Tony's Melbourne Musings

Nudes kick a goal for charity with many behinds

2005-12-04T03:30:00.000-08:00

By Kenneth Nguyen
December 4, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/12/03/1133422148170.html

Volunteers pose nude on the grassy knoll to Federation Square.
Photo: Rebecca Hallas

TRUTH be told, this whole exercise would probably have been rather more comfortable if it had been carried out two days earlier, when the temperatures climbed into the balmy 30s.

But neither inhospitable clouds nor mid-teen temperatures were enough to stop Kew teacher Robert McKay and his brave group of subjects from proceeding with their annual nude photographic project along the Yarra at the city park of Birrarung Mar yesterday.

About 80 Melburnians shed their clothes for the photos, organised by Mr McKay and inspired by the work of artist Spencer Tunick. This was, it should be said, a rather more sparse turnout than that usually seen at a Tunick shoot.

"I would have liked a few more there, but I think the rain put a few people off," Mr McKay said.

"(Birrarung Mar) is a bit open to the elements, but just the look of the shots with the background of the skyscrapers will be interesting to see."

The photos are intended for publication in a 2006 calendar, with proceeds to be directed towards Anti-Slavery International and Friends of Maiti Nepal, which supports the rescue and rehabilitation of Nepalese girls trafficked to work in the child sex industry.

The calendars can be ordered at birthsuitshoot.com.

Our colourful underbelly

2005-12-04T03:19:00.000-08:00

Our colourful underbelly

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/12/03/1133422148230.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Stencil artist Vexta with her diving woman, on the walls of the St Kilda junction underpass. "I don't want to live in a city that's really bland and covered in grey and brown and advertising."
Photo: Cathryn Tremain

By Gabriella Coslovich

December 4, 2005

AS IF Melbourne wasn't labouring enough under the weight of labels and the burden of trying to live up to them: the world's most liveable city, Australia's sporting mecca, and arts capital to boot. Another has just been thrown into the mix, and it's the kind of tag to chill the establishment's heart as the city barrels towards the Commonwealth Games with the grand ambition of presenting itself to the world as tidy-town.

The latest claim to greatness? Stencil graffiti capital. No, not of the nation. Of the world. So say the authors of a new book, Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne, which documents the city's vibrant stencil art scene and profiles some of its leading players — the likes of Ha-Ha, Psalm, Meggs, DLux, Meek, Vexta, Civilian. The city's commuters, shoppers and roamers may well recognise these names, having stumbled upon the signatures and their adjacent handiwork in secluded laneways and underpasses, on tucked-away walls and along railway corridors — sprawling tracts of lively images and text that break the monotony of brick-and-mortar canyons.

For those residents who embrace street art as a reflection of the city's witty, creative and socially aware underbelly, here finally will be a label worth subscribing to, an attribute that sets Melbourne apart in an idiosyncratic, non-conformist way.

Then again, there will be plenty of graffiti-loathers ready to condemn a book that celebrates such illegal activity and has the gall to rate Melbourne as the world's top destination for stencil art.

When it comes to graffiti, it seems the world is divided into those who see it as a menace to society, a sure trigger of escalating crime and falling property values, and those who view it as a vital element of a city's urban fabric and consider the best examples of it as an exciting part of contemporary art practice.

Should Melbourne care that it's pronounced stencil graffiti capital?

"You might not care, but you don't really get the choice because it's going to be there whether you like it or not. You're going to come across it in the street … it's going to arrest your attention," says Jake Smallman, a 27-year-old Melbourne graphic designer and the book's co-author.

We meet at Fitzroy's Kent Street Cafe, a laid-back, double-storey haven furnished with mismatched retro furniture and oozing inner-city cool. Stencil artists Ha-Ha and DLux used to run the "Early" gallery upstairs showing works influenced by street art.

"Although it was small, there was often huge openings with people spilling out onto the footpath," Smallman says.

The gallery has gone, but the cafe's spacious toilet — mirror included — is blanketed in scrawls, drawings, stickers, stencils, a rough and ready temple to graffiti.

It's the perfect setting to meet Smallman and three of the artists featured in his debut publication — Meek, Civilian and Vexta, the sole woman profiled in the book.

Three years in the making, the 150-page book features 500 colour photographs and is the first to extensively document Melbourne's stencil art scene. Ironically, it took a small New Jersey publisher, Mark Batty, to recognise the value of the project. While books on graffiti and street art seem to be flavour of the month with publishers, Batty says Smallman and co-author Carl Nyman's proposal stood out for two reasons.

"One, their idea was well focused — stencil graffiti in Melbourne. Two, they were not approaching the subject from the outside; they're both very much entrenched in this community."

The research, says Smallman, was exhausting, requiring blind faith, optimism and perseverance through numerous setbacks and pitfalls. The result is an informative and entertaining book that documents the evolution of stencil art on Melbourne's streets, from 1999, when stencils bearing the moniker Psalm began to appear, to today's stencil graffiti boom.

Over the past six years, the stencil graffiti scene has flourished to the point that it has gained a certain mainstream acceptance and is being discussed in art and design journals and major newspapers, exhibited in national galleries, and appropriated by shrewd advertisers and corporations wanting to imbue their product with instant street credibility. Today, the world's most influential website on stencil graffiti, Stencil Revolution, comes out of Melbourne.

Smallman and Nyman, a Swedish graphic designer who was drawn to Melbourne because of its street art scene, met at what is believed to be the city's first gallery exhibition of stencil art at the Hush Hush art space, in Melbourne's graffiti-covered Hosier Lane.

Both had been independently photographing Melbourne's stencil graffiti, and soon they were forging plans for a book.

"We just realised that there was nothing anywhere in the world like the quality of the stencils that there are here, and the energy," Smallman says. Their book is divided into themes — skulls, politicians, faces, music, symbols, cartoons, animals, sexy ladies, horror, text. And it is interspersed with a series of candid profiles which give an insight into the diversity of Melbourne's stencil artists, their personalities, styles, influences and motivations — from the audacious Ha-Ha, who boasts that "the risk of getting caught is the ultimate thrill, it's better than sex", to the socially conscious Vexta, whose first stencil was an image of a two-year-old human skeleton, with the text "This is what a war victim looks like".

Tourism authorities and government bureaucrats seem to be in constant brainstorming mode trying to find ways to lift a city's profile and marketability. Architectural landmarks such as the Harbour Bridge or Federation Square, and natural wonders feature heavily in the drive for tourist dollars. Yet a city's unsanctioned marks, the surprises lurking in the undergrowth, the expressions of its subcultures (that is, its people), also capture the imagination of tourists and citizens, and speak volumes about the pulse of the city beyond the official channels.

To borrow a catchphrase from the Melbourne subculture website ThreeThousand, "the best things in life are often hard to find". Especially so for a city such as Melbourne which cannot boast the spectacular natural beauty of, say, a Sydney, or the awesome architectural history of a Rome.

Head down to Hosier Lane on a weekend and you will see how the swirling, wild creations of the city's stencil and street artists engage the mainstream. It's not just wannabe rock stars seeking street cred for their new CD cover who converge on the lane to be photographed against the gritty, glorious backdrop of street and stencil art. Bridesmaids in long satin dresses and stiff up-dos and brides swathed in clouds of tulle, teeter precariously in their stilettos on unforgiving bluestone to secure a touch of urban chic for their wedding albums.

Who needs the Harbour Bridge when your city has soul?

There's no denying the dynamism of Melbourne's street art scene. Hosier Lane and Centre Place, and Carlton's Canada Lane have become ever-evolving public galleries, tourist destinations in their own right. They've been featured in travelogues, such as Lonely Planet's Six Degrees television series.

But stencil graffiti capital? Of the world? It's a big claim. Smallman says he and Nyman came to that conclusion through extensive overseas travel and by scouring websites featuring street art from around the world.

London's street art guru Tristan Manco, whose books include Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, vouches for the vigour of Melbourne's stencil art scene — with one qualification. "To take on the title of 'best stencil graffiti scene in the world', Melbourne would have to have a showdown with Buenos Aires in Argentina — the scene there has reached critical mass right now, with a fiery political and creative passion."

Now there's an idea, a stencil art showdown — an event for incorporation into the Commonwealth Games perhaps? It's not as outlandish as it seems.

When I mention the Melbourne City Council's recent adoption of a zero tolerance policy towards graffiti, Manco responds: "Zero tolerance does seem a little harsh — perhaps they should take a lead from Athens, which organised an Olympic graffiti event inviting such graffiti stars as Os Gemeos from Brazil."

It seems highly unlikely that Australia will be doing anything of the sort. The State Government recently announced it would provide $1 million for the creation of a specialist police taskforce to target graffiti hot spots around the city and push for convictions against graffitists in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games.

But within the Melbourne City Council, there are voices of dissent. Greens councillor Fraser Brindley vehemently opposed the adoption of zero tolerance towards graffiti. He denounces it as a short-sighted, narrow-minded desire to sanitise the city for the Commonwealth Games.

"There's a lot of chest-beating going on and a lot of simple thinking about the way the city should present itself. Prohibition is not working and anyone who thinks beating your chest louder will rid the city of street art is deluded," he says.

"A lot of the laneways have been reinvigorated by street art more than anything else and to document it (in a book) is a great idea and is reflective of its status in Melbourne," Brindley says. He warns that under the new zero tolerance policy, there is nothing to protect the prized street and stencil art in laneways such as Hosier Lane and Centre Place.

Councillor David Wilson, who voted in favour of zero tolerance, does not condone the publication of Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne. He's not averse to buying it, though. In fact, he probably will: "That's not condoning it, that's just information gathering."

Yet even Wilson, who denounces graffiti as illegal, "personally" hopes that the property owners of Hosier Lane and Centre Place will seek council approval to retain the street art there. He disagrees that there's anything contradictory about his stance.

But the State Government and Melbourne City Council's hardline approach to graffiti will backfire, according to Smallman and the stencil artists and result in a proliferation of one of the most detested forms of graffiti — tagging, which can be done in five to 10 seconds.

STENCIL graffiti can take hours from conception to the moment of execution. The technique requires a screenprinter's skills and an artist's eye for design. Stencil artists may take a photo of the image they have in mind, or they may draw it themselves, or find it in a magazine or online.

Once they have their image, they then need to work out how they will turn that design into a functioning stencil. Multi-coloured images require separate stencils, to build layers of colour. The image is then transferred to cardboard or acetate. Depending on the intricacy of the design and the number of colours, it can be a complicated process, and the most arduous part is often the cutting.

"I've had this finger go numb completely for a week at a time," Meek says, indicating his index finger. One of Meek's best-known, most popular stencils is that of a busker, holding a sign saying "keep your coins, I want change". Up-and-coming community lawyer Phil Lynch, a keen campaigner for law reform for the homeless, was recently spotted in the city wearing a T-shirt with Meek's stencil printed on it.

Says Meek: "I thought a long time about that one because I didn't want to put something out that was mocking homelessness in any way, or making fun of people who have to beg. It probably took 10 hours to cut out, probably three to five minutes to put up."

To the uninitiated, three to five minutes may not sound long, but in the world of graffiti, it's a risky amount of time to be standing somewhere spray painting. Tagging, by comparison, takes about 10 seconds or less.

"I'm shitting myself most of the time I'm putting something up," Meek says. "The worry about getting caught isn't that bad; I'm more worried about a vigilante or overly aggressive cop being violent with you."

The National Gallery of Australia's curator of prints and drawings, Anne McDonald, views stencil art as the contemporary equivalent of the political posters of the '70s and '80s. Whenever she visits Melbourne, McDonald drops by Hosier Lane and Centre Place to see how the stencil graffiti scene is progressing. The gallery, she says, is considering ways of incorporating stencil art into its comprehensive collection of Australian prints.

But not everyone appreciates the artistry of street stencils. Even an image as beautiful and serene as Vexta's diving woman, created from an underwater photo she took of a friend, which is stencilled on the walls of the St Kilda junction underpass, managed to offend some small-minded passer-by, who has scrawled "f--k off hippie" on it. But that's the reality of the scene Vexta works in.

Yet that's not the worst of it, as Civilian knows. He faced the full fury of the law, after being caught by police in a disused building where an "Empty Show" — underground stencil art show — was about to be staged.

He recalls the frightening incident: "There were three of them. I was alone in an empty warehouse. They didn't let me go, they had guns.

"They were yelling at me, really angry, and they ripped up all the stencils around me," Civilian says.

"I was doing a lot of political stuff at the time, and they hated it (screaming) … 'How dare you criticise the army! That's my family! They defend our country, if it wasn't for them we'd be living under a different regime, how dare you!' (They were) like yelling in my face. It was quite scary."

Civilian is a gentle, softly spoken 27-year-old, who studied environmental management and science at university. He worries about how the new anti-terrorism laws, particularly the sedition provisions, might affect street artists.

But fear of the authorities won't stop the stencil artists from hitting the streets.

Meek, in any case, has little respect for the dictates of our Federal Government.

"At the time when I was really getting heavily into stencil graffiti, our Government was sending troops to Iraq, which was breaking international law.

"So I was, like, I don't really care about breaking our Government's laws if they're basically breaking laws."

As for Vexta, there are plenty of things she finds far more offensive than stencil art.

"I don't want to live in a city that's really bland and covered in grey and brown and advertising. I never said it was OK to put a billboard on the top of Brunswick Street, so who's to say that I can't put up a small A4 size image in a back laneway?"

The planets line up; it's St Kilda in summer

2005-12-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

The planets line up; it's St Kilda in summer

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/12/02/1133422111080.html

Scale model of our Solar System.
Photo: Nicole Emanuel

By Kathy Kizilos
December 3, 2005

THE sun will be coated in a golden satin and stand on the foreshore opposite the lighthouse near the marina.

The sun is being built to scale, to make it a billion times smaller than the actual sun. At 139 centimetres across, it is bigger than a beach ball, but not enormous.

The planets will be strung along the beach in accordance with the billion-to-one scale.

Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, will be 60 metres away; in space its mean orbital distance from the sun is 58 million kilometres. Mercury, the second-smallest planet after Pluto, will be a pipsqueak on the beach — a mere 0.5 centimetres across.

