Nudes kick a goal for charity with many behinds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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