Private and Public Memory: A History of the City of Malvern by Lynne Strahan (Second Hand Book)

SECOND HAND BOOK

Since the first settlers arrived in the area in the early 1850s, the people of Malvern have made known their feelings about their place of residence. Some comments have been boastful, praising ‘this most aristocratic of aristocratic suburbs’, and others have been acrid, decrying ‘ruin’, denouncing lack of ‘push’. A few have been simply cryptic: ‘Malvern had been known in the past as an extensive cabbage.’

Given that Malvern was part both of a new land and a burgeoning metropolis, two places have, respectively, symbolised the power of nature and the hand of man: Gardiner’s Creek with its once pristine valley and the frosted dignity of the Malvern Town Hall.

Linked to the metropolis and the nation, Malvern endured the catastrophes that gripped the larger world. The 1890sand the 1930s saw the misery of economic depression. The First World War claimed many young Malvern men who were ‘the pick of Australian manhood’. The more immediate threat signified by the Second World War created the drama of ‘mock raids’ and ‘air-raid-tests’. Malvern’s political eminence has become part of the nation’s annals, achieved largely through the arrangement of conservative forces described as ‘perfection of combinations’, and yet there has been much familial brawling at all levels of politics, particularly during the turbulent post Second World War years. Attempting to disprove the adage that ‘the whole duty of man is to be rated and taxed’, ratepayers, too, have over a century provided much strenuous activity through their obstreperous organisations.

Many of the historical and political threads have come together in the battle over the Arterial Road Link through ravaged Gardiner’s Creek Valley, which has exposed the fragility of community consensus and the insoluble tension between ‘progress’ and ‘conservation’.

Specifications:

Condition: Fair. Some staining on dust jacket, general wear and tear, slightly yellowed pages.

Publisher: Hargreen Publishing Company

Year: 1989

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 289

ISBN: 0949905410

$13.00

1 in stock