Marvellous Melbourne
Melburnians are proud of their city. I am never quite certain what it is that encourages such self-satisfaction. For several years, the marketing campaign for the city was ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. Spending time here after seven years mainly in the US, it is something of an eye opener to look at the place with fresh eyes. What is so special or marvellous about this city?
Perhaps some of that feeling comes from Melbourne’s past. The first British settlement in Victoria was established in 1803, in an area close to the bottom of Port Phillip Bay. That little village was a failure, but in 1835, an area at the top of the bay, which is now central and northern Melbourne, was explored by John Batman, who supposedly negotiated the purchase of 600,000 acres with the Wurundjeri (now officially recognised as the traditional owners of the land on which the city sits). No one now knows how valid that deal was, but we do know that a site on the northern bank of the Yarra River was picked and described with the famous words “this will be the place for a village”; OK, words famous to Melburnians, anyway! Despite whatever happened in dealing with the Aboriginals in the area, there is good reason to be proud about one thing – it was the first major settlement in Australia that was not a penal colony, even it was only a tiny settlement perched at the top of vast protected bay.
Most residents prefer to forget that it was the Governor of New South Wales (who ‘governed’ all of eastern Australia at the time), who decided Batmania should be the capital of the Port Phillip District in 1836, (fortunately the name was changed to Melbourne in 1837, when the settlement was re-named after Lord Melbourne). In the tidy way we did things in those days, the British pushed out almost all the Aboriginals, just in time for Queen Victoria to call it a city in 1847, and four years later she named it the capital of the Colony of Victoria.
Not a penal colony, and then something more. In 1851, gold was found in central Victoria, and Melbourne’s growth began. Within 15 years it was the biggest city in Australia, wealthy, and quickly home to thousands of overseas migrants, particularly Irish, German and Chinese. Chinese arrivals founded ‘Chinatown’ in 1851, and I recently learnt that this is the longest continuously-occupied Chinese settlement outside of Asia.
Tempers fray in gold rush times: at the Ballarat mining site, miners led a revolt over unfair taxes (yes, Victorians were quick to get into protests about governments and unreasonable demands on the working man). The resulting Eureka Rebellion of 1854 was an early example of the Australian love of convicts and rebellions. It fell and many died, mainly the miners shot by soldiers. While the rebellion failed, the aftermath was to see major political changes to the colony, improvements in working conditions across mining, agriculture, manufacturing and other local industries, and eventually universal suffrage (men only at the time, of course). The Eureka Stockade flag is still used today in union rallies.
There is a fascination with rebellions. Mark Twain wrote on the Eureka Rebellion:
… I think it may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution—small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression. … It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honorable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.[i]
Whatever else came from the gold rush, the wealth it generated created a major city, and by the end of the 1860’s many of the major older buildings of Melbourne were in place, ranging from Parliament House to Melbourne Town Hall, and from the Old Melbourne Goal to the nearby Magistrate’s Court (this latter is now largely taken over by RMIT, where I am back working and typing right now!!). To be honest, while many of these grand buildings were started back then, some remained incomplete until well into the 20th century. The development was more than a series of buildings, however, as this was the time when Melbourne was planned and laid out on a grid pattern. The underlying plan has remained in place, and today almost all the roads still run north-south or east-west.
Does all that make Melburnians proud? Perhaps not, but something else happened in that early period. In 1855 the Melbourne Cricket Club acquired the Melbourne Cricket Ground (I think just about everyone here only refers to it by its acronym, the MCG), and by 1859 had established Australia Rules Football. Did I say Australian’s love rebellions and convicts? No, sport mate, sport!! The home of ‘footy’ and the revered cricket ground. They’re the things said to make a Melburnian proud.
By the 1870s, economics took over, and Melbourne began the cycles of boom and bust that we still live with today. It eventually lost out to Sydney as the largest city in Australia (although its population is now 4.9m, and catching up with Sydney again, at quite a pace).