The first six planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will be an easy walk from the sun at the marina.

Saturn will be at the northern edge of the Catani Gardens — a distance of 1.4 kilometres. Uranus will be in Middle Park, Neptune in Port Melbourne while Pluto — for many years considered to be spinning on the outer limits of the solar system — will be isolated and alone in Garden City.

The smallest of the nine planets, Pluto will be the size of a pinhead, 0.24 centimetres across.

The St Kilda Solar System Project is the work of Christopher Lansell, a science graduate turned artist, and Ed Redman, who used to be a freelance designer and photographer in London.

Together they make up Wolf Rayet, a not-for-profit art company with an ecological bias. (Wolf-Rayets are a type of star, at least 25 times the mass of the sun, which are approaching the end of their stellar lives. They are rare and look like a spectacular, violent explosion. Naming the company after the star was Mr Lansell's idea. He is a space enthusiast and former astronomy student who, until last year, was an anatomy lecturer at Monash University.)

For Mr Lansell and Mr Redman, the inspiration behind the solar system project was their concern for the third planet from the sun — Earth.

The painted model they have made painstakingly depicts the continents and the seas in miniature. It is only 1.28 centimetres across and will be a mere speck on the foreshore, just as the Earth is a small body in the vastness of space.

Earth will also be the only planet shown with its moon. Mr Redman points out that this is as far as humanity has travelled in space. As the model makes clear, this is a very short distance in the scheme of things. Mr Redman says Mr Lansell's enthusiasm has given him an interest in the planets and astronomy generally, but working on the project has mostly deepened his appreciation for the vulnerability and fragility of our planet.

"It's all about the here and now, this is humanity's one shot," he says.

The planets, which will be on metal stands to allow children to look up at them, will be on display between 2pm and 8pm on two consecutive weekends — December 10 and 11 and December 17 and 18.

During the display, astronomers and informed friends of the artists will be on hand to answer questions. And each planet will have its own information board.

The artists would like the model to be mounted permanently and hope to set up a model in Sydney. They also intend to leave instructions on their website (wolfrayet.com) on how to build the model, so that other people can replicate the idea.

Replicator art, governed by copyleft — the philosophical and technical opposite to copyright — is another Wolf Rayet inspiration. The pair want their art to be available to others to reproduce it. The first example of replicator art on their website is the ingenious marshmallow TV, an invention of Mr Lansell's. Mr Redman describes it as the "lava lamp of the new millennium".

The device, which can be made from toilet paper tubes and tracing paper, turns a TV screen into an ever-changing display of shifting colours. Turn off the sound and you can ponder Earth's place in the universe — which is perhaps what the artists intended.

At the Edge of Darkness

2005-12-03T03:33:00.000-08:00

At the Edge of Darkness

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/12/02/1133422077020.html

Reviewer: Frances Atkinson
December 3, 2005

One of Robert Babic's photographs from At the Edge of Darkness.

At the Edge of Darkness: Photographic works by Robert Babic
Leica Gallery
December 2-14.
20 Smith Street, Collingwood.
Visit leicagallerymelbourne.com

Robert Babics's photographs may be propped up on the floor and wrapped in tight plastic, yet even from behind the plastic, as they wait to be hung on the walls of the Leica Gallery, they still manage to look intriguing. Like gifts yet to be opened. When he does unwrap them, a black-and-white world full of mystery and portent is revealed.

Babic's first solo exhibition, At the Edge of Darkness, is a collection of 16 photographs shot in black-and-white in four different countries over a four-year period. Some images give clues about where the images were taken but most refuse to divulge specific locations. "I really don't want people to know where the places are," says Babic. "The destination is not important, but the atmosphere it creates is."

Ideally he wants audiences to look at the work and let their imagination take over. Babic believes that if the location was made obvious, the mystery would disappear and make the work less powerful. Despite this, he knows some people will want specifics - but he's determined to remain tight-lipped. Some photographs were taken in Japan or Taiwan (where he lived for 12 months) and other images that look equally as exotic were taken only 30 minutes from Melbourne's GPO.

In At the Edge of Darkness Babic decided not to take photographs of people. There is the odd shadowy figure in some of his work, but essentially each image has a solitary, ghostly quality that evokes a feeling of contented isolation. It is a theme, persistent throughout his pieces, that reflects the way Babic prefers to work. "I enjoy working alone and I quite like being the only Westerner in the middle of nowhere," he says.

In an image titled Brooding, Babic spent many hours and rolls of film trying to get exactly what he wanted. Playing with scale and perspective, the photograph includes a series of steps carved into a rock sculpture. "I want people to think, 'Where are the steps going? Where do they end?' It's up to the audience to wonder about what might exist beyond the frame."

Babic was born in Switzerland in 1966. His family moved to Brisbane when he was a child. At 18 he backpacked around Europe and Britain, taking a particular interest in photographing Stonehenge. On his return, he studied art history and photography at the University of Queensland. Around that time he decided to shoot exclusively in black-and-white.

"Someone once said that shooting colour is the McDonald's of photography and I tend to agree." He admits that some photographers are doing interesting work with colour, but Babic says: "When I look back, the images that stand out in my mind are often black-and-white." He mentions the image of a little girl running down a road, covered in napalm, taken during the Vietnam War by Huynh Cong Ut. "I can't think of a contemporary war image that has the same emotional power."

For Babic, black-and-white images capture a sense of mystery and also texture and a heightened definition that colour cannot provide. "When I shoot in black-and-white I can capture warmth, simplicity and the shape of the image. Colour can sometimes appear to give you more visually, but there's a whole tonal range that only black-and-white can provide."

Unimpressed by the advances in digital photography, Babic uses an old Nikon film camera and develops his work in a darkroom. "I can appreciate that many people like to shoot on a digital because it's so convenient, but I don't." Babic believes the rise of the digital camera has made people both lazy and impatient when it comes to photography. He likes the idea of mastering a skill and the romance of watching an image slowly appear on the photographic paper.

No doubt in the very near future black-and-white digital photography will improve and match the quality Babic can achieve with his film camera, but even when that happens, he is unlikely to swap techniques. "I'll always prefer that mechanical side to photography because I don't like beeping buttons. I want freedom to shoot how I like." Babic also likes the idea of his images, which are printed on fibre-based paper, lasting 100 years or more. "With digital, you just don't know how long some prints will last. Five years, 10? The technology is too new."

There is at least one photograph in Babic's collection that does include a person. The Vanishing is a blurry, slightly surreal image of a woman holding an umbrella, looking down a long, empty road, slick with rain. It's not clear if she is waiting or leaving. The ambiguity is intentional. Babic is drawn again to shadows, darkness, intense light and all the shades in between.

Someone once said that shooting colour is the McDonald's of photography and I tend to agree." He admits that some photographers are doing interesting work with colour, but Babic says: "When I look back, the images that stand out in my mind are often black-and-white." He mentions the image of a little girl running down a road, covered in napalm, taken during the Vietnam War by Huynh Cong Ut. "I can't think of a contemporary war image that has the same emotional power."

For Babic, black-and-white images capture a sense of mystery and also texture and a heightened definition that colour cannot provide. "When I shoot in black-and-white I can capture warmth, simplicity and the shape of the image. Colour can sometimes appear to give you more visually, but there's a whole tonal range that only black-and-white can provide."

Unimpressed by the advances in digital photography, Babic uses an old Nikon film camera and develops his work in a darkroom. "I can appreciate that many people like to shoot on a digital because it's so convenient, but I don't." Babic believes the rise of the digital camera has made people both lazy and impatient when it comes to photography. He likes the idea of mastering a skill and the romance of watching an image slowly appear on the photographic paper.

No doubt in the very near future black-and-white digital photography will improve and match the quality Babic can achieve with his film camera, but even when that happens, he is unlikely to swap techniques. "I'll always prefer that mechanical side to photography because I don't like beeping buttons. I want freedom to shoot how I like." Babic also likes the idea of his images, which are printed on fibre-based paper, lasting 100 years or more. "With digital, you just don't know how long some prints will last. Five years, 10? The technology is too new."

There is at least one photograph in Babic's collection that does include a person. The Vanishing is a blurry, slightly surreal image of a woman holding an umbrella, looking down a long, empty road, slick with rain. It's not clear if she is waiting or leaving. The ambiguity is intentional. Babic is drawn again to shadows, darkness, intense light and all the shades in between.

A sense of place

2005-10-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

A sense of place

October 15, 2005

Place is crucial to all Australians. It is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny, argues Hugh Mackay.

ONE OF the silliest ways of trying to put cultural distance between Aborigines and other Australians - particularly those of Anglo-Celtic stock living in the suburbs - is by attributing to indigenous people a mystical sense of place, a special relationship with the land that transcends anything we urban types could comprehend.

It's all rubbish, of course. Not the special relationship bit; that's true enough. What's rubbish is the idea that the sense of place is unique to indigenous people, or even that it's more special, more "spiritual" for them than for us.

Different cultures obviously have different ways of expressing their sense of place; we revere our "tribal grounds" in different ways.

But connection to place is vital to our sense of identity - both personal and communal.

In fact, I suspect that much of the uneasiness, anxiety and moral uncertainty of modern urban societies can be traced to our loss of a strong sense of continuous connection with places that help to define us. Cyberspace, it turns out, is no substitute for the real thing.

So where did we get this weird idea that a relationship to the land is important only in agrarian, nomadic or hunting cultures?

In Australia, the continuing debate about land rights has been part of the problem (and no, this is not a polemic against land rights; on the contrary).

We say "Mabo" and we think "land", and so we should. But many Australians say "indigenous" and think only of land, as if the sense of place is uniquely magical and central in Aboriginal culture.

Perhaps I need only mention the MCG, Flemington, the SCG, the WACA or the Gabba to make the rather obvious point that urban Australia has places of almost mystical significance - places that symbolise deeply embedded cultural values and mark the location of great struggles, great triumphs, great defeats and great outpourings of human emotion.

Sport may not be your thing, and you might think I'm belittling indigenous culture by daring to mention sporting venues in the same breath as Aboriginal sacred sites.

But you'd have to be either prejudiced or blind not to have noticed the profound, if not spiritual, significance of such places as settings for the acting out of ancient and primitive tribal rituals of the battle and the hunt.

If sport doesn't do it for you, think of Gallipoli, Changi or the Kokoda Trail. Think of the Australian War Memorial, or the smaller memorials - parks, plaques, obelisks and halls scattered across Australia, marking the spots where homage is regularly paid to those who made supreme sacrifices on our behalf. Those places matter, their location essential to their role.

Still unconvinced? Revisit your primary school playground, then, or a classroom you once sat in.

The powerful sense of that place - the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it - will stir all kind of emotions in you, positive and negative, not accessible via mere memory.

Those emotions spring from deep wells of half-forgotten longing; reservoirs of an aching simplicity; the momentous nothingness of a child's life lived without any real sense of a past and not much connection with the idea of a future that once yawned in our faces, but has already swirled past us.

Go to the suburb where you grew up (it's probably not very far from where you live now, stamping grounds being what they are) and walk the footpaths, the shops where you strolled and loitered as a teenager; the park where you learned to kick a football, fly a kite or trained your dog to fetch; the backyard where you took your first catch or learned to skip, climb, hide or whistle. Not significant? Go and have a look.

The rush of recognition when we hear songs that supplied the soundtrack to our adolescence and early adulthood is an evocation of place as much as time, because the places matter.

You can see how much they matter when they're torn down or ripped apart. The cinema where you learned about good and evil writ large now a Persian rug shop, forever closing down.

And whatever happened to that corner? Why have they widened the road? Where is the ...

Where is the ... Hey! Where is the house I grew up in? Where is my neighbour's house? Shocking stuff, the removal or disruption of place.

The place where you worked at your first job. The quad at your university, the lawns where you lay in the sun, scarcely daring to believe she was feeling as you were feeling (and usually finding she wasn't). The harbour. The river. The lake. The holiday destination with its beaches, or its mountain tracks. The caravan park, year after year. Go back and feel it. Sense it. Tell me it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't have to be a primitive, unspoiled place. It doesn't have to be grass and rocks and trees and streams. Ask the people who live in Carnegie if those places mean something more than just spaces to sleep and walk and eat in. They don't have to be charming, trendy, beautiful or even well defined.

"My street" is magic in every nuance, and sometimes the magic lingers: I have two streets like that - one in Sydney, one in Melbourne - where an occasional pilgrimage is both reassuring and gut-churning (that tree, that hedge, that fence, that veranda, those ghosts).

What about the cathedrals, churches, chapels, courts and concert halls - places that have enclosed and inspired some of our most numinous, uplifting, heartbreaking or clarifying moments?

Or the places where we stood and heard terrible news: we know where we were when we heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, or the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre because we were rooted to the spot.

And there are places we never want to go to again, because they contain demons or ghosts we know will catch us if we venture too close. I know of one man who will never, under any circumstances, visit his old school again; another who refuses even to drive down the street where he grew up in a desperately unhappy family.

Why would he: the place is the most powerful of all the symbols of his unhappiness.

Some places contain our personal secrets, but places also create and capture our sense of belonging to a community: indeed, it's arguable if we can hold on to a sense of community without anchoring it to places.

The places where we . . . where the family . . . where our neighbours . . . The places that stood for our emerging sense of ourselves as people who belong somewhere, and don't belong somewhere else.

The sense, as a child, of even the next street being alien, let alone the next suburb. The sense of a relative's house in a distant suburb being like an oasis of familiarity in a desert of strangeness. Tribal grounds? Stamping grounds? Of course; what else?

What's less mystical about any of that than the mystical status of place in indigenous culture? It is neither to detract from that culture, nor to honour it any less, to say that place is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny.

It's also fundamental to our sense of morality. Only when we feel connected to others do we seem willing to accept some responsibility for their wellbeing.

The real test of our moral sensitivity is not how nice we are to our friends and family members, but how we treat the people who share the places where we live and work, whether we happen to like them or not. (Funny how we so carefully choose the places where we'll live, but not the people we'll have as neighbours. Did you ever interview the people in the street before you bought a house? No; it was the place that spoke to you.)

