Jo Case interviews Sophie Cunningham, author of the latest in the Cities series - Melbourne, which tells the story of Melbourne over the course of four seasons and tours the city's streets, wetlands, extreme weather, AFL madness as well as the literary, culinary and cultural landscapes of a city best discovered from the inside out.

You write about walking Melbourne at night, capturing glimpses of people living their lives ‘through half-open terrace doors and windows’. This book, where you interweave the public history of Melbourne with your own private experiences, encounters and memories, has a similar feel – of experiencing the city (at least partly) through glimpsed lives. What made you decide on this approach?

I am very interested in the way that personal experiences of a place affects your more public experience of it – by which I mean, the places you live are as much constructed out of memories and experience as they are bricks and mortar. I wanted to capture that. As well, the decision to frame it through my own experience was my way of trying to manage the fact the book needed to be around 50,000 words. This meant, inevitably, that I was having to make fairly aggressive choices about what to include and what to exclude. Going with the approach of writing ‘my’ Melbourne allowed me to make that approach more transparent. It also created a narrative (I hope) around the ideas and themes I wanted to explore.

There were so many surprises for me in reading this book – that a waterfall once fell where Queen Street in the city meets the river; that much of the Queen Vic markets are built on what was Melbourne’s first formal cemetery, and bodies were exhumed to accommodate an expansion; that Dimmeys on Swan Street, Richmond, was Melbourne’s first department store. What were some of your favourite surprises in researching the book?

I think the biggest – maybe not favourite! – surprise was that Queen Victoria markets are built on a cemetery (that’s from Jeff and Jill Sparrow’s Radical Melbourne). I was also pretty amazed by some of the recent history of the gang wars in Melbourne – the way they seemed to touch upon so many aspects of Melbourne society (though a lot of that didn’t make it into the book). I also was really fascinated by the history of the Yarra (thanks to Kristin Otto’s book, Yarra) and, as I suppose become obvious, with the fact that much of Melbourne use to be wetlands. I wanted to think about how that watery history still affects the landscape. As well as new discoveries there were old stories I rediscovered and fell in love with all over again –the fact that Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ was nicked from the National Gallery by art activists being a case in point. It speaks volumes about the kind of place Melbourne is.

‘Weeping Woman’ was stolen from the NGV in 1986, but later found and returned.

You write that Melbourne is a city of ‘inside places and conversation ... a city that lives in its head’. Do you think this has played a part in creating the rich cultural scene – theatre, film, art, music and publishing – that you chart in the book?

Absolutely. Things that can be frustrating about Melbourne – a certain closed-in and claustrophobic feel – have, in fact, resulted in what makes the place special. The old two-sides-of-the-same-coin business. The kind of cultural discussions I tried to map out when I was editing Meanjin also make their way into the book and I quote from essays I published during my three years there – that adds to its conversational quality, I think.

This book is part of what is shaping up to be an iconic series of books on Australia’s major cities, alongside Delia Falconer’s Sydney, Matthew Condon’s Brisbane, and others. What was it like to be asked to become a part of this series? And was there any pressure involved being the writer representing Melbourne?

I was really delighted to be asked to be a part of the series – but I don’t think it was clear then that it would take off to the extent it has. Though Phillipa McGuiness, the publisher, has made such wonderful choices in terms of writers maybe it was obvious all along! Peter Timm’s Hobart had been printed and I had a chance to see how beautiful the series was going to look, but it hadn’t actually been published when Phillipa McGuiness first approached me. And not many of the other authors were in place. I overran my deadline, I’m afraid to say, which is why Melbourne is coming out later than some of the books that were commissioned after it. I was pretty unrealistic about the possibility of writing a book while I was editing Meanjin.

Was there any pressure involved in representing Melbourne? OMG YES. To get back to your first question – that pressure is one of the reasons why I was careful to write the book as ‘a’ version of Melbourne. Not as ‘the’ MELBOURNE. We all live in different versions of the city to some extent. I’m still stressing about things that have been left out that I would have loved to include. The list of what is interesting about our city is a very, very long one indeed and inevitably I’m not – and never will be – convinced I’ve made all the right choices.

Your passion for Australian Rules football – one shared by most Victorians – comes through clearly in this book. What is it that you love so much about it?