However, there’s one more thing that could be a source of pride: in the 1890s, a Constitutional Convention met over a decade to see if there was a way six separate and self-governing colonies could be brought together (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia). Federation was agreed, and the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated on 1 January 1901.
The real point of the exercise? For Victoria, it wasn’t creating the Commonwealth, but rather that Melbourne became the seat of government for the new country. The first federal parliament was convened on 9 May 1901 in the Royal Exhibition Building, and subsequently moved to the Victorian Parliament House where it was remained until 1927, when it was transferred to Canberra. At least we kept it out of the hands of those Sydneysiders!
Marvellous Melbourne has a history. It also has a character, and perhaps that is something that gives the locals a ‘special’ pride. First of all, it has to be the coffee: most people would argue that coffee in Melbourne owes its pre-eminence to Italian migrants in the 1950s, but there is evidence it started with Victorian England and their love of coffee back then. Whatever the beginnings, Melbourne is a city of coffee aficionados, with the alternatives ranging from the smooth and wonderful Italian brews to Greek and even Ethiopian styles (Ethiopian migrants arrived in the 1970s). Whatever else, coffee is an obsession, a matter of many (often heated) discussions, and major source of delight (and occasional anguish) for a significant part of the local population.
Mention of Greeks, Italians and Ethiopians hints at another feature of Melbourne: it is noticeably multicultural. Almost a quarter of its population was born overseas, and the city is home to residents from 200 countries and territories, who speak over 230 languages and dialects and follow some 110 religious faiths.
Melbourne has the second largest Asian population in Australia, and the second largest number of people of Greek background living outside Greece (New York has the most). There are suburbs and areas that are quite distinctive. The Chinese I have mentioned. Among so many others, a large contingent of Vietnamese can be found in Richmond (to the east of the city), for example, or more recently significant numbers of Senegalese have settled in Footscray and Ascot Vale (to the west).
These multicultural communities also indicate the existence of an amazing variety of ‘ethnic’ restaurants: there are more than 200 cuisines on offer. I did read a report some time ago which listed the top selling ‘Australian’ foods – by quantity of sales. The list included: fried rice, pizza, hamburgers, fish and chips, ramen noodles, souvlaki, spaghetti, and spring rolls. Truly ‘Australian’ dishes are hard to find! There’s kangaroo (I love it, but few try it), and even less readily available is Emu Pate (also great), together with Witchetty Grubs (which I wouldn’t recommend, a crunchy and far from delightful experience!!).
That is enough on statistics, so let’s take another perspective. Melbourne is a city of gardens and parks. When the city centre is busy (as it usually is), a short walk can take you across to Flagstaff Gardens to the north west, Carlton Gardens to the north east, Fitzroy Gardens to the East, and the vast vista of Birrarung Marr, the Kings Domain and then the Botanical Gardens to the south. All with a kilometre or so of each other, all offering an oasis among the forest of high rises, each a mini version of Central Park!
For me, what makes Melbourne special is knowing it is a city of leading edge medical innovation, with research institutes alongside hospitals packed with translational researchers. The bionic ear was developed here, (and now a bionic eye is coming closer to completion), as well as immunological treatments for cancer, a vaccine for cervical cancer, stem cell treatments, and breakthroughs in relation to the HIV virus and Type 1 Diabetes.
So, here’s the puzzle. If someone comes to visit Melbourne, what do I recommend they should do? Drink coffee? Visit the parks? No. I suggest they should go out to the Yarra Valley and visit the wineries. Go up to Healesville and the Sanctuary, and see the wildlife of the country. Go over to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, and walk down into the gold mine, or pan for gold in the river. It looks like I tell them to go away: am I trying to keep Marvellous Melbourne free of visitors and save it for myself, or am I missing something?
