Architecture, Art and Photography/Australian History
Book Details

A New City

Photographs of Melbourne's Land Boom

Ian Morrison (ed.)

Foreword by Michael Cathcart

A New City is a collection of photography by Charles B. Walker of Melbourne and its suburbs in the 1880s.

Awards

Commendation, Victorian Community History Awards 2004

Opinion

'This book is beautifully produced, with maps and commentary on the images by historical experts. But the real delight is in the photographs themselves. Recommended for the historically minded, and for fans of old Melbourne.' (Sunday Age, 9/11/2003)

A New City 'is a triumph of intelligent selection, taste and genuine beauty.' (News Weekly, 31 January 2004)

About this Title

'It is usual to say that the photographer somehow freezes a moment in time. But Walker's photographs actually set time in motion, inviting us to see, beneath the unmade road, the Wurundjeri lands whose owners still remember how things were before this bizarre intrusion. And they prompt us to recognise how the city has both changed and endured in the years since each photo was taken . . . how the place in the picture is both familiar and surprising.' --Michael Cathcart

Melbourne in the late 1880s was a miracle: a modern metropolis where fifty years earlier there had been only bush. Visitors beheld with wonder the city built on the riches of gold, wool and financial speculation and brimming with recklessness and optimism.

In the summer of 1888-89, professional photographer Charles Bristow Walker ventured out of his studio into the streets and captured the splendour of Melbourne's boom. Little known in his own day and forgotten when he died, Walker's stunning photographs are now published for the first time. Familiar sites including the Botanic Gardens, the University, St Patrick's Cathedral and Port Phillip Bay can be seen alongside others long gone, like the Eastern Market and the Federal Coffee Palace. These photographs provide a lasting vision of a metropolis imbued with energy and dynamism, a glittering city in the days before the land boom went bust.

The informed commentary from historians, librarians and archivists that accompanies the photographs reflects the social, cultural, economic and political significance of the scenes captured by Walker.

About the Author

Ian Morrison is Curator of Special Collections in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. His publications include The Publishing Industry in Colonial Australia and Australian Almanacs 1806-1930: A Bibliography, with Maureen Perkins and Tracey Caulfield.

978-0-522-85073-4