The research for this history began in the most ordinary way - by looking at the minute books, correspondence files and administrative records of Prahran Technical School and its parent body, the Prahran Mechanics' Institute (PMI). Most of the archives of the various institutions that began as Prahran Technical School are now held at Deakin University (which inherited some parts of Prahran Tech, but by no means all) and at Public Record Office Victoria.¹ The PMI holds its own minute books, the transcripts of a series of oral histories undertaken after a 1996 school reunion, and a bundle of website printouts about famous and infamous personalities who have been associated with the school over the years - among them Kevin Sheedy,² Joan Carden³ and Sir William Dargie.⁴

PROV files include many handbooks and official photographs, which are invaluable for revealing how the school (later college) presented itself to the world. PROV also holds newspaper cuttings, festival programmes, honour rolls and staff handbooks that give an insight into celebrations not recorded in the minute books now at Deakin. Correspondence files at PROV are also of great interest.

I found a few lists of graduates in the minute books and contacted scores of ex-students and teachers through a process of one contact leading to another. I also made use of the internet, where many former students who have become well known could be traced. Almost everyone wanted to talk about their time at Prahran Tech because it was the best time of their lives.

I approached my research in my usual way - by going through the available archives, making photocopies and taking notes in a seemingly random fashion, all the while trying to form a picture in my mind of Prahran Tech and to develop a feel for it. This is always an uncomfortable stage of the research journey for me because I'm not sure what I'm looking for and often feel as though I will never understand, let alone be able to write about, my commissioned subject. But I am also aware that I always feel like this at this stage, so I go on regardless. It all seems very messy and awkward. The best antidote for this feeling of unease is to read about the time and place into which my subject fits and try to understand the big picture. I always finds this very reassuring because it reminds me of what I do know but had forgotten that I know and because the setting is an integral part of the story of any organisation - no matter how small. This part of the process was made easier because the project I had completed previously, a history of the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind in the same area of Melbourne,⁵ owed its existence to the same person - the Reverend William Moss.⁶

Apart from time spent at PROV, in people's homes and studios, and in restaurants and pubs interviewing them, I have been (most happily) located at the Prahran Mechanics' Institute Victorian and Local History Library for the duration of my research and writing. The staff and one committee member of the PMI have acted as a constant sounding-board and source of information. So although Prahran Tech no longer exists, its founding parent has proved invaluable to my work. As well, it's important to note that the PMI is located at 140 High Street, Prahran. Not only was this the address of the Tech (the PMI was always housed within the Tech's boundaries), but Swinburne University of Technology, Prahran Tech's successor, has maintained the buildings and, to a degree, the youth culture around the site. So each day spent in the Institute's bright, window-lit space has been, in a sense, a day spent at the Tech, or perhaps more accurately, in its shadow. There are fewer students walking around and the atmosphere is no longer charged with the breathlessness of 1960s and 1970s youth culture (and its optimism), but it is still an area of intense activity and great diversity.

Photograph of Prahran Technical Girls School building, Hornby Street, Windsor, c. 1955.
PROV, VPRS 9626/P1, Unit 3

High Street near Chapel Street in Prahran is as socially broad as ever. There is a real mix of rich and poor, fashionable and dowdy, conventional and outright weird. Many students and older people throng the area, as do the disenfranchised young and the sophisticated shoppers looking eagerly at Chapel Street boutiques (though this latter group gathers momentum further north toward Toorak Road). Every day some shops close forever and new ones open, but the area has many fine and notable old buildings and 140 High Street is one of these - though admittedly more notable than fine.

It is perhaps worth describing how I begin to have a feeling about a place and how this feeling changes as the research and writing proceed. As each piece of information is ingested, and as each description consolidates the picture, my subject comes more to life. In a way it is like the technique of a recent film about the Winter Palace in St Petersburg:⁷ there were no clear episodes; rather, the camera moved in one long shot from room to room down corridors that were quite similar, yet not the same, through scenes of people who enacted significant moments in Russian history. All was animate and each scene built on the last. As the camera moved, the audience could remember or forget according to its own interest and intellectual and emotional focus.

This is a normal, and at the same time very exciting, process that has occurred with each project that I have worked on, but it was made much more 'real' this time by the presence in the story of so many people whom I have actually met and talked to. Prahran Tech was well known as an art school; many of the people I have interviewed are artists. They had either taught at Prahran or studied there - or, in a surprisingly large number of cases, had done both. The majority of them were at the school during the late 1960s and 1970s - a time of social, cultural and political upheaval. For almost all, this was the period in which they experienced life at its most intense. With each interview my understanding of what made Prahran 'fabulous' became more clear. The minute books and letters and brochures and prospectuses of the time describe a place in transition.