I decided to do some research while I was running sessions for one of the Vietnamese groups visiting RMIT the other day. What should I suggest to them? A website listed 17 things: 14 were buildings – Federation Square, the Arts Centre Complex, the MCG, the National Gallery of Victoria, Eureka Tower, the Melbourne Museum, the Zoo, Captain Cook’s Cottage (a facsimile!!), the Shrine of Remembrance, the Queen Victoria Market, Docklands, Flinder’s Street Station, Parliament House, and the Museum of Immigration; to those we can add the Botanical Gardens, a Yarra River Cruise, and a Tram Tour. Hey, I’ve just discovered we have a Legoland Discovery Centre: who knew!! As I look down this list, I think I was doing better with the places outside the city.
It’s not that kind of city. Perhaps what makes it ‘marvellous’ or ‘special’ is its quirkiness.
One feature that makes Melbourne less like many other cities begins with the laneways in the central business district. Like the rest of Melbourne, but at an early stage, the centre was also laid out on a rectangle, two kilometres east to west, one kilometre north to south, and, oddly, the whole set in a not quite north-south in orientation. This central area is marked out by roads running along the top, bottom and sides, and within the square they create are seven streets going north to south, and three east to west. Each of three main roads has a smaller street in between, so, running east to west we have Flinders Street, Flinders Lane, Collins Street, Little Collins Street, Bourke Street, Little Bourke Street, Lonsdale Street, Little Lonsdale Street, and Latrobe Street (there will be a written test at the end of this blog!!).
Nearly there, because the key point is there are dozens of little lanes branching off these streets, many coming to dead ends, and several are home to the most astonishing graffiti on each side of the lane (usually on the sides of buildings that front on to one of the cross streets). You can spend a day walking along these lanes, just to appreciate the art. Part of the fascination lies in the fact that these extraordinary paintings are hidden away.
One day this week, I was in one of the more affluent suburbs outside the city centre. Kew is a few kilometres away, with a major tram and road junction where Cotham Road branches off from High Street. At the apex of the junction, sits a war memorial, in front of the old post office. An impressive construction, it consists of a circular colonade of eight polished granite columns (of the Ionic order, I read), supporting a flat dome, with a frieze and cornice in the classic style. It looks like a transplant from Rome or Athens.
In the centre is a granite block, with four panels: one bears the dedication, “To the Honor of the Living and the Glory of the Dead”; a second has the names of the 163 soldiers who died in the First World War; and on the remaining two are the names of all the 753 Kew soldiers who served. On the frieze above the columns you can see the names of places associated with the Kew veterans. It was that last part that captured my interest: soldiers from Kew fought in the ‘Great War’ in such places as Salonika (spelt Salonica), Egypt, and Palestine (and for Australians, it almost goes without saying, they were also at Gallipoli), only to die so far away from home.
Melbourne makes much of the fact that it scores well on ‘liveability’. It has been the world’s most liveable city on The Economist Intelligence Unit’s ‘Global Liveability Ranking’ for the past seven years (2011-2017). Right now the Town Hall is waiting with bated breath to see if it repeats its success in 2018. This assessment of 140 cities is based on several factors: the urban quality of life based on assessments of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. I am not certain Melbourne deserves coming out on top (and on other ratings it does less well), but it really is a very pleasant place to live.
Is Melbourne ‘marvellous’? No. That was a silly alliterative marketing line. Is it special? Having been to many cities around the world, I can’t say it is. Despite all I have written, I believe Melbourne’s secret has been its ability to keep its head down. Melburnians don’t boast about their city. Its English heritage shows through in the understated but very real sense of affection people hold. Without feeling the need to tell everyone, it, offers an environment where you can live happily free from the strains that beset so many other major cities. Not perfect: driving at rush hour is bad, but not impossible; there’s pollution, but it’s not too noticeable. It rains a lot (good for gardens), but gets sunny and hot in the summer.
Of course, it can get busy. Actually, if visitors would leave us alone, it would be ideal. Wouldn’t that be marvellous!
[i] Mark Twain, Following the Equator. Classical Bookshelf, 1897, Chapter XXIV, sourced from Wikipedia.
