The Aroma of the Past: In Antipodean London

Abstract

Representations of London in Australia have been mediated for so long by books, newspapers, magazines and, eventually, by film and television, that new arrivals tended to read it as a dictionary of quotations. It has been well said that, above all other cities, London is not just “a place ” it also “takes place ” as it is defined and redefined in the countless versions of it over 800 years or more. And the bounds between the physical city and its imaginative reworkings, between presence and association, are indefinite and permeable.³ Nowhere was this more true than in the Australia of this era. From most childhoods there persisted into the adult consciousness the echoes of nursery rhymes and songs, the words of playground games, and the half-remembered phrases of primary-school teachers expatiating on the England of colorful history and legend. All educated young people consumed the classic Victorian novelists, Dickens and Eliot, Thackeray and Trollope, and these masters ’ visions of the capital became part of their mental furniture.

I don ’t know how or why it should be so, but indeed, with only rare exceptions, the great public of our land up north insists on the presence amongst them, at the beginning, of those to whom its favour is to be extended…Yes, Mr Kestrel, London is the place for you; great, lonely, unique London, splendid and infamous, the beloved granary of all the world, that is the place where you shall win recognition for your children, born and unborn.

Alec Dawson (1900)¹

Arabs, when they make coffee, leave the old grounds in the pot, so that the aroma of past brews enriches the new one. I think it is this aroma of the past which catches Australians who come to Europe.

Martin Boyd (1961)²