Low, Degraded Broots? Melbourne's Little Lons
Australian History Local History Cultural History Business Biography Urban Studies Entrepreneurship History Microhistory
Low, Degraded Broots? Melbourne’s Little Lons is the only full-length social history of the city’s most infamous half-block—Little Lonsdale street between Spring and Exhibition—told through the eyes of the bookseller who rescued its story from oblivion. First published in 2004, this scarce first-edition paperback blends memoir, detective work and economic history to show how a once-feared “slum” incubated Melbourne’s first multicultural entrepreneurs: Chinese furniture-makers, Irish lodging-house keepers, German fruiterers and Jewish tailors who turned sweatshops into the garment trade that still anchors the city. Leckey’s decade of deed-searching, rate-book digging and door-knocking produces a street-level chronicle that is part academic reference, part true-crime page-turner, and 100 % Australian.
What makes this copy collectible is the author’s own hand: the inner cover bears a neat, contemporary inscription (not a signature) that places the book in the first wave of private circulation before it disappeared from shops. Inside, 32 pages of rare black-and-white photographs—many taken by Leckey on the eve of the street’s 1990s redevelopment—survive in crisp, unmarked condition, giving readers a last look at the original bluestone lanes and chimney stacks now replaced by glass towers. The text block is tight, pages are spotless, and the book has never been ex-library, so every archival detail is preserved for researchers or heritage enthusiasts.
For collectors of Melbourne history, Australian business biography, or cultural-studies narratives, Low, Degraded Broots? is the key that unlocks the city’s entrepreneurial DNA. It charts how petty traders on the wrong side of town financed breweries, foundries and the first Melbourne Cup bookies—patterns still cited in university courses on urban enterprise. Demand for first editions is driven by local historians, genealogists tracing Little Lon addresses, and rare-book scouts who know the print run was tiny and most copies went to state libraries. Owning an inscribed, clean copy gives you both the story and the provenance of a street that refused to stay forgotten.
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