have just finished reading a preview copy of The Early Kozminskys by Tangea Tansley; it never ceases to amaze me how many great stories are built into the fabric of the city. and you can still go and gawp at the jewels in Kozminsky's jewellery story today in Bourke Street, 160 years after the Kozminskys got into the business (though there are different owners now.)

Another Melbourne story that caught my eye this week was in yesterday's Sunday Age, revealing that although Port Philip Bay formed about 10,000 years ago, there was a period about 1000 years ago when the Heads were blocked and it largely dried up, forming a marshy hunting ground. It was flooded when the blockage was breached by a storm or earthquake (tsunami?), filling the bay very quickly. which explains why stories about the flooding are still so strong in indigenous culture; they only had to be passed down tens of generations, not hundreds.

and been meaning to get to this, for novelty value: the Public Records Office's exhibition of might-have-been Melbourne landmarks. some seriously weird stuff.

Finally, I'm back on the library trail; talking at Brunswick Library, corner Sydney and Moreland Roads, next Wednesday the 18th of May, from - well, I think it's 7.30 but may be 7.45...:)

so I was looking up this event, billed in The Age as "a Melway of song", and I also came across http://www.stoppingallstationsexcepteastrichmond.blogspot.com/...is there anything that we can't name after a daggy Melbourne suburb?

"the four seaons woven into one -
and that one season a perpetual spring,
Gives life and cheerfulness all around."


The greatest inconvenience, the new comer feels, is the dreadful hot winds which blow for short periods through the three summer months...

- George Henry Haydon, Five Years' Experience in Australia Felix, London, 1846.