Places shape us. Living in a mean little concrete box will take its toll on you, as surely as the design of Parliament House will shape the attitudes and behaviour of the politicians who work in it.

If you're interested in raising the moral tone of a community, look first to the creation of spaces where people can meet, walk, talk, play, eat, drink. (Is the regional shopping mall really the best we can do? Did any community ever find its soul in such a place?)

The places where we discover the magical sense of being connected to a neighbourhood - the pub, the park, the church, the schoolyard, the shops - lodge in our memory.

The "global village", by contrast, is just a hoax perpetrated by the high priests of the IT revolution. Villages, urban or otherwise, need real places to foster the incidental connections - the smiles, the nods - of village life. Falling in love on the net is usually a hoax, too: love needs a place to grow, just as herd animals need a place to graze together. One video screen is much the same as another (a bit like shopping centres and airports), whereas real places are unique. Cyberspace is a clever name, but we must resist the idea that it bears any relation to the other kind.

Our problem is not that we lack the yearning for a sense of place; that yearning is universal. Our problem, especially compared with Aborigines, is that we've often failed to acknowledge the deep need in ourselves.

Aborigines don't have a mortgage on the sense of place, but they could teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to nurture it.

Hugh Mackay is an author and social commentator.

Return of a passionate pilgrim

2005-10-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

By Barry Humprhies

October 7, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/10/06/1128562941049.html

'I was long dismissed as a traitor, or worse, an expatriate merely because I recognised the intrinsic bittersweet comedy of suburban life.'

Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

LESS than a year after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, I was born in Melbourne. My birthplace was an ugly red-brick hospital in Kew and it was often pointed out to me by my parents when we went like everyone else in Melbourne for our Sunday afternoon spin in the Oldsmobile. The purpose of these excursions was to look at the "lovely homes" and my father, being in the building trade took more than a sentimental interest in the chubby new cream brick villas that were springing up on the slopes of Eaglemont and Balwyn. Indeed, the very parts of Melbourne that Streeton and Roberts and Conder had so lovingly painted in the 1890s were the ones Melbourne most enthusiastically sought to obliterate. Years later some planning committee must have looked at the Yarra Valley and still detected a vestige of its former beauty, so they gleefully finished the job with a six-lane (Eastern) freeway.

It was with very mixed emotions that I gazed upon the hospital of my birth and wondered why we always had to slow down to have a look at it, though I suppose if it were more generally known to tourists that this was my birthplace the traffic in Cot
ham Road would undoubtedly be gridlocked. I was really more interested in slums, and on every Sunday drive I implored my father to let me see some. It must be remembered that my parents were a post-Depression couple who still recalled the horrors of the Slump. They both came from the working-class suburb of Thornbury and thanks to the growing success of my father's business they had moved to Camberwell on the fringes of the metropolitan area, from the heights of which could be seen the lavender blue parapet of the Dandenongs.

Slums were the last things my parents wanted to be reminded of though I was sure they existed somewhere at a place called Dudley flats. We never went there. "Don't forget," my mother said, "that some poor people can also be quite nice." I was reminded of my mother the other day when Barbara Bush, speaking of the victims of hurricane Katrina said publicly: "But they were under-privileged anyway."

"Look at that little home," my mother once exclaimed urging my father to reduce his speed to a kerb crawl. There, thrillingly, was a small Victorian cottage joined up to an identical one rather like soldier beetles mating. Today some old Scotch boy would have sold it for half a million describing it as a "stunning Federation townhouse, a real renovator's delight with ample room for a jacuzzi". Then, in those far off days, it was a drab little weatherboard semi with a scrap of iron lace on the veranda but with a gleaming brass doorknob. "See how they've polished that brass," my mother said, "and see how clean the windows are. You don't have to be rich to be particular", at which my father would quickly accelerate, and soon, with a collective sigh, we would be back in the leafy streets of East Camberwell lined with elms and plane trees and nice houses with a decent setback.

I used to bicycle to my prep school through those streets when cars were few and in the autumn, my favourite month, when the leaves were swept into Kellogg's-coloured pyramids. After a few applications of a Bryant May, the fragrant creamy smoke trickled out over the damp suburban gardens. The banning of incinerators and autumnal bonfires was a death blow to the aromatic Melbourne of my youth.

When I was moved by my parents to an expensive school in South Yarra the transport arrangements were more complicated. Usually I took a suburban train to Flinders Street and a tram along St Kilda Road. The train ride into town in a first class non-smoker was always a good reading opportunity and the compartments with their green banquettes were embellished with faded sepia photographs of Victorian beauty spots under glass. Yarra Glenn, Warrnambool, the Grampians, Marysville, Sorrento. Figures curiously dressed in the attire of the past could occasionally be seen with parasols on sepia beaches or posing jauntily under huge tree ferns or by waterfalls at Sassafras. None of these railway murals made me ever wish to visit the beauty spots depicted thereon. I was more interested in going to England, a mythical place full of castles, thatched cottages, Beefeaters and Winston Churchill. "Who was he?" I asked. "A famous English politician who saved England," I was told proudly. Who today would decorate their homes with a portrait of a politician, however popular? Will we live to see the image of Mr Howard or even Mark Latham on a kitchen calender?

In those days there was an image of Churchill in almost every Australian home but you would have to visit the opportunity shops of Melbourne to find a Churchill Toby jug today, and those other treasured objects we dusted and polished in the 1940s.

The noticeable thing about the men and also the women who waited for the train on Willison Station was that they wore hats; workmen in particular wore a kind of uniform of Akubra trilby, baggy grey trousers and a faun — always faun — half Norfolk jacket over a two-tone fawn and burgundy cardigan and an open-necked shirt . They could be seen rolling their own cigarettes and the older men often sported a returned serviceman's badge. They always carried battered Gladstone bags in which one presumed were sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a copy of The Sporting Globe, Truth or Smith's Weekly. These last two newspapers were banned at our place and I had only glimpsed their salacious contents when I visited Mr McGrath the barber for a brutal short back and sides. The women on the station not only wore hats, but not seldom, gloves, for they were going into the city after all, whereas the proletarian travellers would probably alight where the factories were at Richmond and Burnley, when after work, those collapsed Gladstone bags would accommodate six bottles of Abbots Lager.

Going into the city was always a ritual I enjoyed with my mother, for it meant hats, gloves, crumbed whiting at the Wattle Tea Rooms or creamed sweet corn (undoubtedly out of a tin) at Russell Collins. We would only shop in Collins Street. Bourke Street was mostly out of bounds except for Myers and Buckleys. The upper reaches of Bourke Street were thought common and there were second hand bookshops around the eastern market — a paradise for germs. The Melbourne Jewish artist Horace Brodsky, friend of Modigliani whom I knew in the '60s in London when he was in the ninth decade of his life, recalled the Melbourne of his youth when people promenading in Collins Street would never dream of setting foot in the raffish purlieus of Bourke Street two blocks away. There was, he told me, a discernible difference, not merely in the attire of the pedestrians in Melbourne's two parallel thoroughfares but also in their dialect.

I was still growing up in Melbourne when the '50s dawned, an era I have since called The Age Of Laminex. Australia has never been cleaner. Although washing powders had yet to be called "detergents" (they were still, prosaically, soap) the Bendix arrived at about the same time as the Biro. Ballpoint pens were banned at Melbourne Grammar since they destroyed calligraphy though very few old Melburnians went on to write anything more interesting than cheques. The new washing machines replaced the old fashioned copper and trough where we had once as children watched our mothers boil the sheets with shavings of Sunlight Soap, poking the frothy linen bladders with a copper stick before they were submerged in Reckitt's Blue. Where are all those copper sticks now? Burnt up no doubt as kindling in an early barbecue. You won't find a copper stick in the opportunity shop, though of course there are plenty of jaffle irons (a '50s invention superseded by the panini grill) among the rusting pressure cookers, Soda Stream machines of the seventies, and, of course, all those fondue sets that young married couples received in multiples on their darkest day.

I was there in Carlton for the arrival of the espresso machine and the quaintly mispronounced "cuppachino" and when I worked for nearly a year at EMI in Flinders Lane — without ever knowing what the initials EMI stood for — I was present at the birth of the long-playing microgroove record. At parties when the lights were dim, Ertha Kitt huskily intoned her famous song I Wanna Be Evil and the more daring of us smoked Black Sobranie Balkan cigarettes with gold tips bought from Dammans the tobacconist on the now obliterated corner of Collins and Swanston streets.

One of the most important Melbourne spectacles of this period was an establishment in Swanston Street opposite St Paul's Cathedral called Downey Flake. Here crowds pressed against the window awestruck to observe an enormous Heath Robinson-like stainless steel machine which stirred a vat of yellow sludge, scooped dollops onto a conveyer belt and dropped calamari like rings into a cauldron of seething fat from which emerged, on another belt, an endless succession of sugared doughnuts. It was a sideshow almost rivalling Myer's Christmas windows and Phar Lap but never rivalling television, and the throngs outside Veal's, Allan's and Glenns as we gawked at all those Astor and AWA 21-inch blond wood sets with their flickering images of Graham Kennedy, Jeff Corke, Princess Panda and Denise Drysdale and the Tarax Dancers.

By the end of the decade there would be a television set in every house in Melbourne. The Best room, often called "The Lounge Room" where paradoxically no one was ever allowed to lounge or even relax, became a ghost room. At the back of the house the family huddled before the new instrument and driving down a Melbourne suburban street one evening in 1960 you would at first suppose it to be deserted; its inhabitants fled or evaporated like the crew of Marie Celeste. Yet, above the rooftops when you looked a second time, was a bluish grey flicker, like a will-o'-the-wisp; the shimmering aurora Australis of television, the only Australian art form that never disappointed its public by improving.

I missed the Melbourne Olympic Games because I had accepted a job in an exciting little theatre in Sydney which managed to be popular and mildly satirical. But the Olympic Games changed Melbourne. This was the heyday of Whelan the Wrecker, a family demolition firm that proudly emblazoned its name over every act of civic vandalism in the '50s and '60s when some of our best Victorian architecture disappeared. Some of my favourite old bookshops vanished as well. Used books harboured bacteria after all, and it would give visitors to Melbourne a very bad impression if it were implied that we couldn't afford new books. However there were still exciting art exhibitions in Melbourne that didn't happen anywhere else in Australia. The city was full of commercial art galleries, now forgotten. There was Tyes, Georges, Peter Bray, The Athenaeum, The Seddon Galleries, Joshua Maclelland and many more. I saw exhibitions of work by Arthur Boyd, indeed the entire Boyd family, John Brack, Charles Blackman and Leonard French. Clifton Pugh painted my portrait in 1958 which was exhibited and Brummels Coffee Lounge, a South Yarra institution which only disappeared a few years ago. Collins Street then boasted, rather pathetically, a "Paris end" but it had a distinctive charm with the Oriental and Occidental hotels and an array of shops which didn't all sell clothing, as they do now. The trams were still an attractive cream and Rexona green as they had been since the 1930s when the colours were first suggested as the result of a state-wide competition and the influence of Asia was confined to Little Bourke Street.

I am not sure when Moomba was invented but it has to have been in the '50s. Were we told it was an Aboriginal word meaning "let's get together and have fun". At the time, Mrs Edna Everage of Moonee Ponds said that it was a word that the Aborigines gave us when they had no further use for it. Various local personalities disported themselves on floats in street parades — events which Australians never really relished — except on Anzac Day.

There were also kings and queens of Moomba, personages now long forgotten but who would be described today as "icons". It was probably the synthetic gaiety of Moomba that persuaded me to leave Melbourne in 1959 for my travels and adventures abroad.

The boat, an Italian one, sailed from Port Melbourne to Venice, but I already had a taste for things Italian. After all, I had been to university in Carlton where the first espresso machine had frothed up my cappuccino and I had already mingled with the sophisticated crowd who hung out at the Florentino Bistro eating Spaghetti ala Bolognese and drinking Chianti. I left when Harry Ballefonte was singing his famous Calypso island in the sun and only returned in the Beatles era.

When I came back to Melbourne to do my first one man show at the Assembly Hall, the city had changed. Mr Whelan's dust still hung in the air but there were wonderful new buildings like the Southern Cross Hotel with its aqua panels and burgundy carpets. It was hard to imagine then that the Southern Cross would ever be torn down or that the Gas and Fuel buildings opposite St Paul's Cathedral (which was miraculously still standing) would ever be replaced by something worse. Yet somehow the spirit of Melbourne survived.

I have lately been touring the Midwest of the United States and visited cities in serious urban decay. Derelict shops, wig emporiums for African American women, and crack cocaine dealers on every corner. By contrast, what a pleasure it is to stroll through the streets of Melbourne safely at night. To visit small restaurants and to take coffee or browse in the bookstores of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy or Maling Road, Canterbury, or enjoy the thronged restaurants in Lygon Street. Through all of its changes good and bad, the spirit of Melbourne somehow survives and prospers.

It is a sign of progress that I have been asked to address you at all on the subject of my home town. I was long dismissed as a traitor, or worse, an expatriate merely because I recognised the intrinsic bittersweet comedy of suburban life. Few people know that I always travel with a copy of Melways street directory — an increasingly chubby volume — in my hand luggage. At a cafe table in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, on a ski lift in Switzerland, in the garden of ranch in Argentina or a beach in Denmark I peruse this well-thumbed guide to my birthplace, and I dream of Hawksburn, Rosanna, Aspendale, Gardiner, Dennis and Spotswood. The still-to-be explored heartland of my favourite city.

On a visit to Vienna recently I met an old museum guide who turned on the lights for me so that I could more clearly see a favourite picture. When I thanked him he replied with a distinctly Australian accent, "No vorries". I quizzed him on his origins and he explained that he and a friend had come to Australia as migrants in the '50s. His friend had married an Australian girl, settled and become successful, but he had returned to Vienna to nurse an invalid parent and had never got away again. "So you see, sir," said the old guide, gazing wistfully out the window at the dying light glinting on the Stephan's Dom, "I stand here all day dreaming of … Broadmeadows". He made it seem so romantic that it has become a place on the map of Melbourne that still awaits my pilgrimage.

