Melbourne

In 1961, Gwen Harwood submitted a sonnet to the Bulletin under the name of Walter Lehmann. Her poem, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’, held a shocking acrostic secret that many people considered very bad art. Nobody discovered the secret until after it was published. But despite her transgression, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘she found much greater acceptance’ – to the point that she is today considered one of Australia’s greatest poets.

We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.

I have lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs for almost a decade. I am also an aficionado of Australian literature. Thus, I was interested to read Stamping Ground, a collection of writings about my favourite side of the Yarra River.

Academic historians only took to urban history in any systematic way during the 1970s, but Melbourne, regardless of what historians might have had to say about it, has always had a strong sense of its own identity and culture. In the heyday of 1880s ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, journalist Richard Twopeny saw the city as representing ‘the fullest development of Australian civilisation, whether in commerce or education, in wealth or intellect, in manners and customs – in short, in every department of life’. English historian J.A. Froude, staying in style as a guest at Government House, saw Melbourne people as having ‘boundless wealth, and as bound-less ambition and self-confidence’; they were ‘proud of themselves and of what they have done’.

Every now and again, the future of the book emerges as a topic of anxious discussion among literary types. Will books become obsolete, discarded in favour of electronic reading devices with sleek design and smooth contours, or merely lose relevance given all the digital distractions? Literary Melbourne is one publication which betrays no such anxieties. Published to mark Melbourne’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, it is not only a celebration of all things literary but an assertion of the history, relevance and power of books, writing and ideas. Yet, like the city whose literary culture it celebrates, this volume speaks rather than shouts. The muted tones of its cover, echoed throughout in shades of sepia, brown and grey, announce that this is no flamboyant publication: for all its evocation of city streets, it is an ‘indoor’ book, inviting reflection and discussion. Above all, as indicated by small courtesies such as the ‘Ex Libris’ label on the endpage and the ribbon bookmark, this is a book for booklovers, for those hopeless addicts who like to own, hold and return to their books.

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 photography provide clear details of the buildings and people of the time. They will enchant even those who dare think that our premier street is not so very different from the main streets of Manchester or Madison.