A decade of assessment : being a study in the intellectual life of the city of Melbourne between 1876 and 1886

Abstract

This thesis deals with six main fields of colonial thought: religious, educational, political, literary, artistic and scientific. These fields are separately discussed, but are arranged so that the discussion converges upon a central chapter, which is a description of the city of Melbourne in about 1881. This chapter describes a seventh kind of thinking fundamental to the flanking chapters, and provides a focus for, and summary of, the efforts discussed in those chapters. By dispensing with the usual introduction and conclusion, and adopting a concentric structure, the writer has wished to emphasize two things. The first is the importance of the situation, which focused the attention of the thoughtful minority here discussed (a remark meant to indicate the direction of their thinking rather than its bases or content). The second is that this rather arbitrarily selected decade admits no real conclusions, and was not chosen out of any interest in its doing so.