Barry Humphries delivered this speech last night at the 20th anniversary dinner of the Committee for Melbourne.

Something about Melbourne

2005-09-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/10/1125772732696.html

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne is the first such reference book in Australia. Jane Sullivan spoke with the two editors about the mammoth project.

MELBOURNE is a Janus-faced city. One face is ebullient, extremely confident. It says: "I'm a technologically advanced and socially dynamic metropolis looking out on the world." The other face is depressed, anxious, engaged in endless self-examination: "Am I just another small-minded small town?"

Ever since its foundation, and more than any other Australian city, Melbourne has been in a constant state of up and down, ebb and flow. In the 1850s, gold brought sudden prosperity and helped to create the Marvellous Melbourne that was for a time the world's most exciting city. Then the 1890s depression plunged the city into gloom. The ups and downs continued through the 20th century. They are still happening today.

"These things did happen extraordinarily quickly and perhaps that is nested in the psyche," says University of Melbourne history lecturer Dr Andrew Brown-May. "Melbourne still has the sense that the good times can't last."

The story of Melbourne, then, is a tale of two cities. And Brown-May and his colleague, Associate Professor Shurlee Swain, a reader in the school of arts and sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Ballarat, are better placed than practically anyone to tell that story. Their knowledge of Melbourne is literally encyclopedic.

For the past 10 years, the pair have headed a team of five associate editors and 450 contributors, putting together a monumental work, The Encyclopedia of Melbourne. The first of its kind in Australia, and one of only a handful worldwide, it's a complex and fascinating portrait of a city and its history. There are more than 800 pages, lavishly illustrated, in an easy-to-use alphabetical form, with lots of cross-references, from "abattoirs" to "zoo".

There is also an online version which will be released over the next two years, and can be updated; and the editors are developing multimedia presentations of material that will offer different virtual ways of exploring the city.

The editors see the print encyclopedia not just as a book for universities, schools and libraries, but as a browsing and reference tool to be used as widely as possible. From the daily calls to his office seeking information, Brown-May knows there is "a terrific appetite" in Melbourne for local history. With a retail price of $150, the encyclopedia isn't cheap; but nor is it so expensive that curious readers won't pick it up in the bookshop.

The encyclopedia fills "a gaping chasm" in the recorded history of the city, Brown-May says: "No great narrative overview history of Melbourne has been written since the 1950s." Many researchers are still using 19th-century sources such as Garryowen's Chronicles of Early Melbourne.

Meanwhile, plenty of scholars have been doing fine research over the past 25 years into aspects of Melbourne's history, but it is getting harder to publish the results of that research. The encyclopedia was able to draw on a very large number of PhD theses and similar studies languishing in bottom drawers.

The editors also found they could not simply recycle existing history. "There was an awful lot of work that, unknown to us at the start, really had to be written afresh," Brown-May says. "So the encyclopedia is the starting point for a whole new exploration of the city."

Brown-May became interested in the idea of a city encyclopedia as a young PhD student who couldn't get his own research published (it eventually came out as a book, Melbourne Street Life, in 1998). He decided his next project should have a very broad appeal. At first, some people he consulted were dubious about whether he would ever muster the time and resources needed for the job: "I suppose it was my youthful enthusiasm, I said what the heck, let's give it a go."

The project is part of the growing discipline of urban history. "Whatever you're interested in, the city can provide you with a framework to explore broader categories," Brown-May says.

Why an encyclopedia and not a history book? The study of history has been fracturing into many sub-disciplines — urban, feminist, indigenous, labour and so on — to a point where it is hard for any single historian to get across the vast task of documenting the history of a city.

But in the past 10 years in the US, historians have turned to encyclopedias as a valuable and accessible medium for telling the story of a city. In 1995, Brown-May visited the editors of the New York and Chicago encyclopedias, and found out about similar projects in Indianapolis and Cleveland. These books sold very well and boosted each city's image of itself.

Perhaps the most astonishing feature of The Encyclopedia of Melbourne is that it was produced with a mere $400,000 or so in funding. The Australian Research Council gave $180,000 over four years and Monash University gave about the same amount. The Melbourne City Council has just offered $10,000 towards publication, but despite a lot of lobbying, there has been no support from federal or state government or private sponsors.

"That's been a source of frustration and disappointment to us," Brown-May says, pointing out that the council plans to spend $160,000 on flowers for the Commonwealth Games. "There are organisations we believe should be showing the lead in sponsoring this kind of project, but it's very hard to get that sort of money for history making in Melbourne … Part of the problem is that Melbourne is now seen as a branch office of Sydney. When we went to boardrooms, we weren't talking to the people who had the right to dispose of the money."

Meanwhile, Sydney has scored nearly $1 million for its own encyclopedia project — which shows something about the difference between the cities.

But Melbourne was first with the idea and first with the book, and the encyclopedia is very much a labour of love. The editors worked on it on top of their academic commitments, and every contributor donated their work for nothing.

In the early stages of the project, Brown-May and Swain found their team pretty much assembled itself. One day they sat down with a whiteboard and asked what were the broad themes they needed to cover. They came up with a list of 12 themes, put a working group onto each theme and got them to track down the experts in each area.

Gradually a list of entries began to emerge. The hardest decisions were what to leave out: the editors decided they would cover the greater metropolitan region of Melbourne and leave out entries for people, since these were already covered in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Each contributor had to work within a word budget of up to 4000 words; the average entry is about 300 words.

One surprising feature of the encyclopedia is that it is full of opinion, often contradictory, sometimes quite forcefully expressed. The contributors had to include relevant facts, but they were also free to use their own interpretation and opinion to sum up the spirit of a place, a cultural awareness or sensitivity. "They are not just subjective opinions but competing and dissonant voices, and that's a metaphor for the living city," Brown-May says.

Under "Foundation and Early History", emeritus professor A. G. L. Shaw balances the impact of early settlers against the custodianship of the Wurundjeri people. Overall, he concludes, the new arrivals "had benefited from their emigration and had created a thriving city, though they had ravaged an ancient community in the process".

In the next entry, "Founding Myths", a younger historian, postgraduate scholar Penelope Edmonds, is inspired by newer approaches to reading colonial history. The mythic self-imagining of Batman and Fawkner had them commencing the world again in Melbourne, she says; but they were really taking land, knowledge and labour from the people who had lived there for thousands of years.

Brown-May says the two entries are very different in style and approach, but match each other beautifully and meet different needs in the audience. "There's a paradox in the encyclopedia: it's a series of facts and also a series of debates and contested versions of history."

Swain adds: "The old encyclopedias pretended to be objective, and they weren't."

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne will not pretend to be anything other than a product that reflects the concerns of the early 21st century, a time capsule that may be read very differently in another 100 years. Even in the decade it took to produce, Melbourne changed radically. Early entries were written in the days when Jeff Kennett was state premier, and it felt as if he was going to be in power forever.

"A lot of entries had the sense that Melbourne had been permanently changed: there was a feeling of sadness, uncertainty and sometimes anger," Swain says. "When we came to reread them, we realised they were already creations of their time. Sometimes we had to change entries to recognise that Kennett had been defeated. A whole new world had come in."

Another innovative feature is a series of short essays in a very personal voice by well-known writers and Melbourne identities, about what the city means to them. Marjorie Tipping remembers the Jewish refugees who came to live in Princes Hill in Carlton: Jennifer Byrne relives hot summers outside The Age office; Barry Humphries laments a vanished Melbourne in verse.

From their unique vantage point, where do the editors sense that Melbourne is going next? "Into diversity," Swain says. Your mental map of Melbourne is dominated by the area where you live, or where you grew up. But reading through the encyclopedia, your mental map would be displaced quite severely. There's a runaway diversity in even the plainest parts of Melbourne now. Look up the most Anglo-Saxon of suburbs and you'll find something like a Buddhist temple."

Brown-May thinks we are heading into a different tale of two cities: an increased tension between the inner and outer suburbs. The metropolitan sprawl has its negative side, but he believes a decentred city can work.

The inner city is still vibrant and has retained its role as a democratic centre, but Melbourne is also a very nodal place: "Many people who live here would never visit the inner city at all, and people in inner Melbourne feel they have gone to a foreign country if they go to Werribee or Sunshine."

"And each of these different worlds," Swain adds, "are not as people imagine they are."

ARCHITECTURE
Bates Smart, Jackson and Perrott's casino (1993-97), a behemoth in spatially orchestrated social control and fiscal gradation, drained
off CBD activities into a simulated Southbank streetscape, below a battery of gluttonous fireball jets resembling 1780s funerary monuments by Bollee & Gilly.

POLICE AND POLICING
Suspicions of corruption in the detective force were raised as early as 1852, with one magistrate suggesting "there have been, in the case of
several detective officers, a most suspicious suddenness in getting rich".

CONFECTIONERY
MacRobertson's made its name in chocolates from the humble penny Freddo Frog through the nougat bar and Cherry Ripe to block chocolate and the lavishly boxed Old Gold chocolates; Hoadley's pioneered the Violet chocolate-coated combination bar, notably the technically demanding but triumphantly successful Violet Crumble and Polly Waffle ...

CLASS
Young Melburnians first encountered the reality of class at school. In no other Australian city does the question "What school did you go to?" carry such a heavy freight of meaning.

FOOTBALL, AUSTRALIAN RULES
Invented in Melbourne in the late 1850s and codified in 1859, Australian Rules is the oldest code of football in the world.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
One of the really wonderful parts of Melbourne that "melted away" was the Easter Market. There was a Turkish man who sat at the entrance intoning a sort of chant - "Turkey lolly, who'll buy lolly, good for Susie,
good for Johnnie" - all the time he was making pink fairy floss in a spinning cylinder worked by a foot treadle. He did a roaring trade. (Dame Phyllis Frost)

LITTLE LON
Church activists damned Little Lon as Melbourne's chief red-light district.
Their main target was Madame Brussels, who had run a brothel in the
neighbourhood since 1876, and whom newspapers early in the 20th century dubbed the "queen" of brotheldom.

SHOPPING
The revamped Georges of Collins Street misjudged its market in 1998 and became Melbourne's highest-class op-shop when the Brotherhood of St Laurence opened a recycled fashion outlet there.

THEATRE
From the 1890s to the 1910s ... audiences were still thrilled by the extreme realism of the staging ... Huge water tanks permitted the melodrama's heroine to be rescued by the hero, or sometimes by a (well-trained) dog.

WAR: DOMESTIC MOBILISATION
[in 1942] a communications hub was established at Russell Street police headquarters; if telephone lines were cut, Boy Scouts were to deliver urgent messages by bicycle.

Edited extracts from The Encyclopedia of Melbourne.

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, published by Cambridge University Press, $150, is available later this month.

Northcote the new St Kilda?

2005-08-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

Northcote the new St Kilda?

August 12, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/northcote-the-new-st-kilda/2005/08/11/1123353447391.html

"I moved to Northcote 12 years ago," says Mick Thomas, "and everyone said I was nuts." They're not saying the singer-songwriter-playwright and former Weddings, Parties, Anything frontman is nuts any more. According to new stats, Northcote has more songwriters than any other suburb in Victoria. Does that mean Northcote is the new St Kilda? The Triffids' late legendary founder, Dave McComb, lived in Northcote. Nick Barker has recently moved north. My Friend the Chocolate Cake's David Bridie has given years to the suburb as have the Whirling Furphies' Frank Jones, and Kavisha Mazzella.

This musical energy finds expression later this month in the Darebin Music Feast, which will feature, among others, Mazzella in three acts — with the Italian Women's Choir accompanying the silent movie Dall'Italia all'Australia, playing with her band, and leading a BYO vocal cords event called The Big Sing.

Things were different in the old days, says Thomas wistfully. "When I first came to Northcote, I'd been living in the Punters Club in Fitzroy and it did feel like moving to the outback. Everything I did had to start with a 15 to 20-minute cab ride. Now when you go into the Northcote Social Club, you're always running into people — it's like going to the Punters or the Prince or the Espy circa 10 years ago." Real estate agent Kerry Davis reckons the space and greenery are part of the attraction. "It's not just musicians who are coming here, it's people across the whole arts spectrum," she says. "The bigger houses here lend themselves to the communal living that a lot of artists enjoy."

So what are the Northcote landmarks, the equivalents to Richmond's clock on the silo that says 11 degrees? Davis reckons the Westgarth picture theatre is worth a tune, and the parklands that surround the suburb down to the Fairfield boatsheds. My Friend the Chocolate Cake have sung about (John) Cain Avenue, near Dennis railway station. But you can't beat a good shopping mall. Thomas has written the seminal track, Northcote Plaza, while Mazzella's instrumental Tarantella di Northcote Plaza attempts to describe what would happen if all the old Italian guys standing around in groups talking at the plaza suddenly started playing accordions.

This sporting life

2005-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

This sporting life
August 28, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/this-sporting-life/2005/08/25/1124562976266.html

In its short life, TV has wrought massive change on the face of sport in Australia. Brian Courtis takes a look at what we've gained - and what we've lost - along the way.

The rules of the game are that every now and then you must let television tap you on the shoulder and remind you of what you are missing.

They call it nostalgia. It can be sweet or it can be hard to take but, when it comes to sport and Melbourne, the medium largely responsible for changes to both needs to make sure that, whatever it comes up with, it is on a winner.

This is a city where you can fill the Rod Laver Arena with experts ready to bet on the sporting capabilities of a couple of raindrops falling from the stadium roof.

This is also a place where you can worship a stuffed racehorse, where 12,000 gathered at the MCG in 1869 to watch our first cycle race, and where three boring hours of watching a ballroom packed with glammed-up football stars as the umpires' best-and-fairest votes for the Brownlow Medal are totted up count among our top-rating TV programs.

We have always taken our sport seriously in Melbourne. And we still do. Ask Cathy Freeman, Lauren Burns, Michael Klim and their Olympic medal-winning successors of tomorrow. It's not just the big sports that belong here.

