Thoroughly Modern Melbourne

One of the remarkable things about Melbourne is that until recently it had virtually no definable literature of its own at all. There are a few exceptions, of course. Henry Handel Richardson wrote about us, notably in The Getting of Wisdom; Henry Lawson described our appalling working conditions at the turn of the century in the Arvie Aspenall stories, and more recently Alan Marshall, Judah Waten and Frank Hardy, to name only those, have centred novels and stories in Melbourne. But I think it is fair to say that the Melbourne they wrote about would be largely unrecognizable to most of its citizens today, certainly to most of its younger citizens.