By Gregory Day
HISTORY
Corners of Melbourne
Robyn Annear
Text, $35
For the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, a corner represented “a symbol of solitude for the imagination”, a place where we can retreat and take refuge from a chaotic world. The colonial street corners chronicled in Robyn Annear’s Corners of Melbourne: The Great Orange-Peel Panic and Other Stories from the Streets, are pretty much the exact opposite. These are places of exposure and effrontery, of noise both visual and auditory, where every lavish claim to fame was as rawly produced as the whole colonial enterprise.
A wood engraving showing flooded Elizabeth Street in December 1882.Credit: State Libary of Victoria
In appearance at least, Corners of Melbourne is published as a companion to Annear’s brilliant Adrift in Melbourne, in which she took us on a vivid and sardonic tour of some key sites from the early days of the “instant city”. In truth, though, both these books add to Annear’s considerable body of work, where her appetite for humour does nothing to diminish the documentary value.
Annear is a great harvester of emblematic tales from the historical record, and her curation here of printed material about the street corners of 19th-century Melbourne, largely from newspaper records, emphasises absurdity as an over-riding feature.
By applying her characteristically vernacular tone to the utter randomness of colonial Melbourne history, Annear presents us with a street-corner population full of preposterous impresarios, riotous quacks and people slipping over all the time on orange peels. That, mixed with the inveterate and tiresome piousness that accompanies all such dubious aggregations of strangers, makes for an inventory of such metropolitan farce that it is a wonder anything good came out of it.
But a few things did, of course, and one of them was the word “larrikin”. In a fascinating piece of etymological sleuthing, Annear tracks the first coining in print of this now widespread word to a single street corner of the 1870s nicknamed The Granites. This was the corner of Fitzroy and Gertrude streets in Fitzroy, where granite offcuts lying about from a nearby row of terrace houses built by Henry “Money” Miller were repurposed by what we might these days call “street kids”.
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According to Annear, the gold rush had by the late 1860s produced a “demographic bulge of teens and pre-teens”, some of whom took to converting a slab of Money Miller’s granite into a makeshift stage “to perform songs and routines from popular theatre shows”. A “former Fitzroy boy” writing to The Argus some years later explained how the “first favourite” song on the public stage of The Granites was The Leary Cove, which subsequently became “leary kid” and then “learykin”.
In February 1870, the term burst into print for the first time as “larrikin”, appearing six times in the first week of February alone. The “Fitzroy boy” was at pains to stress that on Gertrude Street the word “is not, and never was, pronounced ‘larrikin’ but ‘learykin’“.
Whatever the case, finally the town had a word for the “prodigies of cheek and assurance” who not only sang on slabs of cast-off granite but who seemingly terrorised all attempts at colonial comportment, pathetic or otherwise. Annear reports that Melbourne considered itself at that time to be in the grip of a “larrikin plague”.
In the Carlton Gardens alone, an estimated 25,000 plants were destroyed by larrikins over a seven-year period around the time of The Granites. And that’s before we even get to the more obvious manifestations of larrikinism such as pickpocketing, or emptying the nightpans of local schools whenever it took their fancy.
One suspects Annear has some sympathy for the learykins, a sympathy that is of course crucial to her storytelling verve. Truth is, she writes with her own brand of “cheek and assurance”, staying well clear of moral outrage to present a decidedly local version of the human comedy. She is also good at defining landforms that frustrate the built environment, such as floods in the Elizabeth Street creek, and city swamps that when levelled with enough landfill could be rebadged as street corners to stage bare-knuckled boxing matches between larrikinesses.
She also tells us, in a bracing chapter called “Effluent Society”, of the proliferation of leaking noisome cesspits and of urine “literally streaming from the lanes branching off Bourke St East” during theatre intervals.
Yes, Melbourne was distinguished among colonial cities for its “lagging sanitation”. And it certainly wasn’t short of action. Nor of advertising either. Billposting abounded in a spruiking free-for-all, and it seems a poignant moment in the unchecked rush of modernity when in 1880 “an advertising station of the handsomest description” was erected opposite the newly built Royal Exhibition Building, in part to hide “the view of objectionable cows”. That wasn’t far from the ol’ Granites corner by the way. Animals, larrikins – what’s the difference?
Gregory Day’s most recent book, The Bell of the World, is published by Transit Lounge.
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