Four Seasons in One Day: Welcome to Melbourne (Part I)

From some of the worst flooding in Queensland’s history we fly south to Victoria and arrive during a Melbourne heat wave. It’s New Year’s Eve and a flashing sign on the Tullamarine Freeway reads ‘Fire Ban Today’ in bright orange letters - but how do you even begin to police something like that, I ask the taxi driver, a Czech migrant who has been living in Melbourne since the late 1960s. I won’t do the accent. “You find that some people will still start a barbecue,” he says. “But just look at this scrub,” he gestures to the embankment. “It is so dry that you only need a tiny flame and, woosh, the whole area will be up.” He thinks even the famous end-of-year fireworks over the Yarra River might be cancelled. But that’s why we’re here. Surely not?

By 6pm, the city has reached a temperature of 41.1. Hopetown Airport records the day’s highest at 43.3. The bitumen in Dandenong has started to melt, and a fire breaks out at Boolite which, according to the Herald Sun, burns 100ha of bush land. That’s 1 million square metres. That’s nearly 250 acres. That’s rather big. But it’s a mere tree in the woods compared to the events of February 16th 1983, Ash Wednesday, when more than 180 fires raged through parts of Victoria and South Australia, obliterating nearly 520,000 acres of land. When the summer had ended, 1.25 million acres in Victoria and South Australia had been destroyed, and 75 people killed.

Given such a catastrophe, when state premier John Brumby predicted that the bush fires on Saturday February 7 2009 would cause the “worst day in the history of the state,” there were over 3,500 fire fighters across Victoria on guard for Mother Nature’s worst. “People need to exercise some real common sense tomorrow,” he said the day before events which will now be forever remembered as Black Saturday.

On that day, the temperature in Melbourne reached an all-time record of 46.4, the culmination of a week long heat wave following nearly two months of little or no rain, coupled with wind speeds of 75mph. By the end of Black Saturday, the death toll had reached 173 people, with 120 killed by a single firestorm. The ferocity of the gale force winds carried the blaze at such alarming speeds that, in many cases, most of the victims had little or no time to react. Bodies were later discovered near their cars or outside their homes.

Black Saturday encompassed 400 individual fires, nearly three times as many as Ash Wednesday, and although many of the fires were caused by falling power lines, reports told of human misdemeanor: a cigarette butt in West Bendigo sparked a fire killing two people and destroying 50 homes. In Marysville, a deliberately lit fire at a saw mill caused the eventual devastation of 80 per cent of the town.

I can’t say that I have ever experienced such searing heat as New Year’s Eve in Melbourne: an oppressive roasting, like being oven baked only without the humidity and comfort of a brief reprieve to be pricked or marinated. It was certainly dry enough to be concerned by the eventual presence of fireworks. Despite the precautions, the banks of the Yarra still swelled with 500,000 revellers, myself included, arching our necks to ‘ooo’ and ‘ahhhh’ at the colourful whizzes and bangs emanating from the rooftops of the city’s tallest buildings. It was an invigorating display in a beautiful setting, but then, forgive me, there is something about fireworks that makes me go all reflective, gooey-eyed and childlike. Blame those Bonfire nights and funfairs of old, which might explain why I always associate fireworks with the taste of honeycomb. Weird, but there you are.

We could see our hotel from the Yarra on Southbank, although there aren’t many places where you can’t see it (it's the third building from the right on the very first picture). Being on a city break and feeling slightly frivolous, we had secured three nights in a Sofitel, and although I’m not completely certain of the criteria required for a hotel to warrant a five star distinction, my feeling is that a Pillow Menu is up there (one that includes the options of foam, feather and Tontine latex). Plus the option of a Champagne breakfast. And a personal massage therapist ordered to your room, as long as you realise that the subcontracted Merkas Health is a “strictly non-sexual service”. This bit had been written in both bold and capital lettering, as if this was the sort of routine misapprehension that really needed to be stressed.

Without wishing to brag, the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins is an awesome, towering, opulent, art deco behemoth made mostly out of dark glass with a central twenties-style lounge and restaurant with overhead awnings that cascade from the very top of the building, some 50 storeys up. It’s times like this when a man needs a top hat. All of which starts on the 35th floor, while the escalator offers no option to exit on any of the subsequent storeys. I'm always slightly unnerved by this sort of anomaly, of confounding space and structure, like when you discover a mysterious gap or space in your home with no entry point that doesn’t seemingly serve any particular purpose. What the hell are they doing down there, and why do they need 34 floors to do it?

