Any relatively new society has difficulty in writing about itself without strain and taking for granted the fact that it is worth writing about. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, writing about ‘Melbourne in 1963’ in an essay published in his collection, Melbourne or the Bush, points out that 'Melbournians bitterly resent any criticism offered by overseas visitors, are nervously titillated when a novelist refers to Flinders Street or East Brunswick, and find it impossible to imagine that a song entitled ‘I love Melbourne in the Springtime’ or a movie about dark passions in Murrumbeena could be other than ludicrous’. There’s a tiny example of this cultural strain and self-consciousness in Harry Marks’ novel, The Heart Is Where the Hurt Is, when a German migrant says, ‘I’m what you call a ... New Australian. But I can hardly say I’ve set the Yarra on fire’. The transplanted English idiom sits awkwardly on the tongue out here, especially the tongue of a migrant. We have to find our own individual way of saying, and seeing things.

What Chris Wallace-Crabbe wrote in 1963 would have been true then, I think. But in the last two decades there has been a flood of imaginative literature about Melbourne – fiction, poetry, plays. Part of the reason is simply that Melbourne has become a slightly more interesting place to live, but more pervasively, we have now accepted for granted the fact that most Australians are city people whose lives are defined within the cultural ethos of the city. And we are also, oddly enough since our habits rarely indicate it, a remarkably cosmopolitan people: Australia has a higher percentage of its population born overseas or the children of overseas-born parents than any other country in the world except Israel.

In purely literary terms, the change began with Ray Lawler’s play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and, to a lesser extent, with Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, both of which appeared in the late fifties. It was ‘The Doll’ in particular that showed us that there was an authentic Australian idiom that could be reproduced on stage – and later still, on television (it was many years before we had our own dramatic programs) and later even that that, on film.

Novelists were slower to respond but the first novel that marks an honest and intelligent effort to get at some of the real problems in Australian city life is perhaps David Martin’s The Young Wife, published in 1962. The Young Wife is not a great novel by any means – it is roughly written and sometimes falls into cliche,’ – but as a documentation of what will eventually be seen as one of the great social movements in this country’s history it is utterly absorbing and also well ahead of its time. The Young Wife tells the story of Anna, a beautiful young Cypriot, who has been chosen as wife for Yannis, sight unseen, in faraway Australia. The novel examines the stresses placed on the marriage, despite the good will and efforts of the couple to try and love one another, by the collision of new cultural traits and assumptions with the old. It ends tragically in Yannis’s shooting of another Greek whom he wrongly believes has seduced his wife.

Apart from anything else, The Young Wife is a treasure trove of knowledge about the habits and mores of migrants, at least this group of migrants, in Melbourne. It offers a series of carefully patterned contrasts – between ways of living in East Brunswick as against Williamstown; between those migrants who accept, however uneasily, their destiny in a new world and those who are committed irrevocably to the old one; between the Greeks and those Australians who make tentative efforts to share their lives. The novel has an Australian couple, Professor Barwing and his wife Patricia, who will very quickly become familiar figures in Australian fiction. The Professor attempts to seduce Anna, and thus helps unwittingly to precipitate the final tragedy of the death of Criton; while Patricia also goes to bed with Criton. They embody that propensity among the Australian middle classes for, in the words of one commentator, all values to wither at a touch of appetite.

The novel is interesting for other reasons too. Martin is sensitive to the peculiar paradoxes and ambiguities of feeling that will very often be the migrant’s lot. Pointing to the vegetables in front of him Yannis’s brother Alexis says with a paradoxical pride, ‘Everything here grows bigger than at home’, while of Yannis himself we are told that 'On the whole he got on better with Australian than with Greek or Cypriot girls, but to marry one of these would have broken his mother’s heart’. The tragic paradox here is that Yannis finds it easier to adjust to his new country than to conform to the customs of the old but it is his blind, fiercely traditional mother Maria who insists that his bride be imported.

In addition, Martin shows a keen awareness of the possibilities of Melbourne as a site for fiction, possibilities which remained curiously neglected at least until Barry Oakley came along. He describes Victoria Market on a bustling morning, a walk along Batman Avenue, the Music Bowl, the Botanic Gardens, the Yarra bank, Princes Bridge, Olympic Park, a soccer match between Greek and Italian teams, an election day among the Greek community. There is a wealth of life in Melbourne that has been scarcely touched upon, even now.

