The Birth of Melbourne

Where They Go Ahead

Francis Adams was a radical social commentator, poet and novelist. He arrived in Melbourne in 1884, where he found it difficult to scrape together a living. These observations on the city were published in 1886. In 1890 and, as he explained it, ‘Mind-sick of Australia’, Adams departed permanently for Europe. His legacy in the Australian union movement and in early sociological studies, however, long endured.

The first thing, I think, that strikes a man who knows the three great modern cities of the world—London, Paris, New York—and is walking observingly about Melbourne is that Melbourne is made up of curious elements. There is something of London in her, something of Paris, something of New York, and something of her own. Here is an attraction to start with. Melbourne has, what might be called, the metropolitan tone. The look on the faces of her inhabitants is the metropolitan look. These people live quickly: such as life presents itself to them, they know it: as far as they can see, they have no prejudices. ‘I was born in Melbourne,’ said the wife of a small bootmaker to me once, ‘I was born in Melbourne, and I went to Tasmania for a bit, and I soon came back again. I like to be in a place where they go ahead.’ The wife of a small bootmaker, you see, has the metropolitan tone, the metropolitan look about her; she sees that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree; she likes to be in a place where they go ahead. And she is a type of her city. Melbourne likes to ‘go ahead’. Look at her public buildings, her new law courts not finished yet, her town hall, her hospital, her library, her houses of parliament, and above all her banks! Nay, and she has become desirous of a fleet and has established a ‘naval torpedo corps’ with seven electricians. All this is well, very well. Melbourne, I say, lives quickly: such as life presents itself to her, she knows it: as far as she can see, she has no prejudices.

As far as she can see.—The limitation is important. The real question is, how far she can see? How far does her civilisation answer the requirements of a really fine civilisation? What scope in it is there (as Mr Arnold would say) for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty and manners? Now in order the better to answer this question, let us think for a moment what are the chief elements that have operated and are still operating in this Melbourne and her civilisation…

On one of the first afternoons I spent in Melbourne, I remember strolling into a well-known bookmart, the bookmart ‘at the sign of the rainbow’. I was interested both in the books and the people who were looking at or buying them. Here I found, almost at the London prices (for we get our twopence and threepence in the shilling on books now in London), all, or almost all, of the average London books of the day. The popular scientific, theological, and even literary books were to hand, somewhat cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that were buying them? The people of the dominant class, the middle-class. I began to inquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. ‘And how do Gordon’s poems sell?’

‘Oh, they sell well,’ was the answer. ‘He’s the only poet we’ve turned out.’

This pleased me, it made me think that the ‘go-ahead’ element in Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If, in a similar bookmart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than the name would have been recognised. And yet the middle-class here is as, and perhaps more, badly— more appallingly badly—off for a higher education than the English provincial middle-class is. Whence comes it, then, that a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with his sad ‘trust and only trust,’ and his

weary longings and yearnings

for the mystical better things:

whence comes it that he is a popular poet here? Let him answer us English for himself and Melbourne:

You are slow, very slow, in discerning that book-lore and wisdom are twain:

Yes, indeed, to Melbourne, such as life presents itself to her, she knows it, and, what is more, she knows that she knows it, and her self-knowledge gives her a contempt for the pedantry of the old world. Walk about in her streets, look at her private buildings, these banks of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They mean something, they express something…They express a certain sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. They say: ‘Some thirty years ago the first gold nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we express that wealth—we express movement, progress, conscious power. Is that now what your English banks express?’ And we can only say that it is not, that our English banks express something quite different; something, if deeper, slower; if stronger, more clumsy.

But the matter does not end here. When we took the instance of the books and the people ‘at the sign of the rainbow’, we took also the abode itself of the rainbow; when we took the best of the private buildings, we took also the others. Many of them are hideous enough, we know; this is what Americans, English and Australians have in common, this inevitable brand of their civilisation, of their determination, their pitiless strength. The same horrible ‘pot hat’, ‘frockcoat’, and the rest, are to be found in London, in Calcutta, in New York, in Melbourne.

Let us sum up. ‘The Anglo Saxon race, the Norman blood’: a colony made of this: a city into whose hands wealth and its power is suddenly phenomenally cast: a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. This, I say, is Melbourne—Melbourne with its fine public buildings and tendency towards banality, with its hideous houses and tendency towards anarchy. And Melbourne is, after all, the Melburnians. Alas, then, how will this city and its civilisation stand the test of a really fine city and fine civilisation? How far will they answer the requirements of such a civilisation? What scope is there in them for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and manners?

Of the first I have only to say that, so far as I can see, its claims are satisfied, satisfied as well as in a large city, and in a city of the above-mentioned composition, they can be. But of the second, of the claims of intellect and knowledge, what enormous room for improvement there is! What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge as at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or rather the one great educated upper-class, of France.

There is still the other claim, that of beauty and manners. And it is here that your Australian, your Melbourne civilisation is, I think, most wanting, most weak; it is here that one feels the terrible need of ‘a past, a story, a poet to speak to you’. With the library are a sculpture gallery and a picture gallery. What an arrangement in them both! In the sculpture gallery ‘are to be seen’, we are told, ‘admirably executed casts of ancient and modern sculpture, from the best European sources, copies of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, and other productions from the European continent.’ Yes, and Summers stands side by side with Michaelangelo! And poor busts of Moore and Goethe come between Antinous and Louvre Apollo the Lizard slayer! But this, it may be said, is after all only an affair of an individual, the arranger. Not altogether so. If an audience thinks that a thing is done badly, they express their opinion, and the failure has to vanish. And how large a portion of the audience of Melbourne city, pray, is of the opinion that quite half of its architecture is a failure, is hideous, is worth only, as architecture, of abhorrence? How many are shocked by the atrocity of the medical college building at the university? How many feel that Bourke Street, taken as a whole, is simply an insult to good taste?

…Things move more quickly now than they used to do: ideas, the modern ideas, are permeating the masses swiftly and thoroughly and universally. We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another fifty—forty—thirty years will actually bring forth.

Free trade, federalism, higher education—they all go together. The necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or thrice the amount. ‘There are not,’ says the Australasian Schoolmaster, the organ of the state schools, ‘there are not many under-fed children in the Australian (as there are in the English) schools.’ But the luxuries of life…are dear here, very dear owing to what I must be permitted to call, an exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it…

Free trade, federalism, higher education—they all, I say, go together; but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last. Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards, not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well said, by evolution not by revolution…

We know, or think we know (which is, after all, almost the same thing), that these three questions—free trade, federalism, higher education—are the three great, the three vital questions for Australia, for Melbourne. We know that, sooner or later, they will have to be properly considered and decided upon, and that, if Melbourne is to keep the place which she now holds as the leading city, intellectually and commercially, of Australia, they will have to be decided upon in that way which conforms with ‘the intelligible law of things,’ with the Tendency of the Age, with the Time-Spirit. For this is the one invaluable and, in the end, irresistible ally of progress—of progress onward and upward.