"Marvellous Melbourne"

image of a colonial metropolis

Timothy Chandler

pp. 91-110

in: Richard Hibbitt (ed), Other capitals of the nineteenth century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter examines the Australian city of Melbourne, which, within a few decades of its founding in 1836, became one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the British Empire. The author provides an overview of the city's history and discusses contemporary journalistic and novelistic representations of life in the colony. The primary object of analysis is the image of the city that emerges from these materials. An image of both modernity and historicality, progress and destruction, this image—which bears the title of "Marvellous Melbourne"—has persistently beguiled the city's visitors and inhabitants, but in the final analysis reveals the colonial violence on which it is premised.