Another novel concerning a different group of migrants is the late Harry Marks’ The Heart is Where the Hurt is, published in 1966. Again it is an invaluable record of an earlier historical movement than the post-war migration, comparable to that which took place in the United States at the beginning of this century. There it is liberally documented; here there is only the work of Judah Waten, especially his incomparable Alien Son, and this novel, which looks back lovingly and nostalgically, if at times sentimentally, on the past. Sophie Leifman and her family belong to an earlier generation of migrants than Martin’s; they are Jews who emigrated from Germany as early as the twenties, though tragically some of Sophie’s relatives do not leave in time. The attitude the novel takes towards this movement and towards Australia is an almost unqualifiedly optimistic one. Here is Sophie thinking over the past and the move to Australia:

Fondly she thinks of the Carlton days when they first came to Melbourne. ‘Little Jerusalem’, Gentiles called it, before the great exodus to St. Kilda. Hard, sad days, touched with many happinesses. Days already memories. But alive! So alive! People everywhere. Always someone to talk to. Streets vibrating with talk. Day or night. There was time to talk, whatever else had to be done. Over fences and cast-iron gates, in shops, out of shops, silting at windows or on ribbonlike verandahs. And at her machine, before Max was born, In between coats. …

It was 1928. the start of a new life, but too soon It was 1929. Being foreigners, they were among the first to feel the clammy hand of the Depression. Even then, when at times her spirit seemed to snap within her, she did not regret coming. How much worse it would have been at home in Germany. No, not home. This is home. Australia, she had found, is a country with a heart. A rough, come-and-Join-us-but-take-us-as-we-are country that doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is. A place where tomorrow means hope, where you are judged as a person, not as a Jew ...

The process Marks is describing is one of profound historical significance and there is a great deal of pleasure on one’s recognition of the familiar elements of Melbourne life, even those that are not especially attractive or that have become extinct, such as the six o’clock swill. There are boring Sundays, as seen through foreign eyes, Victoria Market again, a picnic in the bush (the bush at this time is Ferntree Gully), football (this time Australian), the parks (one of the characters says proudly, ‘We have some of the finest parks in Australia’), and another comment that ‘the only things worth reading in the Herald are the Myer’s ads’. So some things haven’t changed, at any rate.

But in addition to this documentation of Melbourne culture, the novel also reveals a profound demographic change that has an important bearing on the novels of the sixties and seventies. Immediately after the above extract the novel goes on:

A dry cleaner's shop. A dream had become reality. Not overnight. Not without scrimping. Not, for Sophie, without misgivings. The choice was plain. Stay where you are, or move out and on. But was there really any choice? To move out and on. This was instinctive in them. They had to better themselves, for Max’s sake. And that meant goodbye old friend to Carlton where, with kinder days, they shifted into larger, cosier rooms. So it was with most of the families. They felt the compulsion of the southern suburbs. As confidence grew with income, they were able to satisfy that urge. For the sake of the children. Yet. though the mind said go the heart said stay. Carlton was a family hearth. Balaclava, a social rung or two better. seemed to Sophie poor exchange.

It is a pattern of movement that is still in evidence except that where these characters moved to Balaclava migrants now move east to Doncaster, or when that becomes too expensive, north to places like Thomastown, while the displaced middle class Australians reverse the direction and return to the inner suburbs. It is partly because of that reverse movement that Carlton – by which is meant loosely not only Carlton proper but North Carlton, parts of Parkville, Fitzroy and especially North Fitzroy – has assumed such a distinctive character in the literature of Melbourne.