Every sport. If tiddlywinks has a championship, you can be sure there will be someone wanting official recognition and the key to our city door.

We will watch anything, everything. From bocce to lawn bowls, from World Hot Air Ballooning Championships to the Commonwealth Games, and from international golf to the grands prix, formula one and motorcycling. Check it out with the city fathers.

In this week's first episode of its two-part special, Made in Melbourne: Sport, Channel Seven uses our awe for great athletic heroes and sporting triumphs to show what television has done to help change us since the 1956 Olympics.

Inadvertently, perhaps, it also reminds us of the less-commercial delights we have lost as we've gained our sporting maturity.

Fifty years of extraordinary change. Barassi is already talking himself towards his 70th birthday. Kooyong, where we lined up hopefully for a glimpse of Laver, Rosewall, Roche, Alexander and the world's finest not so long ago, now enjoys a modest reunion or two, overshadowed by the grand-slam superstar-headlining roofed arena down the other end of the freeway.

Kooyong holds many other memories. In 1969 we watched as Lionel Rose slugged it out with Englishman Alan Rudkin.

The sniff of liniment and other exotica has also drifted away from Festival Hall, that other yesterday-Melbourne venue that would draw us to its curious mix of TV Ringside boxing with Ron Casey, world wrestling, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Julio Iglesias or Cold Chisel.

But pass it today and you're still haunted by Casey's pounding calls, a parry of broadcast genius in moments of controlled brutality.

And didn't we hit the rails, that red train with jammed-open carriages, through the wintry rains to Glenferrie, Moorabbin or Arden Street, arriving soaked but pie-hungry, six-pack thirsty for the full four quarters in those days when going to the football was not like going to the cinema.

We were there to watch Ted Whitten, Michael Tuck, Big Nick, Jezza, Tuddy, Peter Hudson, Big Carl, Bruce Doull, Cowboy, Doug Wade, Graham "Polly" Farmer or Bartlett, rushing home early if Collingwood's flogger-whirling barrackers were looking hungry, perhaps only brave enough to catch the rest on the final-quarter replay on TV.

It was a different Melbourne, surely? One where you found yourself going underarm in a pub gathering that included Frank "Typhoon" Tyson, Ian Meckiff and Ian McDonald, sports editor and later Australian cricket team manager.

And from Macca and other sports lovers you were bowled gently away to TV critiques. That was my fate, at least. Theirs was a kindly spin, but oh, how many questions you wish you could have asked now you've picked up a little more knowledge.

Made in Melbourne: Sport - produced by Graeme Rowland and Gordon Bennett, written by Stephen Phillips - gets you that way. Presented solidly, assuredly, by long-time Seven star John Wood, it takes us back to a time when the network went neck and neck with Nine for Melbourne, sports and the lot.

To imagine Seven without football was like imagining a royal divorce. Or perhaps like imagining Nine or the ABC without the cricket?

It takes us from its scraps of Betty Cuthbert and Murray Rose's 16th Olympiad to broadcaster Tony Charlton and our ecstasies with football as we had never seen it before.

Amazing what Alf Potter could do with three cameras in tow! It shows the larrikin switch from radio days with Ron Casey and Bill Collins.

We return to that black-and-white world of sport that could not look more alien to today's coddled fan than if it were inhabited by Klingons.

This was the world of League Teams, Michael Williamson, Dougie Elliott, Bob Skilton, Jack Dyer, Bob Davis and Lou Richards, Peter Landy, Gus Mercurio and the wonderful savs, meat pies and hairdryer giveaways that lured the VFL's finest into the HSV-7 studios the day after their big games, there to join the wood choppers from Tassie and to try their lot in World Of Sports' handball competition. Ah, sweet, sweet parochialism.

Suddenly we could watch our champions without ever needing to leave the front room.

We entered the magical world of spectacular footy finals, where everyone belonged to Melbourne, where a goal-hopeful star could split the goalpost with a kick, where brawls at Windy Hill looked rough and you always knew who to blame alongside the umpires. Jezza in full flight.

Windy Waverley, which came and is now almost forgotten. Robert "Dipper" Dieperdomenico chasing Jerry Lewis and making the most of his new role at the MCG with the microphone.

Days of change? John McEnroe as erudite, witty commentator. I'd like to see that. Up There Cazaly, the rejected TV advertising jingle that sticks like gum in your mind.

Andy Roddick marathons, Agassi and the Swedish cheer squads. The Wallabies when they were tops. And the reality of an interstate grand final winner? I wouldn't like to see that.

AFL football, in that time before Eddie, Sam and The Footy Show, dominates here. But golf, tennis and boxing each take a round in this program, with today's commentators - Bruce McAvaney, Sandy Roberts and Wood - sliding out of seemingly live scenes to remind us it is not just the tennis centre, Docklands, or Albert Park that has advanced.

Television has never shown us so much at play, allowed us so easily to second-guess our betters.

Along with our sports heroes it opened wider Australia's windows on the world. Now, if Ron Walker can only attract a couple of sponsors to Melbourne for those raindrops, we will all be on another winner.

Made in Melbourne: Sport, 8.30pm Sunday, Channel 7

What's the big idea?

2005-08-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

What's the big idea?
August 25, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/whats-the-big-idea/2005/08/25/1124562976884.html

What would it take to make Melbourne a more liveable city? Martin Boulton goes in search of answers.

ASK Melburnians for an opinion about Melbourne and you’ll get one. Whether the city lives up to the hype of being the world’s most liveable city — a status not taken entirely seriously by all the locals — it is true that nearly everyone has a view of what could be done to enhance life for the inhabitants. After our series on Liveable Melbourne, based on a study by Tract Consultants and ACIL Tasman, The Age sought the views of a cross-section of Melburnians on what they would change. We also invited readers to give us their views on what makes the city liveable — and why they live where they live.

Professor Miles Lewis, of Melbourne University’s architecture, building and planning faculty, says the idea of living in high-rise apartments is alien to many Melburnians, but it will happen. “We will change, people will live in highly concentrated areas, just as they do in Europe,” he says. “It might be some time away still but it will happen and as it does we must be aware of the heritage values that made our suburbs liveable in the first place … the quiet, leafy streets.” Lewis hopes the “erosion of heritage” in Melbourne’s inner suburbs — the features that gave suburbs such as Collingwood and Richmond their identity — is arrested as inner-city growth gathers pace.

The former lead singer of the Hunters and Collectors, Mark Seymour, recently moved out of the city and was shocked to find roads leading to the CBD crammed with traffic during peak hour. “After living in the city for so long I suddenly realised just how congested the roads can get,” he says. “Just negotiating your way in and out of Melbourne is quite hard.”

Architect and professor of urban design at RMIT Dimity Reed believes the liveability survey has shone a light on Melbourne and shown up glaring problems in the public transport system. “There are gaps, particularly with transport in the outer suburbs … gaps that clearly need more attention.

Reliable public transport is crucial,” she says.

“We need a more inter-connected transport system that’s more responsive and flexible, so people in the outer and fringe suburbs won’t have to drive such long distances.”

Radio broadcaster Neil Mitchell worries that “the heart of the city is dying” but agrees transport is a priority. “We need to fix the south-eastern arterial because it is appalling. And the trams and trains are going backwards since they were privatised. We need to get them running on time.”

Former Victorian premier and presidential aspirant at Hawthorn Football Club Jeff Kennett says he’d like to see the Hawks win a premiership. “But in terms of liveability, I think the real test, the most important thing about an area being successful, is the level of confidence in the community and the goodwill in a community,” he says.

Crime writer Peter Temple believes a stronger police presence on the streets would improve people’s sense of safety, wherever they lived in Melbourne. “A couple of coppers is a deterrent,” he says. “In public places generally, particularly in Europe, there is a visible police presence. All you see in Melbourne is a squad car passing by from time to time.”

Chairman of public transport at Monash University Graham Currie says traffic congestion will only get worse across Melbourne and tough political decisions have to be made.

“I worry about the future of trams. We need to separate trams from cars, we have to make decisions that will change the look of the city . . . but we’ve got to make them if we want to keep our trams,” he says.“This (liveability survey) is important to the future of Melbourne (and) there’s plenty of evidence to show people will use public transport — trams, trains and buses — if the service is improved.”

Senior lecturer in transport planning at Melbourne University Paul Mees believes it is a fantasy to think Melbourne can continue building freeways and expect public transport to be improved.

Vancouver — another holder of the world’s most liveable city title— made a decision 35 years ago to stop building any more freeways, he says.

“That freed up additional money to improve their public transport and put them in a position where they couldn’t weasel out of fixing public transport … there was no fall-back option.”

“Nobody, no government will improve public transport until they stop building freeways.”

Jason Marriner, general manager of Marriner Theatres, a group that includes the Forum, Princess and Regent theatres, says the diversity of Melbourne’s live entertainment, its restaurants and retail precincts should be fostered. “It’s what makes Melbourne such a unique experience,” he says.

Save Our Suburbs president Ian Quick wants to see more mandatory planning controls that protect traditionally low-rise suburban neighbourhoods from higher-density development.

“Our biggest problem is big high-rise buildings and the 100 per cent land coverage that’s going into our residential areas — that’s decreasing our liveability.”

Youth worker Les Twentyman wants to see an end to what he calls “postcode discrimination … the stigmatisation of where people go to school and where they live.”

“We should realise we’re all Victorians and we’re all Melburnians, it doesn’t matter where you went to school or how rich your dad is,” he says.

“That’s just a recipe for the problems I’ve seen in places like Los Angeles, where there’s gated communities and people feel shut out, that’s what really concerns me.”

Eating, drinking Melbourne's heart beats anew

2005-08-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Eating, drinking Melbourne's heart beats anew

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/citys-heart-beats-anew/2005/08/18/1123958182702.html

By Adam Morton
August 19, 2005

The city we know and love, from left, the State Library, Degraves Place, Swanston Street.

MELBOURNE'S heart has been "reconquered" as a place for eating and drinking, study and recreation, and the number of people living in the CBD has risen eight-fold in a decade.

The jump in city dwellers helped lift Swanston Street above Regent Street — London's second-busiest thoroughfare — for daily pedestrian traffic, according to a City of Melbourne report to be released today.

Places for People project manager Jan Gehl, a Danish architect who has been visiting Melbourne for 25 years, said the CBD had transformed from being the hole surrounded by the "doughnut"of suburban dwellers, to the "miracle of the Yarra".

"There will be three times more people sitting and standing and listening and enjoying Melbourne today compared to 10 years ago," Professor Gehl said.

Professor Gehl said the city was a marked contrast to the place of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was considered a mono-functional and useless centre of unco-ordinated high-rise development.

The study found pedestrian traffic in the CBD on weekday evenings nearly doubled to more than 90,000 a day in the decade to 2004.

Other increases include:

■ 275 per cent more outdoor cafes, restaurants and bars.

■ 177 per cent more seats at kerbside cafes.

■ 809 per cent more apartments.

■ 62 per cent more students living and/or being educated in the CBD, up to nearly 82,000.

The length of CBD laneways in use has multiplied by a factor of 10, from 300 metres to 3.43 kilometres, including 500 metres of completely new space. Professor Gehl said Melbourne had increased the quality of its streets, the number of squares, parks and trees, and upgraded trams and lighting.

"If one should make a list of what a city could do to make it more friendly for people and more inviting, most of these things would be in that list," he said.

CBD space has grown since the 1994 Places for People report, now including the part of Southbank to St Kilda Road.

Click on this link for a photo gallery of changes to Melbourne City streets from the 1980's to 2005.

http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/2005/08/19/1123958216160.html

CHANGING FACE OF MELBOURNE: 1994-2004
Then Now % Rise
City residents 1008 9375 830
Private residential apartments 736 6692 809
Pedestrian traffic (Sat 6pm-midnight) 88,020 99,420 13
Seats at kerb-side cafes 1940 5380 177
Outdoor cafes, restaurants and bars 95 356 275
Students (learning or living) 50,482 81,732 62
Public space (square metres) 42,260 72,200 71
Lanes, arcades and alleys in use (metres) 300 3430 1043
Pedestrian traffic (weekdays 10am-6pm) 190,772 265,428 39
Pedestrian traffic (weekdays 6pm-midnight) 45,868 90,690 98
Pedestrian traffic (Saturday 10am-6pm) 194,764 212,862 9

Radio ga-ga

2005-08-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

Radio ga-ga
August 16, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/radio-gaga/2005/08/15/1123958002259.html

Photo: Dominic O'Brien

For those obsessed with public radio, the annual fund-raiser is a source of neurotic foreboding, writes Jonathan Alley.

I've always been a creature of my passions. Some may ebb and flow, but my constant all-consuming obsessions are community broadcasting and playing new music. I've been at it since I was 18, and since 1992 I've been with the doyen of Melbourne's thriving public broadcasting scene, 3RRR FM. It's one of the things I live to do.

But, once a year, the piper comes calling for payment from the station's volunteer broadcasters and paid-up subscribers in the annual fund-raiser known as the radiothon.

By about June, the first hairs prick up on the back of my neck. The beast is rattling the cage doors again. By July, I'm scribbling lists of songs, tangential ideas, pitch angles and back-up plans I'll never use. Come August, it's become a minor obsession rooted in vaguely neurotic performance anxiety, an anticipated "event" to be got through — won or lost; the radiothon program where the pitch must be constantly, inventively shaded, refined and repeated to induce new and existing subscribers to actually pick up a phone and pledge money to a radio station they can hear for free.

Triple R's listeners tolerate the suspension of their reliable, habitually loved programming and expose themselves to a 24/7 campaign to cajole, inspire, bribe and downright beg them to fund the broadcasting institution's existence for another 12 months.

With no government funding, this 10-day on-air fund-raiser meets 50 per cent of 3RRR's annual operating budget. It's had various guises over the years — "Feed Your Head", "Planet of Sound", "Show Us Your Love", "Dial It Up", "Cash for Content". This year we "Kick It To RRRs".

