Copyright Andey Films, Melbourne. By working closely together, historians and archaeologists have begun to puncture the myths which surround Little Lonsdale Street, and to open windows upon the communities which once lived there. However these negative and misleading slum myths distort our knowledge of the actual working-class communities to which the slumland label is applied. Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914. The material data contained within the Little Lonsdale Street archaeological collection helps us to penetrate beyond the level of outside myth making, and to begin to look instead at this community from the inside.
Artefacts constitute a tangible link between past and present.
The History of One London Village. Research on Little Lonsdale Street highlights how sensitivity to the material context of past urban life extends our historical appreciation of what it was really like to live and work within such inner-city communities. At the University of Melbourne, undergraduate students in the Department of History are unravelling the life histories of owners and occupiers within the study area, and tracing the houses and businesses they lived or worked in, as well as meshing these inside histories with the outside history of slumland sensationalism and of 'improvement' and 'renewal' projects to weed out the 'slums'. A major research project funded by the Australian Research Council is enabling historians and archaeologists from Melbourne and La Trobe Universities to pool their expertise in order jointly to study 'Li'l Lons'.