Something about Melbourne

September 11, 2005

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne is the first such reference book in Australia. Jane Sullivan spoke with the two editors about the mammoth project.

MELBOURNE is a Janus-faced city. One face is ebullient, extremely confident. It says: "I'm a technologically advanced and socially dynamic metropolis looking out on the world." The other face is depressed, anxious, engaged in endless self-examination: "Am I just another small-minded small town?"

Ever since its foundation, and more than any other Australian city, Melbourne has been in a constant state of up and down, ebb and flow. In the 1850s, gold brought sudden prosperity and helped to create the Marvellous Melbourne that was for a time the world's most exciting city. Then the 1890s depression plunged the city into gloom. The ups and downs continued through the 20th century. They are still happening today.

"These things did happen extraordinarily quickly and perhaps that is nested in the psyche," says University of Melbourne history lecturer Dr Andrew Brown-May. "Melbourne still has the sense that the good times can't last."

The story of Melbourne, then, is a tale of two cities. And Brown-May and his colleague, Associate Professor Shurlee Swain, a reader in the school of arts and sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Ballarat, are better placed than practically anyone to tell that story. Their knowledge of Melbourne is literally encyclopedic.

For the past 10 years, the pair have headed a team of five associate editors and 450 contributors, putting together a monumental work, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne. The first of its kind in Australia, and one of only a handful worldwide, it's a complex and fascinating portrait of a city and its history. There are more than 800 pages, lavishly illustrated, in an easy-to-use alphabetical form, with lots of cross-references, from "abattoirs" to "zoo".

There is also an online version which will be released over the next two years, and can be updated; and the editors are developing multimedia presentations of material that will offer different virtual ways of exploring the city.

The editors see the print encyclopedia not just as a book for universities, schools and libraries, but as a browsing and reference tool to be used as widely as possible. From the daily calls to his office seeking information, Brown-May knows there is "a terrific appetite" in Melbourne for local history. With a retail price of $150, the encyclopedia isn't cheap; but nor is it so expensive that curious readers won't pick it up in the bookshop.

The encyclopedia fills "a gaping chasm" in the recorded history of the city, Brown-May says: "No great narrative overview history of Melbourne has been written since the 1950s." Many researchers are still using 19th-century sources such as Garryowen's Chronicles of Early Melbourne.

Meanwhile, plenty of scholars have been doing fine research over the past 25 years into aspects of Melbourne's history, but it is getting harder to publish the results of that research. The encyclopedia was able to draw on a very large number of PhD theses and similar studies languishing in bottom drawers.

The editors also found they could not simply recycle existing history. "There was an awful lot of work that, unknown to us at the start, really had to be written afresh," Brown-May says. "So the encyclopedia is the starting point for a whole new exploration of the city."

Brown-May became interested in the idea of a city encyclopedia as a young PhD student who couldn't get his own research published (it eventually came out as a book, Melbourne Street Life, in 1998). He decided his next project should have a very broad appeal. At first, some people he consulted were dubious about whether he would ever muster the time and resources needed for the job: "I suppose it was my youthful enthusiasm, I said what the heck, let's give it a go."

The project is part of the growing discipline of urban history. "Whatever you're interested in, the city can provide you with a framework to explore broader categories," Brown-May says.

Why an encyclopedia and not a history book? The study of history has been fracturing into many sub-disciplines — urban, feminist, indigenous, labour and so on — to a point where it is hard for any single historian to get across the vast task of documenting the history of a city.

But in the past 10 years in the US, historians have turned to encyclopedias as a valuable and accessible medium for telling the story of a city. In 1995, Brown-May visited the editors of the New York and Chicago encyclopedias, and found out about similar projects in Indianapolis and Cleveland. These books sold very well and boosted each city's image of itself.

Perhaps the most astonishing feature of The Encyclopedia of Melbourne is that it was produced with a mere $400,000 or so in funding. The Australian Research Council gave $180,000 over four years and Monash University gave about the same amount. The Melbourne City Council has just offered $10,000 towards publication, but despite a lot of lobbying, there has been no support from federal or state government or private sponsors.

"That's been a source of frustration and disappointment to us," Brown-May says, pointing out that the council plans to spend $160,000 on flowers for the Commonwealth Games. "There are organisations we believe should be showing the lead in sponsoring this kind of project, but it's very hard to get that sort of money for history making in Melbourne … Part of the problem is that Melbourne is now seen as a branch office of Sydney. When we went to boardrooms, we weren't talking to the people who had the right to dispose of the money."

Meanwhile, Sydney has scored nearly $1 million for its own encyclopedia project — which shows something about the difference between the cities.

But Melbourne was first with the idea and first with the book, and the encyclopedia is very much a labour of love. The editors worked on it on top of their academic commitments, and every contributor donated their work for nothing.

In the early stages of the project, Brown-May and Swain found their team pretty much assembled itself. One day they sat down with a whiteboard and asked what were the broad themes they needed to cover. They came up with a list of 12 themes, put a working group onto each theme and got them to track down the experts in each area.

Gradually a list of entries began to emerge. The hardest decisions were what to leave out: the editors decided they would cover the greater metropolitan region of Melbourne and leave out entries for people, since these were already covered in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Each contributor had to work within a word budget of up to 4000 words; the average entry is about 300 words.

