Giveaways
ON the way back from Singapore to New Zealand, I stopped over in Melbourne, Australia, to take a cruise on the Yarra River.
The capital of the Australian state of Victoria, Melbourne lies on a vast natural harbour called Port Phillip Bay.
The Yarra River snakes through the middle of town, after going past the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria to the east of the downtown. The river drains into the port to the west of downtown. Here’s a map of the area traversed by the lower reaches of the Yarra.
And a 3D aerial view, looking northward, in which parts of the port, the downtown, and the Botanic Gardens can all be seen. The Olympic Park, created for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, can also be seen, across the Yarra from the Botanic Gardens. The Olympic Park is the green area with stadiums.
You can see that the city is very green downtown! This is one of its main attractions.
Armed with the boat tour’s map, I prepared to hop on board.
The boat was operated by Melbourne River Cruises.
It was a great way to see the city’s modern skyline and old Victorian bridges alike!
I saw this amazing painted sculpture!
Here’s the Morell Bridge (1899), the first bridge in Victoria that was made from reinforced concrete. These days it is only used by cyclists and pedestrians, and joins the Botanical Gardens to the Olympic Park, the latter created for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.
And the completely natural area a little further up, even though you are still completely in the middle of the city.
Here’s a closer look at the very heart of downtown. The big church in the middle is St Paul’s Cathedral (Anglican), which has three spires including the second highest of any Anglican church. The three spires present a very distinctive view down the streets.
Inner-city Melbourne is quite walkable by the standards of the English-speaking world. The next photo shows the Rainbow Pedestrian Bridge over the Yarra River, with countless pedestrians crossing it at dusk.
Underneath the bridge is one of the world’s smallest islands, Ponyfish Island. The island is entirely covered by an outdoor bistro bar, at which some of the pedestrians tarry!
Helping with walkability is the fact that Melbourne’s trams escaped abolition in the 1950s and 1960s and have since been modernised.
A new passenger rail tunnel, the Metro Tunnel, is also being built under the downtown area to cope with increasing public transport demand. It was scheduled to open in 2025 but this now looks doubtful.
I will be writing about my past visits to Melbourne a little further on below. But first, let’s take a look at the city’s colourful history.
Melbourne was founded by the Crown in 1836, following the dubious acquisition of its site by a private adventurer named John Batman in 1835. Batman hailed from Tasmania, then known as the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. According to a neighbour, the artist John Glover, Batman was “a rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known.”
Intent on founding a colony of his very own, to be called Batmania — a possible clue as to the wider soundness of his judgement — Batman claimed for the rest of his days that he had obtained 600,000 acres of land from people on the mainland, called the Kulin. According to Batman, this estate was leased to him in return for an annual tribute of goods, including several dozen knives, shirts, blankets and hatchets.
Batman and his party could not find an interpreter and were thus reduced to negotiating in sign language. It is most unlikely that the Kulin understood the transaction in the same, permanent, terms as Batman. But as one later historian noted, “No doubt the blankets, knives, tomahawks, etc., that he gave them were very welcome.”
Batman’s land claim was immediately annulled by the Governor of New South Wales, Richard Bourke. The Governor moved swiftly to establish an official settlement on the same site with the more sensible-sounding name of Melbourne.
Bourke’s settlement was named after the British Prime Minister of the day, Lord Melbourne, whose party Bourke openly favoured. A few years after his attempt to found Batmania and the official founding of Melbourne, Batman died of syphilis; a disease that may have accounted for the grandiosity of his scheme.
As incredible as it might sound to a New Zealander, the arrangement with the Kulin arrived at by the rogueish and quite possibly deranged John Batman — sometimes dignified with the name of Batman’s Treaty — is the only recorded instance in which European settlers negotiated with Australian aborigines for access to their land. Others, including Governor Bourke, didn’t even bother.
And so, the city that grew up in the former Kulin territory was called Melbourne, created by a high-handed stroke of the Governor’s pen in 1836, and not Batmania.
After the town was founded, as the capital of a new colony of Victoria hived off from New South Wales, it grew rapidly. Within a decade Melbourne was half the size of Sydney, a city founded much earlier in 1788. People took to calling the fast-growing Victorian city ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.
Here’s an 1861 painting of the solid city as it had become, only 25 years after its foundation. This picture, showing the original Princes Bridge, is painted from a viewpoint similar to the modern-day image of Flinders Street Railway Station and St Paul’s Cathedral above, through from ground level rather than the air.
In 1885, the most prominent church in this painting, St Paul’s Church, behind a house that is in shadow, was torn down to make way for St Paul’s Cathedral; but even St Paul’s Church was pretty impressive!
By the 1890s, Melbourne contained half a million people, a grand exhibition hall, a great network of railways and smoking Victorian factories churning out the iron and steel for more rails and the iron lace of Victorian townhouses; and yet there were still oldsters who remembered the site of the city as nothing more than a level plain.
