MELBOURNE
Daily Telegraph - July 2007

THERE'S no doubt the Sydney accommodation crisis is biting. Sky-rocketing rents and house prices like Bond villain ransoms are making it impossible for writerly types to live in the sloth to which we are accustomed.

According to lectures this week by a number of Sydney cultural luminaries at the Town Hall, it is also having a serious effect on artistic life. Many creative types are, allegedly, leaving for Melbourne.

Hearing this news I was struck by two thoughts.

First, performance artists are leaving Sydney… and this is supposed to be a bad thing? Who is next: mimes? Jazz ballet choreographers? In five years will this city be free of street theatre and saxophonists? Say it ain't so!

Second, that no matter how bad things become, I would rather get a begging bowl, a dose of leprosy and a one-way ticket to Dhaka before I moved to Melbourne.
I loathe Melbourne. Not the city itself, which is perfectly adequate - drab, flat and leafy, it could be Toronto's mini-me. What I can't stand about Melbourne is its pretensions to being more than that, the delusion that it is some kind of antipodean Prague, “Mel-Berlin” as it was once described to me, without a hint of irony.

“Melbourne is more European,” announced one of its citizens to me recently. Really? Which part of Europe - Bulgaria? The blast radius of Chernobyl? Standing in St Kilda, staring out at the leaden water and the creaky amusements of Luna Park, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Odessa or Gdansk but, on the whole, Melbourne resembles a European capital in the way I resemble Catherine Zeta Jones on a good morning.

Desperate for something to call their own, Melburnians have recently embraced what they invariably refer to as their city's “labyrinth” of laneways, the subject of a recent ad campaign featuring a wan-looking woman in a nightie pushing a big ball of yarn through a service alley.

I have searched downtown Melbourne extensively and can tell you with confidence that there are about five of these laneways; which means either the Victorian concept of a “labyrinth” differs radically from my own, or the Melbourne CBD is very much like Sydney's except smaller and without the world's greatest harbour.
Balls of yarn and judicious editing can only go so far.

Like a girl in a sack dress and glasses trying to pass herself off as smart simply because she is dowdy, Melbourne is trying very hard to convince us it is something it is not. Then again, if you lived in a windswept disused mineshaft built around a stretch of water that makes Botany Bay look like the Copacabana you'd feel the need to dream occasionally too.

Denying them a few performance artists in such circumstances would only be cruel.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008