87 Days in The Gentle City A Geography o

87 Days in the Gentle
City: A Geography of
Melbourne
Books by Richard Symanski and Korski
Nonfiction
The Immoral Landscape

Order and Skepticism
Wild Horses and Sacred Cows
Outback Rambling
Blackhearts
Geography Inside Out
87 Days in the Gentle City
Brumbies and Blue Eggs
Irreverent Essays on Geographers
The Inquisition and Other Essays on the University
Here’s to a Martini in Your Shoe
A Father’s Journal of His Son’s First Year
Bullies and Other Essays
The Thousand Mountains of Borneo
Fiction
Improbable Fictions on the Road to Poona

The Bar Girl and the Belly Dancer
I Cry for You & Other Stories
87 Days in the Gentle
City: A Geography of
Melbourne
Richard Symanski
Estrilda Publications
Copyright © 2007 by Richard Symanski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Estrilida Publications.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any matter whatsoever

without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For written permissions and
copies of the book contact Korski: www.korski1@cox.net
ISBN 1-4276-1281-1
First Edition
For Nancy
Preface
We were living on a farm near Numurkah in northern Victoria
when the challenge came to me. At the time I was reading two
books, Jan Morris's, Among the Cities, a marvelous collection of
thirty-seven essays on cities around the world, all of them written
between 1956 and 1983; and Evelyn Waugh's, Ninety-Two Days:
A Journey in Guiana and Brazil, which Waugh took in the winter
of 1932. Each book in its own way tugged at my imagination.
Jan Morris is an enviable intelligence with a keen eye. She's
always reaching for summation, the larger picture, the sense of
what gives a city its uniqueness, its special identity. She's a master
of the arresting connection. A lot of what she says about cities as
different as Houston and Alexandria and Cuzco feels right. But
some of her observations and generalizations don't; they're too
glib, they feel slippery, elusive, off-key, contrived. She overreaches,
and she ignores, as she must in twenty or thirty pages, the
immense diversity that one finds in any city that holds the
attention. In some of the cities that she's written about and that
I've spent time in, I get uncomfortable with what strike me as half-
truths at best. She has a way of transforming commonplace
observations into alien and, to my mind, often misbegotten facts.
Jan Morris, I suspect, would be unapproachable as a travel
writer were she to spend more than a week or two in a city; were
she to mingle with common people rather than the rich and the
powerful; were she to stay at other than the best hotels; and were
she less inclined to so doggedly find "true" essence, the alleged
meaning of a city in a small handful of fleeting encounters. But all
viii Preface
my reservations aside, I love reading her essays, and I return to

some of them a second and third time.
Ninety-Two Days is an utterly different kind of travel book,
and it has nothing whatsoever to do with cities. Waugh's journey
at the age of twenty-nine with a "heart of lead" is a detailed and
evocative, occasionally depressing, chronicle of a journey by foot
and horseback into one of the lesser known regions of the world.
Waugh's strengths are his calm and seamless writing style, the
sympathetic eye he brought to those whom he encountered, and,
most of all, the restraint. On the whole he described only what he
saw, and when he ventured forth into the quagmire of motives and
meanings and the interpretations of landscape, he was cautious.
He seemed to prefer to let the reader draw his own conclusions.
These two books got me asking questions. Could I, in the
very brief span of eighty-seven days, the amount of time I would
spend in Melbourne while my biologist--academic wife, Nancy
Burley, pursued research on the mating behavior of zebra finches,
say anything meaningful and interesting about a city of two and
three-quarter million people? Would detail and attention to
particulars create a satisfying whole, perhaps something larger than
the mere sum of parts? I would ask myself: Does it even make
sense to anthropomorphize a city, to think of one as an organic
whole? Is any city of any size much more than a very diverse set of
loose-fitting pieces, the only real commonality among them that of
geography, spatial contiguity?
Aren't cities, after all, really a hodgepodge collection of
individual experiences and histories, small successes and mighty
failures--and everything in between? Aren't cities--in the people
sense--peculiar, ordinary, mundane, piecemeal, baffling, and ever
changing? Surely, except to armchair and willfully wayward
academics, nay, anyone cocooned and largely unconcerned about
truths that belong only to individuals, a city is really a thousand
cities, hundreds of thousands...more. As an Antipodean observer
once noted: "Melbourne has its Paris views, the London view, its
Preface ix
Chicago views; the real Melbourne only comes to one little by

