So, for example, the name 'Austral' was often derived from the name of the singer Florence Austral, who chose her surname to signify her relationship with her country, in similar fashion to the way another singer Nellie Melba chose her name to signify her attachment to the city of Melbourne. We extended the definition of 'Street' so far as to include Austral Downs cattle station in the Northern Territory, located southeast of Tennant Creek near Lake Nash.

This breadth of definition gave us at least one 'Australia Street' in every State and Territory, though by far the most were congregated in Sydney. Apart from Australia Lane named after the Australia Hotel off Collins Street in Melbourne, there were none in Victoria till the last few years. This is interesting in the light of Melbourne's leadership role in the federation of the Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

We did a rough sort of these streets, of which there were about forty if you excluded all the 'Australs' and about two hundred if you included them, and reduced our sample to about thirty. We then did initial research to identify some of their social, economic and environmental characteristics. We were not trying to assemble a rigorously representative sample, nor a random one. Rather we wanted to encompass something of the diversity of Australia according to factors like location, age, income, ethnicity, biological and physical characteristics.

On this basis we selected twelve streets, covering all states and territories. We distributed a leaflet in these streets, seeking the participation of residents. From some streets we got no responses, from others we got up to five or six. Constrained by time and resources,we finally selected nine volunteer households for detailed photography and recording, and of these six have been edited and presented at this time.

We selected the final six homes on the basis of geographical spread and to achieve the greatest diversity across variables such as age, gender, lifestyle, income, house type, etc. However, in no way are these houses and their inhabitants presented as representative of anything other than themselves.

Privacy and Informed Consent
Before embarking on any photography or recording, the nature of the research and the form of its eventual publication on CD-ROM and the Internet were fully explained to the participants and they signed a document confirming this and agreeing to the publication of any recorded material. We then proceeded to photograph the interior and exterior of the house, taking between 150 and 250 photographs, and recording one and a half hours or more of interview with at least one resident of the home. This whole process generally took eight to twelve hours in total.

Inevitably we gleaned from this process an intimate view of these people's lives, especially from the recordings. It was also clear that participants understood the significance of the recording process, and while they were unfailingly generous in their accounts of their lives, they also told us things off-tape which they were not willing to repeat for the record.

In other words, the participants exercised considerable discretion over what they chose to tell us, and the stories that we are presenting are the stories they have told us. We have made no attempt to verify or cross-check any of the oral history material given to us. On the other hand, the participants have had no role in the selection or editing of the material they gave us.

This project has been a very interesting exercise from the point of view of the methodology, ethics and politics of oral history, and we refer the interested reader to the bibliography for further discussion of these issues.

Diversity
One of the major aims of our project has been to capture some the diversity of Australian cultural heritage. In response to our leaflet and publicity we were contacted by people from a broad range of situations with respect to age, gender, income and class, family structure, sexual orientation, style of housing, etc. However, in terms of ethnic diversity, we received no responses to our leaflet from residents of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background, and very few from residents of non-English speaking background (NESB).

In suburbs where we knew there to be a significant NESB population, we door-knocked the relevant Australia Street. In several instances we spoke to NESB residents who were willing to discuss the project with us, and a couple of times people showed us photographs and were willing to answer some questions on tape, but in no instance was there a NESB resident of an Australia Street who was willing to have their home intensively photographed and be interviewed on tape at length.

While there are probably many Australians of Aboriginal or non-English speaking background who would have willingly participated in our project, we did not discover them using our sampling technique and method of approach. This technique and approach are, of course, a matter of of choice on our part and are based on a set of social and cultural assumptions about their appropriateness.

Given that some 20% of Australians were born outside Australia, and some 35% have at least one parent born outside Australia, this failure to be able to record the homes of NESB residents has caused us great concern. We did not have the resources or time to intensively door-knock every house in every Australia Street until we found a NESB resident who would participate in our project, and to have done so would have been something of a distortion anyway, since all of the other participants came forward of their own volition in response to our leaflet.

We have tentatively identified a number of factors which we think may have affected people's preparedness to participate in the project. One is the priority accorded to domestic privacy in the cultural traditions to which people belong. Another is the confidence which people might have in institutions such as museums and universities, especially where there might be fears about the use that could be made of information by other government organisations.

Another is that we were asking people to open themselves and their homes to intensive examination and publicity in relation to a discussion of Australian identity. For participants this would probably require a high degree of self-confidence about their relationship to what is generally represented as 'Australian identity', either as conformists, critics or something else.

In a situation where there is widespread community debate about the levels and impact of immigration, and where media discussion of these issues is often couched in prejudicial and racist tones, it is not surprising that immigrants would want to keep a low profile. This is especially the case when the information to be supplied would include a detailed presentation of the domestic and private spaces of people's homes, and would be available internationally to anyone at all via the Internet. It does not stretch the imagination to conceive of circumstances where a participant could become the object of unwanted or hostile attention.

In other words, the range of responses we received and the diversity they do or do not represent are themselves an indicator of factors that might influence the relationship between social identity and cultural heritage. The Australia Street Archive itself is not a neutral, random or 'scientific' representation of Australian society as an exercise in voluntary participation between public institutions and volunteer participants, it is a product of that society with all its contradictions, hidden places and different modes of interaction.

Further development
What is presented here at this time is the tip of an iceberg. As becomes clear to any user as soon as they embark on a journey into Australia Street, the range of related topics, issues and information is endless. We have amassed a huge amount of information in various stages of preparedness for inclusion. With further funding we hope to continue expanding our contribution to the project.

However, we are looking to the public, in Australia and elsewhere, in the form of individuals, organisations and institutions, to make their own contributions through the Your Street facility. Our goal is that Australia Street on the World Wide Web will become a public meeting place, a virtual town square, where people meet to debate and make their own contributions to discussions about identity and cultural heritage. We welcome any suggested pointers to related sites on the World Wide Web, institutional collections and resources, etc.

If we are successful, it will be only a matter of time before the initial contribution that we have made in establishing the Australia Street Archive will be dwarfed by the contributions of others.