Don’t miss our next speaker at the club’s May 12 general meeting!
Award-winning author and historian Carmel McKenzie will share surprising and often funny insights into nineteenth-century St Kilda. It used to be the wealthiest suburb in Melbourne and known Australia-wide as a bastion of privilege and power. Then its golden age imploded in the 1890s for reasons Carmel will describe.
Carmel laughs when recalling her childhood dream of becoming an archaeologist. The parallels with her career in the investment sector and her passion for Australian history only clicked decades later.
After years spent digging into share market and economic data for themes and insights, Carmel switched focus to interrogate the social fabric of nineteenth-century St Kilda, resurrecting its spirit, fragment by fragment, street by street. She lives in the neighbourhood and revels in its quirks and characters.