Modern Melbourne

Rod Giblett

Description

Melbourne, founded in 1835 among marshes and beside a sluggish stream, grew from wetlands into a world-class modern city. Drawing on a wide range of historical, literary and artistic sources, this book explores the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site. Tracing the city from its swampy beginnings in a squatter’s settlement nestled in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers, Rod Giblett illuminates Melbourne through its visible structures and the invisible history of its site.

The book places Melbourne within an international context by comparing and contrasting it to other cities built on or beside wetlands, including London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Toronto. Further, it is the first book to apply the work of European thinkers and writers on modernity and the modern city – such as Walter Benjamin and Peter Sloterdijk – to an analysis of Melbourne. Giblett considers the intertwining of nature and culture, people and place, and cities and wetlands in this bioregional and ecocultural analysis. Placing the city in its proper bioregional and international contexts, Modern Melbourne provides a rich historical analysis of the cultural capital of Australia.

1. Australian Capital of Modernity

PART I – City of Ghost Swamps

2. Lost Wetlandscapes

3. Wasteland and Wetland

4. Found and Founded Wetlands

5. Lost Foundations

PART II – Visible City, Invisible Site

6. The Paris of the South

7. Nature on Display

8. Streams of Living Water

9. Modes of Transportation and Communication

10. Sport and its Homes

11. Culture on Display

 

Sujets

• Cultural studies
• Anthropology
• Ecology
• Melbourne
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381962
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments
Series Editors: Donna Houston, Emily Potter and John Charles Ryan; Founding Editors: Rod Giblett, Warwick Mules and Emily Potter
Coming out of cultural studies, this series examines nature as the largely forgotten other of culture. It also considers landscapes and the environment, as well as the political, economic, semiotic, philosophical and psychological dimensions of all three terms. Firmly placed in the tradition of cultural studies of nature and landscape begun by Raymond Williams and continued by Alexander Wilson and others, it will publish interdisciplinary work that draws on established approaches within cultural studies, as well as develop new ones. It will make a unique and vital contribution not only to academic inquiry but also to new ways of thinking, being and living with the earth. The series will be of interest to a wide range of theorists and practitioners who are seeking directions out of, and solutions to, our current environmental and cultural malaise.
Published previously:
Rod Giblett, People and Places of Nature and Culture ; Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland (2013); and Canadian Wetlands: Places and People (2014)
Warwick Mules, With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy (2014)
Emily Potter, Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place (2019)