While we broadcasters all have fun spinning the various themed campaigns on air, it boils down to a fundamental truth and reality for the 62 shows: get the numbers up, and keep them coming — or no station. The fate of a Melbourne cultural institution and the industries relying on it rests in the unpaid hands of 150 on-air volunteers, annually. We all shoulder the burden and we work hard.

Station staff and volunteers answer phones, handle data entry, stuff envelopes and assist with the campaign in many ways, but only the announcers intimately know the existential terror of sitting alone in a small studio, living and dying by the red flashing lights of the phone system. I've had nightmares about the lights.

A blank board can be crushing. Seeing a full board is euphoric. The ebb and flow of the lights as you weave around pre-prepared themes, special mixes, lists of newly minted subscribers and prize inducements with station favourites mark the fortunes of a radiothon program. Old favourites can be telling — I swear Nick Cave, Polly Harvey and King Tubby have garnered me more subscribers than all other artists combined in 12 years.

Jonathan Alley in the studio
Photo:Dominic O'Brien

The station's atmosphere during the radiothon is markedly different — numbers are discussed in depth, tallies are kept, strategy is formulated; guests are welcomed, former announcers suddenly turn up. It's the music industry's equivalent of a war room, sometimes; a nerve centre. Walking into it can be nerve-racking and exhilarating all at once.

The final Sunday afternoon of "The JVG Radio Method" in 2004 was more like a carnival — Dave Graney and David Bridie live in the studio, a packed green room and plates of donated food. It felt like a party — I guess it was.

Tuesday evening's Best of the Brat is known for its presenters stripping as the subscriptions roll in. The Skull Cave's Stephen Walker continues to conjure the big numbers, his iconic brand of lateral psychology/philosophy and musical finesse holding firm, year after year.

But I have no such speciality or pedigree, no tricks or trademarks — I'll think on my feet, play the tracks I know will count and hope the reserves of enthusiasm will infect and inspire. Before my own radiothon show begins, my hands will be shaking. I'll carefully rearrange the selected CDs and vinyl again. I'll introduce myself to the dozen phone-room volunteers — listeners who turn up to man the phones and arrange subscriptions. I've been known to ingest a hurriedly purchased 250-gram bag of chocolate coffee beans; it's always empty by halfway, and I'll continue babbling when it's all over, albeit a little less coherently — sans the pressure of the live microphone and the threat of a shortage of little red flashing lights.

But it's not all abject terror and DJ neurosis. Over 12 years, some of my fondest and most inspiring memories of life at 3RRR have come during the radiothon. Relationships and marriages (though not my own) have germinated and blossomed in the station green room between shifts, companies and bands established, friendships formed. The extremities can be entertaining, too. Passionate listeners will often subscribe their unborn children, body parts and vehicles, and pet subscriptions now take pride of place in the yearly prize line-up.

For me, my on-air colleagues and, most importantly, listeners, 3RRR remains a rock of imagination and character in a bland, moneyed world where reality TV, latte travel and corporate hegemony get more media time than famine, art and injustice.

Mark Phillips, a Melbourne journalist writing a history of the station, perhaps encapsulates this in a soon-to-be-published article in The Trip, the station's subscriber magazine: "Sometimes it feels as if our social structures are being broken apart, but that largely invisible community of 3RRR listeners out there is always a safe refuge."

Triple R is a living, evolving cipher of the strands of community it holds dear. To many, it exemplifies warts-and-all humanity in aural form. Come Friday, I'll be looking for your flashing red light — it'll mean more than you may think.

Jonathan Alley is a Melbourne writer who broadcasts Tough Culture on 3RRR from 6-8pm on Saturdays. The "Kick It To RRRs" radiothon airs August 19-28. Details: www.rrr.org.au

Victorian identity loss

2005-08-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

Victorian identity loss

http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/08/10/1123353384555.html

By Jake Niall

August 11, 2005

The greatest calamity to befall Victorian clubs isn't a lack of money or facilities, or their domination by interstate interlopers, but a crisis of identity.

Eddie McGuire seemed to sense the problem last weekend when defending Collingwood's constitutional right to bear black-and-white stripes. "We will not become a franchise for the AFL like McDonald's," he thundered.

McGuire saw the jumper as inviolate because so much else had been sacrificed on the altar of progress. "These days we don't have home games, we do not have home zones, we get our coaches elsewhere, we are forced to get our players from the draft."

The impositions McGuire spoke of have been driven by the centralising AFL, which, in its (successful) zeal to create an even and economically sustainable competition, has also made a competition in which the club differences we once celebrated have shrunk. Equalisation, sadly, has brought homogenisation.

McGuire wants to save the sacred jumper, but what do their — or any old club's — colours really represent these days? History, yes, but what about the present?

Nine teams share two grounds in this city, thanks to ground rationalisation. The clubs draw their players from a draft pool, in which anyone could end up anywhere, regardless of their geography or tribal inclination. The only significant concession to tribalism is the father-son rule.

Coaching panels contain fewer and fewer former players who played for that particular club. The only former Richmond player on the Tiger match committee is Terry Wallace! Neale Daniher's panel does not contain a single Demon.

Geelong and the interstate teams are not threatened with the same identity issues. The Cats not only retain a home ground, they have a penchant for recruiting locals and have made a deliberate effort to hire former Geelong people in their coaching panel. They are shamelessly, and blessedly, parochial.

Ground rationalisation wouldn't be so troubling if it had not been accompanied by the randomness of the draft, the career coach and administrator and other homogenising forces. Carlton, the last Melbourne club allowed to play home games, does not feel like Carlton right now. The Blues have lost Princes Park, have won a spoon and struggle to pay the bills. The system, which can and will undo any club, has humbled them. It is not the arrogant Carlton of yore. This team lets you down, quite often, while St Kilda — thanks to the system — is reinvented as a winner.

West Coast — rich, arrogant, uber-professional, with a fortress ground — is more like the old Carlton.

Something is seriously rotten in Denmark, too, when Carlton and Collingwood supporters are talking about the benefits of tanking Saturday night's game.

The AFL, doubtless, will argue that its crowd and television ratings are booming, that beanie sales have never been greater, and so on. It measures the competition's health largely by numbers, speaking of KPIs. If people are still turning up, tuning in and remaining loyal consumers, everything's fine.

I see more troubling trends. Kids today are more apt than ever to follow a winning team, or even to follow seductive and exciting players, such as Chris Judd. The game has become part of the entertainment industry, but in the process has sacrificed biodiversity and spiritual fervour.

Essendon can keep a powerful identity while Kevin Sheedy is coaching, and James Hird (father-son), Matthew Lloyd (local from the north-west) and Dustin Fletcher (father-son) are running around, but, as the draft removes their Essendon-ness and Sheedy goes, it mightn't be the same. The same goes for Collingwood, Eddie and the Clokes and Shaws.

Same grounds, same player pool, same interchangeable coaches and decision-makers. I guess the supporters are the last definers of cultural identity, along with the businessmen who represent them. The club is them and, as such, the congregations should re-assert ownership of their churches.

In Melbourne today, there are only nine churches, instead of the 11 (plus Geelong) we grew up with. For decades, we've wondered how many will be left standing but the result might be worse: nine clones, plus Geelong.

Snow falls in Melbourne - first time in 19 years

2005-08-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

The last time it snowed in Melbourne city was in July 1986. I was 12, walking to school thru it at the time. Now I'm in Vancouver, Canada and missed it.

Check this link for the full story
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/whiteout/2005/08/10/1123353351466.html

The '70s stripped bare

2005-07-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

The '70s stripped bare

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/16/1121455933362.html

By Peter Wilmoth
July 17, 2005

Vale Street 1975 would come to be regarded as a significant moment in Australian photography.
She was young, talented and ferocious. Carol Jerrems focused her lens on Melbourne's 1970s sub-cultures in a way that no one else dared to do. Peter Wilmoth reports on a new film celebrating the photographer's work.

It was when Carol Jerrems was making a film about a gang of 15-year-old sharpie boys from Heidelberg, most of whom had been expelled from school and, in their own words were involved in "bashing, beer, sheilas, gang bangs - which is rape - gang fights, billiards, stealing and hanging out" that she found out most clearly the cost of getting involved with her subjects.

"So far I have myself only narrowly escaped rape but was bashed over the head by the main actor while driving my car, which had just been dented by the rival gang with sticks. They steal my money and cigarettes when I'm not looking, but I refuse to be deterred."

Very little deterred Jerrems, even the game in which the sharpie boys drew straws to see who would "go off" with her. Her shy, earnest demeanor and angelic face framed by golden frizz belied a ferocious appetite for photographs that would capture the moment, a thirst for the next great shot that could - and sometimes did - endanger her life.

Friend Michael Edols recalls in a new film about her life that he and Jerrems went into a pub in Sydney's Redfern. "I remember watching Carol in the middle of this room and she turned her camera on this young man and photographed him." The man grabbed at Jerrems and tore off her necklace while Edols dragged her out of the pub and into the car. "On the way out," Edols says, "I got whacked in the chest and cracked two ribs. We had every window of the car totally smashed in, including the headlights."

"Carol was very shy and she didn't like being shy and she was always pushing against her inhibitions and her limits, and that often led her to dangerous situations," says Kathy Drayton, the director of Girl In A Mirror, about this extraordinary photographer's intense, short life. "There was a certain amount of naivety.

"Her photographs engage the viewer in an intimate relationship with her subjects. It's not always a friendly intimacy - sometimes her subjects look defensive, irritated or even menacing, but you always sense that you're seeing beyond the mask into the soul."

Jerrems was born in Melbourne in 1949, grew up in middle-class Ivanhoe and studied photography at Prahran College between 1967-70, where she was filmmaker and photography teacher Paul Cox's best student. "She stood out, she was odd," Cox says in the film. "She had this odd little smile."

Jerrems had found her calling early. In her second year at college, her confidence was such that she made up a stamp, "Carol Jerrems, Photographic Artist" which she would stamp on all her finished prints. "We were a bit scared of Carol," former Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford, who was also at Prahran, says in the film. "She was real serious. Carol was the first feminist I ever met. I remember she gave me a lift home once. I said 'Thanks, baby'. She said 'Come here. You don't call me baby.' Got a bit of a lecture."

Jerrems' success came quickly. In 1972, Rennie Ellis, the Melbourne photographer who died in 2003, opened Australia's first dedicated photographic gallery, Brummels, in South Yarra and selected the 23-year-old Jerrems' work as part of its first exhibition, a show called Erotica.

Always carrying a camera and flirting with the idea of danger, Jerrems wanted to capture the raw edges of the world she saw around her, subjects others weren't focusing on artistically: sharpie subculture, street life and urban indigenous people. "People were stereotyping indigenous people," said a friend, Ron Johnson. "I think Carol was showing 'This is not what it's all about, look, look at the expressions on people's faces - see what they're really feeling."
"People at the time were interested in traditional Aboriginal people while Carol was solely interested in urban Aboriginal people," says Kathy Drayton. "And at the time, sharpies were considered to be real bogans so it was unusual for someone of Carol's background to be interested in them."

Jerrems found work teaching photography at Heidelberg College, in the middle of a tough housing commission area. She was fascinated by the anti-social wildness of the boys, and spent time photographing them swimming in rivers, hanging around in backyards, wearing their skinned-rabbit jumpers, tight jeans and short curtains of fluffy dyed hair.

In this milieu, Jerrems found what Drayton calls the "brash sexuality of Australian youth in the '70s, a sexuality laced with vulnerability and darkness", and it inspired her most famous photograph. Vale Street 1975 is a mesmerising portrait of Melbourne model Catriona Brown flanked by two sharpie teenagers, the boys standing just behind in the shadows. The shot was taken at a house in Vale Street, St Kilda, at the end of a long day of shooting. Brown had asked Jerrems to take a shot for her folio, and Jerrems agreed, as long as she could shoot the boys with her, and use the shot for her folio.

The photograph is, says Drayton, regarded as a significant moment in Australian photography "as it bridges documentary realism and the more subjective style of photography that marks the post-modern era". The power of the photograph was the human connection. "Jerrems does not presume that she is outside the event without influence on it," wrote Helen Ennis, former curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

Jerrems' development as a portrait photographer coincided with rising interest in photography as an art form in Australia. Photographers were beginning to be deeply involved with their subjects rather than discreet observers shooting at a distance. Jerrems saw the traditional documentary style of photography as exploitative and believed the more personal collaborations between photographer and subject to be more honest, even if they were more risky personally.
Paul Cox once wrote: "She had to experience everything and feel things deeply before she could record them. She lived to the fullest, then withdrew into her own world."

Part of the power of Jerrems' work stems from its reflection of a certain pocket of life in the mid to late 1970s, the world of filmmakers, photographers and other creative types living in group houses. The sexual freedom and youthful confidence of the time, as enunciated and encapsulated by Skyhooks' Living In The Seventies album, is everywhere in her work. Drayton says Jerrems was "adventurous and forthright in her sexuality", having affairs with many of her friends, men and women, reflected in her work, "at times seductive, at others, frankly post-coital".

In the film, one of her great loves, the filmmaker Esben Storm, remembers Jerrems arriving in Sydney with new photographs. "Inevitably they'd be photographs of her waking up . . . with someone. While I'd been off sort of having wild times, she'd be having her wild times. She would sleep with someone and that would mean there would be an intimacy that would allow her to take photographs.

"It was the time of free love in a way, even though we weren't that free. There were ideals that it was uncool to be jealous and that you weren't possessive. We all tried to live by that, even though we couldn't really."

Greg Macainsh, Skyhooks' songwriter, remembers Jerrems photographing the band for a book called Million Dollar Riff. "She came to a number of gigs," he says now. "She was very quiet, reserved. She would make herself virtually invisible. I remember her in the dressing room being very still in the corner. She didn't take a lot of shots, she would wait for the right moment. She wasn't a motor-drive type, she was a bit like a sniper, waiting for the perfect opportunity."

Ross Hannaford was close to Jerrems for a while at Prahran College and remembers the seriousness with which she pursued her photography. "It was a time when there was incredible optimism in the air," he says now. "If you had a dream, you could do it. There didn't seem to be anything holding people back. I'd watch Carol shooting and I didn't realise what she was up to. 'What are you taking all that rubbish for?' But when you look back it seemed to encapsulate the times and the life around you. Her work took on a significance later on."