Melbourne fiction is not merely an urban literature but necessarily, because of the shape the city has taken, a suburban literature as well. Certain suburbs have in the last few years taken on clearly defined identities. Here, for instance, the narrator of Peter Mathers’ novel Trap, David David, speaking about a certain area of Fitzroy:

You know the streets between Gertrude and Victoria Parade? Well, there are plenty of similar ones in our no man's land. And. among the old houses, in these straight and treeless streets and the back lanes and alleys, the old houses of bluestone and redbrick, there's more life – real, a squirming, dancing life – than to the square mile of suburban Ringwood or Highett or Preston. And one day soon, notwithstanding the current wishes of our illustrious mayor, his area will be discovered by the suburb-haters and wrested from the natives and hoisted level with Carlton and Parkville. And probably made twee and chi-chi – unless enough of the present locals can hang on. The sururb-haters’ll find these one-and two-and three-level bluestone and brick places and drool over them. Our progressive mayor will be disgusted. But he'll probably not lose by it. For by then he and his pack of scabby suckhole mates’ll own it all and make millions, despite their suburban outer-ethic.

The opposition is stated there as directly as anywhere, and Mathers' novel is unusual in this respect in that it deals with working-class characters and that group of underprivileged people in our midst, the urban Aborigines, rather than with middle-class professional people and intellectuals. Or rather, it deals with the latter only to subvert and satirize them and their values. Mathers takes much the same view of the dividing line of the Yarra as later Barry Oakley and Helen Garner do; it is to Carltonites what the Hudson is to New Yorkers. Just as the Hudson marks the beginning of the mid-west, so the Yarra marks the beginning of the wilderness of suburbia, and both Oakley and Mathers save their special venom for the area roughly defined by South Yarra and Toorak. Here, for instance, is Mathers’ rather crude satire of Mrs. Nathan’s Tooraky views:

Writing and sculpture she dismissed as mere industries. Theatre – that was  different. She adored (her emphasis of adored is inimitable, her pronunciation has to be heard to be believed) the stage. The Doll was delightful with alt its colourful slum characters. One could have too much, however. For where were the plays of Toorak and other better-type suburbs? She was sure there were just dozens of plays by good Toorak types just waiting to see the light of day. It was possible there was a conspiracy against talented upper class Australian writers. Of course Lawler did an impossible one set in Vaucluse, but, of course, it flopped. Little theatres appalled with their grim, sarcastic offerings. The big commercial firms were the ones with vital theatre.

Toorak-South Yarra is associated, no doubt unfairly, with flashy wealth, phony pretensions to artistic talent and patronage, and rapacious middle-aged society hostesses looking for young men of talent whom they can gobble up. The only exception to this is Morris Lurie, who is our one southern Yarra novelist, and whose protagonist in two novels and several stories, Rappaport, runs an antique business on Toorak Road.

Helen Garner in Monkey Grip locates her group of characters most specifically in Carlton, which is seen as an enclave of its own. At first sight Garner seems to be writing about a totally different world, a world Oakley can only guess at but which she knows at first hand. Her characters have no surnames – they are Hank, Chris, Willy, Martin, and they come and go at random – and the women sometimes have male names like Micky and Paddy. Vera’s boyfriend often addresses her as ‘mate’, and despite the abundance of fucking the characters have a peculiarly androgynous feel about them. They form an urban tribe with strict customs and rituals of their own. When the heroine Nora goes to the screening of a film about dope in which she has a part she looked for her boy friend Jagobut discovers that ‘he was with the Prestige junkies, Chris and Mark, and I was in the front row with the straights, and following what the novel calls ‘that unspoken social pact’ no communication between them is possible.

Like Mathers, Helen Garner describes an unusual segment of Carlton life, or at least one less well known to her middleclass readers, the dope world, but it is a surprisingly familiar one in many respects. Her characters live from hand to mouth – occasional jobs, the dole, sometimes stealing, often from each other – but they also travel frequently, even interstate or overseas and Nora herself is educated, reads widely if eclectically – Agatha Christie as well as Henry James and Jean Rhys. To be fair, she is only partly in the world of dope, and even then largely because of her connection with her boy friend. But her attitude to the ‘straight’ world outside comes out comically when a friend asks her to come to a meeting with him and she agrees reluctantly. Then he tells her ‘The meeting is in Caulfield. We’re getting a lift with Philip’, and she responds mentally ‘Caulfield! The other side of the river’.

