From 1962 Dunstan was also moonlighting for the Sydney-based Bulletin, which had recently been acquired by Frank Packer’s Consolidated Press and was undergoing a journalistic transformation. Editor Peter Hastings, ‘an old mate’, asked Dunstan to write a Melbourne column, and this he did, for some twenty years, using the pseudonym ‘Batman’. Now Keith Dunstan’s son David, himself a historian who has inherited his father’s love and concern for Melbourne, has brought together this selection of Batman’s articles, which sought to interpret Melbourne to the rest of Australia, though often, one suspects, this really meant Sydney. The articles are arranged thematically, beginning with a tour of the decaying picture palaces, threatened with demolition, and winding up with a salute to another Melbourne institution, Jimmy Watson’s wine saloon.

Although there is a smattering of articles from the 1970s, and one from as late as 1984 on the mystery of cricket pitches, the Melbourne being remembered here is principally of the 1960s, that strange, distant decade when it seemed that the staid certainties of pre-war Australia were (at last) being questioned or undermined. Dunstan diagnoses Melbourne as still then suffering from an historic inferiority complex, dating from the devastating bank crash and depression of the 1890s. Batman at times reflects that complex when he satirises aspects of the old Melbourne culture, particularly its wowser-ish manifestations. Only South Australia took longer to reform its liquor laws and to do away with the six o’clock swill. Dunstan has a particularly good time poking fun at Melbourne’s ‘sepulchral Sunday’, endorsing Brian Fitzpatrick’s claim that Melbourne’s Sunday was ‘a work of art’, and seeing in it ‘a tranquillity, a pure beauty about this haven of domestic calm that is unique’. He could do so in the knowledge that the wowsers were, in the 1960s, in retreat.

But the dominating tone of Batman’s reflections is one of amused and tolerant affection for his hometown. The historian in Dunstan delights in providing the historical and social context that helps make sense of the Melbourne he is describing. So, in celebrating the picture palaces – in decline with the advent of television – he takes us back to their origins and the extravagant claims made on their behalf. The souvenir programme for the opening of the State Theatre in 1929 hailed the ‘supreme beauty’ of ‘this Florentine garden of music, of picture and of song’. As for Burley Griffin’s Capitol, one is tempted to agree with Batman that the elaborately lit ceiling ‘was always better than the movie’. Dunstan was a pioneer in recognising that the extravagant architectural pastiche of the picture palaces had acquired historical significance as an expression of the popular culture of the period between the wars.

Dunstan laments the passing of much of Melbourne’s Victorian heritage: the Eastern Market, the Colonial Mutual Building (‘the most magnificent building ever to be wrecked in this country’) and a whole batch of hotels, of which the Federal (‘our most unbelievable piece of Victoriana’) was the most tragic loss. In spite of the wrecker’s assault, he can still enthuse about the charm of Collins Street, and he relishes the subtle social distinctions of Melbourne suburbia. This was a time before postcodes, when Toorak, in the manner of London, was SE2. One of his first columns in 1962 welcomes back the talented Mr Humphries, who, in the guise of Edna Everage, was already dying to try it in Highett. And, of course, he is in love with the trams, though what he makes of the contemporary models, swathed in lurid advertising, I shudder to think. Presiding over Batman’s Melbourne was the sometimes benign, often truculent, presence of Premier Henry Bolte, who is described in 1970 as being ‘beautifully unmellowed’.

Dunstan professes to believe that ‘Australians are far too interested in sport’. He exempts cricket from this censure on the grounds that it is a tribal ritual rather than a sport, and in the 1960s he was already disturbed by the pressure for ‘brighter’ cricket, which entirely missed the point of a game that was ‘the perfect soporific, the ideal tranquilliser’. On the other hand, he gained notoriety as the founder of the Anti-Football League, though sceptics might interpret this as no more than a devious form of propaganda for the Melbourne-invented code of Australian Rules.

In a collection such as this, repetitions are inevitable, though, in Batman’s articles, they can take on the character of symphonic motifs as he returns, almost obsessively, to his principal Melbourne concerns. Less acceptable are a number of typographical glitches. It is alarming, for example, to learn that the Regent Wurlizter was silent for 312 years, until one realises that perhaps 3½ was intended. Incidentally, Batman manages to shift the Regent from Collins to Bourke Street. Alas, proof-readers seem to have gone out of fashion.

Humphries describes Dunstan as having about him ‘something of the “flâneur”, without the frivolity that attaches to that epithet’. Batman’s reflections may convey for many of us a potent whiff of nostalgia, but they are also important documents of a Melbourne that was in the process of reinventing itself.