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.

Really good event @ St Kilda library last night - about 20 people came along, which is a perfect number for everyone getting to have a say. Quite a few people who'd come to Melbourne from elsewhere; they had a different pov about the city to those who'd grown up here, perhaps a little less averse to change?

And thanks to Gwen from a volunteer group at the SLV. They read and index the old Argus papers - a valuable job - and she brought a cool little editorial (or letter, I'm not sure) from the 1899 edition, waxing lyrical about the brave new city of Melbourne, its extent, its importance to the colony and its beauty - and bemoaning change, in this case the incipient addition of ugly plumbing with the coming of a universal sewerage scheme. classic stuff.

very grateful to Nick and Alistair from the library too, who set me up and stayed after closing to finish things off. :)

so Oprah has seen our city and will take back to the US a series of images...probably, yes, predictable, but also iconic, like the view of Flinders Street seen from Fed Square.

funnily and unlike some, I don't mind us spending squillions ($3 million) to get her and her acolytes over here. I figure it's likely to pay off in tourism...got to be better and more positive than Tiger Woods. and no, I don't watch Oprah. or Tiger.

want to argue with me? well get on down to the St Kilda Library, Carlisle Street, at 6.30 this Thursday the 16th: I'll be there, talking about the book, Melbourne and, I hope, your favourite images/books/films/shows about Melbourne.

another review:

"If you are looking for a quirky gift for the ultimate Melbournian this Christmas, pick up a copy of When We Think About Melbourne: The imagination of a city. Jenny Sinclair’s book explores what makes Melbourne unique, why we are such an ‘it’ city and what our collective imagination can create.....

The chapter on Melbourne’s souvenirs also managed to bring a smile to my face – who amongst us doesn’t have a Melbourne tea towel lingering at the bottom of a drawer somewhere?"

The Only Melbourne website has reviewed the book...I feel like I should be sending them a bottle of wine, it's so kind...

so we will have a new government. and with it, a whole new set of policies about everything from roads to the arts. fingers crossed for the city...

have just booked in to speak at the St Kilda Library in Carlisle Street on Thursday 16 December from 6.30 pm. Quite close to Christmas, but an easy to get to location for the St Kilda types; I'll be focussing on the St Kilda-related elements of the book, particularly photography, and talking about the cultural landscape of the suburb generally.

a little You Tube-assisted time travel: Melbourne trams in the 1960s, complete with plummy-toned voiceover and comments on "typical weather". Flinders Street trams....

there are lots more old tram vids under the history heading.


I was on 3CR's Published...or not program yesterday (to which I drove after starting out on my bike and being assailed by some "typical weather"). Had a good chat with the presenter, Jan Goldsmith, about the Melways, tourist cliches and why the book is such a personal perspective. There was also the pleasure of meeting my co-guest, Lloyd Jones.

if you happen to be near a radio at 10.45 am, get onto Radio National 621 and you'll hear me reading part of the chapter on Melbourne and music..or if you miss it, there's a downpoddy thing here.

I thought I might go to the Johnston Collection, a lovely old house where Akira Isogawa has rearranged the furniture on quirky themes.

but getting there is a matter of booking in and then catching a minibus from a nearby hotel for a 90 minute tour. all too much hassle. I'm sure it's very good. it's on until Friday if you can be bothered.

only in East Melbourne could the neighbours cause such onerous restraints to be put on a museum. I think of similar places in New York, where you just walk up and pay your entry. I mean, how much trouble can a few middle-aged museum-goers make for even the most peace-loving rich East Melburnians?

the West Gate Bridge

...I had an article in A2 last Saturday (the 9th) about the Public Records Office exhibition on the 40th anniversary of the West Gate's collapse. the article's it's not online so I can't link to it.

but I can post this, which I wrote to pitch to another section of the paper, which was unable to take it. it's a day early because I won't have a chance to post it tomorrow.

there is an online exhibition here, but the actual show is at Old Treasury in Spring Street from Friday. it's free.

