Sanitarians bemoaned the stinks of the still-unsewered 'Marvellous Smellbourne', and the mounting typhoid casualties of 'Murderous Melbourne'. Cultural critics attacked 'The Barbarisms of Barbarous Melbourne', such as larrikinism, bad manners and the universal obsession with sport. With the bank crash of the early s, financiers had to endure the odium of having created 'Marvellous Smellboom'.
The chorus of praise now became a lament. It took the city more than a generation to recover something of the optimism of the land-boom era. In Victoria's centenary year, , with the city mired in another depression, a publisher bravely entitled a book of souvenir photographs Marvellous Melbourne , claiming that the subject 'still finds apt expression in the happy one-time sobriquet'. In the Australian Performing Group revived the title of Dampier's melodrama in a stage satire in which the excesses of the s land boom found a contemporary echo in the city's more recent history of land deals.
The Age journalist, John Stevens, later adopted the title for his weekly column covering the city's history and heritage.
Designed by the architect William Pitt, the Princess Theatre reflected contemporary French influences and was in keeping with the great theatres of Europe. The prestigious theatre debuted on 18 December with a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. The performance was warmly received and the audience also gave a rousing reception to William Pitt, who appeared on stage during the interval. Goodall was a passionate supporter of the Geelong Football Club.
In August he wrote in his diary: 'Heavy rain and hail, very cold. Lively football match at Kardinia Park. Mud and slush no object! Enormous crowd. Intense grief!!! John Mitchell Christie — was one of Melbourne's finest detectives, famed for his creative disguises and arrests of a young city's criminal class.
The Library holds Christie's personal case files relating to his work in Victoria between and his retirement in Francis Beyer was a renowned rollerskater and rink proprietor, whose daughters Hilda Florence and Ruby, known as the Misses Beyer, became professional 'lady skaters'. The sisters competed in roller polo matches and demonstrated their fancy skating manoeuvres to captivated spectators in rinks around Australia.
Little is known of May Stewart beyond the contents of her diary from , when it's thought she was an year-old boarder in the home of a Mrs Hadlow. Her diary details how she spent her leisure time, including domestic activities such as knitting, crocheting, writing letters and reading.
However, she was more often out on the town, attending the theatre or exhibitions, shopping or promenading with friends, or 'mashing' young men. Skip to main content. Free databases. Research tools. Events by category. Events by cost. Plan your visit. Melbourne went on to be the capital city when Federation came but it wasn't the same. There was a lot of civic shame and inferiority. This us-against-them attitude may even have played out during the COVID lockdown, as Melburnians took a certain kind of pride in going through the ordeal alone.
I think that has endured, that feeling of being the underdog. Marvellous Melbourne no longer reflected the prevailing mood, and the tagline was replaced in newspapers with less effusive nicknames such as Miserable Melbourne and Murderous Melbourne. There was also Marvellous Smellbourne to reflect the noxious odours being produced by the city's abattoirs, tanneries and factories. Before mass sanitation, the Yarra was an open sewer.
Melbourne's famous laneways were used to cart "night soil", a euphemism for human waste. For a while, Sala's words acted as a cautionary tale of a city that got swept up in greed.
The boast became a target for parody — a satire, Juvenal in Melbourne , lampooned the city's hubris. Then the slogan was mostly forgotten, swept away and confined to history, as the city lived through another boom before the crash of the Great Depression in the s. But a generation later it started to appear again.
Tens of thousands of Melburninans turned out to see a light show for the Queen's tour in Credit: Fairfax. In , as the Queen and Prince Philip boarded a Qantas plane at Essendon Airport in front of 10, people after a triumphant tour, there was a fresh optimism in the air. People were moving to the suburbs to enjoy the benefits of sustained economic growth. On Bourke Street, Italian migrants were installing one of the city's first espresso machines, shipped from the old country to a cafe called Pellegrini's.
The arrival of coffee culture would eventually lead to Melbourne exporting its own style of cafes and coffee-making, particularly the flat white, back around the world. Credit: Fairfax Media. Speaking in front of the royals, lord mayor Robert Solly recalled a saying that had been popular when he was a young man, at the start of the century. It was, of course, Marvellous Melbourne. Two years later, the Olympics sparked a rush for Melbourne to reinvent itself as a modern city.
That resulted in the wrecking ball being put through many of the grand buildings still left from the s — decisions now looked upon with regret, even though such an attitude was seen as old-fashioned at the time.
The city managed to save its trams, at serious risk of being replaced by cars and buses. Now they are intrinsically linked to Melbourne's identity even though many other cities around the world have them.
The opposite happened in Sydney, which ripped up its tram network in the s. Recently, a light rail line was rebuilt through its CBD at great expense. The reclamation of the slogan started in the s, as people began to look back at what the city had been like years earlier. Soon it was a rallying cry to breathe life back into Victoria's capital after the collapse of the State Bank and the subsequent recession of the s.
In Sydney, newspapers were making jibes that Melbourne had fallen once again. It was during that decade that the inner city was revitalised , as a relaxation of licensing laws created something else Melburnians would claim as their own: the laneway bar.
Migration from all parts of the world, particularly Asia, gave the city an international feel. Rather than being deserted by office workers after 5pm, a nightlife reminiscent of Sala's era returned to the city. That would lead to another crown: world's most liveable city.
0コメント