Melbourne claims to be the centre of the Australian arts. Certainly the industry is crucial to the city’s economy and is a huge draw for visitors. According to Arts Victoria figures, there were more than 1 million international visitors to Victoria in 2011, many of them passing through the state’s capital. Of these 1 million visitors, 60 per cent cited cultural motivations for their visit.¹ The domestic market is equally enthusiastic about the city’s reputation for the arts. National surveys indicate that Australians view Melbourne as the country’s ‘cultural capital city’,² a title earned thanks to the city’s many annual large-scale cultural events and arts festivals, its many established and innovative galleries, theatres and concert venues, and the ever-increasing number of bars, cafés and boutique spaces.

In 2013 the ultra-cool global lifestyle magazine Monocle announced Melbourne as the second-best place to live (behind Copenhagen) in its annual global cities report. The city consistently ranks highly among world lifestyle indexes: lists that predict quality of life based on factors such as access to bike paths, public schools, hospital beds, and the density of libraries, theatres, cafes and artisanal bakeries. In 2008 the city of Melbourne was officially recognised as a Creative City when UNESCO named it the second specially designated City of Literature. The award came four years after the inaugural designation went to Edinburgh and brought with it high expectations. An editorial in the Age written just before the announcement was made predicted, ‘If this city receives UNESCO status, the cultural capital (so to speak) will be considerable: Edinburgh receives an estimated £2.2 million ($AS million) a year from events, visitors and book sales.’ The editorial noted that the literary enthusiasm of everyday readers and writers in the city, combined with significant financial commitments from the state government, ‘sets the stage or builds the shelf (pick your metaphor) for this city to be a national and international centre for literature and all its offshoots’.³