The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne

I originally read your book The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne as a reaction against the earlier book, Michael Cannon's The Landboomers. What I was really trying to do was not so much a rebuttal as a kind of corrective. You're more looking at the sort of popular up swelling and the desire to be a part of a new suburban way of life. Unless you factor in those things, you can't understand why people were engaging in what in hindsight was perhaps looked like irrational or imprudent behaviour. It's no wonder people fell for it, why they wanted it.