Graeme Davison explores the economic, political, social and cultural consequences of the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of the city dubbed 'Marvellous Melbourne'. In the 1880s, a generation after the gold rushes, Melbourne rose to become Australia's most populous, modern and self-consciously 'metropolitan' city. Its offices and warehouses leapt skyward, its suburbs sprawled and the tentacles of its commerce reached across...