HistoryAtWork has spent over twenty years working with communities, places and collections.
Our clients include individuals, professional organisations, community groups, local government, corporates, property developers and institutions.
The way we work is integral to the success of our work and our strong relationships with clients - you can read more about our methodologies here and contact us for references or read some of our client testimonials here.
Communities
Knowing your community’s history, and your place within it, enables you to connect its significance to your own life. Different types of communities - neighbourhoods, community groups, institutions, professions, organisations, families - each have their own stories, inspirations and peculiarities which together produce a sense of belonging and a shared enterprise. Exploring your history provides opportunities for sharing successes, recognising mistakes, making amends, shaping values, making new decisions, understanding evolutions, providing legacies, intriguing outsiders, embracing insiders, and so much more.
Community Projects & Articles
Places
Natural and built landscapes, precincts and neighbourhoods, parks, streetscapes, industrial sites, institutions, private homes and gardens – they all have stories to tell. Whether you’re buying or selling, or embarking on a major new development, appreciating the architectural and social history of a place and its significance to the neighbourhood and community adds new dimensions to the experience of the place, to its interpretation, or to the memory of it. Our work can shed light on the place’s history and significance, reveal surprising stories, add new levels of appreciation, and provide evidence of its architectural and social qualities.
Place Projects & Articles
Blog
Collections
Exploring the breadth and depth of your collections with professional rigour can reveal their interpretive potential for custodians and the broader community alike. Applying sound principles and methodologies to help you with significance and preservation needs assessments, collection archiving, curation, management, conservation and interpretation enriches this potential enormously. Our team has extensive experience in all facets of collection work, in particular:
Collection management, conservation and preservation
Significance assessments
Preservation needs assessments
Collection policies and plans
Interpretation
Collection archiving and curating
Collection auditing
Workshops, training and other activities
Rehousing collections
Collections Projects & Articles
Blog
Other initiatives
History and heritage is about all of us - in our workplaces, homes and public domains - dealing with the ‘stuff’ of our day-to-day lives. We are the underpinnings for the bigger sweeps and flows of history.
To explore these underpinnings further, and to bring history into your life to make for a better future, we have developed our own projects.
We invite you to make use of our expertise in project development and grant programs, and explore our Memoir Toolkit and Neighbourhood Postcards projects.
Grant programs
Grant programs are opportunities for you to seek support for your history and heritage project, particularly if it will have a positive impact on your wider community or can be shown to be a significant collection but in need of preservation or conservation. We have worked on many such projects and can assist with applications.
Memoir Toolkit
Although we help people write family histories and memoirs, we understand that the cost of hiring a professional or embarking on the complex journey yourself can be daunting. We believe everyone has a valuable story that can enrich the lives of their families and friends so, we developed this “DIY” toolkit for writing your own memoir.
Neighbourhood Postcards
Recently launched, these local heritage walks are about wellbeing with large dollops of curiosity, familiarity and comfort, and engaging today's residents as active players in their neighbourhood’s unfolding history. We mine the archives for stories of past residents and we talk to locals about what their places have meant over the years.