GREAT city likes to write its better memories in bronze. The plaque at the corner of William St and Flinders Lane, for example, records how a tiny town took root beside its muddy river.

 

On this spot, it begins, John Pascoe Fawkner built his first dwelling and accommodation house in October 1835.

 

It's a nice thing, that plaque -- a reminder of how a city began life as a bushscape of huts and humpies.

 

But other memories don't sit so well -- especially the ones too painful to cast in metal and put on a wall.

 

"Was it so long ago, 12 months, since that animal started shooting?" said a middle-aged woman who had slipped away from her desk to sneak a fag beneath that tribute to one of Melbourne's founding fathers.

 

"Last year, you should have seen all the flowers," she continued. "There was a mountain of them, and they were still appearing a week later."

 

Yesterday, apart from the odd squashed butt, the footpath was bare. As for memories, they tended to be less of Christopher Hudson's rush-hour rampage than of the disruption it caused.

 

"They had the whole area roped off and we couldn't get into work," recalled Paul, who works in the Pitcher Partners tower over the road.

 

"That was a day! I wasted time, you know, just hanging around, then I went to my brother's office to kill some more time. But in the end I just went home."

 

What began with shots and a city shocked at such brazen violence becomes, after a time, "the day I couldn't get to my desk".

 

It's a human way of coping.

 

Up the William St hill and around the corner, the florist fussed with roses and lilies at his Collins St kiosk.

 

If customers wanted bouquets to mark today's anniversary of the shooting, he promised to have them.

 

Once, Fawkner's corner was just a Melbourne oddity -- the place where trams run along Flinders Lane, if only for a single block.

 

Now it is both a murder scene and an annexe to the fleshpits of nearby Kings St, where Hudson spent the night carousing before his fury, and his pistol, erupted.

 

Melbourne is bigger. Bigger, not necessarily better. You can see more flowers Melbourne at

http://www.rapidflowers.com.au