Melba: an Australian city
Melbourne is a city and Melba was a singer; it could be said that Dame Nellie was the Bradman of Australia’s music until that other dame, Joan Sutherland, came along. Melba will never be forgotten in the city of her origins, nor did she intend it to forget her. When it was made clear that she needed a stage name, she adapted the name of the place where her voice first broke into song. Australians, not noted for being a musical people, followed her fortunes from afar, feeling that she represented them, as she was often quite proud to do. It cannot be forgotten, however, that she could never have reached her heights in the mundane place whose name she borrowed. She had to win her glory elsewhere, and bring a little home. The essays in this volume begin by considering the singer’s career, then assess her city in terms of the rejection that she had to make. How far has it come, how much has it changed, since she left and came back? Would a modern Melba have to leave? In the ebbs and flows of change and continuity, how much of the singer’s Melbourne has been swept away, and how much of it remains? How good is it, and how distinctive are its ways? Do the very qualities that distinguish it also hold it back? These essays, making no claim to be the last word on anything, are a contribution to a city’s life and thought – two things that cannot avoid going together.
Written by Chester Eagle
Designed by Vane Lindesay
Layout by Chris Giacomi
First published 2004 by Trojan Press
200 copies printed
Circa 54,600 words
Electronic publication by Trojan Press (2006)
The writing of this book:
Most of what I want to say about the writing of this book is in the introduction, ‘Boston airport, 1994’, but I ran into another problem as I began to write. The question was a double one: what would I choose to talk about, and what style or approach would I use?
There must, I thought, be things about any city that don’t go out of date quickly; I was certain that I didn’t want to produce an account of my city that could easily be invalidated by some change made almost overnight. For example, it seemed to me that I could, if I wished, talk about the layout of the city’s rail lines, but not about its ticketing system, which has changed many times over the years. I could talk about the city’s passion for Australian Rules football, but not the rules of the game or the players’ uniforms, both of which are changed regularly (far too often, in my opinion). This was easily decided, but still left me searching for a central theme, and this is when I chose Melba as my starting point, because she had chosen Melbourne as hers.
Nellie Armstrong née Mitchell could not have become Melba in Melbourne, yet she took its name. Just as she had gone in search of fame, success and greatness under the city’s name because the city of her day could not have given her what she wanted (beyond the adulation she got when she came home), so the city, I felt, was in a long, almost endless, search itself. As a writer I am inclined to judge a city by its cultural level, and Melbourne, I feel, is still searching, growing, developing … It’s not doing too badly but it’s not the confident centre it might be, largely because Australians simply aren’t that sure of themselves, and also because confidence is dangerous in a way that Australians instinctively avoid. Australians are too aware of flood, fire and drought to think that life offers any easy rewards, so that success is regarded very warily in this country, as I think it should be. Big fortunes are easily lost!
So my themes are underlying ones: the transformation from a class-ridden society, English-style, to an affluent city, taking wealth for granted and ignoring those who haven’t got it. It is also, as I say in the third essay, a withdrawn, shut-the-front-door society that loves, paradoxically, to get out! It’s obsessed with football, it’s a city that reflects, expresses and relies on the countryside (Australia Felix) that it sits in, and it poses certain problems – all cities do – for those who choose to write about it. (I take up some of these problems in the essay ‘The waves, the sea’.)
Finally of course it has a consciousness of itself, largely though by no means entirely formed by its artists and writers, and this consciousness is helped in its formation by those large gatherings described in ‘City of crowds’. Lastly, I would like to say that just as Australia is a land of migrants, so Melbourne too is a city of those who’ve either chosen to live here/there, or have, perhaps, drifted to where they are. I say this because the business of writing about Melbourne has made me very aware that there is a New South Welshman in me, not very far below the surface. To stand on the bank of the Murray River at, let us say, Swan Hill, and look at the country on the other side is, for me, to be filled with a powerful yearning for the land I think is ‘really’ mine. Our childhood, and mine was in New South Wales, is something that will not be denied. The Eagle family, though, lived in parts of New South Wales which were closer to Melbourne than to Sydney, so that when our daily papers arrived, or we were sent away to school, it was to Victoria that we turned our eyes. Many years ago I travelled to southern New South Wales with my friend the photographer George (Geo. W.) Bell, and he said at the end of the first day of travel that for him the most important feature of the day had been the loss of the feeling that we were in the grip of Melbourne. We weren’t yet in the grip of Sydney, he said, but we were almost out of reach of Melbourne. This idea that a city is an atmosphere, an influence, that may go far beyond its city limits is something that was at the heart of my choice of subject matter for these essays.