Corners of Melbourne: The great orange-peel panic & other stories from the streets

What better defines a city than its street corners? A corner gives you a starting point, a destination and a place to turn. It’s furnished with pillar boxes, newsstands and tram stops, and lamp-posts for light and lounging. Where would you be likeliest to find a pub? At the corner, of course. Let Robyn Annear squire you around the corners of Melbourne, and reveal their bizarre, baroque and mostly forgotten stories?

In this (appropriately corner-shaped) book she will introduce you to:

• street-corner ‘galvanisers’ who offered the thrill of electric shock at threepence a time
• the rude boys of the Fitzroy back streets who became the original ‘larrikins’
• infants named for the corners on which they’d been abandoned
• a rogues’ gallery of unruly women, incorrigible men and runaway horses

…and, of course, the civic sinners who discarded orange peel in the streets, to the endangerment of the unwary.

Adrift in Melbourne: Seven Walks with Robyn Annear

Melbourne’s streets have always been marvellous – but the proud facades of the nineteenth-century boom aren’t the half of it. In seven meandering walks, Adrift in Melbourne explores the hidden histories we might hurry past every day, the buildings long gone and the ordinary and extraordinary characters who inhabited them. Whether you read it on the move or in an armchair, Adrift in Melbourne will inspire you to unleash your inner flâneur on the lurking surprises of this great city.

‘An unexpected delight. Annear writes history with a smile but with a deadly acerbic stare… On this tour of Melbourne we are in the best possible hands.’
~ Gregory Day, Saturday Paper

‘Annear tackles her sprawling subject matter with her trademark wit and her knack for singling out the perfect historical reference.’
~ Age

Nothing New: A History of Second-hand

Text Publishing, 2019

Here’s what it says on the cover flap:

” ‘Given the way we live now,’ writes Robyn Annear, ‘it would be easy to suppose that newness has always been venerated.’

“But as this [ahem] wonderfully entertaining short history makes clear, modern consumerism is an aberration. Mostly, everyday objects – from cast-off cookware to clothing worn down to rags – have enjoyed long lives and the appreciation of serial owners.

“Nothing New is itself an emporium – a treasure store of anecdotes and little-known facts that will intrigue and enlighten the devoted bargain-hunter and the dilettante browser alike – with Robyn Annear its diverting proprietor [or, I would say, proprietress].”

A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker's Melbourne

Black Inc, 2005

The demolition firm of Whelan the Wrecker was a Melbourne institution for a hundred years (1892-1992). Its famous sign – ‘Whelan the Wrecker is Here’ on a pile of shifting rubble – was a laconic masterpiece and served as a vital sign of the city’s progress. It’s no stretch to say that over three generations, the Whelan family changed the face of Melbourne, demolishing hundreds of buildings in the central city alone.

In A City Lost and Found I use Whelan’s demolition sites as portals by which to explore layers of the city laid bare by their pick-axes and iron balls. From beneath the rubble I bring to light fantastic stories of Melbourne’s building sites and their many incarnations, in a book about the making – and remaking – of a city.

Fly a Rebel Flag: The Eureka stockade

black dog books, 2004

The diggers were fed up with being hounded by the police, forced to show their gold licences on demand, like common criminals. At last the diggers of Ballarat made a stand for justice. They took up arms, built a stockade, and swore to defend themselves and each other against the authorities.

When government troops stormed the Eureka stockade the battle lasted just twenty minutes, but it changed Australia forever.

Was it a blow for democracy? A glorious rebellion? Or just a bloody massacre? You decide.
(For younger readers)

The Man Who Lost Himself: The unbelievable story of the Tichborne Claimant

Text Publishing, 2002

Tom Castro, the Wagga Wagga butcher, had a jowly face and carried himself like an uneven load, tipping the scales at twenty-one stone. Roger, the young Tichborne heir – before he was lost at sea in 1854 – was all narrowness: long neck, hock-bottle shoulders and hips that were hardly there. He walked ‘like a Frenchman’.

Not even Roger’s mother could tell them apart.

After all, a man might change his shape in a dozen years; and so it was that Tom Castro declared himself to be the long-lost Roger and headed for London to claim his inheritance. By 1871 there was no more notorious celebrity in the British Empire than the charismatic Claimant: the subject of songs, plays, cartoons, endless speculation and one of the longest-running court cases in British judicial history.

But who was he, really?

Nothing But Gold: The diggers of 1852

Text Publishing, 1999

Within a year of gold’s discovery in 1851, the infant colony of Victoria was transformed from a sump for ex-convicts to a Land of Opportunity.

To be on the diggings in 1852 was to be in the thick of it. And in that astonishing year 75,000 adventurers learnt as much about housekeeping as they did gold-digging – the same shovel a digger used to fry up his breakfast might unearth him a fortune before lunch.

Australia became the talk of the world in 1852, a moment in our history when there was nothing but gold.

Bearbrass: Imagining early Melbourne

Mandarin, 1995; Black Inc, 2005

‘When I lived there, I made Melbourne my village. I’m not talking about suburban Melbourne, where rusticity can be as close as the corner shop: a few Scotch thistles, a galvanised iron roof and a flickering Peter’s ice cream cone can work magic on your sense of time and place. I made my village of central Melbourne – and it’s a village that takes some finding. I think of it as Bearbrass…’

Bearbrass (one of the local names by which Melbourne was first known) is an attempt to resurrect the village that was early Melbourne – from the arrival of white settlers in 1835 until the first gold rushes shook the town – overlaid with my own impressions and experiences of the modern city.