Visualising organisations over time and space: The Visual Atlas of Australian Co-operatives

There has been an upsurge of interest in co-operatives as an alternative business model since the Global Financial Crisis and the UN’s declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives. While this upsurge of interest is welcome, there has been a long history of co-operatives in Australia since at least 1833. Unfortunately, the rich history of Australian co-operatives is poorly documented and overlooked in the major accounts of Australian history. The Visual Atlas of Australian Co-operatives History Project aims to explain the fluctuations in co-operatives over time and regional clusters through combining the skills of historians and business information researchers. The data is drawn from a wide range of sources including published histories, the Trove newspaper database, government sources and co-operative records. The Visual Atlas is based on Tableau software which allows researchers to chart the development of Australian co-operatives over time and space. This chapter, besides outlining the theoretical explanations of co-operative development and the VAACHP, also highlights a preliminary result in terms of the upsurge of co-operatives in Western Australia following the First World War.