Shutter City
Product details
- ISBN 9780522881776
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Melbourne University Press
- Publication City/Country: AU
- Product Form: Paperback
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Suppose that you could travel back in time to a Melbourne city street from 150 years ago or even longer. What might meet your eye that has eluded history's gaze?
Shutter City presents city street views spanning the hurly-burly decades of the 1850s to 1870s, between the gold rushes and Marvellous Melbourne. Robyn Annear peers into every shadowy corner to reveal postcard streetscapes as miraculous time-capsules, packed with hidden-in-plain-sight historical detail. Her discoveries - she calls them 'sparks' - illuminate and decode each of Shutter City's street views.
Among the sightings: barbers' poles, drinking fountains, the three gilded balls of a pawnbroker's sign, gleaming white cups at a coffee stall, street-vendors' carts, neighbourhood dogs (and a cat), assorted ghosts, and ladders - lots of ladders.
Let Shutter City be your time-machine and Robyn Annear your guide: her lively and insightful commentary weaves the street views and their 'sparks' into a vivid narrative of a near-forgotten Melbourne and the photographers who captured it.
