For those who don't know Melbourne very well, the suburb of South Melbourne dates from the earliest white settlement of Victoria in the mid 1800's. The area was historically known as Emerald Hill, and during the Victorian Gold Rush which began in 1851, a tent city known as Canvas Town was established. The area soon became a massive slum, home to tens of thousands of migrants from around the world all looking to eventually find their way to the goldfields.

South Melbourne became a working class suburb, filled with small terrace houses built in the Victorian era, between 1860 and the turn of the 20th century. By the 1980's a process of gentrification had begun, spurred on by a rapid infiltration of business (including the advertising industry) into the area. Property values shot up dramatically as people once again discovered the delights of living within walking distance of their office, with the added benefits of the CBD and the beaches being just a short bike or tram ride away. Of course, this process of gentrification meant that a huge proportion of the old Victorian housing stock was ripe for renovation and upgrading.

At the time, our business was located in South Melbourne. One morning as I walked along a street near our  office, I approached a row of terraces that was in the process of being gutted in preparation for the inevitable renovation. As it was starting to rain and I was without an umbrella, I was hurrying along, when suddenly my eye was caught by a pile of newspapers standing in the gutter along with piles of building debris, musty old carpet and general rubbish. They had clearly just been deposited there by the workmen inside, and all waiting to be thrown into the skip standing in the road. Maybe it was the yellow colour but something caught my eye and I stopped to look. I realised that here was a treasure trove of newspapers from the early 1930's. From the look of the old carpet beside them, it was obvious that the newspapers had been lining the floorboards under the carpet for all these years. The top copies had already been ruined by the rain, so I scooped up the rest and carried them back to the office.

And they were fragile. On cleaning them up and dusting them off, I realised I had several entire copies of Melbourne's daily newspapers from 1935 and 1936. They are a wonderful record of life in Australia (as well as in Europe and the US) at the time. The job of scanning and cleaning the content up to make it suitable for reproduction is the subject of another story.