What better defines a city than its street corners? A corner gives you a starting point, a destination and a place to turn. It’s furnished with pillar boxes, newsstands and tram stops, and lamp-posts for light and lounging. Where would you be likeliest to find a pub? At the corner, of course. And who better than Robyn Annear to usher you around the corners of Melbourne, and reveal their bizarre, baroque and mostly forgotten stories?

In this (appropriately corner-shaped) book she will introduce you to:

street-corner ‘galvanisers’ who offered the thrill of electric shock at threepence a time

the rude boys of the Fitzroy back streets who became the original ‘larrikins’

infants named for the corners on which they’d been abandoned

a rogues’ gallery of unruly women, incorrigible men and runaway horses


…and, of course, the civic reprobates who discarded orange peel in the streets, to the endangerment of life and limb.