But amid the gaiety and youthful charge in Jerrems' pictures, Helen Ennis says a distinct change in mood is evident in the work. "The early photos between 1972 and 1975 were all about optimism. There's a huge amount of energy in them. It was all bound up with the excitement about the Whitlam government and this desire for change. But from 1976 I don't think they were anywhere near as optimistic."

Darkness

It wasn't just the Whitlam dream fading that gave Jerrems' work this darkness, nor the mood captured in the Skyhooks song Whatever Happened To The Revolution? ("We all got stoned and it drifted away"). While there is great exuberance in the decade the film documents, there is also a profound sadness about Jerrems' life. The odd little smile that Paul Cox talks about is rarely seen in the several self-portraits that feature in the film. Instead, there are many hints of the depression that she struggled with. Her friend Robert Ashton, who lived with Jerrems in a group house, remembers her bedroom door being closed for hours and even days.

In 1979, Jerrems went to Hobart to teach. Shortly after arriving she was diagnosed with polycythemia, a rare blood-related cancer. She underwent months of invasive and painful procedures, but came to a realisation she was dying. Jerrems photographed and wrote about her physical decline. She photographed doctors hovering, the scars on her stomach, and her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, visiting. As the camera pauses on a shot of her mother, an actress reads from Jerrems' journal: "She is one of the few people with the ability to push me over the edge into tears or screaming."

Carol Jerrems died in Melbourne in February 1980, three weeks before her 31st birthday. Her work was bequeathed by her mother to the National Gallery of Australia. In 1990 a retrospective was staged, but until now Jerrems has remained unknown outside photographic and film circles.

Girl In A Mirror gives an insight into the counterculture of the 1970s - the music, the cars, the fashions, the social tensions, the sexual experimentation. Kathy Drayton, with help from the National Gallery of Australia, had access to hundreds of Jerrems' photos as well as shots from Rennie Ellis (who photographed Jerrems often), friend Robert Ashton and Henry Talbot. The journals Jerrems kept after 1975 are used to "narrate" the film.

Drayton, who has worked as an editor with SBS television as well as editing a variety of independent experimental films and short dramas, says her interest in Jerrems was piqued when she saw three of her photographs at a New South Wales Art Gallery exhibition. The "deceptively simple power and beauty" of the three photos haunted her, and she began to research Jerrems.

"There's an emotional intensity and intimacy with Carol's photographs," she says.
Who was Carol Jerrems? "There were a huge number of perspectives from people about Carol," says Drayton. "She went into roles with people, played games. She became whatever people wanted her to become."

Girl In A Mirror will screen at 3pm on Saturday, July 30, at Greater Union, corner Russell and Bourke Streets, as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Hairy skirts or sand in your tapas?

2005-07-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

Hairy skirts or sand in your tapas?
Dusk to Dawn

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/13/1120934299559.html

Sally Jeremiah

July 15, 2005

You can't have it both ways, Melbourne's north-south divide is confounding "mixed" matches.
Newly emigrated mate from Bris-Vegas recently pondered where she might set up digs in Melbourne. It's a topic that inspires laboured discussion in provincial lounge rooms and online forums like mess&noise, where it is often the subject of vicious debate. Because while the hum of the inner burbs attracts a population that values nightlife within walking distance over the quarter-acre block, the city is dissected by a river, leaving folk to struggle with the unavoidable north or south question.

At times the journey from south to north feels like that to a "galaxy far, far away". It divides my mates - half live south side, half north, hindering any spontaneous decision to hit the corner pub for a couple of casual beers.

Pick a side.

In the north they're roasting pork on a spit in leafy backyards, in the south we're grazing on makeshift tapas from Astroturf-lined balconies. As effective as the Berlin Wall in its heyday, a soul-sapping Punt Road all too often puts a stop to thoughts of impromptu dinner arrivals.

In the north it's denser and darker. There are mahogany hued bars with flock wallpaper and bookshelves. There are lamps with actual lampshades and other shades of urbane bohemianism. Fashion? It's vintage; skirts are hairier. Best leave those ostentatious red cowgirl boots at home.

A brief stint in a single-fronted terrace out of cooee of the nearest tidal zone left me a little claustrophobic. The move south played out amid discouraging groans from Empress-going pals not to leave "the dark side", but I grew up with the sea air so it's no surprise my rental radar eventually honed in on St Kilda.

The shiny south exudes a more summery appeal, a sense of open space. It has trendier decor but less comfortable chairs. There's sand in the concrete cracks and a smattering of palm trees.
For the record: the number of times I've swum at St Kilda beach totals zero. But I live a mere seven-minute walk from that nondescript strip of shallow beach between pier and marina, should the urge ever take hold. In my playground the sun sets through the Espy bay window, frosty beers can be downed at the open sill of the

St Kilda Inn, and the informal warmth of the St Kilda Bowls Club is inviting on a Sunday night. And on the walk home, nine times out of ten the beer-inspired sandwich board slogan outside the George will make you chuckle aloud.

Not wishing to fan the flames of debate here. I don't camouflage my subjectivity, only celebrate it. We all go where the gig guide takes us; would $10 to see Six Ft Hick's limber singer lose a cuban heel inflicting a paso doble on a speaker at the Tote, be any better spent witnessing the same gusto at the Espy front bar? Walking to a gig is a boon to the inner-suburban local, eclipsed only by the walk home two feet above the pavement high on a cracking encore. But after a thigh-slapping good time and a liver-full of lager, does a cab ride home really kill you?

North or south, dark or shiny, each has its own charm. Either side of the big creek, we all wake with the same happy stamps tattooed on our inner wrists, a token of another inner suburban odyssey.

Cold comfort

2005-07-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Confirmation at last for old convent

2005-07-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

Confirmation at last for old convent

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/08/1120704557996.html

By Royce Millar
City Editor

July 9, 2005

The old Abbotsford Convent's long-promised new purpose in life is set to become a reality.

The long-awaited resurrection of the historic Abbotsford Convent as a cultural hub is finally under way, with the developer Australand agreeing to withdraw.

Eight years after the Kennett government gave up the convent site for apartments, the Bracks Government will today announce that land on both sides of St Heliers Street will remain in public ownership.

A car park on the northern half, until now reserved for apartments, will instead be set aside for use by the Abbotsford Convent Foundation and the Collingwood Children's Farm.

The apartment plan has long been opposed by a diverse group of residents, heritage experts, businesses and the children's farm. They feared that in a spot poorly served by public transport, the proposed convent arts complex and the farm would not work without parking.

Richmond MP Dick Wynne, who has worked for years to secure the precinct for public use, was jubilant yesterday. "This is the missing piece of the puzzle in the St Helier's convent precinct that the community has fought hard and long for," he said.

Four kilometres from the city centre, the heritage-listed convent occupies 5.6 hectares overlooking the Yarra River. Built in the mid-1880s in the style of a French medieval village, the former Convent of the Good Shepherd was run for many years as a home for wayward women.
La Trobe University quit the property in the mid-1990s.

The Abbotsford Convent Coalition was formed in 1997 after a Kennett government tender process chose Australand to develop housing on the site.

After packed public meetings, the coalition developed its own arts community and education scheme in opposition to Australand's. The plan also attracted about $2 million in philanthropic contributions.

In 2002 the Labor Government formerly backed the coalition plan by handing control of the southern site to the Community Foundation.

Under the revised plan, Australand was to build an apartment complex on the northern site, between St Heliers and Johnston streets. But the foundation and the children's farm warned that their projects were at risk if they lost access to the existing car park on Australand's northern site.

A driving force for years behind the coalition was Abbotsford resident Jo Kinross. Now living in New Zealand, Ms Kinross said she could finally celebrate after a years of minor victories and setbacks.

"The various celebrations up to this point have always felt a bit premature, but now we can all truly celebrate a victory," she said. "There aren't too many good news stories of this kind around any more."

Premier Steve Bracks said the decision on the northern site showed that the Government recognised that car parking was crucial to the precinct's success.

"The unique rural setting of the convent and the children's farm, so close to the centre of the Melbourne, is an important asset, not only for the local community but for all Victorians," he said.

But securing the convent sites has come at a cost. The Government has paid Australand $1.8 million to withdraw, and almost $8 million to VicUrban for the costs it has incurred on the site since the 1990s.

This is on top of an initial Community Support Fund grant of $4 million to help refurbish the buildings.

But the foundation's chairman, Bill Russell, also chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the convent project was worth the investment. "It just should never have been viewed as a residential development site," he said.

This week Australand apartment manager Rob Pradolin said he had "mixed emotions" about severing its eight-year association with the site. He said he believed the apartment project would have been successful despite a downturn in the apartment market.

Frank Palomares, acting manager of the children's farm, said the decision was a breakthrough. "This means the future of the farm is secure, and we can grow and prosper," he said.

The convent is to be occupied by a Steiner School, the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE, 3MBS classic radio, the offices of the Slow Food movement in Victoria, indoor and outdoor function spaces, restaurants, bars and artist studios.

Nostro Baretto

2005-07-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Nostro Baretto

http://www.theage.com.au/news/reviews/nostro-baretto/2005/07/04/1120329358986.html

By John Lethlean
July 5, 2005

So it's official.

Melbourne is pumping.

The CBD is bursting with new apartments, shops, bars and restaurants compared with four years ago, let alone 1992, when the Melbourne City Council land-use census began; we have an official MCC report to prove it.

Does this come as news to you? Of course not. Not if you've walked around Melbourne's commercial centre lately.

There are people living in dumpsters fitted with Poliform kitchens. You can buy this year's Paris pret a porter collections at Spencer Street station. The guy on the newsstand will mix you a Manhattan if you need one that early, and it's easier to get linguine with porcini in the city these days than it is to get a salad sandwich.

Yep, per capita, we have a lot of bars and restaurants in town. Maybe too many. Yet there are still people coming up with new angles, refining their ideas to wedge into a section of the market they figure isn't being serviced properly. Just when you thought you'd seen every permutation of cafe-bar-lounge-restaurant-produce store, along comes something that, while not exactly reinventing the proverbial, removes a few spokes to lighten the thing up and make it spin just a little better. Something that looks at how and where people are working and spending their leisure time, and works backwards from that.

Umberto Lallo's Nostro Baretto is a case in point. It's part of the GPO, itself a zeitgeist development representing all that is buoyant and optimistic about CBD life, targeted at the city's ever-expanding residential base as much as visitors. It's slick, modern (while embracing heritage) and aimed at a certain upwardly mobile, educated, urbane city worker-dweller-visitor.

Don't worry, they'll put up with the rest of us, too.

And Lallo, who set up King Street's Sud with Giovane Patane back in the '90s, has come up with a nice concept for Nostro Baretto - literally, our little bar. It can be many things to many people.
First, and most obvious, is the fact that it uses Postal Lane, between the GPO building and Myer, as an integral part of the floor space (as will its soon-to-open neighbours Kenzan at GPO and Ca de Vin.) Clever awnings and heating systems mean the outdoors should be useable all year round. But while Nostro's laneway real estate has the traditional tables and chairs, it also has space for standing or perching at high tables - bar-like, dare we say, in a European manner - where a person eating pasta, reading a paper and enjoying a glass of wine on their own would be perfectly at ease. It's a nice idea.

More fundamental: a lot of the food, written on ever-changing blackboards rather than printed menus, is pitched at a price point, and is simple enough to allow Nostro to wedge itself somewhere between sit-down full-service restaurant and up-market sandwich-salad place. It's territory Pellegrini's and Florentino's Cellar Bar have occupied successfully for many years.
This is an underserviced section of the market; there are plenty of city workers who earn respectable money and appreciate decent food, but for whom a proper restaurant lunch in town
would come fairly infrequently. Nostro will appeal to them.

It has unpretentious style with its distressed waxed plaster walls, towering ceilings (it was originally some sort of electrical substation), timber cabinets, old-style copper light fittings and subtle Italian flair. Being a wine-centric sort of place, the glassware is excellent, as are most of the accessories.

And the proprietor knows service, wine and food.

It's important to think about the dishes and their prices, and how each might work at that hypothetical working-day lunch. Three fat Tasmanian scallops, for example, served in their shells with a herby cauliflower-potato puree underneath and a crisp shard of pancetta on top - at $13 - are excellent, but could only be seen as part of a meal. A nice part.

Similarly, I cannot see anyone other than a sparrow getting away with just a bowl of stracciatella ($10), even if it is made with a wonderful, full-flavoured chicken stock with eggs and fresh parsley whipped into it and some chicken meat thrown in at the end, too.

On the other hand, a plate of grilled cotechino sausage slices at $13 would, with a few slices of decent bread from Laurent and a dip into the great, fruity olive oil served at Nostro, make a respectable lunch. It's good sausage, grilled so there is crispness to complement that lovely, sticky gelatinous quality that comes from making a sausage from parts of the pig you don't want to think about. I love it. It's served on braised lentils finished with a nice sweet vincotto splash - a little overcooked - and a judicious drizzle of truffle oil. It works.

As with most Italianish menus, there is pasta and risotto in the price-size territory between entrees and mains.

Which would make the braised meatballs - at $25 - a proper main course, a stand-alone dish for a hungry man or woman. For that, you get three large, dense and nicely flavoured pork and veal balls cooked in, and served with, a bright and herby tomato sugo with very good-quality mashed potato.

It's a small menu: there are just three dishes in that price region, and I'd have been happy with any of them. Or perhaps all.

For the sake of sampling, there's a side dish of grilled, soft polenta with taleggio ($7) that could work as a snack with a drink as much as a carb-loading accessory to a main. And a salad of cos and radicchio is of first-class leaves, beautifully dressed.

We also sampled zabaglione whipped with plenty of really good old Marsala, poured over fresh strawberry halves in a big glass ($9). It's jolly good. A kind of rustic apple tart is less successful: the pastry, which is a kind of semi-puff, seems a bit dry inside.

