Melbourne and Mars was first published in Australia in 1889. The author, Joseph Fraser, was born in England and came to Melbourne, via New Zealand, in 1885. “Marvellous Melbourne,” as it was then known, was one of the world's richest and fastest-growing cities, its wealth coming from rich gold deposits. As well as having Australia's wealthiest citizens, however, it also had Australia's worst slums
This 2020 reprint is introduced and edited by Alexandra Roginsky and Zachary Kendall, of Deakin University. Except for correcting a few spelling errors, they retain the original text.
Joseph Fraser was a phrenologist as well as an avid orator and writer.1 He never prospered and, when writing this book, was dying from consumption. Melbourne and Mars includes numerous semi-biographical insights into Fraser's tough life of Melbourne as well as his imagined delights of Martian life. As the editors write about Fraser, this “novel leaves an...