little."
Among books on cities by geographers I'd read before going
to Australia was Peirce Lewis's, New Orleans: The Making of an
Urban Landscape.1 It is still perhaps the best known and most
widely respected of a whole series of city "vignettes" written by
geographers in the 1970s. Most of these were, I think it fair to say,
not only forgettable but dry disasters. The idea of city vignettes
was a great idea poorly and embarrassingly executed, mostly by
people who thought that cities--American cities in this instance--
were all about central places, freeways, census numbers, and not
much more. The New Orleans book was an exception to this rule,
and for this reason if no other it was thought to be a much better
effort.
Peirce Lewis calls his New Orleans book an essay, and he
presents it as an answer to students whom, over the years, he had
been telling that it was possible to recognize "the hard realities of
urban life without treating the city as an economic machine," and
that it was also possible to "draw a holistic picture of a place like
New Orleans." So he spent some time in the city (how long is not
clear), and during that time he engaged some university
geographers in the state, and some planning commission people.
There are others to whom he was indebted for what he learned
about New Orleans, this "big city in a short time--not perfectly, of
course.” In particular, he found himself indebted to New Orleans'
"fine folk."
Early on, in the first chapter of New Orleans, a chapter
entitled "The Eccentric City," Lewis says that "New Orleans is in a
select company of American cities beloved by their residents and
praised by visitors." How Lewis knows any of this, any more than
Beltway pundits have a clue what's on the minds of ordinary folk
in Missoula, Montana or Melbourne, Australia is a complete
1
Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.:
Ballinger, 1976).
x Preface
mystery. As far as I can tell, it's merely a prejudice that he brought

to his project. And since there's not the slightest indication that he
talked about this issue to even a small sample of the city's
inhabitants, there's no reason to believe that this generality is any
better than a great many others that he makes. In truth--and it
ought to be obvious--just about any generality about a whole city
is going to be problematic, if not just downright wrong. For the
one thing we do know about any geographical grouping of several
thousand people, to say nothing of more than a million (the
population of New Orleans at the time Lewis wrote his book) is
that there is very considerable diversity of opinions about just
about everything. This is why the very glib travel and globe-
trotting "city synthesizer" Jan Morris is so frustrating dead wrong
about so much when she reaches for the one- or two- or three-
word phrases to get to the "essence" of Sydney or San Francisco.
In about the middle of Lewis’s small book, he writes about
"the Latin American linkage," and he comes up with a high figure
of 80,000 Latin Americans in New Orleans in the early 1970s.
There was, he says, once a large Cuban population, and there are
now (at the time of writing) substantial numbers of Hondurans,
Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. But what do we learn about any of
these Latin peoples? Do we hear anything about where they live,
or why they have come to New Orleans, or whether they like the
city, or whether they want to return to their native country, or
what they eat, or how they are perceived by non-Latins, or
whether they wax romantic about the city's history, or whether
they can even spell the name of that great river that may be a
block or two away from where they live? We read nothing at all
about any of these or similar questions. There is, in fact, not a
word in the book about or from a single one of the individuals
who might be--heaven forbid--a "representative" voice of the
group--Hondurans, Nicaraguans, or Cubans.
Peirce Lewis isn't interested in any voices or individuals in
New Orleans. In the whole of this book we hear not the single
voice of a rich or a poor black, or an Hispanic, or a Cajun, or a
Preface xi
woman, or a child, or someone new to the city or someone born

