Abstract
The Victoria Room is a time capsule at the heart of old empire.’ It is situated in the town hall of Melbourne—named in 1837 for the British monarch of the day—in the state of Victoria.2 The corner stone of the Melbourne town hall was laid by Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1867. Shoulder to shoulder with his fellow loyal Melburnians, journalist and author Marcus Clarke had “bunting on the brain” as he cheered and shouted, baked on veranda tops, was deafened by brass bands, and had his toes trodden on during the duke’s visit, which was the first by British royalty to Australian shores.3 Here Melbourne’s municipal authority was ensconced, at the heart of civic power, at the height of an imperial age. Once the office of the deputy town clerk, the Victoria Room’s polished cedar bookcases climb giddily up to fanlight level on the east and south walls. Carved consoles supporting a continuous timber cornice separate the cases into sections, the shelves bowing under the weight of the corporation’s former professional library.4 For a hundred years after E. G. FitzGibbon commenced his thirty-five-year reign as town clerk of the city christened “Marvellous Melbourne” by George Augustus Sala, the walls of the Victoria Room and its adjacent corridors and offices echoed to the command of only four town clerks, those “chief instruments of local power.”5
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Notes
This chapter revises and expands arguments published in “‘I cittadini stanno iniziando a lamentarsi.’ Saperi municipali e contrattazioni intorno ai comportamenti pubblici molesti a Melbourne,” in La regola e la trasgressione, ed. Denis Bocquet and Filipo de Pieri, special issue of Storia Urbana 28, no. 108 (2005): 53–66, itself developing ideas first mooted in my Melbourne Street Life (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1998).
E. G. FitzGibbon (1856–1891); John Clayton (1891–1915); Torrington George Ellery (1915–1923); William Valentine McCall (1923–1936); Harold Samuel Wootton (1936–1955); on the role of the town clerk, see David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis: Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City, Melbourne 1850–1891 (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1984), 93–120.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams, 1963).
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001).
See, for example, Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche, eds., (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005).
Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996); Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development (London: Routledge, 1976); King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990).
Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, eds., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988);
David Goodman, ed., The European Cities and Technology Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), Part 3.
David Hamer, New Towns in the New World: Images and Perceptions of the Nineteenth-Century Urban Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Driver and Gilbert, Imperial Cities, 3.
Cited in ibid., 4.
Albert Shaw, Municipal Government in Great Britain (New York: Centenary Book Company, 1895), 11.
On systems of municipal government, see John H. Warren, Municipal Administration (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1954; first published 1948); I. M. Barlow, Metropolitan Government (London: Routledge, 1991), chap. 5 on Melbourne. On municipal systems in Melbourne see Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis; H. E. Maiden, The History of Local Government in New South Wales (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1966).
Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983); James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets 1830–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993).
For a pertinent case-study in municipalization, see William B. Cohen, Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s, 1998), chap. 10.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), chap. 6.
Municipal, state, and federal administrations comprise the tiers of government in Australia. For an overview of municipal government in Melbourne, see David Dunstan, “Municipal Government” in The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, ed. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 493–95; Bernard Barrett, The Civic Frontier: The Origin of Local Communities and Local Government in Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979).
Tom Stannage, “Bold, William Ernest (1873–1953),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 7:335–36.
Peter Morton, After Light: A History of the City of Adelaide and its Council, 1878–1928 (Kent Town, Australia: Wakefield, 1996), 253.
See two of the contributions to Michèle Dagenais, Irene Mayer, and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City: New Historic Approaches (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003): Emmanuel Bellanger, “Town Clerks in the Paris Region: The Design of a Professional Identity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 103–23; and Irene Mayer, “A (North) British End-View: The Comparative Experience of Municipal Employees and Services in Glasgow (1800–1950),” 177–99.
A sample of the books includes: Charles Slagg, Sanitary Works in the Smaller Towns and in Villages (London: Crosby Lockwood and Company, 1876); Edmund W. Garrett, The Law of Nuisances (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1897); William H. Maxwell, The Removal and Disposal of Town Refuse (London: Sanitary Publishing, 1898); W. C. Popplewell, The Prevention of Smoke (London: Scott, Greenwood & Company, 1901); Albert E. Leach, Food Inspection and Analysis (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1905); William Mayo Venable, Garbage Cremation in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1906); George A. Soper, Modern Methods of Street Cleansing (New York: Engineering News Publishing, 1909); Hollis Godrey, The Health of the City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910); Charles Baskerville, Municipal Chemistry (New York: McGraw Hill 1911); Henry S. Curtis, The Play Movement and Its Significance (New York: Macmillan, 1917); Howard Lee McBain, American City Progress and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918).
Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Taking Up the Bet on Connections: A Municipal Contribution,” in Municipal Connections: Cooperation, Links and Transfers among European Cities in the 20th Century, ed. Pierre-Yves Saunier, Special Issue of Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (2002): 517.
Andrew Brown-May and Simon Cooke, “Death, Decency and the Dead-House: The City Morgue in Colonial Melbourne,” Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria 3 (2004), http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/provenance/no3/DeathDecencyDeadHouse1.asp.
Robert Freestone, “City Planning,” in Brown-May and Swain, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, 139–42.
Christopher Hamlin, “Environmental Sensibility in Edinburgh, 1839–40: The ‘Fetid Irrigation’ Controversy,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (1994): 311–39.
In Melbourne Street Life, I observed a developing corpus of regulation governing public behavior and the social use of the streets of an Australian city. Other explorations of the street as a social space, similarly inward looking—such as James Winter’s London’s Teeming Streets, or Peter C. Baldwin’s Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999)—while giving varying inflection to diverse reform agendas, or constructing differing narratives of continuity or decline, provide an important critical and empirical framework to pursue more global understandings of the city-making process.
Collingwood Mercury, June 29, 1878, quoted in Chris McConville, “From ‘Criminal Class’ to ‘Underworld,’” in The Outcasts of Melbourne, ed. Graeme Davison, David Dunstan, and Chris McConville (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 72.
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: The Development of Manners; Changes in the Code of Conduct and Feeling in Early Modern Times, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 156–60. See also Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; first published in French, 1982).
Elmer B. Borland, “Municipal Regulation of the Spitting Habit,” Journal of the American Medical Association (October 20, 1900): 999–1001. See also New York Times, January 19, May 13, and June 15, 1896.
On accidents in the urban context see Bill Luckin, “Accidents, Disasters and Cities,” Urban History 20, no. 2 (1993): 177–90.
Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: St. Martin’s, 1968).
Kenneth T. Jackson, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of New York City, as quoted in the New Yorker, July 25, 1994.
Ann Curthoys, “Does Australian History Have a Future?” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 118 (2002): 140–52.
Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver, “Historical Anthropology through Local-Level Research,” in Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Don Kalb and Herman Tak (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 152–67.
Graeme Davison, “The European city in Australia,” Urban History 27, no. 6 (2001): 791.
Simon J. Potter, ed., Imperial Communication: Australia, Britain, and the British Empire c.1830–50 (London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2005).
Lindsay Proudfoot and Michael Roche, “Introduction: Place, Network, and the Geographies of Empire,” in Proudfoot and Roche, (Dis)Placing Empire, 3.
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© 2008 Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen
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Brown-May, A. (2008). In the Precincts of the Global City. In: Saunier, PY., Ewen, S. (eds) Another Global City. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613812_2
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