One surprising feature of the encyclopedia is that it is full of opinion, often contradictory, sometimes quite forcefully expressed. The contributors had to include relevant facts, but they were also free to use their own interpretation and opinion to sum up the spirit of a place, a cultural awareness or sensitivity. "They are not just subjective opinions but competing and dissonant voices, and that's a metaphor for the living city," Brown-May says.

Under "Foundation and Early History", emeritus professor A. G. L. Shaw balances the impact of early settlers against the custodianship of the Wurundjeri people. Overall, he concludes, the new arrivals "had benefited from their emigration and had created a thriving city, though they had ravaged an ancient community in the process".

In the next entry, "Founding Myths", a younger historian, postgraduate scholar Penelope Edmonds, is inspired by newer approaches to reading colonial history. The mythic self-imagining of Batman and Fawkner had them commencing the world again in Melbourne, she says; but they were really taking land, knowledge and labour from the people who had lived there for thousands of years.

Brown-May says the two entries are very different in style and approach, but match each other beautifully and meet different needs in the audience. "There's a paradox in the encyclopedia: it's a series of facts and also a series of debates and contested versions of history."

Swain adds: "The old encyclopedias pretended to be objective, and they weren't."

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne will not pretend to be anything other than a product that reflects the concerns of the early 21st century, a time capsule that may be read very differently in another 100 years. Even in the decade it took to produce, Melbourne changed radically. Early entries were written in the days when Jeff Kennett was state premier, and it felt as if he was going to be in power forever.

"A lot of entries had the sense that Melbourne had been permanently changed: there was a feeling of sadness, uncertainty and sometimes anger," Swain says. "When we came to reread them, we realised they were already creations of their time. Sometimes we had to change entries to recognise that Kennett had been defeated. A whole new world had come in."

Another innovative feature is a series of short essays in a very personal voice by well-known writers and Melbourne identities, about what the city means to them. Marjorie Tipping remembers the Jewish refugees who came to live in Princes Hill in Carlton: Jennifer Byrne relives hot summers outside The Age office; Barry Humphries laments a vanished Melbourne in verse.

From their unique vantage point, where do the editors sense that Melbourne is going next? "Into diversity," Swain says. Your mental map of Melbourne is dominated by the area where you live, or where you grew up. But reading through the encyclopedia, your mental map would be displaced quite severely. There's a runaway diversity in even the plainest parts of Melbourne now. Look up the most Anglo-Saxon of suburbs and you'll find something like a Buddhist temple."

Brown-May thinks we are heading into a different tale of two cities: an increased tension between the inner and outer suburbs. The metropolitan sprawl has its negative side, but he believes a decentred city can work.

The inner city is still vibrant and has retained its role as a democratic centre, but Melbourne is also a very nodal place: "Many people who live here would never visit the inner city at all, and people in inner Melbourne feel they have gone to a foreign country if they go to Werribee or Sunshine."

"And each of these different worlds," Swain adds, "are not as people imagine they are."

Bates Smart, Jackson and Perrott's casino (1993-97), a behemoth in spatially orchestrated social control and fiscal gradation, drained
off CBD activities into a simulated Southbank streetscape, below a battery of gluttonous fireball jets resembling 1780s funerary monuments by Bollee & Gilly.

Suspicions of corruption in the detective force were raised as early as 1852, with one magistrate suggesting "there have been, in the case of
several detective officers, a most suspicious suddenness in getting rich".

MacRobertson's made its name in chocolates from the humble penny Freddo Frog through the nougat bar and Cherry Ripe to block chocolate and the lavishly boxed Old Gold chocolates; Hoadley's pioneered the Violet chocolate-coated combination bar, notably the technically demanding but triumphantly successful Violet Crumble and Polly Waffle ...

Young Melburnians first encountered the reality of class at school. In no other Australian city does the question "What school did you go to?" carry such a heavy freight of meaning.

Invented in Melbourne in the late 1850s and codified in 1859, Australian Rules is the oldest code of football in the world.

One of the really wonderful parts of Melbourne that "melted away" was the Easter Market. There was a Turkish man who sat at the entrance intoning a sort of chant - "Turkey lolly, who'll buy lolly, good for Susie,
good for Johnnie" - all the time he was making pink fairy floss in a spinning cylinder worked by a foot treadle. He did a roaring trade. (Dame Phyllis Frost)

Church activists damned Little Lon as Melbourne's chief red-light district.
Their main target was Madame Brussels, who had run a brothel in the
neighbourhood since 1876, and whom newspapers early in the 20th century dubbed the "queen" of brotheldom.

The revamped Georges of Collins Street misjudged its market in 1998 and became Melbourne's highest-class op-shop when the Brotherhood of St Laurence opened a recycled fashion outlet there.

From the 1890s to the 1910s ... audiences were still thrilled by the extreme realism of the staging ... Huge water tanks permitted the melodrama's heroine to be rescued by the hero, or sometimes by a (well-trained) dog.

[in 1942] a communications hub was established at Russell Street police headquarters; if telephone lines were cut, Boy Scouts were to deliver urgent messages by bicycle.

Edited extracts from The Encyclopedia of Melbourne.

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, published by Cambridge University Press, $150, is available later this month.