God, I don’t think I can answer that question briefly. We cut about 10,000 words of AFL from the book and there’s still heaps there, as you say. At first I loved the theatre of the game. There’s nothing like arriving at the MCG when it’s close to full and hearing the roar of the crowd, seeing the vivid green of the grass, and the players running onto the ground. I also enjoyed the way footy injected a kind of personality into the city – I’m thinking of radio like the Couldabeens here – that general approach to commentary that can also be applied to politics and other things. Then, as I watched the game more over the years, I came to appreciate the incredible skill involved in playing it. And I was lucky enough to publish great footy writers, like Martin Flanagan, which fanned the flames. I’m also lucky (forgive me for being partisan here) because barracking for Geelong has meant the last 20 years have had incredible lows and highs. The drama of it becomes very compelling. Finally, there is something about watching a team play – the way they can work with or against each other, which I find fabulously interesting –a metaphor for life, you could say. Players like Geelong’s Matthew Scarlett fascinate me. He hardly ever kicks a goal but he’s essential to the functioning of the team.

Melbourne’s culinary history is an intrinsic thread in the book, from the fact that many of the chefs who came to Melbourne to cater for the Olympic Games in 1956 stayed, to the influence of our licensing laws on nurturing our thriving bar scene and the early role of places like the Italian Waiters Club in Meyers Place, which served illegal booze in surreptitious coffee mugs after 6pm until those laws changed. What are some of the Melbourne culinary institutions that mean the most to you, and why?

I’m very biased to north of the river, and tend to mix it up between being faddish about new places and having old favourites. I’ve lived near the Standard Hotel in Fitzroy for most of my life – that feels a bit like an extension of my living room, if a somewhat crowded one. I often eat at places like Tiamo’s and the University Cafe in Lygon Street. I love the Cellar Bar in Bourke Street – the one to the side of Florentinos. I’ve been going to all those places since I was a kid. My parents used to go there when they were teenagers – and were equally struck with them back then.

Mario’s in Brunswick Street sustained me for many years and I spent much of my twenties there, as well as being served – napkins and all – by the waiters there when I worked at the Brunswick Street bookstore on a Sunday night in recent years. It was the kind of place I always knew I would see friends. More recently I’ve started going to Newtown in Brunswick Street, which is small and has lovely owners (both the former owner and the new ones). I still love Brunswick Street’s Sila. That has the oldest (in situ) espresso machine in Melbourne. My latest passion is the Columbian cafe, Senido, in Gertrude Street. That’s a real newcomer. If I’m feeling rich, and like a piece of new Melbourne, I get myself to an Andrew McConnell restaurant.

The weather – water and the lack of it, fire, and extremes of heat and cold – is central to this book, from its opening during the searing temperatures of Black Saturday 2009, to its closing during the wet summer of 2010. In fact, you call Melbourne’s weather the city’s ‘nemesis’. Did you always know how central weather would be to the book, or did it creep in as a theme as you wrote?

The first decision I made about the book was to structure it around the seasons. The joke about Melbourne used to be that it always rained but when I began the book it had barely rained for years. I wanted to play with that idea – the difference between the cliché about Melbourne and the truth of that decade of drought. As well, I feel very strongly about the whole climate change debate. The drought and the heat of that summer of 2009 really bought home questions around the fact that Melbourne is (all cities are) going to experience more and more extreme weather. Where does that leave us? What does that mean? I committed to the project (in my head, I mean!) on Black Saturday – the day that it was 47 degrees and the bush fires exploded. I felt a pressing need to write about what was a very traumatic time for Melbourne and Victoria.

‘Melbourne’s a city you get to know from the inside out – you have to walk it to love it.’ What are some of your favourite Melbourne walks?

There are a couple of formal walks I like to do: around Albert Park Lake, along Merri Creek. I walk around Carlton Gardens most days. In general I love walking anywhere and everywhere, but preferably the back way – that is, through lanes and side streets. A few weeks ago I walked from Fitzroy to St Kilda for dinner and I could tell from the look on my hosts’ faces that my habit was becoming somewhat pathological. They got me a bit drunk to make sure I didn’t try and walk home. I’ve been doing a lot of walking around the lanes of the CBD lately and really enjoying that.

You write a lot about Melbourne’s literary scene, offering an intriguing insider’s view, from your early days at McPhee Gribble to your recent editorship of Meanjin. If a newcomer to Melbourne asked you to recommend some writers or books to give them a flavour of the city, who would you suggest?

I quote a lot of the Melbourne writers I enjoy in the book actually. Writers – both fiction and non-fiction – that have a way of making you feel the city: Helen Garner, Shane Maloney, Robyn Annear, Peter Temple, David Nichols, Kristin Otto, Gary Presland, Paul Kelly, Jeff and Jill Sparrow, Christos Tsiolkas. More recently, I read and enjoyed Meg Mundell’s Black Glass, which is set in a Melbourne of the future. I’d also commend the series of little books on Melbourne being published by Arcade – all on Melbourne’s history. I particularly loved Jenny Lee’s book on early Melbourne, and Seamus O’Hanlon’s book on Melbourne since the 1970s.

Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne is out now in hardback for $29.95 and ebook for $14.44.

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