Our room is on the 39th floor, but it might as well be on the moon. Apparently, one of Melbourne’s main tourist spots is the Eureka Skydeck 88 (so-called because of the number of floors), where you can not only pay for a hair-raising view of the city from the “highest viewing platform in the southern hemisphere”, but also opt to enter a glass cube which projects 3 metres out from the building. Feeling that $17.50 is a tad too much to ask for essentially vomiting in a box, the view from the Sofitel would have to do, and what an epic sight it is. The picture below looks out to the north of the city - the mock gothic church is St Paul’s Cathedral, built on the site of Melbourne’s first Christian services in 1836; in the centre is a slightly obscured Parliament House, and that rotunda in the top left forms the roof of the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens, which seems a more than apt place to start.

Following the European tradition of international exhibitionism, this massive 12,000 square metres of Florentine inspired space was feverishly constructed in 1880 to host the country’s second international exhibition. With Sydney hosting the event the previous year, this exhibition could arguably be seen as the arrival of Melbourne as Australia’s second city. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne was never settled as a penal colony, but instead made prosperous by the good entrepreneurial fortune of auspicious gold diggers. The Victorian gold rush of the mid-1800s would triple the city’s population, leading to huge migrant communities in pockets of the city that have continued to develop and prosper to this day. The Melbourne International Exhibition would go on to attract 1.5 million visitors, at a time when Melbourne’s population was 280,000.

My favourite story regarding the development of Melbourne regards settler John Batman, who famously purchased 100,000 acres of land from the Aborigines in an 1835 treaty which must surely be one of the earliest acknowledgments of indigenous land rights. Granted, Batman only rented the land on an annual basis in exchange for “40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and 6 shirts,” but as my trusty guide book identifies, “the fact he bought the territory (…) rather than simply stealing it, was a rare occurrence for the period.” And what would he call such a wondrous new acquisition? 'Batmania', of course. Brilliant.

Unfortunately, the stuffy traditionalist Sir Richard Bourke, who was Governor of New South Wales at the time, stepped in while Batman was dying of syphilis to instead christen the town Melbourne, after Lord Melbourne, or William Lamb, the British Prime Minister (pictured). In his middle age, Melbourne, a Whig, developed a closeness to the young Queen Victoria and a penchant for spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies which is clearly a topic for a completely separate blog post, one that I'm sure we will eagerly return.

Nowadays, of course, people go to Melbourne to “do shopping”, which at least acknowledges the city’s gold rush heritage with every corner of the consumerist conscience is covered. Even the Sofitel is positioned above a shopping centre, located at the top of Collins Street where the Church of Scientology makes comfortable bedfellows with the Church of Louis Vuitton. The major drawback of any capitalist structure is how every city street appears to have turned into endless, identikit malls of Prada and Mcdonalds. Melbourne could be Rotterdam, or anywhere.

But forgive the thought, as Melbourne is still an invigorating, lively and genuinely welcoming place, nothing nearly as staid as Sydneysiders claim, although the changeable climate seems to be an acknowledged truth: following the peak temperatures of New Year’s Eve, the following day reached only 17. It even rained. No, worse: it drizzled. ‘Four Seasons in One Day’, as Crowded House once sang. Victoria is the size of Great Britain, and with all the Victorian architecture and bad weather, it’s enough to make a pom quite homesick.

As for the touristy things, visiting a Victorian prison may seem like a particularly unpleasant thing to do on New Year's Day - and of course you would be right - but we reached the decision on the basis of two quite polarising figures in Australia’s history. Captain Cook, whose stone cottage was transported brick by brick from Yorkshire in 1934 to a location just down the road from our hotel, and Ned Kelly, the metal-headed bush-ranging so-and-so who was executed at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1880. My girlfriend’s patriotism won out: “why would I want to see where Captain Cook lived? He wasn’t even Australian.” Well, quite. How dubious an honour of posterity when you discover a nation and still lose in a popularity contest with a gun-slinging murderer. I should probably add here that, as it happens, the cottage actually belongs to Cook’s parents and there is no evidence that Cook ever lived there. I failed to raise this fact with my girlfriend for fear of tarnishing the man’s reputation further.

