Robyn Annear - Adrift in Melbourne

Melbournes streets have always been marvellousbut the proud facades of the nineteenth-century boom arent the half of it.

What about the stories behind them?

The great corset scandal of Melbournes belle epoque;

The heritage-listed toilets out the back of the Rialto;

The exploits of the women who ran the brothels in Little Lonsdale Street;

The reason George Mallaby starred in Homicide wearing a hat two sizes too small.

This book contains a series of walks created by Robyn Annear to showcase the hidden histories we might scurry past every day, the buildings now gone and the extraordinary characters who inhabited them.

Charming, erudite and frankly gossipy, Annears highly entertaining guide to Melbourne past and present need not be experienced on the move. But whether you enjoy it from a tram stop or an armchair, Adrift in Melbourne will inspire you to unleash your inner flneur on the lurking surprises of this great city.

For Michael

The city is always vanishing, maybe never faster than now.

ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ IN THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2020

Vanished doesnt mean gone. In Melbournein any placethings change all the time. Yet, the way I see it, nothings ever really gone.

Like other books of mine, this one deals largely in absencesof people, buildings, institutions and even lions that were here before us. Lately weve been absent too. But absence is no obstacle to memory. This book is proof.

Melbournes original self-definition was not-Sydney. If you ask me, it still does the job. Much of whats been said since in Melbournes favour is mere puffery: Marvellous Melbourne (travelogorrhoea); Paris of the Pacific (comme si); Worlds Most Liveable City (whatever); Laneway Melbourne (pimped for Instagram).

So, call me an unfluencer. I make no special claims for Melbourne: only that its the city I know best, having dug deep into it and walked it all over and over. Besides, I like the place.

This book is ostensibly a walking guide, but you can drift just as well from a couch. Armchair city-walkers can get their bearings using Google Maps and Street View. Plus, theres a Melbourne mobility map online (or in any Melways) showing the relative steepness of the city streets, so you can chart how much legwork youre missing out on.

If you do find yourself afoot in the city with this book, be sure to look up from the pageup and around. Just because the places youll read about have mostly disappeared doesnt mean theres nothing to see. One Sunday morning in La Trobe Street I spotted a ghost ship riding high on a west-facing wall, its uncanny square-rigged sails formed by reflected sunlight from windows in the building opposite. Walking in the city, something is sure to snag your interest; when it does, try not to Google it straightaway but let yourself wonder a while. Wondering will take you places Google cant.

If nothings ever really gone, then lets acknowledge the story that underlies all the places in this book: the dispossession of Indigenous people and desecration of their culture. By underlies, I dont mean figuratively. Melbourne is built on land seized from its traditional custodians, sometimes with deadly force. When we focus on the citys history, that foundational and enduring fact tends to get overwritten, forgotten. Lets remember it. And lets consider, too, what storieswhat memoriesmust have attached to this place in all the time that came before. More than well ever know.

Whether reading at home or on the move, youll want to see pictures of some of the disappeared places and people mentioned in this book. Start with the State Library Victoria website, where youll find Melbournes digitised visual pastphotographs, maps and more. Other repositories of Melbourne images online include the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Public Records Office Victoria, the City of Melbournes Art and Heritage Collection and the Victorian Parliamentary Library.

As a vivid illustration of the changing city, you cant beat https://1945.Melbourne which pulls off a neat time-travel trick by overlaying a 1945 aerial photo of Melbourne with one from 2015. Zoom in on the CBD, slide the recent image across the old black-and-white one and you get to see the low-rise city transformed, block by block.

The website www.emelbourne.net.au hosts a wealth of Melbourne history. The entire contents of the Encyclopedia ofMelbourne can be found there. Comprehensively indexed, with clickable links, its your readiest source of further information about places, people and events touched on in this book.

Also at the eMelbourne website you can explore decades worth of old Melbourne directories (185780), digitised and searchable. For a granular snapshot of a lost (yet familiar) Melbourne, browse the occupants of any street or lane in a given year. Trust me, itll change the way you see the city.

This three-storey building is a sprig of parsley: a garnish to the tower that overshadows Collins Street. Number 74 survives as an early example of the townhouses that used to line this end of Collins Street, albeit one so altered over the course of 165 years that its only original interior feature is the staircase.

For many decades it served as a doctors rooms and residence, then in 1927 its front wall was knocked through for shop windows. In the 1970s, upping the demolition ante, its neighbours were amputated to falsify a Collins Street address for the towering Nauru House (behind, facing Exhibition Street), leaving exposed a roughcast party wall. Number 74 would have gone too, if its owner had been willing to sell.

From 1934 to 2010 this was Le Louvre, a fashion salon so exclusive that few Melburnians ever stepped over the threshold. Its copper-framed windows were dressed with gauzy curtains that repelled the plebeian gaze, so when Le Louvre finally sold up and a high-end hipster brand moved in, it was a shock to see inside. Disappointing, too. It was just another shop, after all. Except for that staircase, leading upstairsto what?

The buildings first occupant, in 1855, was Thiennette Brigny, a homeopathic physician from France via New Orleans. Downstairs was his dispensary, where he specialised in the treatment of addiction to mainstream medicines. Upstairs, his wife Adle gave birth to two sons, and the doctor held regular sances. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Spiritualism was everywhere at that time, and in Melbourne, this stretch of Collins Street was its hub. It was contact with spirit guides at Dr Brignys sance circle that led William Terry to found the Victorian Spiritualists Union (still in existence) and to open a spiritualistic and free-thought bookshop and herbal emporium in Russell Street, where, for years, the Theosophical Society had its rooms.