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’.
...
(read more)