After this initial period of fast growth, however, Melbourne’s growth tapered off, and it never succeeded in catching up with Sydney. During the twentieth century, Melbourne would always play second fiddle to its brash New South Wales cousin. Between 1901 and 1927 Melbourne did have the distinction of being the capital of the new Australian federation.
After Canberra became the capital in 1927, Melbourne became firmly stuck in second place and even began to acquire a reputation as a city that was a bit slow, rather than fast-growing (though it was still the second-biggest city in Australia).
In compensation, Melbourne began to claim that it was somehow a better place to live than most other parts of the country, its way of life a happy medium of town and country principles: a ‘garden city’
Whether people were speaking of a brash and Americanised Sydney or dusty regions of the Outback, Melbourne was held to be a cut above all those sorts of places.
So, what is Melbourne like today? Well, the short answer is that it is a real city. The central area is a delight to wander about in and be a tourist, with a Free Tram Zone since the beginning of 2015.
And of course, Melbourne did retain its trams when other cities were tearing them out half a century ago, courtesy of an unorthodox head of the local board of works, Major-General Sir Robert Risson, who declared that “transportation is civilisation.”
The usual rationale for getting rid of the trams was that they made it hard for cars to get into the central city. The trams hogged the middle of the road and were hard to overtake. Well, if by retaining the trams Melbourne succeeded in discouraging bogans in Holdens from cruising up and down Bourke Street, that was just fine as far Sir Robert was concerned!
Risson’s attitude was typically Melburnian. There is something old-fashioned and slow-paced about the city, a certain something which goes beyond the obvious fact of the retention of the trams.
At the same time, there is a lot that is modern and go-ahead. The urban train service has been progressively improved, with a circular City Loop rail tunnel excavated under the CBD in the 1980s, and the newer Metro Tunnel now well on the way to completion.
And exciting modern architecture exists everywhere. The dull, grey, industrial-looking aluminium cladding that seems to sheathe every second building in downtown Auckland, including the Sky Tower, seems to have been banned in Melbourne.
Maybe they still use this kind of cladding. But if so, it clearly has to be some colour other than grey. That seems to be the planning rule in Melbourne: either that or it’s a point of pride that the building owners uphold themselves.
The only real negative for Melbourne, as for most of the rest of urban Australia and New Zealand, is the ridiculous cost of housing. This is a problem that could be solved if the political will was there, but it isn’t.
In this respect Melbourne has become the kind of big city once described by the urbanist Hugh Stretton, in his book Ideas for Australian Cities, as “physical and psychological devices for quietly shifting resources from poorer to richer and excusing or concealing — with a baffled but complacent air — the increasing deprivation of the poor.”
On a previous visit, I flew into Melbourne after visiting Tasmania. I hadn’t been to Melbourne for quite a while before that, so I was keen to see the city again. I was scheduled to stay for nine days, and spent them with some people at an Airbnb close to Southern Cross Station for A$60 a night; they took me out for breakfast and showed me the markets.
The unexpected highlight of my tour was a visit to the Victoria State Library. It had an impressive, domed, reading room with leather-covered desks, and the staff gave free tours around a museum section.
Our tour started on the 1st floor and the tour showed the history of Melbourne and how Melbourne had had waves of immigration, from places like Greece and Italy, arriving in the central city after World War II. There were extracts from the diary of May Stewart, an ordinary young woman around 1906, which showed the everyday life of Melbourne in those days. And there was a Ned Kelly section which showed why he had become desperate; it was to do with Irish politics and being harassed. They even had a plaster death mask of Kelly, which I will not show here as it is too macabre.
There is also a separate Immigration Museum. This museum brought out the misfortunes of current refugees and migrants, whose position makes me wonder if Australia is returning to the old White Australia policy in some ways. At any rate, refugees are somehow the scapegoats for wider community concerns about the rate of immigration to Australia and population growth, and the general strain that it has been allowed to put on urban infrastructure and housing given that just about all the immigrants come to the major cities.
Critics allege that the Australian political class has used immigration to stoke the big-city housing markets where presumably they and all their friends have investment properties, and also to keep the country technically out of recession, since with high levels of immigration economic growth is unlikely to turn negative, no matter what. Meanwhile, genuine refugees have become the meat in the sandwich, victims of a symbolic crackdown against a particularly vulnerable class of immigrant who, of course, brings little money into the country.
On a more cheerful note, there is a lot of ornate old Victorian architecture still, such as the Royal Exhibition Building from 1880, the Melbourne Town Hall and the famous Flinders Street Railway Station.
In terms of some of the newer architecture, the South Bank of the Yarra, and the Docklands were both impressive. While on the South Bank, I went with some friends to Ponyfish Island, which I’ve mentioned above.
Just as impressive is Federation Square, on the north side of the Yarra and close to the Princes Bridge, across which many of the trams go, including the trams that run to Melbourne’s famous St Kilda Beach and several other seaside destinations.
I never made it to St Kilda beach, but I still want to go there!
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