Volume 69 Number 3, 2010

Editorial

We often talk about a city as not just having a character, but being one. You might say, for example, that Sydney is the star of Fiona McGregor’s terrific novel Indelible Ink (part of which was extracted in our Autumn issue, no. 1, 2010), or Melbourne of Peter Temple’s Miles Franklin winning novel, Truth. New Orleans is certainly the bedraggled Mardi Gras Queen of David Simon’s Treme, an HBO series that is set post-Hurricane Katrina, while Delhi emerges from William Dalrymple’s book City of Djinns as some kind of God figure, impossible to kill. (See the interview with Dalrymple in this issue, pp. 176–82).

Because I am writing a book about Melbourne, and also because I’ve been following the Renew Newcastle project (renewnewcastle.org) initiated by Marcus Westbury, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to make a city—and, more to the point, keep one alive over centuries. Several essays in this issue of Meanjin consider this in one way or another and while the focus is on Melbourne, it’s my hope that in the particularities of my (and Meanjin’s) city there is much of relevance and interest for all.

Rachael Weaver takes us back to the later decades of the nineteenth century, when Melbournians visited the morgue as a form of family entertainment. David Nichols (with Mia Schoen) takes us on a stroll through Doveton, one of Melbourne’s first Housing Commission suburbs, and considers what it was like in the 1960s and how it is today. Tanya McIntyre shares photos taken at Punk venues around Melbourne in the late seventies, while Dianna Wells photographs the ever-shifting boundaries on the city’s edge. Her work reminds me of the idea (expressed here by Michael Buxton in 2002, then chairman of Green Wedge Taskforce) that ‘The most viable cities in this century will be those with the best quality environments. Our relationship with our rural hinterland is critical to the survival of Melbourne as a viable place to live … Lose it and our city becomes just another casualty to anonymous global urban sprawl, another city that has obliterated the last vestiges of nature … Melbourne has alternative futures. The future without a green belt can be found in greater Los Angeles and the other vast urban conglomerations of the United States. The future with green belts can be found in the English countryside on the fringes of London, or on the edges of Copenhagen or Portland, Oregon.’

In ‘On Logophobia’ Elizabeth Glickfeld asks why a city that prides itself on its design prowess should farm its logo out to a multinational company with an office in Sydney, while at the same time noting the pleasure commentators took in denigrating the process of design itself. Ben Eltham’s portrait of the Nicholas Building reminds us of what we stand to lose if rising rents force many of the building’s famous and not so famous inhabitants out, not just of the Nicholas Building but also of the CBD.

Often as not it’s precisely the buildings and bars and lifestyle that Tourism Victoria promotes in its ads that are most undermined by government policy. This gap between Melbourne’s sense of itself—We’re liveable! Creative! Great live-music scene! Sophisticated little bars!—and policies that make it increasingly hard for the city to live up to the hype is highlighted by Michael Harden in ‘Unique and Deplorable: Regulating Drinking in Victoria’. That essay looks at the history of, and recent changes to, liquor licensing laws and the fallout for pubs, music and bars.

This gap between wishful thinking (or, if you like, legend) and fact is also taken up by Hilary Glow and Stella Minahan in their ‘Richard Florida and the Arts: A Rescue Fantasy’, which looks at the contradiction between arts policies and working conditions, and the argument that creativity is critical to the success of the global capitalist economy. Paul Daley has contributed a moving and well-researched critique of the Anzac Myth in his CAL/Meanjin Essay: ‘Anzac: Endurance, Truth, Courage and Mythology’, while Nonie Sharp looks at the stories that the culture needs to tell itself (and those it chooses to leave out of the telling) in her revisiting of the legend of the ‘the little wanderers’, three young children who were lost, then found, in 1864. And don’t miss Matthew Ricketson’s analysis of that great fabulist, Truman Capote, in his consideration of the ethical obligations of ‘nonfiction novels’ such as In Cold Blood.

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Contents

Editorial by Sophie Cunningham

Newsreel

• With Jessica Au, Mark Dapin, Hilary Glow, Stella Minahan, Joyce Parkes and Damon Young

Meanjin In Colour

• On Edge by Dianna Wells

• On Logophobia by Elizabeth Glickfeld

• In the Outer: Doveton by David Nichols with illustrations by Mia Schoen

Essays

• CAL/Meanjin Essay: Anzac: Endurance, Truth, Courage and mythology by Paul Daley

• Unique and Deplorable: Regulating Drinking in Victoria by Michael Harden

• The Morgue by Rachael Weaver

• The Nicholas Building: A User’s Manual by Ben Eltham

• Waves of Love by Anthony Macris

• All in the Family: Three Australian Women Directors by Brian McFarlane

• Truman Capote and the world he made by Matthew Ricketson

• No Place like Home by Chris Womersley

• Lessons Learned from Literature by Maria Takolander

• E-books and the Australian Publishing Industry by Jeremy Fisher

• Book Doomsday: The March of Progress and the Fate of the Book by John Potts

• Three Lost Children: Revisiting a Heroic Legend by Nonie Sharp

• Repeat Offenders by George Dunford

• Artless Mad Fun by Tanya McIntyre and Clinton Walker

Memoir

• Rolls Royce Rhythm by Rachel Buchanan

• Welcome to the Club by Peter Mitchell

Interview

• Swimming Up the Down Current: Sophie Cunningham talks to William Dalrymple

Fiction

• Prospect by Jennifer Mills

• Home by Catherine Cole

• Somebody Else’s Bali by Simone Lazaroo

• Small by Natalie Sprite

• The Secret of the Dark Elves by Belinda Rule

Poetry

• Flirt by Tricia Dearborn

• Seduction by Ali Alizadeh

• In the Villa Gorilla by Andrew Sant

• Tricky arithmetic by Charlotte Clutterbuck

• Hollow Amid the Ferns by Claire Potter

• Hair by John Kinsella

• Travelling The Golden Highway, Thinking Of Global Warming by Mike Ladd

• Ambiguities by Jillian Pattinson

• Aubade by Peter Coghill

• Vertigo by Tracy Ryan

• The Sea Is by Dominic Zugai

• She Speaks by Sam Byfield

• Crossword: Right Back at Ya! by Alison Sampson