marvellous melbourne and the masterful Dutch.

I have just spent the weekend 'seeing' Melbourne with a couple of friends visiting from Queensland. Predictably, the only time I seem to get out and explore this wonderful city is when I'm showing people around! We only had two days together, so we really packed it in. We went to the Dutch Masters Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, had lunch at Federation Square, went shopping at Bridge Road, had a drink at the Gin Palace, ate dinner in Chinatown and listened to jazz in Bennett's Lane... and that was just Saturday! Yesterday we went to the Vic Markets and had coffee in Lygon Street before church. I'm completely exhausted, which probably explains why I usually spend my weekends on the couch with a book!

The Dutch Masters Exhibition was fascinating. In my Anglo arrogance, I was surprised to discover how significant the Netherlands was (were?) in seventeenth-century Europe. Most of what I know about this period comes from Neil Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, a rollicking series of novels set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The novels are about alchemy, slavery, Barbary corsairs, Isaac Newton, royalty, philosophy, religion, forgery and lots of other interesting things. Andrew and I read them out loud to each other, which took a long time but was lots of fun. In the series, Amsterdam is a centre of trade and (relative) religious tolerance and that does seem to have been the historical situation if the exhibition is to be trusted. Certainly, though Amsterdam had a Calvinist history, it was a much better place to be a Jew than almost anywhere else in Europe. And as a number of quotes at the exhibition emphasised, in keeping with the success of Dutch trade, the values of frugality, temperance, reliability were highly prized. Max Weber, come on down. Having said that, a large proportion of the artefacts on display were elaborately designed vessels used in drinking games!

I'm not sure if I should be at all concerned by the fact that even though I'm a 'professional' historian, I'm developing my understanding of this period on the basis of a few novels and an art exhibition....