It didn't, however, taint a favourable post-prandial impression. It's a difficult time of year to open a new food and wine business, but I suspect a certain busy professional crowd that knows the difference between good Italian food and rubbish - the kind that might eat at Il Bacaro or Becco on a date, or the odd Friday lunch - will respond well to Nostro Baretto.

Despite that census-documented boom, it's the kind of place we need more of.

Streets ahead

2005-06-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

By Rita Erlich
June 28, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/06/27/1119724554563.html?oneclick=true

The collective noun for food in Melbourne is often street. Food halls are all very well, but for most, food stores and restaurants are best when they come in groups, strung out on both sides of the road. There are dozens of food streets in Melbourne, local shopping areas that have withstood the pull of the mega-shopping centre and the giant supermarket.

I could have written about dozens, the ones in Kew and Yarraville, Footscray, North Carlton, North Fitzroy, Hawksburn, Brighton, Box Hill and Hawthorn. But these three are especially dear to me, and each tells its own story of a changing Melbourne.

Gertrude Street, Fitzroy

When I first lived in Fitzroy, on Nicholson Street near the corner of Moor Street, I was woken every morning by the sound of a cock crowing. No kidding. Somewhere on Moor Street someone kept chooks. It was probably more than one.

Fitzroy in the early 1970s was a particular kind of foodie haven. Its residents were Australians, old and new. The newer ones, mainly Italian and Yugoslav (as it was then), grew food in their front and back yards. Tomatoes, herbs, zucchini, beans, silverbeet and chooks. I never saw the chooks, only heard the rooster in the morning.

A decade later, food was becoming a glamour commodity. But in my part of Fitzroy, there was nothing very grand about it. A van came around to the factories (now transformed to apartments) selling vegetables to the female workers, who streamed out at the sound of a siren. There was cheese, too, from a factory. I remember almost warm, still wobbly, ricotta. "Put it straight in the fridge when you get home, love," they told me. A wonderful old Italian couple had a grocery on Brunswick Street, of the kind you still find in remote villages in Italy. Crusty bread, pyramids of tinned tomatoes and tuna, sacks of dried beans, and home-grown lemons.
Gertrude Street, however, was dodgy. We didn't walk near the pubs, which were violent places, all grog and fights. The violence was entirely personal, I think, but I wasn't going to risk getting caught in the fall-out. I remember someone who had been around in the 1950s telling me of houses with dirt floors and no electricity, and children with the diseases of poverty.

But Gertrude Street had its better moments. There was Potts Bakery, where bread was baked in wood-fired ovens that were a century old. There were Yugoslav restaurants where they served immense bowls of vegetable soup and even larger servings of grilled meat and salad at absurdly low prices. There were funny little cafes with tables of men playing cards and drinking coffee from tiny cups. English was scarcely spoken, not even at Potts Bakery.

There was a wine store, one of the last few with an Australian wine licence so they could sell wine but not beer or spirits. It was called Grovers at one point, I've forgotten what before that, and I used to buy single bottles of gorgeous wines for what seemed like very high prices. One example: in the early 1980s a bottle of mid-1970s Leo Buring riesling cost me $2.65 - we drank it many years later, and the price tag was still on the bottle. The wine store is now a restaurant called Yelza.

Perhaps surprisingly, the street is largely unchanged architecturally. A couple of new houses have appeared on a vacant block, businesses have changed hands and names but, basically, it looks much the same. The stretch between Smith Street and Gore Street now forms an earnest little foodie village that includes Enoteca (for wine, any time) and Ladro (for pizza, at night).

Books for Cooks233 Gertrude Street, 8415 1415
Part of the store used to be my local milkbar. It's now a double shopfront, full of books about cooking, food, wine, eating and drinking, new and second hand. It is cheerfully sociable, since anyone who wanders in is likely to meet someone they know.

Gertrude Street Organic Bakery228 Gertrude Street, 9417 5998
Janine and Paul Schillier established the bakery in March 1997, and make mainly sourdough loaves that are, as it were, the best thing since sliced bread, although they may not see the joke because they don't slice bread to order. But they do sell bread knives.

Organic Gertrude238 Gertrude Street 9417 775
Fruit and vegetables, grocery items, and a separate dairy refrigerator. There is also food to go.

Lygon Street, Carlton

Gertrude Street has acquired food stores, Lygon Street has lost them. Or rather, it has acquired different ways of selling food. Where there were once greengrocers, delicatessens and butchers, there are now cafes and restaurants.

The transitions - there have been many here - show how life keeps changing. Carlton was an immigrant suburb for decades - first Jewish, then Italian, with a fair overlap between the two in the 1950s and 1960s. Frank Lucchiari, from Excell Meats, remembers with fondness the last kosher butcher in Lygon Street. "He used to make us hot dogs. Beautiful. And his pickled meats ..."

When Lucchiari came to Lygon Street in 1972, the butcher shop that is now Excell belonged to a Mr Williams, whose family had been there for about as long as King & Godfree. Vince's, the butcher's across the street, had been the first Smorgon butcher shop when that family settled in the 1920s. Now it's a fish shop.

Until the early 1980s, Lygon Street was a local shopping street, its immigrant population intermingled with the students and academics from Melbourne University. Because of the students, there was room for cafes such as Genevieve (in Faraday Street), and then Tamani (where Ti Amo is now). The academics came to the University Cafe and Jimmy Watson's. When the pubs started to upgrade and turn their dining rooms into restaurants, it was a clear signal times had changed. And when the pubs started closing and being turned into fashion stores, times had obviously changed again.

My old Italian Carlton included Mamma Varrenti, a deli that is now Ti Amo 2. There was the Lygon Food Store, an Italian store that sold great cheeses and salume, much photographed because of a giant provolone in the window. Lesley's Ham and Beef was the relic of an older Australian Lygon Street. King & Godfree was a licensed grocer that split into a wine store and a supermarket around the corner in Faraday Street. There was Grinders, next to which was a little cake shop called Brunetti. When Brunetti moved in the 1980s, as I wrote in a guide to food stores called Good Enough to Eat: "I took the change of premises rather gloomily. With each year, Lygon Street loses more of its character - that special cosy, sometimes shabby air, the look of a street that has kept its history."

But it's still there. Now the supermarket is part of the Lygon Court complex, King & Godfree has a restored veranda, Lygon Food Store has lost its provolone but gained a cafe, there are still two excellent butchers and a charcuterie, and Jimmy Watson's is open for dinner. And Grinders coffee is available throughout Melbourne.

Frank Lucchiari, however, notes the shift in his customers. There used to be lots of Italians who lived locally and had large families to feed. Retail sales have halved: "There are fewer families in the area. The Italians have moved out, others have come in with maybe one or two children."

What has grown is the wholesale side of his business: he supplies about 30 restaurants.

Excell Meats307 Lygon Street, 9347 5516
Great veal, chicken, offal and aged beef.

Donati402 Lygon Street, 9347 4948One of the more elegant butchers in Melbourne. Excellent lamb, veal and pork.

La Parisienne PatesRear 307 Lygon St (off Tyne Lane), 9349 1852
A worthy addition to the street and a great charcuterie.

King & Godfree293 Lygon Street, 9347 1619
Excellent wine store; a good place to pick up oil, bread and salume.

Grinders277 Lygon Street, 9347 7520
This is where it all began, in 1962, with Giancarlo and Selma Giusti.

Chapel Street, Windsor

There used to be four points on the food compass of this end of Chapel Street, south of High Street: Rubinstein's, the grocer; Hansa, the butcher; Paterson's, the cake shop; and Santos, the coffee shop (it sold beans, not cups of coffee).

"A generation of European-born shoppers used to build their shopping around those four centres. People used to do a circuit and the other traders fed off those retail icons," says Fred Gomo, co-owner of the coffee shop, now called Cisco's. The other owner, Danny Ehrlich, is the son of the couple who established the store in the early 1960s (a little before Giancarlo Giusti opened Grinders in Lygon Street).

The Ehrlichs (no relation to the writer) had moved into a lively and long-established area. Paterson's, the cake shop, was much older, dating from about 1916, when a pastrycook called Ortner opened his shop. It was taken over by a Mrs Paterson, in partnership with a Swiss-born pastrycook called Stauber, with whom Walter Schneider worked. The Schneiders bought the business in 1952, and Peter Schneider still works there, 50 years after he joined his grandfather, father and aunt.

Rubinstein's was established in the early 1930s and was an important food centre for more than 50 years. Hansa came much later, in the late 1950s, about 20 years after another butcher, Julius Redlich, had opened his first shop further south along Chapel Street.

This used to be a local shopping strip for people who cooked and ate at home. It's hard to believe in an area that now contains so many opportunities for eating out.

Perhaps the biggest change to shopping and eating habits was the disappearance of the shoe and textile industry in Windsor. Fred Gomo talks about all the factories that closed and were turned into apartments. The women who worked in the factories used to shop in Chapel Street. Now the former factories house singles and couples who regard themselves as time-poor and shop at weekends in between breakfast and lunch.

In 1997, Paterson's added a small eating area to the cake shop. Those picking up one of the wonderful celebratory cakes can stop for a cup of coffee and an eclair, or a pie, as many locals do.
Hansa has changed hands many times and is now a small butcher selling meat and vegetables. Rubinstein's closed in the 1990s.

Is Chapel Street's success in the past? Gomo says in the past 11 years he's seen three or four major changes in the strip, and there are more to come. To some extent, Cisco's has been protected because there are so many people devoted to coffee. But their business is now largely wholesale and they supply coffee to about 200 places around Victoria. (They also send coffee to former regulars who have moved away, including a woman in her 90s who moved to Adelaide.)
There has been another significant change in food stores. Gomo grew up around another food street, Acland Street, and remembers the feeling of freedom on the street as a child, watched over by the shopkeepers who knew all the local children. He remembers being given lollies, almost as a form of greeting.

So what's new? As Gomo puts it: "These days, I tell the staff you have to ask the parents first and get their permission before you give a child a sweet."

Paterson's Cakes117 Chapel Street, 9510 8541
For decades, no one would have dreamed of a party without Paterson's sausage rolls, or a celebration without one of the big cakes, made to order.

Cisco's106 Chapel Street, 9510 7997
Check out the hard-to-find beans from South America, Africa, Papua New Guinea. Or buy some tea.

Rita Erlich is an author and freelance writer, and a former editor of The Age Good Food Guide.

Celebrating the unique spirit of Melbourne

2005-06-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Below is the text from an article in Melbourne's daily paper The Age (www.theage.com.au).
Melbourne is one helluva cool place. There is such a strong community spirit there, especially amongst the music community. There are 3 pretty popular community radio stations located in the northern suburbs, and 2 of them were involved in a fundraising event last week for a local charity.

Anyways, the article says it so much better than I ever could.

cheers, Tony

Celebrating the unique spirit of Melbourne June 28, 2005

Community and footy came together at the Junction Oval on Sunday, writes Tracee Hutchison. Something quite extraordinary happened in Melbourne Sunday afternoon. About 22,000 people went to the Junction Oval to watch a football match and raised more than $165,000 for charity. The game was a sell-out - even though, at times, it was a bit like watching the Dimboola thirds, with substantially less match practice.

So why all the people and why all the dosh? A little thing called community. Now in its 12th year, the Sacred Heart Mission Community Cup has become much more than the social game of kick to kick between local music luminaries and volunteer broadcasters from community radio stations 3RRR and 3PBS that it began as. The event has come to signify a profound sense of belonging.

A reason for being, at a time we need it most. And warmed by the knowledge that all proceeds from the day from the gold-coin entry, to the sales of donated hot pies and cold beer, help make the daily work of St Kilda's Sacred Heart Mission that little bit easier. The community bound by a love of live music and heartland-Melbourne radio happily hands over whatever it can afford so it can be part of it.

Much has been made of the passing of the grassroots footy feel of AFL football and, with the loss of Princes Park this year, the Cats' Kardinia Park - I just can't call it Skilled Stadium - remains the last vestige of the code's original suburban appeal. This was the very thing that founded the traditional rivalries, now known as "blockbusters", that helped propel the game to an elite national competition.

While much of what happened on this AFL split-round Sunday afternoon at Junction Oval was about restoring a sense of ownership of Australian rules football in the game's home town, it was actually staking a claim on something that goes to the heart of what sets this city apart. In its simplest terms, we do things differently in Melbourne. And, at the risk of sounding like a parochial idealist, I think that's because we are more likely to say "yes" to being part of something that means something to us first, and worry about how much, if anything, it might be worth to us financially, second.

Maybe it has something to do with the city's long history of benevolence and patronage that arrived with its founding fathers. Or maybe it's just that we have nurtured a keener sense of the strengths and rewards of collaborative effort; a realisation that there is power in the passion of the many and a willingness to carefully harness that passion and bring everyone along for the ride.

It is hard to imagine an event such as the Sacred Heart Mission Community Cup in any other capital city in this country; to imagine the subscriber-base of two community radio stations drawing crowds that rival some of those at the game's elite level; to imagine hundreds of volunteers and thousands of dollars of donated goods and services being trucked in and cleaned up to help a modest, but vital, local charity. And while it's not impossible to imagine Australian bands in other cities lining up for fund-raisers, because there is a long and proud tradition of our musicians being unfailingly generous when it comes to charity dollars in this country, it is impossible to imagine some of the biggest names in Australian music clambering over each other to play between the sirens at a charity football match.

Paul Kelly, Tim Rogers, Dallas Crane, Spiderbait, Magic Dirt and a re-formed Weddings, Parties, Anything - these are some of the home-town favourites proud to say they've played the Community Cup. In our music community and our community radio stations - and I think it's important to state that the involvement of both the community radio stations and the local musicians is entirely self-funded: no government grants, no subsidies or tax concessions - we have something unique in Melbourne.

And we have men, women, kids and dogs - some with means, others with next to none - side by side and screaming wildly at a bunch of local heroes, desperately trying to will an oval-shaped leather ball between the big sticks. Part of something. Part of the spirit of this city.

Tracee Hutchison is a Triple R broadcaster and was part of the calling team at this year's Community Cup.