Melbourne was never supposed to be.
Planted atop unworkable land, it was surveyed, poked and prodded hundreds of years ago until a gent called Batman (yup) unlawfully ‘purchased’ the lot of it from the aboriginals for a few household items and a yearly top-up of dysentery-inducing blankets and the like.
Posh and dirty, illicit and straight-laced, the new Melbourne is an immigrant dance-party. A shipping container becomes a hipster mecca with many beertaps and salty crunchy things to ease your behavior. A tram is a free ride around town where sweaty people stare at one another. A market is a place where a capsicum is bigger than your head, strawberries are real, meat sellers yell at nothing specifically, and leather belts are very, very important.
Coffee is not funny, not even close. The bean is integral and it gets real down here. Turns out back in the day The Royals were not so keen on all the boozing going on around town, so a pandemic of religious acts, social programs and community renewal uprooted the evil, replacing most speakeasies with luxe coffee houses. Thus bubbled up a very sophisticated espresso culture. White, black, long, flat; get your shit right or you will be mocked with the most passive of aggression. And mocked, we have been.
“I don’t know what I just ordered,” she whispered.
I shrugged, but I did know what I ordered and based on the response from the god-like barista, it would come with a complimentary loogie. Don’t say Americano in Melbourne, just don’t.
Graffiti layers the city walls, from meek and lifeless tags to protected works of the greats from decades past. The city both takes advantage of the art, and demonizes it – spray coated finger tips can earn you jail time, but your art could also be featured on tourism brochures at the same time. Without credit, of course.
We ate our way through this town, the tiny and obscenely-priced plates, the massive and dirty-dirty. In an alley, we ate bad roasted jalapeños while across the way a dirty old Italian restaurateur with a tick hollered at young Asian women as they scurried past. We had amazing carbonara and house wine in an attic with shared seating and no menus or prices. There was a ploughman’s brekkie beside a dumpster in the rain, a charcuterie with birds behind the market. Wine…so much good wine.
