This Encyclopedia – claimed by the publishers to be the first for Melbourne – is an immense undertaking. The sheer numbers are staggering: 1500-odd articles, 850,000 words, 250 illustrations, nineteen maps and twenty-one tables, produced over a period of nearly ten years by an army comprising two principal editors, five associate editors, fifteen working parties and 440 authors (to say nothing of administrative and publishing staff). Fourteen notable residents offer more reflective pieces on ‘My Melbourne’, ranging from Stephanie Alexander on ‘Eating Melbourne’ and Barry Dickins on St Paul’s Cathedral (his ‘favourite place of anarchy’), to Barry Humphries’ elegiac meditation on ‘the days of Gladstone bags and gloves and hats and glads, / Before Melbourne had been Starbucked, and the trams plastered with ads’.

Melbourne, in the editors’ grand vision, encompasses: ‘the greater metropolitan region, including coverage of the thirty-one municipalities created after local government restructuring in 1994 … from Wyndham and Melton in the west, Hume, Whittlesea and Nillumbik in the north, Yarra Ranges in the east, to Cardinia and Mornington Peninsula to the south-east.’ But ‘the focus remains on the historical centre’. While there are articles on almost every locality in the greater region, some articles that might have ranged more widely are limited almost entirely to the historical centre: smell, street life, public toilets and traffic lights, for example.