Constructing cosmopolitanism, promoting humanitarianism: The marvellous melbourne of E.W. cole in lisa lang's utopian man (2010)

Lisa Langs award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous Book Arcade in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running in its central Melbourne location from 1883-1929, in popular discourses Coles Book Arcade was, and is, synonymous with nineteenth-century Melbourne itself; its vibrant, eclectic atmosphere seemed to capture the essence of the booming nineteenth-century metropolis. In Langs biofiction, the Arcade becomes a lens through which to view Melbourne itself. Cole is sympathetically drawn and his characteristics his eccentricities, entrepreneurism, philanthropy and idealism provide a critical contrast with a city increasingly suspicious toward immigrants, as Australia moves toward federation, and toward establishing the White Australia policy. While it is set entirely in the past, the novels structural nostalgia the Arcade and its values are always already lost in this narrative speaks to a present in which Australia is once again closing its borders. The novel positions itself as witness to Australias lost alternative of a tolerant society, one that embraced other views and welcomed a range of immigrants, and which exists today only as memory.