The Five Walking Sticks describes the life of Maurice Brodzky, a man who was very well known in Melbourne from 1885 to 1903. His story is most unusual and certainly more fascinating than many others that relate to the rich and famous, and the reader certainly does not miss out on the rich and famous by travelling through the pages of Maurice's life.

But The Five Walking Sticks is much more than the life of a solitary human being. It is a course of study, a curriculum of history, anthropology and civilisation, which physically takes you into one of the most astonishing places on earth, the city that the British journalist George Augustus Sala dubbed 'marvellous Melbourne' in 1885.

That we know so little of Maurice today is because rich and powerful opponents helped sanitise Melbourne's history of him and later day historians continued their omission. Michael Cannon in 'The Land Boomers' was the first exception. Indeed Cannon went so far as to describe Brodzky's muckraking exposes, of the land boom and bust period, as 'a record of individual public service which, it is safe to say, has never been surpassed anywhere in the world.'

The world is fortunate that sufficient information has survived to make a comprehensive book possible.