Forty years ago today, at 11.51 am, two huge slabs of roadway collapsed on the site of the West Gate Bridge, killing 35 men.
In a new exhibition drawn from the archives of the Public Records Office of Victoria, archival material – evidence from the Royal Commission into the collapse, plus photographs – is set beside newspaper clippings and new video interviews with eight survivors and family members of men who died in the collapse.
Many were young at the time, but after 40 years, the Public Records Office saw a need to collect their stories. Two brothers are interviewed about their father: one was eight years old and heard the news from a teacher in the school yard; the other was three months old and never knew his father at all.
One survivor was working on the eastern side of the bridge; his brother was on the western side and died.
Exhibition curator Kate Luciano says the disaster was full of such near-miss stories. And even for those who were not connected to the bridge, the event is burned in their memories.
“People remember the conversations they were having, the weather, what they were doing, who they were with when they heard.”
The collapse was all the more tragic because of the pride the workers had in what they were doing – bringing together the two halves of the city. “Kids would point at it and say ‘My dad’s building the bridge’,” Luciano says. Special viewing platforms were set up nearby, and the worksite was a popular weekend destination for Melburnians.
When the bridge collapsed, it was the last in a series of collapses of similar box-girder bridges around the world. Emeritus Professor Paul Grundy, of Monash University’s engineering faculty still gives lectures on the disaster and its causes. Forty years ago he had the job of testing the wreckage in Monash’s labs, and several large pieces of the bridge are still kept in the gardens at the faculty’s Clayton Campus.
“We usually take our visiting professors down there (for) a sobering thought of what can happen,” Professor Grundy says. The pieces, some up to three by four metres of structural steel, “are all distorted and twisted and tattered and torn”.
Luciano says that bridge building sites around the world were shut down after the Westgate collapse, and the Royal Commission report sold out in minutes as engineers internationally tried to understand what went wrong.
“People didn’t understand what was going on (structurally),” Grundy says. “The West Gate was probably the most notorious of all the collapses.”
The only good to come out of the collapse, Luciano says, was the better understanding and the dramatic improvements in workplace safety and post-incident procedures. At the time, the workers themselves spent all day and night digging for their mates in the mud and rubble. Then, as one survivor told the interviewers, “The bridge collapsed on the Thursday, we got sacked on the Tuesday and then we started going to funerals.” Because the site was shut down, the workers lost their jobs with no compensation or counselling; it took a public outcry for that to happen, and a proper memorial park was not opened until 2004.
“Workplace safety came to the forefront because of the West Gate tragedy,” Luciano says. That wouldn’t have been difficult to improve; not only were repeated warnings of shaking and faults in the construction not acted on, simple mistakes like placing the lunch rooms underneath the bridge span cost lives.
“It was kind of a ‘what not to do’,” Luciano says.
When the (redesigned) bridge was completed in 1978, a parade of vintage cars was joined by army tanks, perhaps in an effort to show the public how strong the structure was – footage of the opening is also included in the exhibition.
After 40 years, many survivors and their families still refuse to travel on the West Gate Bridge – a kind of irony in that their sacrifices opened up new parts of Melbourne, but they cannot bring themselves to benefit from the bridge.

a long and thoughtful review of the book at The Melbourne Urbanist - and if you don't want to read the review, go over anyway and read through their many other insightful Melbourne-themed posts...

the picture in the Yarra Leader is truly hilarious. it had just better sell some books...

I've just booked in to give a talk at Westgarth Books, on High Street Northcote, on November 6 at 11.30 am, if you're around and want to pop in to talk about Melbourne with me...

...this image is being used to promote the comedy debate this Thursday 7/10, linked to the exhibition, on whether Melbourne is a city of shoppers....

I can recommend The State Library's "til you drop shopping" exhibition. not sure that it's a major step forward in scholarship on the city, or even that revealing, but delightful all the same for the ephemera - ration cards, old shopping bags, the plans of a Bourke Street retail palace now-demolished - and for the pictures of old shops and lots of cool 1950s and 60s era dresses.

I took my Dad, who used to work at Myer (in the offices, not on the floor) and got a few memories from him as well; take an older relative to this show and the stories will flow....

The bad news, when I turned up at 774, was that Chopper had read page 176 of the book, where I call the character based on him in the film Chopper a "bullshit artist", and wanted to know where I got that from, to which I had to admit it was all my own words...

The good news is that I survived the interview. Can't ask for more than that. Podcast and photographic evidence will be here shortly. Also look out in Sunday's M magazine and next week's Melbourne Leader for more of me and the book....

and what has someone got against Melbourne's historic trees? First the Separation Tree in the Botanic Gardens was attacked, and now this ringbarking of old trees out in the hills.

774 Melbourne. Conversation Hour, Friday.

Me and Chopper Read. How Melbourne is that?

:)

a little bird tells me there will be a review of my reading of bits of the book in M magazine soon...keep an eye out.

and meanwhile, here's some funky Melways lamps.

There's an extract from the book in the Herald Sun's Books section today...from the Melways chapter. Sometimes I feel like that chapter is the musician's equivalent of a hit song: everyone seems to like it and that's great, but I can only hope it leads them to the rest of the "album". Anyway the Herald Sun is also making the book available through its ordering service.

I'm working on a presentation for libraries etc...of course there will be reading from the book and a few images, but I'm also keen to find out what other people love about the city, so audience participation will be mandatory...surely everyone has at least one favourite Melbourne song/book/film/image they can share?

ooh darling!

the wonderful new magazine Kill Your Darlings has posted an extract from the book on their Website:

http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2010/09/city-stories-an-excerpt-from-jenny-sinclairs-when-we-think-about-melbourne-the-imagination-of-a-city/