Historian Robyn Annear takes the reader on seven walks through Melbourne.
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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

Secrets involving the British Secret Service and the Bosnian War are revealed in John LeCarre's final novel.
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Julian Lawndsley is a former city trader who, having made his money, has retired to a pleasant little village to open a bookshop. Better Books doesn't do a roaring trade, or even turn a profit, but it keeps Julian contented. One day the affable and charming Edward Avon turns up. A preliminary conversation reveals that Edward was friends with Julian's father. It doesn't take long before Edward's wife, Deborah, invites Julian to dinner. It turns into a rather uncomfortable evening, as the imperious Deborah picks a quarrel with her generally unflappable husband. Things get curiouser and curiouser until a byzantine plot is revealed, at the heart of which is the British Secret Service. Edward Avon has a dark backstory, involving clandestine involvement in the Bosnian war. Has he revealed too many secrets during his patchy career, and how is he to be muzzled?
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Silverview is acclaimed spy writer John Le Carre's final novel, published posthumously. It's plot is finely tuned and ticks with perfect timing, carefully peeling back the layers until the tragic heart of the story is revealed. With its cast of eccentric old spies and dry British humour, Le Carre fans are sure to be pleased.  

Silverview, by John LeCarre. Published by Viking. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A lost dingo finds sanctuary with some human friends. 

One day a dingo cub finds himself grabbed by a giant eagle and taken from his family home in the mountains. When he is later dropped in a suburban garden, a kindly human looks after him. But he can't stay there forever and is passed from human to human until he makes friends with Lyn, a worker at a special sanctuary for dingoes. Lyn names the little cub Wandiligong, which means “manifestation of spirit”. Wandi soon makes several friends at the sanctuary, and becomes especially close with a female cub named Hermione.
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Wandi is adult fiction writer Favel Parrett's first book for children and was inspired by her work at the Dingo Discovery Sanctuary and Research Centre. It's a beautifully written chapter book with delightful illustrations throughout. Children will learn much about the ecological importance of dingoes, how they contribute to controlling pests and their now precarious state as an endangered species. An illuminating author interview is included and an afterward by Kevin D. Newman, Sanctuary Supervisor and friend to the real life Wandi. Children and adults alike will find much to learn and enjoy from this touching story.

​7+

Wandi, by Favel Parrett. Published by Lothian Books. $19.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A compelling social and economic history of Tasmania's convict class that made their way to Victoria.

Vandemonians were convicts originally sent to Van Dieman’s Land, later migrating to Victoria. They were an underclass much abhorred by Victorian society. Many hid their convict past – even from their own children - making up fake identities, backstories and names. The history of Victoria’s Vandemonians is one of violence, alcohol, poverty, disease, starvation, repeat court appearances and jail time. Careers in crime could be multi-generational, passed down the family tree. Children often died young, from disease, hunger or neglect. Sexual abuse of children was shockingly common. In short, the odds were stacked against ex-convicts, and they often failed to produce a lineage, making them lost to history.

Historian Janet McCalman has written a sharp, intellectually bracing portrait of this doleful cohort of early Victorian settlers. Based on research from the Ships Project, McCalman presents a gallery of tough, tragic and yet resilient battlers who carved out a precarious existence in a hostile world. With its strong grasp of the economic, social and historical forces that entrench poverty and disadvantage, Vandemonians illustrates how so many of these problems are still with us today. A first class history that will surely become a classic.

Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victoria, by Janet McCalman. Published by Miegunyah Press. $39.99

Review by Chris Saliba