Book Review: Old North Melbourne by Fiona Gatt
- James Lesh
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Old North Melbourne, by Fiona Gatt, Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2025, 246 pp., colour illus., $44.00 AUD (paperback), ISBN 978-1-923267-20-6.
Fiona Gatt's Old North Melbourne firmly belongs to the Melbourne School of Urban History. In this work, Gatt joins a significant tradition of local histories that have shaped our understanding of the city, sitting alongside Weston Bate's A History of Brighton (1962), Geoffrey Blainey's A History of Camberwell (1964), Bernard Barrett's The Inner Suburbs: The Evolution of an Industrial Area (Fitzroy and Collingwood) (1971), Janet McCalman's Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900-1965 (1984), John Lack's A History of Footscray (1991), and Andrew May's Melbourne Street Life (1998/2017).
What makes the Melbourne School distinct is a commitment to deep empiricism paired with rigorous analysis, enabled by some of the world's most extensive nineteenth-century archives. Gatt relies on this archival wealth to map Old North Melbourne from its 1852 land sales to its reabsorption into the City of Melbourne in 1905. Drawing from colonial newspapers like the North Melbourne Advertiser and The Age, alongside municipal minutes, rate books, and probate files, she looks past the surface of the suburb.
Mapping the Colonial Urban Frontier
It is a people's history that moves from the grand civic architecture of the Town Hall to the lived experiences of residents like businessman Samuel Grey King and the notorious Valentine Keating. The book is structured chronologically, mapping the evolution of the district across five decades of the nineteenth century.
It begins with the colonial urban frontier between 1852 and 1861, examining Indigenous urban history and then exploring the settler-colonial imperative for housing and municipal governance in Hotham, as the area was known between 1859 and 1887. The middle sections focus on the 1860s and 1870s, tracing the transition to a borough of working-class families and the consolidation of formal institutions, and the rise of a commercial and civic elite.
Social Identity and Industrial Realities
Later chapters address the fault lines of the 1880s and the manufacturing turn of the 1890s, concluding with the 1905 reabsorption of the municipality into the City of Melbourne and the symbolic end of an old identity. Throughout this timeline, Gatt uses specific case studies and data—such as occupational groups, home ownership percentages, and population density—to illustrate the shifting social and physical landscape.
The narrative highlights a persistent tension between Hotham's egalitarian hope of working-class home ownership and the realities of a densely packed industrial landscape. Gatt explores how this community was shaped by unique local factors, including a high percentage of Irish Catholic residents and unskilled labourers, which solidified class distinctions visible in the built environment. She illustrates how a stable identity was forged in Hotham through local shopkeeping, sporting clubs, and religious institutions, creating a sense of shared affiliation despite these divisions.
Recovering the Nineteenth-Century Community
The book is a labour of love that grew out of Gatt's PhD research. In the preface, she traces her own family's connection to the suburb back to 1862, when her great-great-grandparents, Elizabeth and Lawrence Simpson, arrived from the goldfields to set up a tailoring business. She notes her family members later distanced themselves from this history, likely influenced by North Melbourne's mid-twentieth-century reputation for slum enclaves and social degradation.
By turning her thesis into this book, Gatt heals the reputational wounds left by these later stigmas to recover the complex, ambitious community that defined the area in the nineteenth century. Australian Scholarly Publishing should be commended for producing these kinds of books and making them widely available. While it would be brilliant if the economics of independent publishing allowed the wonderful photographs to be printed in colour on higher-quality paper, having 39 greyscale figures and maps is invaluable for visualising the old suburb.
The Importance of Historical Rigour
The chapters are tight and short, making the dense microhistory of the volume digestible. Ultimately, Gatt dissolves the artificial distinction between academic and public history. Her book proves that quality historical scholarship rises above trends and fads.
This study is a quiet reminder that producing historical knowledge requires rigour, tenacity, and a willingness to do the hard work across diverse source bases, rather than relying solely on generative AI prompts and limited digitised sources to create quick and hollow narratives. Gatt's work inspires us to walk the streets, review a rate book, dive into municipal minutes, and trace a biography to produce urban and public histories that will remain relevant for generations.
Heritage Workshop is committed to the "Next-Generation Conservation" of our urban environments. We believe that deep historical insight, such as that demonstrated in Fiona Gatt’s research, is essential for creating meaningful and sustainable places for the future.
To learn more about how our expert collaborative advisory can unlock value for your heritage project, please contact Dr James Lesh and the team today.
This article is adapted from Dr James Lesh's book review for Pharos, April–May 2026, the Journal of the Professional Historians Association (Victoria and Tasmania).
