What better defines a city than its street corners? A corner gives you a starting point, a destination and a place to turn. It’s furnished with pillar boxes, newsstands and tram stops, and lamp-posts for light and lounging. Where would you be likeliest to find a pub? At the corner, of course. And who better than Robyn Annear to usher you around the corners of Melbourne, and reveal their bizarre, baroque and mostly forgotten stories?

In this talk, Melbourne’s favourite historian will introduce you to:

• street-corner ‘galvanisers’ who offered the thrill of electric shock at threepence a time
• the rude boys of the Fitzroy back streets who became the original ‘larrikins’
• infants named for the corners on which they’d been abandoned
• civic reprobates who discarded orange peel in the streets, to the endangerment of life and limb
• and a rogues’ gallery of unruly women, incorrigible men and runaway horses

Robyn Annear’s books include Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne, Nothing but Gold: The Diggers of 1852, Nothing New: A History of Second-hand and Adrift in Melbourne. Her podcast ‘Nothing on TV’ presents stories from Trove historical newspapers. Robyn also appeared in the popular 2022 documentary, The Lost City of Melbourne.

House-keeping

You will be sent an automatic email confirmation once you book – please check your Spam or Junk Mail folder as these automatically generated emails can go astray.

We will send the Zoom log-in details 24 hours prior to the event

As at most RHSV events, we will be serving refreshments from 5:30pm to 6pm when the lecture starts