City Dreamers begins like a sophisticated travel book but quickly reveals its true focus as well as its author’s willingness – uncharacteristic of many first-person-avoiding social science academics – to reveal the face and the personality behind the ratiocinative gaze: ‘For many years I stayed at the same little waterfront hotel, the Palisade ... It wasn’t just habit or the panoramic view that brought me back year after year ... The view I sought was not geographical but historical.’ From what became on many visits his familiar vantage point on the balcony of room fourteen of the Palisade, Davison launches his own attempt to ‘excavate the foundations of [a] long-lived prejudice’, namely that the

Australian city ... was neither authentically Australian nor fully European. For more than a century this image of the Australian city as a terra nullius of the human spirit – without songs, architecture, history – lay like an incubus on the national psyche, a drag on the efforts of planners, architects, writers and historians to forge an authentic Australian urbanism.

His process of ‘excavation’ has many stages and different depths. It is a characteristic of archaeological digs that they turn up not only what is sought and expected, but also new and surprising relics and evidence. The same is true of what Davison calls the ‘archaeology of knowledge’, ‘mental excavation’. It reveals, for example, the enigmatic Liverpudlian Stanley Jevons, who walked tirelessly around Sydney to gather material for his social survey and whose practical and intellectual research led him ‘to contemplate a new vocation – social science’. As Davison puts it, ‘“social science” was in vogue’ in the late 1850s, but Jevons, while fascinated with ‘Social Statistics or the Science of Towns’, was equally captivated by a more intimate view afforded on his long, solitary walks, which he records in his ‘Sydney by Night’ (manuscript published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1929). As Davison suggests, this affords

a poignant glimpse of the unsociable sociologist peering from the darkness of the backstreets into the bright interior of the houses ... There is a wistful note in his description of the ‘cheerful’ interiors ... of families seated convivially at tables ... the ‘murmur of their good-humoured conversation’ penetrating the walls to the eavesdropper in the street.

The poignancy, the darkness, the wistfulness irresistibly recall another Sydney wanderer, the ‘unsociable’ poet Christopher Brennan, looking ‘with regret / on the darkening homes of men and the window-gleam ...’

The watcher on the Palisade balcony brings this sort of personal and referential touch to all his categories. His ‘slummers’ take their inspiration from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor (1851) and their colonial avatars are Marcus Clarke and John Stanley James, pseudonymously ‘the Vagabond’. Davison enjoys but dismisses Clarke’s ‘lurid imagery’, but the Vagabond’s ‘A Night in The Model Lodging-House’ (1876) prefigures Orwell on the same streets some sixty years later. ‘As I became a vagabond in appearance, I began to feel a vagabond in my nature,’ James muses, while Orwell, briefly failing to recognise his tramp-self mirrored in a shop window, finds ‘My “new” clothes had put me instantly into a new world.’

A boy and his dog jump across ‘Elwood Canal’, one of more than 150 photographs collected in A Snapshot of Melbourne (The Worldwide Publishing Empire, $34.95 hb, 148 pp, 9780994569202). The photographer, Ian Kenins, has ‘long observed the people of Melbourne going about their daily rituals’

The triumph of City Dreamers is not only in the wealth, the sheer ordered abundance of information, reflection, speculation, and persuasive conclusions about Australian cities and their successes and discontents. It is also the deft portraiture by means of which Davison brings to life the characters in his urban, suburban, and to some extent Spectorskyan exurban drama. His dreamers – Jevons, John Claudius Loudon, Charles Bean, James Barrett, and Hugh Stretton among others – are the subjects of brilliantly incisive biographical sketches through which their city dreaming is threaded and contextualised. Likewise, Davison’s free-wheeling concepts – automobilism, moderns, drifters, sprawl (both the physical phenomenon and the Les Murray ‘quality’: ‘Sprawl is the quality / of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce / into a farm utility truck’), and so on – are all treated both seriously and with great good humour. Davison has a naturally engaging, effortless prose style unafraid of the vernacular (‘other writers were busy giving the nouveau riches a leg up’), and an ironic humour which occasionally shakes free of the leash (‘even loyal Melburnians had difficulty in sustaining [Melbourne’s claim to having a Mediterranean climate] on a drizzling July day with a westerly blowing down Collins street. [This illusion] survived more because its supporters sought to escape the frostiness of the city’s moral atmosphere than to adapt to its physical climate.’)

Each chapter is preceded by an italicised paragraph which sets out, like a précis, a context for, and the main details of, what is going to be dealt with in the text that follows. This looks to me like a failure to trust the reader: Davison’s lucid exposition certainly doesn’t need this social science-style arrangement any more than it needs the unsubtle signals of changing typography.

While Davison more or less concedes that City Dreamers is a tale of two cities, the emphasis on Melbourne and Sydney is understandable and is somewhat diminished not only by his attention to Canberra and the idea of national capitals, but especially by the continuing references to London and European models. Still, perhaps Don Dunstan’s Monarto vision and other city-dreaming aspects of the Dunstan decade (‘South Australia will set the pace’) might have merited a look. Nevertheless, of all the ‘dreamers’ Davison so expertly and luminously evokes, it is another South Australian, Hugh Stretton, who stands out and is treated, I think, with special affection and profound admiration, sentiments which those of us who knew Hugh would heartily endorse.

Davison’s splendid intellectual, visual, archaeological, and imaginative journey that began on the balcony of the Palisade Hotel ends in Federation Square where ‘there is something about the spirit of the place’ that speaks to him and where, like Christopher Brennan’s Wanderer, he feels the possibility of being at last ‘at home’.