As I entered the street, I heard noises that sounded vaguely industrial, but it soon became clear that the hammering was coming from the construction of some units. Could it be that the street was now residential? Not entirely: the factory, or part of it, had, against the odds, survived the gentrification of this highly desirable corner of Melbourne. Still, there was something amiss. I could not see any workers. The factory was clearly still doing business, but I didn’t spot a single human being during my stroll. The eerie quiet was a far cry from the bustle of the 1970s.

Seamus O’Hanlon’s City Life: The new urban Australia helps place this trip down memory lane in perspective. When commentators – frequently journalists – have turned to the economic renovation of modern Australia since the 1970s, their triumphalist narratives are invariably models of abstraction, far removed from the impact of change on any actual people and places. They have little interest in those affected by the reforms they celebrate, politely averting their gaze from the post-industrial wastelands.

The world of neoliberal economic reform has brought cheaper cars, cheaper clothes, and cheaper holidays. It has gifted us nice restaurants, bars, and gyms, as well as opening hours convenient to those who patronise them. The better-off can hire cheap labour to clean their loos and mind their children, the latter subsidised by governments otherwise impatient with spongers. Urban renewal has revitalised the inner city, creating ‘lifestyle’ benefits for anyone with the money to pay for them. Who would want a noisy Rosella factory if you can have in its place an art gallery, a café, or a studio apartment?

Of course, that same transformation has also created outer suburbs that, in parts, still bear more than a passing resemblance to Berlin in 1945. In 2016, O’Hanlon reports, the Melbourne state electorate of Broadmeadows – once a major industrial centre and the site of the Ford car plant – had just 53.5 per cent of its population of fifteen to sixty-four-year-olds in the labour force. Only half of these were working full-time. The land that invented the Freddo Frog – created in 1930 by the Melbourne firm MacRobertson’s, I learn from O’Hanlon – no longer makes motor cars and has largely abandoned the mass production of anything much except university graduates.

O’Hanlon is understandably ambivalent about these changes. He tells us at the end of the book that some years ago he came to accept that there was no future for Australians in producing goods that could be made more cheaply overseas and imported. He clearly loves Australian cities, celebrates the ethnic diversity of the largest of them (while noting that much of Australia remains very white and even Anglo-Celtic), and admires the ingenuity that has gone into the making of the post-Fordist urban order. Abandoned factories and offices have become apartments, unwanted industrial land has been taken over by expanding universities, and the shabby and decaying inner cities of the 1970s have been turned into sparkling residential, entertainment, and educational precincts.

Yet there are reasons to hesitate. As O’Hanlon argues, there is a sameness about many of the developments that have emerged from urban renewal. Waterfront projects such as Darling Harbour in Sydney and Southbank in Melbourne could just as easily have been in London, Baltimore, or Shanghai. City high streets now increasingly resemble each other. When developers, real estate agents, and politicians – they can be hard to tell apart – bang on about ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘diversity’, and ‘lifestyle’, they are really using euphemisms ‘for wealthy, educated, highly cultured, and internationally focussed, but also often young, female, hedonistic, and, in some neighbourhoods, gay’. It is all very inclusive, so long as you have the money to buy inclusion. And there is the irony that the very circumstances that draw the young and creative to inner-city areas soon pass as the wealthy professionals move in, pushing up the price of housing.

An undated historical image of Melbourne, the clock tower and spires over looking the market (photo via the State Library of Victoria)

In Australia, there are other reasons to worry. Urban revitalisation is being driven by speculative investment encouraged by government policy. This includes sale to overseas investors – usually Asian – of large city apartments that in due course will become run down and in need of repair and renovation. How will the government face the problem of ensuring that absentees cough up? And isn’t there a danger that, at some point, the bubble will burst?

O’Hanlon is an astute commentator on the paradoxes that the new urban Australia is throwing up. He has a dry wit that enlivens an account that sometimes threatens to become bogged down in its large array of facts – especially figures. And he is good at showing how the various economic, policy, social, and cultural pieces fit together. Yet, his account is somewhat limited in its geographical focus. Sydney and Melbourne dominate, as they dominate the Australian urban scene, but he misses some opportunities. Brisbane is barely mentioned, and so Expo 88 and South Bank are overlooked. The Saints fans will be cranky at his ignoring Brisbane’s contribution to the Australian punk scene, which he presents as a Melbourne show. The revitalisation of Fremantle – partly stimulated by the America’s Cup defence of 1986–87 – is not discussed, nor do Canberra, Wollongong, or Newcastle have any role in his story.

Sydney Harbour Bridge and the city from the north, 31 August 1937 (photo via the Royal Australian Historical Society/Wikimedia Commons)

One of O’Hanlon’s findings is that while Melbourne is growing faster than Sydney, it is some way behind in terms of its status as a world city and centre for finance, media, and much else that is shiny, glamorous, and lucrative. As recognised by many historians, this tale of these two cities – and their touchy relationship – has been central to Australian history for 170 years now. In the period immediately ahead, we seem destined to encounter yet another fascinating chapter.

O’Hanlon ends on a somewhat pessimistic note. Has Australia, by investing in much-needed infrastructure, wasted the opportunities offered by the China boom to create truly great cities? Why do we need to sit forever in traffic, or catch two trains and a bus to get to work? And can we really build a prosperous country by selling each other, as he puts it, ‘coffee, food and massages’? Like so much else that has gone wrong in this country over the last quarter of a century, the chance to reinvent the Australian city for a globalised world has probably been wasted by a political class lacking in vision, competence, and courage.