I won’t go into too much detail regarding Kelly for fear of repeating my previous blog post, but mainly because the story of the Old Melbourne Gaol is such a ghastly one that it extends way beyond the Kelly mystique. For starters, Kelly was only one of over 130 prisoners who were executed on these grounds. You can still see the gallows, follow Kelly’s final steps, take part in a trial re-enactment, and poke your head into each of the damp, cramped, stony cells, which now speak of graphic tales regarding child killings, prostitution, opium dens and murder, the incriminatory backlash to the desperate slum life of Melbourne’s over populated gold rush communities. Happy new year, by the way.

Opening in 1841, the first public execution to take place here was in 1842, and a dogged mess it proved to be. ‘Bob’ and ‘Jack’ were Aborigines, sentenced for the murder of two whalers. Given the manner of using prisoners as executioners, the job fell to John Davies, a shoemaker who stole a sheep in England and ended up on a ship to Sydney. In exchange for a limited pardon and ten pounds, Davies pulled the lever, only the drop failed to fully open. The scaffold had to be repaired while the two men were left choking. Davies was paid only five pounds and his freedom was refused.

The horrific stories continue in this vein: stories of female ‘baby farmers’ who were taken to the gallows with a drawstring around their skirts to stop their dresses from billowing as their bodies fell. Capital punishment was abolished in Victoria in 1975, and the Gaol chooses to focus predominantly on tales of grave social injustice, like the death of 65 year old Basilio Bondietto, a charcoal burner accused of murder who spoke no English and had no interpreter at his trial. Or the story of Colin Ross, blamed for the death of a 12 year old girl on the evidence of hair strands found on Ross’ bed, despite his continuous protests of innocence. This was the first use of forensic science in a murder trial and, thanks to the reopening of the case in the late 2000s, the investigation proved that scientists at the time had got it wrong. Very wrong, actually, as Ross was sent to a slow death in 1922, taking somewhere between eight and 20 minutes to die. His last words were, "I am now face to face with my Maker, and I swear by Almighty God that I am an innocent man." Ross would prove to be the first Australian to receive a posthumous pardon.

You won’t need long within the Gaol's confides to satisfy all of your morbid curiosities, especially when you see the prisoner’s death masks. These are moulds of the prisoner’s faces made soon after execution (Ned Kelly's is pictured), which was a standard practice for phrenologists to investigate and draw their nonsense conclusions. Phrenology is pretty much discarded now as a scientific study, in which it was argued that criminology could somehow be hardwired into your neurological make up rather than taking into account things like upbringing and mental health. The waxwork heads of executed prisoners is disturbing enough, but what really concerns is a simulated miniature hangman structure where groups of children are encouraged to push a button and watch as a plastic figurine drops through a hatch, attached only by the hangman's noose. The punishing vigour possessed by some of these children was really quite remorseless. Lets hope they can eventually be coaxed into an alternate career path.

Let us close on a more comforting thought. The portrait pictured on the right is called Chloe, and can be found upstairs in the innocuous setting of Victoria’s oldest pub, the Young and Jackson, opposite Flinders Street station. Originally owned by John Batman as the site for Melbourne’s first schoolhouse, it was established as a pub and hotel in 1861 and bought by two Irishmen in 1875, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Young bought the Chloe portrait in 1909 to add to his growing art collection, and she has become a sort of naked mascot for the city ever since. Those closeted Victorians from the 'Ladies Branch of the Anglican Social Purity' caused much harrumphing when Chloe debuted at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1883 and was exhibited on a Sunday. She was stripped down, if you will, after only three weeks.

Chloe was painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre in 1875 and depicts a passage from a Andre Chenier poem regarding a lady who hears the beckoning call of her lover from behind the trees. Quite why she's completely starkers in the middle of the woods is a bit of a headscratcher, but I can tell you that the model is a 19 year old Parisian called Marie. Seeing such a striking painting in the top room of what essentially feels like a Wetherspoons is a bizarre but beautiful surprise. Tragically, two years after Chloe was painted, the model Marie committed suicide. She boiled poisonous matches and then drank the fatal concoction. I'm sure you can probably order something similar at the bar.