The opening scenes of my forthcoming novel, A Gentle Empire, are set in the city of my birth and childhood, Melbourne, and in its south-eastern neighbourhood, St Kilda. In it I describe some of the landmarks that were also landmarks my own childhood.
Young and Jacksons is the celebrated hotel into which, on the eve of World War One, my hero, Percy, and his younger brother enter to celebrate having enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. In Australia the term 'hotel' is frequently used in reference to a licensed establishment serving alcohol, so, of course, Young and Jackson was not a childhood haunt of mine. But it was a place I was aware of, as it is prominently located at the very entrance to the city, just across Prince’s Bridge, on the corner of two main streets, and opposite two of Melbourne’s best-known landmarks – St Paul's Cathedral and Flinders Street Station.
The former, still without its spires in 1914, is an attractive example of Victorian neo-Gothic. Designed by the British architect William Butterfield, when its spires were completed in 1932, alongside the elegantly curving Yarra River and the verdigris-domed train station, it really took on the mantle of landmark. The view of these three features from the train always brought upon me a thrill of anticipation, for they heralded of a day of delight, an escape from the tedium of regular school days, in the bustle of the 'city'.
The second landmark, Flinders Street Station is a building of eclectic, one might say excentric, design. It was a sight that Percy, like myself half a century later, could not have avoided seeing. Its copper domes give it a somewhat oriental appearance that inspired the popular fiction that its design had actually been intended for Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, and that it had instead become the Australian state of Victoria's main railway terminus through a mixup in the post. Along with the domes and tower, it has a gaping arched entrance, a bit like Luna Park’s ‘Moonface’ without the teeth, through which the crowds pass beneath a row of clocks displaying departure times of the various train lines. That became the place to meet up. “I’ll meet you under the clocks” was, and perhaps still is, a popular expression.
How great a part the trains played in my childhood. In Percy's time he would have taken a steam engine; I have a vague recollection of seeing these; but in my childhood we would take a ‘red rattler’ (not a venomous American viper, but one of the tomato-soup-red electric trains that first came into use a few years after Percy set off on his 'Great Adventure'). Taking a train to the city was always an delightful thing to do. It had comfortable leather seats, varnished woodwork interiors, wooden-louvred sun blinds, pressed metal ceilings, swaying frosted glass light fixtures, doors that slid open, and large, black and white photographs of country destinations. There was no plastic to be seen, no graffiti. Everything was solid and refined. I recall the swaying, rattling motion (hence their nickname), the pleasant smell of the seat leather, the ding-ding-ding as we passed level crossings. We knew the station names by heart, and I recall them particularly from the Frankston Line, which means it must be from a time when we briefly lived in the beachside suburb of Carrum: ‘Chelsea, Edithvale, Aspendale, Mordialloc, Parkdale, Mentone, Cheltenham…’. Yet, how can I remember that? I was a practically a baby when we lived there.
Another landmark mentioned in the novel is St Kilda Road, a broad, tree-lined boulevard leading from the seaside suburb of St Kilda, north towards the city. In my childhood there was a busy junction that no longer exists, with a tram terminus where, when on foot, I would dawdle behind my father, so that he would not notice me bending down to to pick up the ticket stubs thrown away by the tram conductors. For some reason I found delight in pocketing these little stapled wads of coloured paper. On one side of the junction was the iconic Junction Hotel, a building on a triangular plot between St Kilda Road and Barkley Street that was shaped like New York's Flatiron Building. On the corner facing the Junction it had an elaborately-designed Victorian tower that Percy would have seen in all its glory, but that in my day was rudely hidden behind an enormous neon sign advertising cigarettes.
Another landmark, one that in my childhood dominated the road into the city, as indeed it does today, is the Shrine of Remembrance (mentioned in an earlier post) – a bizzare conglomeration of the Parthenon in Athens and the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. It is a creation as odd and seemingly out of place as the train station, but also as inseparable with our conception of Melbourne as the Eifel Tower is of Paris. Percy would not have seen it of course, for it was built only in the 1930s to commemorate the soldiers who fell in the war that he was about to set off on.
Also on St Kilda Road is a building that I referred to in the novel as "the formidable bluestone edifice of Victoria Barracks". Prior to Federation in 1901, it served as the headquarters of the British colonial forces, and subsequently as those of the Australian Department of Defence. From there the newly recruited soldiers marched for a whole day to reach their training camp at Broadmeadows, a green, windswept plain to the north of the city, where many years later my father, an engineer by profession, put up a prefabricated house in a single day – a feat which, at the time, was thought of as little short of miraculous.
Scattered across the older suburbs of the city, and along the length of St Kilda Road (though many have been demolished since my childhood) are still to be seen, elaborate Victorian palaces – fabulously ornate buildings, many of them in the ‘Italianate’ style, with arches, columns, pediments, balastrades, decorative urns, and tall towers. These were mostly built with the vast wealth acquired from the gold fields in the decades following the goldrush of 1850s and 60s. I made one of these Percy's home. Already, by 1914, past its glory, it was subdivided, as many of them were then, or have become since, though still bearing witness to the social aspirations and financial successes of their original owners.
Finally, in one short episode, Percy and his lover, Laura, enter a park where they see a red-flowering gumtree filled with screaching, gaudy parrots. There is something I find particularly delightful about parrots, quite humanlike in their noisy comradery and wild avian antics, rather like gangs of teenagers that could not give a damn what the more restrained and respectable birds might think of their shylarking. I recall a tree by the Yarra that at a certain hour of the day was filled with hurdreds of these brilliantly coloured rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus moluccanus) with their blue, green, yellow and orange plumage. Oddly, when I think back to my childhood, I don't recall seeing parrots in such numbers as one sees today in the suburban areas. Can it be that the population has increased greatly since then, or have I simply forgotten, being away for so many years, or perhaps, having grown up with them around, I didn't pay regard to their abundance then as I do now?
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