The Unsuspected Slums: Revisiting the Slums of 1930s Melbourne (Picture Poetry)

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 . . . 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.