Land Boom Advertising

TO CONSIDER MAPS as objects of material culture, geographer Martin Brückner advises us to ask the question, ‘What do maps . . . want us to know?’ Maps, like any object, are not passive remnants of the past; rather they provoke numerous lines of potential inquiry. When Cremorne, a suburb of inner east Melbourne, went to auction in January 1885, a land sale map was prepared to attract interest A part of material culture, the Cremorne Broadsheet is not only an article of commercial ephemera incorporating a subdivision map but also an aesthetic object, a product of print culture, a socio-spatial representation offering clues about the then booming metropolis. This article utilises what Karen Harvey calls the object-driven approach to material culture along with Jules Prown’s typology for studying objects to investigate the socio-spatial significance of the Cremorne Broadsheet. Prown advises students of material culture to describe, then deduce and finally speculate about objects – and so this article takes that approach to uncover the Broadsheet’s entanglement with Melbourne’s socio-spatial transformation of the 1880s.