Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne is one in a series of portraits published by new South Books of Australia’s capital cities. Melbourne is composed as a series of psychogeographical essays that range across terrain that reflects Cunningham’s personal, impressionistic and cultural understandings of the city across a year in its life.

To a Melburnian, some of the ground Cunningham covers will seem inevitable: the Westgate Bridge collapse, the (tiresome) North versus South of the river divide (what do the kids in Dandenong or Burnside make of this?), gangland wars, footy, festivals, and laneways.

While Cunningham draws a very familiar picture of these aspects of Melbourne life, her skill is to find a personal way in to saying something about them. Both her experience and her emotional attachment to them lift them out of the terrain of travel guide, somewhat in defiance of her own claim that the book is not a memoir

So, the ongoing cultural and political battles between the generations of the left play out in her editorship of Meanjin; a larkish exploration of exploration of subterranean drains buoys her into a regained feeling of childhood freedom; and an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria on Melbourne’s publishing life becomes a moment of catharsis when she sees a photograph of a couch at the publishing house McPhee Gribble where she began her career. The personal is made public.

What underpins Cunningham’s understanding of the city is the relationship of its people to environment, hardly surprising given that it is bookended so neatly: at the beginning by the 2009 bushfires that ravaged communities around the city and at the end by a drought-breaking deluge.

It would be nice to imagine that the gift of this book to Melbourne is its greater capacity to understand itself and its webs of connection.