Without a town square, which was a normal feature of a town at that point in time,” Annear said. “A generally accepted thing – it’s somewhat disputed – is that Melbourne was deliberately designed without a meeting place. The two most relevant to this quest: Adrift in Melbourne: Seven Walks with Robyn Annear, and Bearbrass: Imagining early Melbourne.īearbrass was one of the names early settlers had for Melbourne, speculated to be a gross misinterpretation of Birrarung, meaning “river of mists” in Woiwurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri people, the owners of the land on which I am currently writing, wondering how the fuck they got “Bearbrass” from “Birrarung”.

I reached out to Robyn Annear, an Australian author and historian, who has drawn on her hometown of Melbourne as inspiration for several books. After being ignored by the Reddit commenter, knocked back by the State Library, and batted away by a prominent historian who was “reluctant to give air to silly rumours”, I was questioning whether my efforts would be for shit.Īll I knew was that this was the single most important topic I needed to be reporting on. It was difficult to get Melbourne’s eminent historians to entertain this particular investigation. There wasn’t a trace of this rumour on the internet, and by that I mean, not on the first nor the second page of Google results.

Perhaps it did and has since been removed. Were occultists involved in Melbourne’s early design, and did the tram terminus locations spell out a sprawling pentagram across the city?įirst, no such article, as referenced by the Redditor, exists.

Bearbrass by Robyn Annear