Melbourne

Sophie Cunningham

Jan 2012 · UNSW Press

About this ebook

Sophie Cunningham writes a year in the city's life, a year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on Black Saturday when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the destructive deluge of a hailstorm. She walks through Melbournes oldest suburb to its largest market, she goes to the footy and to the comedy festival, she talks publishing and learns how to use a letterpress. Along the way she journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she grew up in, and tells stories from its history: the theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William Barak's trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge Disaster, the high drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL grand finals and the Market Murders of the sixties. She strolls by Melbourne's rivers and creeks while considering the history of the wetlands and river that sit at Melbourne's heart. She clambers through the drains that lie beneath. For it is water the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, the lack of it that defines Melbourne's history, its present and its future.

About the author

Sophie Cunningham is an author who won the ninth Australian Book Review Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. Her essay was entitled, Staying with the Trouble. It is about the epic walk up Broadway in New York. The Calibre Prize is worth $5000 and is intended to `encourage brilliant new essays and to foster new insights into Australian culture and society. Cunningham's winning essay is published in the April 2015 edition of ABR. she also made the shortlist for the 2015 Chief Minister's Northern Territory History Book Award with her title Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy. This same title made the shortlist for the Nita B Kibble Literary Award 2015 and the Waverly Library Award 2015 shortlist.