Graeme Davison - The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne
Graeme Davison
The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne
Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press (Melbourne University Publishing)
Second edition 2004. Pp. xviii + 382 ISBN 0 522 85123 1 paperback
At its first publication in 1978, Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne became an instant classic in Australian urban history. He wrote of the city as if it were a living creature with a throbbing will of its own that transcended the people who swarmed its streets. But he also wrote of the two final decades of the nineteenth century when, for the first time since John Batman had tagged the site for a village, Melbourne was running into trouble. Soon after a visiting British journalist had celebrated its marvels in 1885, the property boom burst and the banks faltered. Even more fundamentally, the city’s crucial warehousing function was undermined by the combination of steamships and the international telegraph, which made possible just-in-time deliveries from Europe. Would Melbourne have to be abandoned as a gigantic Hill End, could it prove to be a Pompeii swamped by the volcano of its own dynamism?
In an extended preface to this new edition, Davison traces the origins of the book. From schooldays in Essendon through undergraduate education in the Melbourne History Department, Davison simply could not identify with Russel Ward’s Australian Legend or, rather, he could not see why the values it celebrated had to be associated solely with the bush. The English historian Asa Briggs posed a different kind of challenge, as he celebrated Melbourne in his Victorian Cities (the adjective was temporal not geographical), but implied that it was primarily an extension of a European urban phenomenon. Happily, R.N. Twopeny’s atmospheric study of 1883, Town Life in Australia, was enough to pre-empt any derivative theory. After a detour to Oxford, Davison headed to ANU for a doctorate. From the viewpoint of the modern-day postgraduate production line, he marvels that his supervisor, the great J.A. La Nauze, allowed him to tackle so broad a subject, but he gives a superb portrait of the fertile world of the Coombs Building where, with the support of F.B. Smith and Patrick Troy, he ran the gauntlet of Noel Butlin’s criticisms and imbibed insights from the sociologists. Looking back at his book, he wishes that he had included more of the seamy side of Melbourne life, and focused attention on the physical legacy of townscape, even the smells and sounds of the streets. But this was already a synoptic study, bringing together the central business district and the suburbs, and interweaving the reality of urban daily life with the hugely powerful myth which helped to sustain Melbourne through its time of troubles. In the end, Davison has wisely decided to reissue the text in its original form.
The first edition of The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne was also a landmark in scholarly book production in Australia. The original tables and pictures are reproduced, not least those wonderful cartoons featuring Runemup the Builder. The two sections of the book, respectively devoted to the city and its suburbs, now have double-page illustrated title-markers. There are also four four-sided inserts of photographs and colour illustrations maps, panoramas, photographs and paintings. The confident interpretation of Bourke Street West by Tom Roberts in 1888 perhaps offers a subtle clue why it was Melbourne that acquired its luminously alliterative adjective, whereas we never got to hear of Superb Sydney or Amazing Adelaide. In a brief afterword, Davison tentatively explores the way the tag has resounded, challengingly and sometimes sardonically, ending with the reflection that, a century later, Melbourne is still in pursuit of the same combination of happiness and success. In short, a welcome reissue of a much-admired book.