in the city. We get not a single hint that he even talked to half a
dozen of any or all of these peoples. So, then, how could Peirce
Lewis "know" how the city's residents see their city, or how they
feel about it, or whether they love it or hate it, or only tolerate it,
or don't give a flying anything about it. Pure and simple, he
doesn’t have even a first approximation answer to any of these
questions.
I don't have any idea how much Peirce Lewis drove around
New Orleans and if he ever got out of his car (other than to take
some photos--and he may not have gotten out of the car for even
this reason); but it appears that just about every line of his book
could have been written not only without leaving his apartment or
the libraries he used, but even without going to New Orleans. My
guess is that he could have stayed in his university office in
Pennsylvania and had inter-library loan send him the books and
maps he needed, and the book he wrote wouldn't have been much
different than the one he wrote by living there for part or all of a
year.
Now none of this is to say that Lewis hasn't produced
something of value, but what that something is has to be kept in
perspective. He's given us a nice and brief and cleanly written
historical geography. But--again--there are no voices, no smells, no
sense of the look and feel of a single street, a single neighborhood,
the ordinary grinding and very quotidian lives of all those
interesting people that are New Orleans. To be sure, the city is
also its history, its geography, its buildings. But what makes it a
whole lot more, and gives some real meaning to the word
"holistic" (what Lewis says he's after) are all of its people and their
stories: short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones, as different
and unique and fascinating as each individual is in his or her own
way. Not all stories can be heard or recorded, and no one would
have the time or interest in hearing or reading them in any event.
But without some stories, some sample of the diversity and
complexity and number of landscapes that make every city
xii Preface
different from every other city, we have not the geography of a

city but something quite different. We have, well, something that's
not all that different than what is found in popular travel guides. 2
I could not, of course, in the short span of three months,
portray anything like even a thousand Melbournes. But I might be
able to sketch nearly a hundred of them. And would not such a
portrayal, fractured and partial to be sure, be more satisfying than
trying to capture Melbourne with a dozen different adjectives
differently mixed? That any large and complex city could be
reduced to a score or more of fetching adjectives and adverbs!
2
These same arguments were later included in an essay titled, “New Orleans
Folks and Fictions,” Richard Symanski and Korski, Geography Inside Out
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 137-140.
New Orleans was revised and updated; Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The
Making of an Urban Landscape (Santa Fe: Center for American Places, distributed
by the University of Virginia Press, 2003). No critique is offered here of the
updated effort, since it was not available at the time this geography of
Melbourne was written (1987). The following are appraisals of the old and new
efforts by Lewis; both appraisals are by academic geographers, the first an urban
geographer, the second a gadfly who has an opinion about almost everything.
Michael Conzen at the University of Chicago has written: “Peirce Lewis’s
original New Orleans earned iconic status in geographical writing on the
American city. The appearance of a thoroughly reworked new edition is a
devoutly welcome event.” Paul Starrs at the University of Nevada at Reno has
written: “A city of legend, a legendary geographer, and a landscape loved by
America’s legions of place-cherishers: These come together in Peirce Lewis’s
timely revision of New Orleans. No place so embodies the generational
distemper of the baby boomers, and no landscape historian has proved so
willing and able to make sense of the face of a place as Peirce Lewis. This is a
ticket to the very best kind of geographical adventure.”
The Conzen statement is indicative of the poverty of geographical writing
on cities, a condition that has hardly changed since the publication of Lewis’s
book. The Starrs’s statement is just plain blather, coming from a close friend
and admirer of Peirce Lewis. Paul Starrs is largely incapable of seeing things for
what they are. See, for example, “Deconstructing a Drugstore Cowboy,” in
Symanski and Korski, pp. 49-56.
Preface xiii
A large city as I envisioned getting to sort of know it presents

a writer with a problem not encountered in a straightforward
journey through space. There is, seemingly, no easy systematic or
logical way to move through a city. One could, I suppose, go east
to west or north to south, perhaps zigzagging on a predictable
quilting design. Or one could start from the inner city and move
out in broad concentric circles. Or one could proceed on intuition,
or mood. Here's what I felt like doing or seeing this morning.
Here's what I chanced upon, here's a situation I created by
snooping, intruding, asking questions...whatever and all of it,
readily admitted, filtered through personal history, cherished
preoccupations, inner thoughts, even the homespun prejudice.
Yes, I thought, this willy-nilly approach is how I would most
enjoy learning about Melbourne and its many peoples.
From what I knew and had read about the city, it would be
both a challenge and an immense amount of fun. Along with
Sydney, Melbourne was not only one of Australia's two great
urban areas, but it came as close as any place on the continent to
possessing a multi-cultural mix of peoples. It was a delicious ethnic
mix that became evident again and again in many of its suburbs, in
a city that by almost any measure is one of the most suburban in
the world. Added to this is the fact that Melbourne geographically
is a big city. It sprawls over more than 6,100 square kilometers, an
area about twice that of Greater New York City, and four times
the size of Greater London.
This, then, was the city where, for eighty-seven days I would
walk and drive and talk and listen, in search not of a coherent
story or a single Melbourne--for surely no such place exists--but of
examples, some random, some not, of the many Melbournes. This
book is not a journal, nor is it a travelogue. Nor is it, I dare say,
any kind of standard academic portrayal of a city. It is a little of
many things: descriptions of streets and neighborhoods, dialogues
and monologues selectively but faithfully recorded, and small
histories of this or that individual or place, all of this larded with
xiv Preface
what I could find in libraries when it rained, or I wanted some

