The recent launch by playwright David Williamson of Carlton: A History, written by many hands, rang bells for me about the importance of locality in shaping lives. In the story of Melbourne, the inner suburbs have a special place, for nowhere else (and particularly in Carlton) have the tides of change flowed as strongly, and nowhere else has ethnicity been as powerful a creator of colour and identity.
The launch, for Melbourne University Publishing, was held under a strong autumn sun in the crowded carpark of La Mama Theatre (founded in 1968), where new voices, like Williamson’s and Jack Hibberd’s, were heard with delight by the avante garde. During the 1970s the nearby Pram Factory also provided a venue for the Australian Performing Group, which spawned Circus OZ.
Just as the book launch spread over and beyond the carpark, the camaraderie of theatre people spilled into the streets, enlivening cafes and Melbourne’s first espresso bars or Jimmy Watson’s wine bar. It went further, into demonstrations against censorship and condemnation of the Vietnam war.
I had not known about Jimmy Watson’s Italian ancestry, but, of course, he represented what Celestina Sagazio regards as the Italo-Australian community’s penchant for public ceremonies like street festivals, church and family functions, music and sport. The paving and concreting skills of urban northern Italians shaped modern Melbourne (just think of Grollo) while the need to feed those migrants, and village born southerners, has made Carlton the Mecca for lovers of Italian cooking.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, a watershed for Italians, there was also a considerable Jewish population whose cultural centre, The Kadimah, attracted radical intellectuals and artists of all faiths. Interestingly, the life of Carlton’s Italians and Jews was the subject of a pace-setting social history exhibition at the Melbourne Museum when in Swanston Street.
Even if I added Greeks and Lebanese to the migrant story, I would only be able, here, to give a flavour of the contents of this marvellous publication. Its 500 pages contain over fifty articles from reminiscences, like Arnold Zables’ about the 1950s to serious research about social welfare by Shurlee Swain. You can find out about factories, bookshops, other businesses, sporting clubs, the Exhibition Building, Melbourne General Cemetery, the University, terrace and slum housing, the Trades Hall, the Womens’ and Childrens’ Hospitals, schools, churches, parks, crime and almost anything that takes your fancy.
And notice that much of the consciousness of Carlton depicted in this history derived from the struggle of a group of citizens, called the Carlton Associates, to prevent the indiscriminate clearing of areas designated as slums in 1969 by the Housing Commission. Almost thirty years later, to fight the desire of the University of Melbourne to demolish cherished terrace housing, the Carlton Residents Association was formed. It has built well on the work of its predecessor by sponsoring this publication and finding Peter Yule to edit it.
