Making and Unmaking 'Marvellous Melbourne': The Colonial City as Palimpsest in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Non-Fiction

This article discusses the representation of colonial Melbourne in Robyn Annear's creative nonfiction, Bearbrass (1995), and A. L. McCann's novel, The White Body of Evening (2002). It suggests that their depictions of the city are drawn from the material traces still visible in vestigial form today, and from previous representations of the nineteenth-century city, drawing on literary images not only of Melbourne itself, but also of London, particularly as it is represented in neo-Victorian fiction. It argues that these two, contrasting, evocations of Melbourne's past suggest the ways in which neo-Victorian representations of the colonial city construct it as doubly palimpsestic: inscribed upon it are not only the vestigial remains of its own past shape but traces, too, of the grand European city it was built to imitate. The Australian city of Melbourne is a particularly evocative example since from the planning of the nineteenth-century city to its literary productions, there is a way in which it is always, already, neo-Victorian.