historical and geographical context for what I had heard or seen.
In the end, and maybe no different than anyone else who has
not confined himself to the historical record of a city, this is my
Melbourne. Nay, it is my Melbourne of a very specific time and
place: April, May and June of 1987. I am certain that it would not
be my Melbourne in February of 2007 when I returned to this
manuscript and decided to lightly edit what I wrote almost twenty
years ago.
Richard Symanski
Irvine, California 2007
87 Days in the Gentle City
It's grand, stupendous, alive, childish, just plain magnificent! In all
it's twenty-six feet long, more than six feet wide, a sinuous
serpent-dragon of many colors--aqua and sepia, scarlet and forest
green and purple. It has a curling black and yellow tail, a
rectangular spiky head with an ominous darting tongue. On top of
the snout sits a medieval candle holder, and therein a glowing
white candle. Light for the trip out of the blackened city on the hill
and into the forbidding wilderness beyond.
The serpent-dragon is peppered with well-defined Caucasian
eyes that glower and glow. They belong to naked surreal beings
from another world, to an imagination of many forms. One has a
pear-shaped nose the size of its abdomen. One has ears like those
of the devil. One is steering a wheel, which is attached to the
heavy middle section of the savior serpent-dragon. Other
allegorical figures of dark and distant dreams are fleeing the dead
city on foot, on bicycles, through the air.
It all brings to mind saturation bombing, total devastation,
The Final Holocaust.
I get bumped on the left, then on the right, from behind. I'm
reminded that I've been meandering without compass through a
street dream, completely oblivious to the home-bound masses of
well-mannered Melbournians hastening down Elizabeth Street, all
but a handful headed for the rust and yellow misbegotten
Victorian marvel, the Flinders Street Station.
I turn my attentions to the street artist. He's dressed in blue
jeans with fist-sized holes in the knees, a ballooning sweater, and
2 87 Days in the Gentle City
an orange and purple wool cap. He smiles and approaches and

