Historian Robyn Annear takes the reader on seven walks through Melbourne. Robyn Annear is well known for her pithy, always amusing histories of Melbourne, including Bearbrass and A City Lost and Found. In Adrift in Melbourne, Annear takes the reader on a perambulatory adventure through the city's major landmarks and its lesser known byways. Street corners, dead ends, crumbling buildings all have their story to tell. Not only the streets, but beneath we find an old Melbourne - “Pompeii-like” - buried underground. Old houses, fences, cellars were built over, leaving a mysterious subterranean world. Archaeological digs in the notorious Little Lon district, famous for its brothels and rough characters, show its erstwhile residents not so down at heel as once presumed. They owned, among other things, fine China and jewelry. Melbourne is not just its monuments and street grid, and Annear takes joy in its varied personalities and unusual professions: mesmerists, fortune tellers, wig makers, tooth pullers, herbalists, phrenologists, quacks and crooks. Indeed, the city is its people, the mad shopkeepers, visionary business people such as Edward Cole (famous for Cole's Book Arcade) and even the tramps who cling to the city for succour. The descriptions of Bourke Street's Job Warehouse drapery store will bring back memories for many, with its dingy, unkempt windows and notoriously querulous proprietor. Even the intrepid Annear was too scared to enter. Adrift in Melbourne is a vivid history that moves back and forth in time, from pre-invasion to now. Readers who have lived in or regularly visited Melbourne will recall places from the past: the clanging noise of Coles Cafeteria, the short lived skateboard ramps at the old Queen Victoria Hospital site, the 1980s City Square. The hilly Flagstaff Gardens, we learn, is one of the few places in Melbourne that retains its original landscape. If you want to imagine Indigenous Country before white settlement, go visit. An entertaining romp and joyous celebration of a city that keeps on giving. Adrift in Melbourne, by Robyn Annear. Text Publishing. $27.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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