Ethnography & writing history: The Melbourne Group forty years on

In this article two historians describe how they were influenced by the ethnographic approach pioneered by ‘Melbourne Group’ in the 1970s and 80s. They argue that the ethnographer’s fieldwork-based methods they were taught as graduate students has allowed them to detect signs of change and conflict that are hard to see using traditional research methods. The key, they argue, is to look for something odd or unexpected, and then to use library and archival research to tease meaning out of the oddness. Demonstrating how this works in practice, they give examples of their own work, undertaken many years after graduating: Glenn Moore describes how time he spent in and around a wooden railway station in suburban Tokyo led him to a deeper understanding of changing Japanese attitudes to ‘modernity.’ Katherine Ellinghaus explains how she had students in her indigenous history subject go into the field and find evidence of conflict and violence in the colonial period lurking beneath the quiet surface of Melbourne streets and parks.