Dr David Dunstan
Deputy Director, National Centre for Australian Studies
B.A. (hons) (Mon); PhD (Melb), Grad. Dip. Edit&Pub (RMIT), TSTC (State College Vic,Hawthorn)
Contact details | Research interests | Research supervision | Publications
David’s long standing interests in Exhibitions and Public Culture are represented in his current publications. For the authoritative and recently published Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions edited by John Findling and Kimberley Pelle McFarland Publishing, 2008) he wrote the entries on the Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880-81 and the Centennial International Exhibition, 1888-89, also held in Melbourne. This international Encyclopedia contains individual histories of each of the nearly 100 World’s Fairs and expositions held in more than 20 countries since 1851. View details and purchase book on Amazon.
David is an experienced university teacher and widely travelled researcher with many books and published essays to his credit. He is an experienced and accredited supervisor of higher degree research at Monash University. He is a collaborator in collective research and an historian who has had wide experience in industry, in public administration and journalism.
David’s specialist areas of interest include the study of Australian cities and culture, biography, industrial and regional communities, wine, publishing, newspapers and media, collective consumption and Australian communities abroad.
He has been instrumental in developing the Centre’s Publishing and Editing and undergraduate Sports Studies programs and served as Director 1994-1996.
David completed his Arts degree with first class honours in History at Monash University in 1974 and his doctorate (also in History) at the University of Melbourne in 1983. He has studied under and worked with such distinguished Australian historians and academics as Weston Bate, Geoffrey Blainey, Carl Bridge, John Graeme Davison, Diana Dyason, John Lack, Roger Joyce, John Rickard, Peter Spearritt and Geoffrey Serle. He is a trained secondary teacher and has taught in Victorian secondary schools. He completed the Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing at RMIT University in 1995 studying with the late John Curtain. He has taught History and Australian Studies at the University of Melbourne, at Monash University and at Deakin and RMIT universities.
David has been a free lance journalist and historian as well as a Victorian public servant. His life has not been spent entirely in universities. He found an outlet in wine and travel journalism in the 1980s and 1990s and contributed extensively to the Age, Business Review Weekly, the National Times, the Sun-Herald, and the Wine Spectator in the United States. He has worked as a consultant and researcher for industry and government. Interests in history and heritage saw him working as an historian, planner and administrator with the Victorian Ministry for Planning and Environment and the Historic Buildings Council (now Heritage Victoria) for six years. From 1990 to 1993 he was an historian, administrator and exhibitions planner with Museum Victoria. From 1994 to 1996 he was a Lecturer in Public History with the History Department at Monash University (now the School of Historical Studies) and a consultant historian and author to the Royal Exhibition Building. He is a member of ICOM, the Australian Historical Association and other professional associations.
David joined the National Centre for Australian Studies in 1997 and was its Director from 2004 to 2006.
With Mr Nick Walker he co-ordinates and teaches the Graduate Publishing and Editing program conducted by NCAS. With other colleagues, Dr Tom Heenan and Dr David Nadel, he teaches in the undergraduate Sports Studies program and is an occasional contributor to the Graduate Tourism and other programs conducted by NCAS.
Research interests
David’s research interests have connecting threads through Melbourne and Victoria and through the study of cultural forms and media. He has written extensively on his adopted city of Melbourne (he was born in New York to Australian parents). His doctoral thesis on Melbourne’s nineteenth century government was published as Governing the Metropolis (Melbourne University Press 1984) and remains a standard work. His interest in Melbourne, its governance, politics, history and public culture is reflected in chapters in books, essays, articles and entries for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Encyclopedia of Melbourne. He is a contributor to public debates about the city’s future and is undertaking a comparative study of Australian urban government, planning and transport systems. His urban history interests embrace government and politics, social reform, built form and planning, low life, population movements, consumption, the drink trades, crime and sport.
David has been the recipient of research and project grants from the Australian Research Council, the Co-operative Research Centre for Tourism, the Institute for Global Movements, Monash International and industry and business.
Abroad
He has researched the experience of Australians abroad and in with Professor Carl Bridge of Kings College, London, is editing a book of essays on Australians in Britain in the twentieth century to be published by Monash ePress. He finds that we learn much about Australia and Australians through the experience of expatriates and travellers both abroad and at home.
