History

Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Australian urban history. It took some time for historians here to take up Briggs’ challenge, but with the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Australian urban history has come of age.

This is a most interesting, readable and, in a larger context, valuable book. It deals with written recollections collected from some 215 living veterans from the First A.I.F. (some have since died) – a list of their names is included as an Appendix – detailing how they felt about the War as it approached and when it commenced, and also what led them to enlist at the time. Each informant is allowed to speak for himself, with his own peculiar spelling, punctuation end style of writing; in effect, the outcome provides a broad picture of the social origins and nature of this cross-section of soldiers.

A virile energetic people inhabits the island of Malaita in the middle Solomons. From the time of first contact Malaitamen were prized for their ability to work, but they had to be handled cautiously, or their inherited pride and confidence would turn them to rebellion. Those who live on the sea-coasts are readily adaptable to innovation when they can see value in it, but they abandon tradition with some misgivings.

Bibliomania is a disease that has afflicted men, and occasionally women, in many walks of life. Some of the most famous cases have been extremely wealthy bachelors, like Richard Heber in England and David Scott Mitchell in Australia, whose only interest in life was collecting books and manuscripts. At the other end of the spectrum have been men who were leaders in business, the professions or politics, yet who still had the time, energy and money to amass huge collections. Sir John Ferguson in Australia, John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington in America, William Gladstone in England and Sir George Grey in New Zealand fall into the latter category.