Peter Yule

Although William Baillieu was not the founder of the Baillieu dynasty in Australia – that honour belonged to his father and mother, who produced sixteen children after he jumped ship and settled in Queenscliff – it was through him that the family name became a dominant one among the Melbourne Establishment. Six of the sixteen Baillieu siblings were involved in what Peter Yule describes as Australia’s greatest business empire, centred on the Collins House group. William Baillieu was its founder, builder, and leader.

Operating submarines has been a very expensive part of Australian naval history. The first two boats (submarines are referred to as ‘boats’ rather than ‘ships’) were lost in wartime operations: AE1 with all hands off Gape Gazelle (New Guinea) in 1914, and AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey) in 1915. After World War I, Australia was given six ‘J’ Class submarines by Britain, but lacked the personnel and funds to maintain them. They were soon scrapped. Two submarines acquired in the late 1920s – Oxley and Otway – were decommissioned during the Great Depression. Thirty-five years later, the RAN took delivery of the first Oberon Class submarines built in Scotland. All six boats served with distinction during the Cold War, several engaging in highly classified ‘special operations’. By the mid 1980sthe RAN’s ageing submarine fleet needed replacing. Australia was about to learn that submarines were even more costly to build. Although submarines had been refitted and extensively modernised in Australia, none had been built from plans.

‘The very rich are different from you and me’, F. Scott Fitzgerald thought; and so he told Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, who came back with a deflating reply, ‘Yes, they have more money’, boasted that he had won that little exchange. Yet Fitzgerald was right; and he proved it in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. In the American novel more generally, money creates and defines character; as it does in Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan or Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Destructive though it may be in these novels, the making of a fortune is an expression of power and a source of drama.

Major events in histories of public institutions – museums, galleries, libraries and universities – lend themselves to publications that acknowledge and celebrate openings, building extension projects and anniversaries. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the State Library of Victoria (SLV), which, with the completion of its massive building extension project in 2003, is now able to present a souvenir book on the collections. While this is in no manner a catalogue of the library’s collection, it does serve as a guide and as a useful primary source for seeking the more unusual items – the treasures.

When is a suburb not a suburb? When it is an inner-urban locale with a distinctive café culture, its own postcode and football team, but no town all. And here’s another: how did an Old English word meaning ‘churl’s farm’ come to be assigned to a swanky inner suburb of a major city in the southern hemisphere? These and numerous other questions are answered in Carlton: A History. This encyclopedic book tells a fascinating story that resonates way beyond its notional suburban boundaries.

As Melbourne grew, its suburbs became too vast for one local government body to administer, and areas were carved off to form separate municipalities: Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy, South Melbourne, North Melbourne. Carlton, however, despite periodic agitation from its residents, has remained within the boundaries of the Melbourne City Council.