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The Unsuspected Slums: Revisiting the Slums of 1930s Melbourne
Paperback
Series: Picture Poetry
ISBN13: 9781923166486
Publisher: Wild Arancini Press
Published: Feb 16 2026
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.83
Height: 0.93 Width: 8.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
the truth will cost you a shilling
just one shilling
will you come along to listen?
Living on the susso. Losing yourself to rotgut and the metho. Living cheek by jowl with neighbours, using a tin tub for bathing and washing your clothes. Confusing flea bites for measles . . .
Welcome to the inner-city Melbourne slums of the 1930s.
In The Unsuspected Slums, Frank Prem revisits Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Port Melbourne and the other slum areas of Melbourne that were later torn down and rebuilt after sustained agitation led by accountant and Methodist lay preacher F. Oswald Barnett and his colleagues.
Drawing on Barnett's original photographs, Prem reproduces and poetically interprets these stark records of daily life inside Melbourne's apparently unsuspected slum pockets scattered throughout the inner city.
In contemporary, mid-2020s Melbourne, agitation over housing has returned as a pressing social issue, with the High-Rise estates that once replaced the slums now themselves slated for demolition.
The world has changed - and yet, some things remain the same.
eight shillings and sixpence
for a house made out of packing case wood
still
it's a roof over our heads
isn't it?
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