says, "My name's Peter."
I say, "Aren't you disappointed when people walk all over
your work as soon as you're gone?"
"A few people do. But mostly they walk around it. It doesn't
matter. If they walk on it and smudge it, I just go over it and fix it
up when I return."
Two chunky men in sports clothes stop and lilt in admiration.
One folds his arms and brings them to his chest--a supplicant. The
other one, with shifty eyes, lifts a hand that finds his forehead.
They move in closer.
"Great!" the suppliant says.
"How come you got so many palm trees?" the supplicant's
companion says. "I never seen palms round here. Where are the
gums?"
The supplicant wonders out loud: "What does the drawing
mean?"
"That people don't like the city," Peter offers. "They like the
country more."
"That all?"
"That's as far as my politics go." The corners of Peter's mouth
reach for his ears. He suddenly looks elfin, mischievous.
"Where did you get the idea?" the supplicant says.
"From a drawing on a letter I sent to my girlfriend." Peter
raises a hand and carefully measures a distance between his thumb
and index finger. "It was about this big." He smiles like a rodeo
clown.
No hidden messages here, nothing that particularly complex, I
think. It's all there at our feet, all very personal. Just imagine, make
associations, come up with your own poetry.
Peter explains that this is his second full day working on the
chalk drawing. He's not sure but he thinks he might return
tomorrow to touch it up, fill in missing details. It's not quite
finished. He might, he says, have to return a couple of times in the
next several days, now that he thinks about it. And for a different
87 Days in the Gentle City 3
reason: to see what comes to mind as his street drawing loses form
and color, disappears beneath the feet of pedestrians. Disappears
as all things disappear.
"It's legal to make these large drawings in such a busy place?"
I ask, unable to fly with such universal profundities.
"You only have to get permission from the city council. As
long as it's not lewd or suggestive, you can do anything. They give
you permission to do your drawings here and on Swanston Street.
You can do them most anywhere if they don't bother people. It's
been this way for a year or so. I first put one on the mall in front
of Myer. That wasn't allowed, but I didn't know it at the time."
All matter of fact, the way he says it. No more than minor
legalisms, necessary knowledge to carry on as urges dictate. And I
think: Imagine being allowed to make something like this on New
York's Fifth Avenue, San Francisco's Market Street, Chicago's
Michigan Avenue. And not be pinched, fined, publicly rebuked.
Ha!
Another passerby stops to judge Peter's art work. "There
might be something working here," he opines, "but I really don't
fathom flights of surreal fantasy. And how 'bout you?" he says,
turning to me.
"I like it," I say. "It brings to mind the American sixties."
He says he's British, from London, that Melbourne's now his
home. When he arrived in Australia in l975 he took a job in
Sydney. "It sort of reminded me of London, the hustle, the bustle,
a really busy city." This he didn't like, and soon he and his family
moved to Melbourne. "It seemed more provincial, more country
like, and that's why I have stayed here. I thought, hell, if I'm going
to have a change, I might as well make it a real one." Now he and
his family live in Macedon, about sixty kilometers west of the city.
He drives into Melbourne each day for work. "You get used to it
after a while. I thought I would be like a fish out of water out
there, but I quite enjoy it. The traveling is a pain, but you get used
to it."
"Did you live in closer at one time?" I say, my curiosity

aroused.
"We lived in Moonee Ponds, then in some of the northern
suburbs. We didn't like it very much. We didn't get to know the
names of our neighbors in one suburb we lived in. That's when it
became quite enough for us."
Peter picks up a bottle of lemonade, gulps it down. He then
says that he has to have something to drink off and on during the
day, because the pollution bothers him. Melbourne, superficial
appearances to the contrary, is high on a list of the world's most
polluted cities.
Peter reaches beneath a crumpled dirty blue coat lying on the
pavement and picks up a notebook. He begins leafing through
thick ragged pages, until he comes to colored photographs of
other sidewalk drawings he's done. By comparison with this large
and suggestively subversive story at my feet, they seem flat,
colorless, too geometric and modern.
He hands me the notebook and without thinking, in the grip
of an eagerness to see deeper into his world, I thumb through
several pages. They're full of elaborate pen drawings, quotations
he's picked up from reading, aphorisms designed in his own mind,
weird magazine ads and newspaper clippings.
Feeling guilty because of my unconscionable snoopiness, I
hand Peter his treasure trove, perhaps his most prized possession.
But the urge to do an anthropology of him, to make of him
something much larger than this fleeting moment remains. I'm
tempted to grab back his notebook and devour it.
"You going to be doing more of these here or on Swanston
Street in the future?" I say.
"Don't know. Soon as I get enough money I'm going to
Sydney to see my girlfriend. She's going to have a baby." He
sparkles, his face is full of new colors. I see none of the gloom and
doom tugging at our feet.
There's a long silence, and I imagine Peter and his girlfriend

