The Borders of Bohemia

Image: Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building, Liz Ham, 1997 via State Library of Victoria

Bohemia is newly respectable with an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, based on Dancing with Empty Pockets,  historian Tony Moore’s exploration of some of Australia’s most colorful characters. From literary bohemians, to painters, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians and fashion designers, the exhibition hopes to refresh bohemian iconoclasts and showcase the mark they made on Melbourne over the last 150 years. In this book extract, Moore tells us where Bohemia was born and its broad Australian borders.

Bohemia was first named by Henri Murger, a struggling Parisian journalist who hit a popular nerve with Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, his serialised stories about the unconventional and impoverished artists of the Latin Quarter. Writing in the latter 1840s, he was romanticising the community of young and aspiring writers, painters, poets and philosophers that had formed in Paris between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Murger, like most chroniclers of bohemia since, was writing about his own lost youth.