Barry Oakley finally embodies this sense of Carlton as a kind of ghetto from which its residents – so many urban Che Guevaras (an image Oakley actually uses once) sallying out into the wilds of Brighton and North Balwyn to perform their depredations. Oakley is unusual, not only in the explicitness with which he spells out this idea in his third novel, Let's Hear It for Prendergast but for the ingenuity and comprehensiveness with which he has employed the landscapes and customs of Melbourne for comic and satiric effect. Football (in A Salute to the Great McCarthy)-, Moomba, that irresistible target; the Herald Outdoor Art Show, which Lurie also uses in Rappoport-, Myers, with which Oakley has something of an obsession; the Shrine of Remembrance; Flinders Street Station; St Patrick’s Cathedral; the Exhibition Building, described as ‘the third biggest of its kind in the world’, which reminds one of that strange phrase one hears so often in Australia, the largest/longest/highest etc. in the Southern Hemisphere. Oakley’s novels end spectacularly. In A Wild Ass of a Man the hero, Muldoon, another of those Irish Catholic Australians who makes a mess of his life, is mock-crucified by being tied by life- savers to a Silver Wheel on the St Kilda Promenade, thus expiating, not the world’s sins but his own.

In Let's Hear It for Prendergast, the title figure, the ‘tallest poet in the world’ and, to judge from the samples Oakley gives us, the worst as well, dies spectacularly when he sets fire, with himself inside it, to the Exhibition Building. Prendergast lives in Carlton – Muldoon had lived in Chapel Street, Prahran – and has a strongly developed sense of its separate identity. When the narrator Morley is visited by the very strait-laced brother of Prendergast from Brighton, he concludes the visit grandly by saying ‘Allow me to escort you back to civilisation. Don’t ever wander this far into the jungle again’. When he ventures out into the suburbs Morley laments, ‘We’re heading for the suburbs, the endless red brick around Dandenong Road, Malvern, Caulfield, fellows out hosing their gardens on this gentle evening in spring’. He could not have sounded more miserable if he were being transported to Siberia and a moment later, adds, ‘Take me back to Carlton, I want to go home!’ Prendergast he calls ‘the king of Carlton, Mr Freedom, an exile back with his people. Outwitter of prudes, outrager of moralists, he saw himself as the scourge of suburbia, appointed by God’. Prendergast and Morley are urban guerrilla fighters; their targets, which seem rather dated now, are the Legion of Decency, police, censors (both self-appointed and otherwise) and anyone who lives a conformist, materialistic life.

It remains to ask whether these novels have anything further in common and whether there are, potentially more fruitful or original themes than the ones I've been discussing. With the exception of Peter Mathers, I think that most of these writers concentrate on middle class problems. Oakley’s subversive protagonists are not very convincingly subversive at all and Prendergast’s iconoclastic gestures usually don’t amount to much more than amusing pranks. I would like to see a great many more themes explored. In a city which has for its cultural heroes men with names like Jesaulenko and Barassi it seems more could be done with both football and migrants than has been done so far.

There is a large amount of life in Melbourne untouched. With exceptions – such as William Dick’s A Bunch of Ratbags – Melbourne’s literature is about writers or aspiring writers, teachers, academics, the professional classes generally. There has been nothing like the documentation of the lives of ‘ordinary’ people of the kind that our cinema has started to do recently in films like John Duigan’s ‘Mouth to Mouth’ or in Sydney, Mike Thornhill’s ‘FJ Holden’. A few moments’ thought is enough to make one realize the multitude of themes and groups left untouched: bored and lonely, housewives trapped in the affluence of the outer suburbs; the plight of migrants, especially female migrants, who are forced to come to terms with a way of life that is totally alien to their own; disaffected and/or unemployed youths; the disco and Saturday night pub band scenes; the predicament of urban Aborigines; the phenomena of sport and gambling; drugs; violent crime; living in high rise flats.

But writers live like the Aboriginal nomads, eating off the land and moving on when there are no more pickings. Nowadays, they are moving to Sydney, where the opportunities for writers are far more abundant than here. Barry Oakley is gone. Alex Buzo has gone. David Williamson has gone. Peter Carey has gone. Morris Lurie writes as much about Europe than Melbourne these days. We await a whole new group of writers who will do for Melbourne in the ‘eighties’ what these writers did for it in the ‘sixties’ and ‘seventies’, and perhaps in younger writers such as Helen Garner, Michele Naymen and Beverley Farmer they are finally beginning to emerge.