holding tight to a month-old baby while zinging along on roller
skates on Elizabeth Street, eating a vegetarian sandwich.
"You live in Sydney?" I ask.
"Here. In Camberwell. Been there?"
"Not yet."
Out of nowhere he says, "My girlfriend is a traveler. She's a
professional traveler." A playful grin washes over his face, like he's
not quite sure I won't laugh, that anyone can really understand this
category called professional traveler.
I go back to admiring the drawing. Peter picks up a piece of
chalk and stoops to sharpen the contrast between the serpent-
dragon and the yellow-green landscape through which it slithers.
His longish brown locks cover the neck of his sweater, veil the
young and accepting face with the sparse beard. He works with
purpose. He takes no obvious notice when a passerby throws a
coin into his tin and it tingles a harsh note.
I say goodbye to Peter, and in response he puts down his
chalk and gets up to give me one of those long disarming flower
child smiles I remember so well from the Haight-Ashbury sixties.
I start to walk away, but am brought up short, a victim of
habit, a slave to socially conditioned shame. I wait until Peter's
engrossed in his work, then take out a couple of bills and drop
them into his tin.
Curiosity gets the best of me and I return to Elizabeth Street
early the next day. But it's raining hard. Peter's nowhere in sight.
I'm disappointed, fear that our next meeting will be in the
hereafter, in the land of doom and gloom.
I have a late breakfast and then walk up the street for a
second cup of coffee, hoping against the odds that the low
seamless clouds will break. They don't, and I remind myself that
Melbourne is like Portland and Seattle. The clouds can drip for
days. It's a place where my kind of born-in-the-land-of-eternal-sun
psyche easily turns dour. It's the kind of place that even after a
week of such benign rains I wonder if I'll begin to rust.
It rains off and on most of the day, and by mid afternoon a

detour down Elizabeth Street confirms the easy inference that
Peter's serpent-dragon drawing is no more than a pale imitation of
its former self.
Eight long blocks that measure about a mile in the heart of the
inner city, Collins Street is a hodgepodge of the new and the old,
the crass and the elegant, mammoth multi-million dollar banks and
businesses, cinemas and fine dress shops, camera stores and
chemists (pharmacists), beauty parlors, chic bistros, stylish
boutiques, and a history that reaches for comparisons to the
Continent.
At the far western end where the street might be said to begin
or end--at Spencer Street--are warehouses and shipping docks, the
trains that go to and from the countryside. From this inauspicious
geographical entry point, someone afoot quickly moves east and
past the Department of Health, then the elegant and upscale
Menzies at Rialto Hotel. Soon, it's into the monied core of the
whole street, the clustered location of financial institutions and
investment houses and the home of accountants, and banks, and
more banks. This is a reach of a few blocks where more money
changes hands than is true for any single courtyard collection of
buildings anywhere on the continent.
At the other end of the street, home to the Uniting Church
and the Scots Church and the Wesley Church, the Nauru House,
the Hyatt Hotel and the Regent Hotel, my eyes fix on the parched
Holland blinds in the prestigious Melbourne Club, doorways that
still have boot scrapers, prominent brass doorbells that are
regularly polished, and foot paths once thick with Mintaro slate
and Bluestone brought as ballast in clipper ships from Italy and
Scotland, now giving way to long patches of bitumen. At the end
of the nineteenth century, and long before the arrival of these
overbearing modern mammoths, this stretch of Collins Street was
highly coveted by doctors, and those with money who desired to
live in the heart of the city, just down the block from Melbourne's
finest theater, the Athenaeum.
The street has plenty of history, for in 1839 on the corner of
Collins and Elizabeth streets, the city's first brick building was
erected. Allotment No. One, and the city's very first land sale,
measured "one rod and thirty-six perches." It was sold to a
carpenter in 1837 for the sum of thirty-two pounds. Whether or
not it was a good deal depended on perspective, for then the street
was a dustbowl in summer, a quagmire in winter.
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a small piece of
Collins Street was a social node of consequence. Then there was a
requisite walk between Elizabeth and Swanston streets known as
"doing the block." The city's prettiest young women would stroll
along the north side of Collins Street while young gawking men
would "cruise" the south side, in search of carnal fantasies, that
ideal young woman they hoped to court and marry. The
Melbourne Punch noted that it was "the sole delight of the women
to outshine in dress their friends and neighbors, while the
simpering, effeminate, lackadaisical manners of the men becomes
too painful to behold."
With the opening of the twentieth century, Melbourne's
stylishly dressed ladies of the city allegedly had no peers in the
whole of the country. They were now doing the block with the
regularity and timing of faithful church goers: between three and
five in the afternoon during the week, between eleven and one on
Saturdays. When the women needed something new and elegant to
show themselves in a fresh and more attractive light, they need
only walk east a block or so to George's department store, then as
now the place to go for the city's "very nice women" in search of
something elegant.
After World War II, the eastern end of Collins Street became
known as the "Paris End." There were cafés with outdoor tables
and chairs and striped umbrellas, and for a while there were street
lamps with globes hanging from old iron standards. At the right
time of year, there were ageing and leafy plane trees that provided
atmosphere. Where Collins Street met Spring Street stood the

