Recreating place: Little Lon

Abstract

In 1948, Little Lon was razed to the ground. Almost every visible vestige of the vibrant, multicultural, working-class community of Little Lon was lost. All that remained in popular consciousness was an image of Little Lon as a slum, riddled with poverty, prostitution and drug addiction. This myth has been challenged in Melbourne Museum's new exhibition The Melbourne Story, in which two weatherboard cottages, representative of those that populated the back lanes of Little Lon in the nineteenth century, have been created. The cottages' small, crowded, poorly lit rooms are dressed with a mixture of props and collection objects, and peopled through audio and text panels. This paper addresses the rationale behind the museum's decision to recreate a physical environment in which to tell the story of Little Lon. It shows how working with resources gathered from a variety of historical sources has created a vivid glimpse of life in Little Lon.

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