On behalf of NCAS and the Monash Institute for Global Movements he is a convenor of the SouthernWorlds conference on South Africa and Australia compared to be held in 25-28 November, 2008 at Monash South.
http://southernworlds.com/index.php
The Press
An interest in the media and public culture derives from being born into a family of journalists and newspapermen but also from the powerful contribution made by newspapers to the culture and politics of cities and nations. David is working on a long term project on the history of the Melbourne Herald newspaper and Australian journalists, columnists, correspondents and cartoonists at home and abroad. His interest in biography and journalism has resulted in a scholarly edition of a convict autobiography Owen Suffolk’s Days of Crime and Years of Suffering (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2000) and a collection of his father, Keith Dunstan’s journalism, The Melbourne I Remember: Batman in the Bulletin (Arcadia 2004).
Wine
David’s interest in wine and the drink trades has a scholarly basis in the social and cultural significance and achievements of the wine industry, the history of wine and viticulture in Australia and the role drink has played in our culture; also, industry regulation, temperance, prohibitionist and anti-drink trade movements, the regional character of wine and concepts such as terroir. David is the author of Better Than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria (1994) and Wine from the Hills (2000). A new edition of Better Than Pommard! is underway. He is also writing a history of the Viticultural Society of Victoria.
Sport
His commitment to undergraduate teaching at NCAS has prompted a research interest in sport. Together with his colleague Dr Tom Heenan he is researching the history of Australian Indian cricket and as part of his wider interest in newspaper history is researching Australian sports writers and writing. David contributed a paper on the 1947-48 Indian Cricket Tour of Australia to the Indian Australian Studies Conference (IASA) held at Kolkata, India, in January, 2008.
Research supervision
David has supervised more than thirty higher degree research theses, including 4th year Honours and Masters qualifying, Masters and Doctoral theses. David supervises students in Tourism, Australian Studies and History, and Publishing. He has co-supervised higher degree research students with colleagues in other Schools and Departments in the Faculty of Arts and the faculties of Business and Economics and Art and Design at Monash University.
He is interested in supervising future studies in the following areas:
- Australian newspaper and media history
- Australian communities abroad
- The history and culture of wine, food and drink in Australia
- Regional and remote communities
- The history of travel and tourism
- Australian biography, autobiography and popular narratives
- The history of Australian publishing
- Cultural Policy in Australia
- Popular and material culture
- Australian consumer culture and politics
- Australian capital cities and their governance
- Australian sports writing
Recent doctoral completions supervised by him include:
- Morna Sturrock, Bishop of Magnetic Power: James Moorhouse in Melbourne, 1877-1987 (2005) subsequently published as a book by Australian Scholarly Publishing.
- T.M. Mike Williams ‘Melbourne and Country Victoria: the Drift to the City: 1916-1918’ (2007).
Publications
David contributes to scholarly journals in Australia and is a reviewer and contributor to the national and local press. Among his current projects is (with Carl Bridge) an edited collection of essays Australians in London: the Twentieth Century Experience to be published by Monash ePress. This includes his essay ‘The changing knowledge of London’: transformations of the Australian community press in London since the 1980s’.
David has been a prolific contributor the Australian Dictionary of Biography with more than thirty individual entries under his name. Recent entries include the Victorian Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, the Lord Mayor and architect, Sir Bernard Evans, the journalist, Frederick Howard and the vine breeder and CSIRO scientist, Alan Antcliff in volume 17 published in 2007. David’s studies of Victorian premiers William Watt, John Murray and Sir Henry Bolte appeared in The Victorian Premiers (Federation Press, 2006) edited by Brian Costar and Paul Strangio.
David was a founding and Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Melbourne Cambridge University Press, 2005 and the author of major entries including ‘Politics’ ‘Municipal Government’, ‘Mayoralty’, ‘Melbourne City Council’, ‘Health’, ‘Heritage’. David’s Governing the Metropolis: Melbourne 1851-1891 (Melbourne University Press 1984) is a standard work on Melbourne.
David is an editor of the Journal of Publishing published by Australian Scholarly Press. His essay ‘Food and Drink: the appearance of an Australian publishing subculture’ (co-authored with Annett Chaitman) was included in David Carter and Anne Galligan (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (University of Queensland Press, 2007). His writings on the history of wine, wine tourism and viticulture include ‘With Sam Benwell and the House of Lords Journeying to Wine in Victoria’ in Culinary Distinction: Journal of Australian Studies No. 87, 2006, and ‘A Sobering Experience: From ‘Australian Burgundy’ to ‘Kanga Rouge’: Australian wine battles on the London market 1900 to 1981’ Journal of Australian Studies (UK) 2002. His book Better Than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria remains the standard history of the Victorian wine industry in the nineteenth century.
David’s book Victorian Icon: Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building (1996) is a large format extensively illustrated multi-author book edited. Its publication helped this Australian treasure achieve World Heritage Listing.
