News / History
Brunswick author takes us on a wild ride from past to present
New book about trams is part history, part memoir
Mark Phillips
IN the course of researching a new book, Greg Gardiner travelled every kilometre of Melbourne’s vast tram network but when it comes to his favourite route, it is the one closest to home that wins out.
The Brunswick resident has no hesitation in nominating the #19 up Sydney Road as the best route in this tram obsessed city.
“I think the 19 is absolutely magnificent,” says Gardiner, the author of Tram, over a coffee in a café near the Brunswick Tram Depot.
“There’s so much history in the street, it’s right there in front of you all the time, and the trams are really quite frequent on this street. They’re like a character in a novel, trams in the street.”
A former conductor and driver and lifelong user of trams, Gardiner, 70, spent more than half a decade working on the self-published 348 page book, which features on its cover the mural of a green W class tram by Mike Makatron that fills a wall at Michelle Guglielmo Park in Sydney Road.
Initially setting out to write an updated history of Melbourne’s trams while he was recuperating from surgery, Gardiner has produced a book that defies categorisation.
Part history, part memoir, part fiction, with chapters that move back and forwards in time, Tram hops genres like passengers changing routes.
Tram has 47 chapters, including its prologue and epilogue, and a 12-page bibliography reflecting Gardiner’s background in the State Parliament’s Library Research Service and academia.
Along with chapters on the history of the trams and the explorations of the routes, there are also fascinating depictions of driving a W-class tram, the roles of the gripman and conductor, and visits to workshops. Gardiner invented a second first person narrator, set in the 1880s, to depict what Melbourne was like in the network’s early days and unconsciously, he also began weaving parts of his own family, warts and all, into the book.
Gardiner says the final structure of Tram was intentional and can be best described as creative non-fiction.
“I guess what that encompasses is you’re doing history, and you’re being faithful to that history, you’re keeping to the facts, but it gives you a certain sort of level of freedom to imagine things, as long as you’re doing the imagining in good faith and not distorting the past.
“This sort of genre allows you to really explore a subject in a different sort of way to perhaps a standard history.”
Gardiner set out to understand how and why Melbourne’s tram network had survived when most other cities in the world long abandoned trams decades ago due to the popularity of motor cars.
With 250 kilometres of double tracks, 24 routes, almost 500 vehicles and more than 160 million passenger rides a year, Melbourne’s network is the largest in the world.
Gardiner says the network survived in spite of attempts by politicians, media and the car industry in the 1920s and the 1950s to dismantle it. But formidable characters, including the long-serving chairman of the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board, Robert Rissom, who had been a Major-General in World War Two, ensured trams had a future.
Gardiner says trams are now an inseparable part of the fabric of Melbourne and make the city and its residents unique in many ways.
“So often you have Melburnians say, the first thing they tell you when they’re telling you a story is ‘I was on the tram’ or ‘I just got off the tram’.
“I wanted to communicate the history of trams in a way that perhaps a lot of people haven’t had it communicated to them before … the fact that trams live in us subconsciously and at an emotional level, because they’re connected to so much of the history of our lives.”
Gardiner began his research in the Victorian Parliament’s Library, where he worked for many years, by reading the first inquiries and legislation that established Melbourne’s tram network in the 1880s.
Tram covers the history of the network extensively, but it is in the chapters about each of the routes that it really takes off.
Gardiner’s narrator would stick a pin in a map of Melbourne to decide which route to explore on each trip. He keenly observes sights on the way but also has conversations with fellow passengers about their own tram memories and their lives.
It was during these trips that Gardiner came to understand just how crucial a role trams played in the growth of Melbourne into a modern metropolis.
“It gradually emerged that the Melbourne that I really loved, which is inner Melbourne … was basically constructed around the time that the cable [tram] system got going.
“So if you look at the buildings coming up Sydney Road, you’ll find so many of those buildings were built since 1888, 1889, the cable tram started in 1887, it ran all the way up to Moreland Road.
“When the trams suddenly emerged, people just flooded onto them.
“They realised ‘Gosh, I can go to the footy, I can go to church. I can go and visit my relatives, friends and go to work on it. I can go to the movies’ … They were central to the development of that golden era of Melbourne when the population doubled in a decade, about half a million people by the [18]90s, and basically everyone was on trams.”
With his long background as a researcher along with a few years working as a tram conductor and driver, Gardiner is perhaps uniquely placed to write such a book.
He says he almost fell into a job on trams after returning home from overseas in his early-20s with no idea what he wanted to do.
Initially a conductor, he trained to become a driver and was based out of the Camberwell depot for a few years in the late-1970s riding routes 70, 72 and 75 from the city to the eastern suburbs. The 70 remains a favourite of Gardiner’s.
He enjoyed both jobs and laments that conductors will probably never return to trams after their jobs were abolished in the 1990s. “Connies” were an essential part of the community, he says.
As Melbourne continues to grow, Gardiner sees a bright future for the city’s trams. He is delighted that Victoria has begun making its own trams again rather than importing them, and he believes trams will play an important role in the city’s transport infrastructure for decades to come.
“Melbourne has five million cars, and it’s got 500 trams. If we add another million cars to our streets over the next decade, we’re going to have gridlock.
“So I really believe that we should be doubling our tram numbers and creating a system that goes out into the suburbs, using the existing lines to go further, but also creating cross town trams.
“There’s also the reason of community and communality that trams bring because when you’re on a tram, you’re with your fellow citizens in all their glory, good and bad but when you’re in your car, you’re alienated, you’re isolated.
“It’s environmentally crazy to do that while trams last for decades. Since 2019 they’ve all been using renewables, and they’re safe.”
Tram can be borrowed from the Brunswick Library and can be ordered as a paperback Books Online and Amazon.
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