The Ghost Cities of Australia


Book Description

This book examines failed new city proposals in Australia to understand the hurdles – environmental, societal, and economic – that have curtailed such visions. The lessons from these relative failures are important because, if projections for Australia’s 21st century population growth are borne out, we will need to build new cities this century. This is particularly the case in northern Australia, where the federal government projects a four-fold increase in population in the next four decades. The book aims that, when we commence 21st century new city dreaming, we have learnt from the mistakes of the past and, are not doomed to repeat them.




Australian Ghost Towns


Book Description

Other cultures have lost civilisations, we have ghost towns. Australian landscapes are littered with the half-buried remains of once thriving towns. The renowned pioneering spirit of settler society often faltered under the onslaught of changed circumstances--mine yields that declined, industry that failed and the end of penal colonies. Some towns are in ruins today, while others have become tourist destinations, such as Port Douglas, Port Arthur and Oodnadatta. This extensively researched book delves into the stories of these ghost towns--rich with memories of turmoil, perseverance, resistance and dogged optimism




Abandoned Australia


Book Description

Digging beneath the sun-baked soil, Shane Thoms uncovers the modern ruins scattered over this arid continent and reveals a series of beautifully broken abodes hiding in the crevices of the Great Southern Land.




Ghost Towns of Route 66


Book Description

Explore the mystery and beauty of historic ghost towns from Illinois to California with this gorgeously illustrated guide to America’s favorite highway. The quintessential boom-and-bust highway of the American West, Route 66 once hosted a thriving array of boom towns built around oil wells, railroad stops, cattle ranches, resorts, stagecoach stops, and gold mines. Join Route 66 expert Jim Hinckley as he tours more than twenty-five ghost towns, rich in stories and history, complemented by gorgeous sepia-tone and color photography by Kerrick James. Also includes directions and travel tips for your ghost-town explorations along Route 66.




Urban World History


Book Description

This book seeks to deepen readers’ understanding of world history by investigating urbanization and the evolution of urban systems, as well as the urban world, from the perspective of historical analysis. The theoretical framework of the approach stems directly from space-economy, and, more generally, from location theory and the theory of urban systems. The author explores a certain logic to be found in world history, and argues that this logic is spatial (in terms of spatial inertia, spatial trends, attractive and repulsive forces, vector fields, etc.) rather than geographical (in terms of climate, precipitation, hydrography). Accordingly, the book puts forward a truly original vision of urban world history, one that will benefit economists, historians, regional scientists, and anyone with a healthy curiosity.




Tasmania's Vanishing Towns Not What They Used To Be


Book Description

Tasmania is Australia's most decentralised State in terms of population living beyond the capital city. There is 'history and heritage' everywhere...around every corner. In many places there remain numerous buildings particularly sandstone buildings and other relics of times past. Many communities still exist in relative isolation even today. but there is more. According to ancestry organisation websites "Based on the records, demographics, birth rates, census data and immigration patterns, the sites estimated 22 per cent of living Australians had a convict ancestor." Around 50% of early convicts arrived via Van Diemen's Land/Tasmania. In other words about 11 per cent of living Australians [or around 5 million] have a Tasmanian family history connection. Tasmania's Vanishing Towns describes hundreds of towns, villages, communities and is deal for the real or virtual traveller to Tasmania. easy to read, comprehensive yet concise with hundreds of illustrations.




Ghost Towns of the High Country 2nd Edition


Book Description

Includes former businesses, services, information, stories, maps, colour and b/w photographs. Colour throughout. Distributed by A.B.C. Maps & Guide Books.




Ghost Cities of China


Book Description

Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 2030. Between now and then, the country's urban population will leap to over one billion, as the central government kicks its urbanization initiative into overdrive. In the process, traditional social structures are being torn apart, and a rootless, semi-displaced, consumption orientated culture rapidly taking their place. Ghost Cities of China is an enthralling dialogue driven, on-location search for an understanding of China's new cities and the reasons why many currently stand empty.




The Town


Book Description

"A powerfully doomy debut" (The Guardian), Shaun Prescott’s The Town is a novel of a rural Australian community besieged by modern day anxieties and threatened by a supernatural force seeking to consume the dying town. This is Australia, an unnamed, dead-end town in the heart of the outback—a desolate place of gas stations, fast-food franchises, and labyrinthine streets: flat and nearly abandoned. When a young writer arrives to research just such depressing middles-of-nowhere as they are choked into oblivion, he finds something more sinister than economic depression: the ghost towns of Australia appear to be literally disappearing. An epidemic of mysterious holes is threatening his new home’s very existence, and this discovery plunges the researcher into an abyss of weirdness from which he may never escape. Dark, slippery and unsettling, Shaun Prescott’s debut resurrects the existential novel for the age of sprawl and blight, excavates a nation’s buried history of colonial genocide, and tells a love story that asks if outsiders can ever truly belong anywhere. The result is a disquieting classic that vibrates with an occult power.




Signs of Australia


Book Description

Once upon a simpler time, hand-painted and hand-crafted signs brought color and vibrancy to Australian towns and cities -- advertising everything from dining rooms, milk bars, and CWA halls to Peter's ice cream, oatmeal, stout, Chinese restaurants, and Shelley's famous drinks. Now faded and slowly disappearing, they tell the story of life over two centuries, recording a distinctly Australian vernacular language. A keen photographer of the everyday, Brady Michaels has recorded an impressive array of signs from across Australia -- from the earliest ads for household goods and services, to more recent but now defunct video lending libraries and internet cafés. These beautifully composed and nostalgic images are accompanied by brief commentary by Dale Campisi, who ponders the significance of these fading and disappearing signs -- artful, kitsch, and at times hilarious -- lovingly preserved through Brady's lens.