Neil Clerehan

Two new books with Melbourne as their subject couldn’t be more disparate in size, form, content and accuracy. Collins: The Story of Australia’s Premier Street is a big, well-designed book. It has a mysterious provenance and more than a smattering of inaccuracies: but it has pictures. These are mostly from the State Library of Victoria, and even those dating from the early years of outside phot ... (read more)

Our retail establishment has never received the spotlight focused on its predecessors, the miners, pastoralists, makers and land boomers. The next wave, the shopkeepers – the Foys, McLellans, Treadways, Nathans, Morans and Coles – are mainly remembered by fading signs above grand buildings occupied by others. (For a wonderful example of history in pressed cement, stand in Prahran’s Cato Stre ... (read more)