From 2014 to 2016 my wife Lynne and I walked around our home city, Melbourne, in a series of connected walks, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way we uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. In the end we completed 60 or so walks, which I wrote about in my blog Melbourne Circle.
In 2018 I experienced another kind of loss when Lynne died of cancer.
The book Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory and Loss, was released in late 2020. It is the story of our journey, a memoir, and a meditation on personal loss. You can buy it here, here, here or ask at your local bookshop.
“What a gem this book is! Oddity, wonderment, weirdness: these splendid essays reveal a marvellous Melbourne most of us have never encountered before. This is a psychogeography dense with vernacular history, humane detail, and from beneath the shadow of grief, love.” – Gail Jones, author of Five Bells and The Death of Noah Glass
The blog also spawned a number of essays about place, walking, and psychogeography, which you can find linked from the Other Writing page.
Nick Gadd - author 