Cold comfort

Cold comfort

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/14/1120934362546.html

By Joanna Murray-Smith
July 15, 2005

I wish it was colder.

If it's going to be this cold, it may as well snow. I'd like to ski all the way down powdery Bourke Street, the real Bourke Street, from a glacial Parliament, waving gaily to the moody hot-chocolate-sippers on the Pellegrini stools. Frost is good, but ice storms would be better. Imagine the tinkling beauty of St Kilda Road, dripping frozen tears.

I've always felt this way about Melbourne. It is gloriously cold, with an ice chill that reminds me, some evenings, of Manhattan in February. In the city, at least, it's not a relentless, maudlin grey winter, like London; it's more often sharp and edgy. It's active with Antarctic breezes. And when the sun shines, steely golden rays trapped tight in refrigerated air, it's heroic and dazzling.

A genuinely magnificent winter has to have one, unnegotiable accessory: deciduous trees.

Winter's beauty is the climax of a long, slow anticipation. The city parks are our natural calendar - in autumn's beauty is the forewarning of its own vanishing.

First, the parched copper glow signifying the leave-taking of summer. Summer's over - last picnic in the park, last swim in the Fitzroy pool, last weekend surf. Then leaves fall, until only a few cling to the top boughs.

The parks have deep golden trenches. We look at the spindly trees, so frail and undressed, and order firewood. We contemplate paying to have it stacked or stacking ourselves, choosing malley roots or redgum, think snugly of real food, red wine.

Melburnians show their admiration for the cold by throwing on their hats and scarves at the earliest possible moment. At the end of summer, the first day only vaguely beneath 25 degrees, I saw three people in Brunswick Street in broad daylight wearing beanies.

There's a whisper on the streets: "Bring it on." For a fashionable city, winter is the only season, a panoply of accessories to enliven the body: scarves, hats, tights, coats, colours and layers, artistry in unlikely combinations, a Mitfordesque chic.

This is the thing: Melbourne is never more itself than in winter. It's Ultimate Melbourne. It's Melbourne doing what it does best. The rest of the year, there's always the shadow of being a bit like somewhere else: Toronto, Glasgow, Boston. It's not as sordidly pretty as Sydney, not as cultured as Berlin. But winter becomes Melbourne. It makes a virtue of its claustrophobic alleys, its inviting shadows and dark bars, its inclusion as a sport, the sitting in cafes talking about life, its predilection for fashion and food, its refusal to reveal itself in a glance.

Melbourne likes mystery, revels in anything that preserves its vague inaccessibility. The cold keeps out obviousness; it means those who find its winter soul have overcome something - a cold commute, a foggy night, a trek.

The bay is shrouded in evening mist, the first lights sparking in an arc around Beach Road, an affordable Clarice Beckett. Sea, sky, light, dark - everything is suspended in the cold, frozen between states. Container ships give comparative definition to the vast grey bay. Lone dog-walkers along Beaconsfield Parade blink back icy sea winds.

Something that I love: walking diagonally from the MCG across the Fitzroy Gardens to St Patrick's after a game. Something else that I love: tribal scarves hung jubilantly from car windows and the general good cheer that, by some miracle, football in Melbourne has hung on to. We get our heat emerging from concrete stairwells into the full, glorious tilting glow of green. We find warmth in the shambolic, rugged-up crowd. That first roar of the Melbourne fans - it's the best theatre all winter.

Every time I hear it, I always think this is what we should record and send into deep space as the symbolic voice of Earth. There are no longer prim gangs of elegant housewives in Collins Street, dressed in smart belted camel coats, heading for Georges.

When passing through the city on cold early evenings, I long for the wintry images of my childhood and before, the John Brack peakhour with its clouds of real hats and men in rain-proof trenches over their suits, passing beneath the Flinders Street clocks, locked into the bleak inevitability of salaried lives. Those images were a childhood's metronome - the regimented commutes, the dependability of fathers. In childhood winters, a trip to town meant wearing a smart coat and Mary-Janes, visiting antiquarian bookshops with dad, the volumes cataloguing warmth.

As kids, we would sit in Pellegrini's kitchen chatting to the cooks, then play bowls at the Southern Cross, with its hotel foyer just like American hotel foyers, where someone gallant was sure to meet someone glamorous, wearing a red carnation. Winter dinners in town meant meeting dad after work, wearing his dark-grey raincoat (always with a KitKat in his pocket), carrying his real brown briefcase. When things were tough, we'd eat at the Waiters' Club, and when we were flush, it was the Italian Society at the top of Bourke Street, where the little red table lamps spilled warmth into the night.

Years later, a poor student, the best winter nights were spent with my boyfriend having soup at Le Monde, over the road from where the Italian Society once was. The old French couple fed battalions of us. Later, we'd delay returning to the freezing bedrooms of rented Carlton houses by seeing a movie at the Carlton Movie House and drinking hot-chocolates at Genevieve's until we were thrown out, then trudging down Faraday Street, past Johnny's Green Room, flirting as we breathed mist.

I'd like to say I still flirt with my husband in Faraday, but more often we're flirting with domestic mayhem in a house bursting with small children with large voices. Parenthood has turned us inward.

Once, we adventured out into the wintry city, wandering down puddled, cobbled alleyways, up staircases and into clubs, where we merged with crowds insulating themselves from the cold with ecstasy and Grace Jones. Now, our nightlife is full of little, insomniacal birds - insistent chirps from under duvet clouds.

In winter, this feels right. Perhaps it's getting older, or the sheer domination of an expanding family, but winter has become more about home. Outdoors is kept for a brisk walk to school across the gardens, or for looking out my study window at football players on the oval, performing drills between tiny iridescent markers on the green. In the first glimpse of evening, grass seems lit from beneath.

I love this time of the day - day not quite lost, night not quite come, when houses take on the strongest glow of refuge. When I was young and travelling through strange cities, this time of day brought the deepest sensation of aloneness - house lights burnishing in unknown streets, summoning the belonging of others. This memory stays vigilant.

With all the wintry complaints, winter is when we realise how great it is to have somehow
collected around oneself a life: children or dogs or books, walls, a roof - a front door signifying the one place in a teeming, freezing city that seems happy to know you.

Joanna Murray-Smith is a Melbourne writer. Her novel Sunnyside will be published by Penguin in September. She will be a guest at the Melbourne Writers' Festival next month.