First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments
Series ISSN: 2043-7757
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Copyeditor: Emma Rhys
Production manager: Emma Berrill
Inside cover image: Dean Stewart
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-195-5
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-197-9
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-196-2
Printed and bound by 4Edge.
To find out about all our publications, please visit
www.intellectbooks.com .
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Dedicated to Mother Marsha Melbourne, Lutetia du Sud
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Australian Capital of Modernity
P ART I: C ITY OF G HOST S WAMPS
2. Lost Wetlandscapes
3. Wasteland and Wetland
4. Found and Founded Wetlands
5. Lost Foundations
P ART II: V ISIBLE C ITY , I NVISIBLE S ITE
6. The Paris of the South
7. Nature on Display
8. Streams of Living Water
9. Modes of Transportation and Communication
10. Sport and Its Homes
11. Culture on Display
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Various people have helped with the research for and writing of Modern Melbourne. For Chapters Two and Five, I am grateful to Robin Ryan for pointing out that, unknown to me at the time in 2014, Melbourne is a wetland city, and I am grateful to her for lending me her copy of Gary Presland’s The Land of the Kulin (1985). I am also grateful to John Charles Ryan for his helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of these chapters, and to Janet Bolitho, Nandi Chinna and Andrew Lemon and two reviewers for the Victorian Historical Journal and its then editor, Marilyn Bowler, for their helpful advice and suggestions regarding many useful sources for Chapters Two, Three and Four. I am also grateful to Nandi for passing on to me an extract by Ellen Clacy about the Yarra River and its swamps. When I presented a shortened version of this material as the annual ‘Melbourne Day’ lecture in September 2015 at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, a few people present, especially Andrew Lemon, made helpful comments and suggestions for which I am grateful, as I am for the invitation to deliver the lecture. Shorter and earlier versions of Chapters Two, Four and Five were first published as ‘Lost and found wetlands of Melbourne’, Victorian Historical Journal , 2016, 87:1, pp. 134–55. I am grateful to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria for their permission to reproduce this material.
For Chapter Three, I am grateful to Janet Bolitho, former councillor and mayor of the City of Port Phillip, for first sparking my interest in Fishermen’s Bend and Westgate Park; for giving me a guided tour of the Park in April 2015; and for her website Port Places, which contains a wealth of information that has been an invaluable resource for the writing of this chapter. Go to: http://www.portplaces.com . Janet also writes for the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society website; see for example: http://www.pmhps.org.au/2013/11/a-sodden-expanse-fishermans-bend/ ; http://www.pmhps.org.au/2013/11/fishermans-bend-the-past-and-the-future/ ; and http://www.pmhps.org.au/2013/07/fishermans-bend-do-the-maps/ . I presented a shortened version of Chapter Three to a meeting of the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society in February 2016. I am grateful for the invitation and opportunity to do so.
For Chapter Four, I am grateful to Marilyn Bowler, David Blyth and Karl Just for fanning my interest in Bolin Bolin Billabong and for supplying useful information about it, most especially to David for giving me a guided tour of the Billabong in July 2015.
For Chapter Five, I am grateful to Chris Coughran for drawing my attention to Lloyd Williams’s chapter on ‘the stream that became a street’ in History Trails in Melbourne (1957), and for passing on a copy of the book to me.
For Chapter Seven, I am grateful for the opportunity to have presented an earlier and shorter version of this chapter as a paper to the Environmental Humanities symposium held on the Gold Coast Campus of Southern Cross University (SCU) on 1 July 2016, and I am grateful to SCU for funding my airfare to attend. I am also grateful to Tim Entwisle, current director of the Melbourne Gardens, for making helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper; to Warwick Mules for suggesting the multimedia diorama; and to Grayson Cooke of SCU for encouraging me to think about the paper more in terms of environmental art.
For Chapter Eight, I am grateful again to Robin Ryan for drawing my attention to Tony Birch’s Ghost River (2015) and Maya Ward’s The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage (2011), and to Ursula Heise for drawing my attention to George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (2013) .
Finally, I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their extensive, detailed and helpful comments and suggestions. They have helped to sharpen the argument, improve cohesion, remove repetition, reduce obsessions, correct factual errors and make for a much better book. I am grateful to Emma Berrill of Intellect Books for seeing the book through a long process to publication. I am also grateful to Dean Stewart for permission to reproduce his map inside the front cover.
Australian Capital of Modernity
Melbourne has repeatedly been voted the most liveable city in the world (Anon. 2016). Part of its recent liveability has its foundations in the mid- to late nineteenth century and the early to late twentieth century when it was the Australian cultural capital. It was also the political capital of Australia for 26 years in the early twentieth century, after Australia became a nation in 1901 and while the city of Canberra and the Federal Parliament were being built. From its swampy beginnings as a squatter settlement in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers in Port Phillip Bay, south-eastern Australia, in 1835 (discussed in more detail in Chapter Two), Melbourne achieved its status as the Australian capital of the mid-nineteenth century in three ways: (1) through the naming and sanctioning of the settlement as Melbourne in 1837; (2) through the incorporation of Melbourne as a town with municipal governance in 1842; and (3) through the proclamation of Melbourne as a city in 1846. All these events were packed into the short time span of just over a decade during the first half of the nineteenth century.
During the second half of the long nineteenth century there were more exciting developments, with the separation of the Port Phillip District from New South Wales in November 1850; the official proclamation of the colony of Victoria in July 1851; and the beginning of the Victorian gold rush in August 1851. The gold rush in Victoria ushered in what Geoffrey Serle (1963) calls the ‘golden age’ of Victoria from 1851 to 1861, during which Melbourne, according to Graeme Davison, ‘held the world record for urban growth’ (1986: 120), quadrupling its population. The Victorian gold rush has been described recently by Ben Wilson as ‘one of the greatest upheavals of the [nineteenth] century’ (2016: 30), and one of the leading instances of what he calls the ‘heyday’ of Britain and its empire, and ‘the birth of the modern world’ in the 1850s (as proclaimed by the title and subtitle of his book) – or at least of high modernity, as the modern world has its origins posited as much earlier than that, including, according to Robert Marks (2015), the fifteenth century. Wilson also relates how the nouveau riche, the ‘swaggering, bearded diggers’, were dubbed ‘the hairystocracy’, for they ‘seemed to rule Melbourne’ (2016: 38), as he puts it in a chapter named after, and devoted to, ‘the hairystocracy’ (Wilson 2016: 30–52). The latter-day hairy hipsters of the inner suburbs and inner north of Melbourne are following in their footsteps (and Ned Kelly’s), as far as facial hair is concerned, but without the