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On the seventh floor of the Nicholas Building, with its cracked tiles, peeling paintwork and lived-in Art Deco splendour, the trio behind new newsletter-based magazine The Paris End have a fitting view of the city.
Here writers and editors Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz can peer into office windows, spy on pedestrians and, if the mood takes them, stare deep into the city’s bowels through the pit that will soon be the new Town Hall Station.
Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz.Credit: Simon Schluter
The Paris End soft-launched into Melbourne’s literary scene in February this year. It’s quickly grown a readership of thousands. Each week, readers’ inboxes are lit up with long-form writing on Melbourne culture, treating the city with the same reverence (and irreverence) that New York and London have long been served with.
Melbourne is rich and strange, and has an identity of its own.
“A city that needs a Paris End is not Paris,” says Schwartz. The title, a reference to the parochial name for the posh bit of Collins Street, has multiple meanings spiralling around this particular time and place.
“We think of the Paris End as this amorphous cosmopolitan purgatory,” says Hurst. “The Paris end of the world. The Paris end of history.”
The Paris End mascot image.Credit: Aaron Billings
Schwartz, Olds and Hurst write, edit and do everything in between. All three are fantastic writers. Schwartz is a freelance magazine writer and poet. Olds is known for her essay collection People Who Lunch, and Hurst is an arts writer and historian. The trio found each other through mutual admiration of each other’s work. They got talking about what they liked reading, and what they wished existed for them to read.
“I was sick of reading internet-y, COVID-y pieces that were just recounting internet debacles and discourse,” says Olds. “We wanted to write about being around town, what people are actually doing.”
The Paris End was born.
All three are enthusiasts of a certain kind of 20th century journalism, when long lead-times, long lunches and long word counts led to in-depth, razor-sharp writing that really said something about its time and place. Our conversation keeps coming back to The Vanity Fair Diaries, the frothy memoir of ’80s magazine editor extraordinaire Tina Brown. Schwartz goes back further to Maeve Brennan, who wrote social sketches for The New Yorker under the nom-de-plume “The Long-Winded Lady” for decades.
“The feeling was that New York was a big country town,” says Schwartz. “It doesn’t exist there anymore. But it can here.
“Melbourne is the perfect size for this. It’s a big city, but it’s interconnected and interpersonal enough that you can weave your way through it.”
This kind of painstaking (and expensive) culture writing is rare in the mainstream media landscape, for purely economic reasons. But as a labour of love, The Paris End has no bean counters or overheads, and the trio can take their time and craft.
Perhaps the most successful bit of The Paris End is the Stars column — which seems to fire up the readers most of all — in which disparate things from the global to the local, the grand to the trivial, are ranked from five stars to one in a droll and sometimes inflammatory way.
For instance, the much-maligned HBO series The Idol (two stars) is “literotica for confused Zoomers with vape addictions and ageing skater bros who have their Tinder age range set between eighteen and twenty-one”. It is certainly not as good as Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup (five stars) – but is nominally better than a near overdose of psychedelics (one star).
For all the flippancy, The Paris End is serious about what it does. They are passionate about going to the lengths that journalists used to be able to go into as a matter of routine, spending weeks of their spare time on a story and building up a real sense of what’s happening. “It’s actually much more diligent than a lot of mainstream media, in terms of fact-checking, because we have more time,” says Schwartz. The trio work closely together, and relish the process.
“It’s really valuable having people to collaborate with,” says Schwartz. “To edit your work, to workshop your ideas.”
“After publishing my book, which was an intense and solitary process, every day working on your own, this was really motivating to collaborate,” says Olds.
This Thursday, The Paris End will formally launch into the world with an event at Chapter House. It sold out immediately. Their readers love a party. ABC journalist Mahmoud Fazal will kick off proceedings, and the trio will be reading a live Stars column (“It’s not in print so we can be a little more deranged,” says Olds).
“We were unofficially launched before,” says Hurst. “This is the official launch. It’s a debutante ball for emails.”
The Paris End is at theparisend.substack.com
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