spaces, from queer street festivals to Aboriginal land-back movements.

Memory and Forgetting

• Layered histories: Streets and towns carry traces of Indigenous movement, colonial expansion, and migration.
• Commemoration and naming: Contestation of monuments and place names that encode selective national narratives; Indigenous toponymy asserts ongoing sovereignty.
• Regional hauntings: Abandoned mining towns and flooded valleys, such as Wittenoom and Lake Pedder, reveal the environmental costs of “progress.”
• Sensory memory: Sound, scent, and texture evoke deep temporal layers of place.
• Embodied remembrance: Acts such as returning, walking, or farming preserve memory through gesture.
• Forgetting and erasure: Redevelopment and extraction erase working-class, migrant, and Indigenous histories, while local archives and art projects re-inscribe them.
• Postcolonial re-inscription: Storytelling, language revival, and activism contest amnesia, insisting that place remains alive and unfinished.

Material Cultures

Urban material cultures: street furniture, signage, laneways, high-rise balconies, markets, and transport ephemera—objects that choreograph urban life.
Suburban material cultures: domestic architecture, gardens, shopping centres, schools, and sporting paraphernalia—markers of aspiration, conformity, and community.
Regional and rural material cultures: agricultural tools, main-street memorials, transport relics, fairs, and coastal leisure objects—traces of endurance and identity.
Material cultures of belonging: photographs, recipes, clothing, and souvenirs that anchor memory and heritage, revealing how belonging is made tangible.

Histories from Below and Embodiment

• Histories from below challenge elite heritage narratives by recovering working-class, migrant, queer, Indigenous, and disabled voices.
• Embodied practice: Place is lived through the body—labour, sport, ritual, and migration inscribe meaning onto space.
• Material embodiment: Tools, uniforms, and foodways reveal the sensory and bodily textures of everyday life.

Memory, Affect, and Contestation

• Affective power: Ordinary places hold emotional resonance—nostalgia, grief, and pride.
• Contested spaces: Belonging, access, and heritage are negotiated daily.
• Material traces: Graffiti, shrines, and fences mark conflict, remembrance, and re-appropriation.
• Industrial, militarisation and petro-cultures: Industustrialisation of places (Wollongong, Newcastle, Wittenoom, Yallourn, Womera and petro-cultures of Bathurst, Sumernats reflect and embody memories and affect due to corporatistion.

Indigenous Place-Making

Indigenous conceptualisations of Country challenge Western notions of ownership and boundary.

• Lived experience: Place is kin, relation, and responsibility.
• Memory: Story, song, and ceremony transmit ancestral presence.
• Material culture: Sacred landscapes, objects, and community art are living expressions of sovereignty and continuity.

Mobility and Migration

Migration shapes how people negotiate belonging.

• Lived experience: Settlement, dislocation, and adaptation are enacted through everyday routines.
• Memory: Letters, photographs, and oral histories sustain transnational connections.
• Material culture: Recipes, keepsakes, multilingual signage, and household artefacts preserve identity across distance.

Methodologies of Place

Studying place requires attentiveness to embodiment, affect, and reflexivity.

• Researchers’ positionalities—as insiders, outsiders, or both—shape interpretation.
• Memory and biography are legitimate scholarly modes.
• Objects, spaces, and ephemera serve as methodological entry points into lived histories.

Why Now

The timeliness of Australia from Below lies in its capacity to address urgent questions about space, identity, and belonging in contemporary Australia.

• Post-pandemic revaluations of space: COVID-19 made the everyday newly visible—homes, local parks, and shopping malls became central to emotional and social life while exposing inequalities in housing and mobility.
• Climate change and environmental precarity: Fires, floods, and droughts have transformed how communities remember place, embedding trauma and resilience into landscape memory.
• Debates over heritage and sovereignty: Calls to decolonise monuments and public space highlight place as a site of ongoing contestation.
• Demographics: Shifting demographics and displacement reveal belonging as fragile and negotiated.
• Digital place-making: Online media and AI reshape how people imagine and memorialise space, creating digital archives that reproduce or resist erasure.

Together, these dynamics make Australia from Below not only a work of cultural recovery but an intervention in the politics of place in the twenty-first century. It invites readers to see Australia not from above—from government, heritage, or nation—but from below: through the lived, material, contested and remembered geographies that shape everyday life.

Submission details

• Abstracts: 250–300 words outlining the argument, framework, and contribution
• Author bio: 100 words
• Abstract deadline: 1 September 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2026
• Full papers due: 1 March 2027

• Length:1,000 – 10,000 words (including references if applicable)

• Referencing: Chicago Author-Date
• Submission and enquiries: jo.coghlan@une.edu.au