Cabbage patch capers.(150 Years of Spring Street: Victorian Government 1850s to 21st Century)(Book review)

CABBAGE PATCH CAPERS 150 Years of Spring Street: Victorian Government 1850s to 21st Century, by Robert Murray; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007, $34.95.

THIS BOOK on the state government of Victoria was launched by Premier Bracks' chief of staff only a short time before Bracks' surprise exit from his position. Murray points out that in the last half-century Victoria has had stable government, with long-term premiers like Henry Bolte, John Cain jnr, Jeff Kennett and Steve Bracks. This contrasts with the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when a succession of governments based on fluctuating alliances tried to run the state.

Robert Murray has been a prominent writer in Victoria for half a century. Best know for his widely admired book The Split, he has written many other histories while working as a journalist, and is still going strong, with frequent appearances in literary supplements and journals, including this one.

Murray chances his hand by offering a series of clear, stimulating generalisations about the governance of Victoria. In this his latest book has some similarities to Geoffrey Blainey's recently reissued history of Victoria. Murray has produced a sort of primer of Victorian political history, based on wide reading but uncluttered by too much detail. For each period, after covering parliamentary events, he provides a brief summary of social statistics and significant developments, such as the founding of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works in the 1900s and the State Electricity Commission in the 1920s.

Victoria came into existence fifty years after the British foundation of New South Wales, which had a long history of rule by Governor and executive council, before its parliament was established at the same time as Victoria's. John Hirst has shown in his book The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy how this history affected the New South Wales parliament--some wanted a non-elected upper house based on the British House of Lords, even a bunyip aristocracy. In contrast, Victoria, then experiencing its massive gold rushes, had a populist atmosphere, with goldmining radicals swamping the newly established Port Phillip Gentlemen. Victoria's early parliaments had a modern democratic feel, with all members elected, a generous franchise and secret ballots. Murray explains very clearly, basing his analysis on Geoffrey Serle's researches, how in the nineteenth century parliamentary power can be seen as a struggle between conservatives, liberals and radicals, with the liberals often having control, sometimes in alliance with the less extreme radicals. Irish Catholic numbers were high, but on some issues they were conservative. It was the strong dissenting, Evangelical liberal strain which was very influential in Victoria, and still is. Geoffrey Serle was himself an example. Murray also shows how after gold the large surplus population turned to manufacturing, and then to tariffs for protection.

This book reminds one of the extraordinary rapidity of Melbourne's development, caused by Victoria's immensely rich gold discoveries. In 1836 there were no Europeans on the swamps of jika-jika and the plains of duti-galla. Only twenty years later Melbourne was building its impressive parliament house, its state library and its university, and laying out its botanical gardens on the Yarra River. These and other projects were so substantial that they gave the city a feel of permanence. When I was young I walked around Melbourne thinking it had been there, like other cities in the world, for many hundreds of years, and was amazed to find out that it began only a little over a hundred years before I was born. The long boom years of the 1860s to 1880s ...