Matthew Bailey on the Rise of the Australian Shopping Centre: ”A Triumph of Consumer Capitalism”

How did the shopping centre become a ubiquitous part of Australian life & is its retail and cultural hegemony greater here than anywhere else on the planet?

On this week's Afternoon Light Georgina Downer speaks with retail historian Matthew Bailey to reveal the fascinating stories associated with the rise of the Australian Shopping Centre. An outgrowth of Menzies-era prosperity, automobility and suburban growth that we not only made our own, but which, through the likes of Westfield, we then began exporting to the world.

Dr Matthew Bailey is an Associate Professor at Macquarie University and one of Australia’s leading retail historians. His book, Managing the Marketplace: Reinventing Shopping Centres in Post-War Australia (Routledge, 2020) is the first book on the subject, and one of the few to comprehensively examine Australian retail history. Dr Bailey has published widely on retail and retail property history, including in leading international and Australian journals such as Urban History, Enterprise & Society, Australian Economic History Review, Journal of Australian Studies, History Australia, and the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing.

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