I seem to have developed a fascination with Melbourne's lost railways.

This is rather less romantic than it sounds. Only a small part - the inner-circle city - of Melbourne's suburban rail network is underground, which makes the whole business of "lost railways" rather less Neverwhere and more something Google maps have been extremely helpful with. (Speaking of which, I experienced my first surround-vision streetview on Google maps yesterday. It's possible Google wants to turn the whole world into a first-person shooter. It's possible this will be awesome.)

Let's start at the beginning. Early last week, I ventured out into the slightly-further-out suburbs (this is a big thing for me; I'm very attached to the city) to try and find an Italian and possibly magical cobbler to make me a new pair of boots. This mission successfully discharged, I was skipping happily back down Nicholson Street when I realised I'd just crossed traintracks crossing the road. This perplexed me mightly, as to my right there was a building. The only patch of actual tracks was those that crossed the road; but in either direction, something of a cleared space of park ran.

I started my investigation playing with the Melways, and even there it's quite easy to trace where the railway used to run, from one eastern curve to the corresponding western curve, across the inner-northern suburbs. When I went to the online maps, it was even more obvious in the "satellite" option, a band of parkway and cycling track.

I attributed my early satisfaction with this discovery to the answering of a couple of old, if vague, questions. One, why the signs on the lines out to Clifton Hill say "Clifton Hill Loop", and another, why the western line going north first swings rather wildly out into a curve. Mysteries solved! Excellent work.

Where I went wrong, perhaps, was getting on wikipedia to try and find out some more about the history of the line, and perhaps why it was abandoned (because I think it'd be dead handy these days, but I suppose that's the sort of foresight that's easy to possess some sixty years after the fact). This was a problem, because I found that the article on this railway was part of an "abandoned railways of Melbourne" group. Now I'm fascinated by this "Outer Circle Line" that appears to have once run through the eastern suburbs. And let's not even get started on how interested I've always been in the fact that the St Kilda and Port Melbourne trainlines were converted into tramways.

The most hilarious part of all this is that I live - and have for the past five years lived - across the road from the Railfan Shop. I've been peering at the maps in the window, of Melbourne's past-and-present train network, and correlating places and dates to things I've been looking at. It's possibly only a matter of time before I actually go in, at which point I may spontaneously generate a mackintosh and turn into an old man. Stay tuned!

As per usual for the Melbourne Writers Festival, fantasy is strictly for children.

The year that really made me rant and wave my hands was the year (I think last year, but don't quote me on that) they had Kate Forsyth, internationally published author of something like 8 huge-selling fantasy novels. And what did they have her talking about? Her new, first YA fantasy novel. (I'm sure it's a great little book. Just... for fuck's sake, people.)

This year, they have Margo Lanagan, who is - fair enough - a YA author (though the borders are blurring more than ever between "adult" and "YA"... for everyone but the organisers of the MWF). She's involved in the first panel at the MWF that I've actually wanted to attend in all the years I've been perusing and bitterly spitting upon the program - Myths with a Twist, possessing the bold appellation: "Do fantasy writers avoid reality, or confront it more directly?" Oh glory! Oh frabjous day! Oh bollocks, it is - of course - on the Schools Program.

Because fantasy is for kids.

(To back this up, another panel Ms Lanagan is on is actually for growed-ups, but is charmingly entitled: "Other worlds: Worlds in which young readers can lose themselves." Gee, thanks.)

When I first came down to Melbourne, it was to attend the RMIT's celebrated Professional Writing and Editing program. I was a little bit nervous, because I am (just in case anyone didn't know) a genre writer. I read and write (and breathe and dream) fantasy. And I was worried that a snooty Melbourne writing course would turn up its literary nose at what I had to bring to the table. But it wasn't so. Everyone in the course - teachers and fellow students - was really interested in engaging with my work, and learning what my point of view could show in their own work. There was a hefty handful of other genre/speculative authors as well, to the point there my dozen-strong advanced novel course had another fantasy author in it as well.

If I was in any danger of considering that perhaps I'd been wrong about Melbourne, however, the Writers Festival reassures me every year that Melbourne is, actually, still completely snobbish about "literature". (To a certain extent, the same bias can be witnessed in The Age's coverage of books every weekend, though they are considerably more enlightened on the topic.)

It's not just fantasy (and sci-fi and horror) that get the shaft. Romance is another bastard cousin best not talked about. Which also makes me flail, because there's an incredible depth of talent (not to mention experience and publishing dollars) in Melbourne in speculative and romantic fiction. Crime gets a look-in - apparently it's acceptable, and we can possibly thank Text Publishing for that. And historical fiction has always been happy to tag along as literary fiction's more scholarly sibling.

Now, I freely, fully and brazenly admit that a lot of the stuff being merrily churned out upon the hamster wheel of Australia's lone spec-fic imprint - Harper Collins' Voyager - is mediocre and simplistic realist-storytelling pap (for which I'm absolutely certain we can all blame Sara Douglass). But there are Australian authors doing inventive, innovative, decidedly literary things with the fantasy genre (the mind springs immediately to KJ Bishop here - someone told me once she was a Melbourne girl, but I don't know whether that's true).

Despite that, at least as far as the Melbourne Writers Festival is concerned, fantasy remains just for kids. (It's enough to make me want to send them all a copy of KJ Parker's Shadow, because if that doesn't blow their minds out their ears, they're possibly too stuffy to live.)

Gosh. I think it's done.