The Arts - Melbourne and Victoria - page 717

Literature
It may seem at first glance that in Melbourne and Victoria words and stories are relegated
to the wings while sport and socialising take centre stage, but scratch the surface and you'll
find they're home to writers of all descriptions, independent booksellers, a prosperous pub-
lishing industry and a thriving culture of reading and discourse on the written word. Mel-
bourne nourishes literary types with its tempestuous weather, rich range of cultures and
identities, wines bars and moody architecture.
Melbourne's wordy reputation was formally recognised with its designation as a Unesco
City of Literature (in 2008) and the birth of the Wheeler Centre ( www.wheelercentre.com ),
Australia's first centre for 'Books, Writing and Ideas'. Located within a newly renovated
wing of the State Library of Victoria ( www.slv.vic.gov.au ) , it's home to several literary or-
ganisations and hosts a rich program of talks and events designed to 'get Melburnians
thinking'.
Literary publishing companies Black Inc, Scribe, Text and Penguin are based here, and
the city produces a host of magazines, journals and websites that highlight literature and in-
tellectual life, including the Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Black Inc's series of 'Best'
anthologies and the Quarterly Essay, and the short-fiction collection Sleepers Almanac .
The City Library in Flinders Lane has an entire section dedicated to books on Melbourne.
Has there been a great Victorian novel? Melbourne has certainly provided a variety of
memorable backdrops for literary works, from the 19th-century cult crime fiction of The
Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Fergus Hume; 1886) to Peter Temple's The Broken Shore
(2005), which is also partly based in western Victoria. Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap (2008) is
set in the backyards of the inner north, where postwar migrant families settled in Mel-
bourne. Helen Garner's Monkey Grip takes readers on a journey through drugs, love and
music in urban Melbourne in the 1970s, while Utopian Man by Lisa Lang tells the story of
the late-19th-century days of 'Marvellous Melbourne' and E.W Cole's Book Arcade. Peter
Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang , set in the central Victorian haunts of Australia's
most famous bushrangers, took both the Man Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writers'
Prize when it was published in 2001; despite Victoria's largely urban, multicultural popula-
tion, it just may be a novel with a historical - even mythological - bush setting that can
claim the 'great' title.
On the non-fiction front, Jill and Jeff Sparrow's Radical Melbourne (2001) looks at Mel-
bourne's counter-culture and its secret history. Germaine Greer, another radical Melburni-