Brunswick

This guide to Brunswick in Melbourne starts with the Hoffman brickworks whistle that called four hundred workers to five nonstop kilns producing forty million bricks a year before the First World War. It traces the suburb's origin to a surveyor's failed 1830s farming subdivision and the one settler, James Simpson, who stuck around only to be driven out by mud. Clay that ruined a farmer went on to build boom-time Melbourne, brick by brick, through the 1880s.