Treasury Building, architecturally one of the most appealing prizes
for the discriminating eye in the whole city. For a while in the
1960s, this end of Collins Street was said to be one of the most
splendid single streets in the Southern Hemisphere, bested only by
Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires.
But the comparison of Collins Street with this or that
imagined street on the Continent or with a rival across the Pacific
was, in an important sense, more than a little bogus. Liquor could
not be drunk outdoors, and so Melbournians in all of their finery
and pretensions drank not Pernod but tea. They ate tomato
sandwiches. And everyone, irrespective of class, had to put up
with Australia's all-too-common flies.
The image of Collins Street's specialness was eroded in a
different manner in the 1960s and 1970s. A twenty-two story
block of apartments was added to the "Paris End" of the street, a
eyesore that one observer described as "a strange assortment of
balconies that look like untidy drawers." Other uncomely buildings
preceded and followed, the most infamous of which is the fifty
story Nauru House, built by funds from the Nauru government,
and adorned with small sculptures made from super phosphate.
With a wry smile, taxi drivers call it the bird-shit house.
In the other direction, and back down and west and into the
heart of big and small commerce, a proletarian mindset has made
its mark. There are now discotheques, travel agencies, a hearing aid
center, and an adult theater called the "Pussycat Cinema,"
complete with nude girls on stage. They have their own version of
doing the block.
Joe Lachowicz has lived in a boarding house in Canterbury for

seventeen years. He's lived there ever since his wife of more than
twenty years "pissed him off" and moved to Newcastle, New
South Wales, whereupon Joe sold the house and the car and most
of his possessions and bought land for his three children so they
could "get a good start and wouldn't worry." Joe, a real talker, says
that his wife left him because he drank all the time. He started
drinking when they arrived in Australia in l950 from Poland. He
drank slow and he drank hard, and then harder; he's never been
able to stop. He tried to convince his wife that alcohol was good
for the mind, for smoothing the bumps of life. She thought
otherwise.
Joe and I are talking on a park bench in Canterbury. He's not
feeling well, his ribs hurt. He cracked three of them when he fell
on his way to the toilet in the middle of the night, drunk. He had
just come from St. Vincent's Hospital and had gotten some relief
from pills they gave him. Joe was thankful that he didn't have to
wear a corset, as he's had to do on four previous occasions when
he'd cracked or broken ribs from falling or rolling down stairs,
drunk.
Joe motors into the past, to a time when he came to know
Russian and German soldiers during World War II better than he
wanted to. While out buying bread for his mother, he was
captured by the Russians and sent to a prison camp on the
Caspian Sea. He spent seven months there before escaping and
finding refuge among Russian peasants. Of the peasants, he says,
"They very good, generous people. Better than anyone know.
They give you everything." While among them, he learned to
speak Russian and Ukrainian, a point of quiet pride.
Upon Joe's return to Poland, he was captured by the
Germans. He was sent to Dachau. There he saw Jews shot without
provocation. He saw them marched to the gas chambers. He was
in Dachau two months before they released him. "Because they
found I innocent," he says. Joe doesn't explain what he was
innocent of. I presume his innocence is all about being Catholic,
somehow being able to make the claim believable.
Joe spent the years between the end of the war and l950 in a
refugee camp, and then, already married and with two small
children, he found himself faced with the delightful prospect of
choosing where he wanted to live for the rest of his life. England,
Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, the United States and Australia were
possibilities. "I wanted to go to Venezuela," he says, grinning.

"Glad, very glad I didn't!"
When Joe was asked by people in the Department of
Immigration what he knew about Australia, he said, "I tell them, it
there somewhere in the Indian Ocean and they have lot of cattle.
How could I know what Australia was? I never be there before."
Joe's first job, and his only job for the next twenty years, was
tending bar in a hotel in Ringwood. Later he worked in a rubber
factory, then as a general handyman on farms. All of this came to
an end when his wife left him. He then went on a pension, moved
into the boarding house, and began worrying about making ends
meet when not wondering when he would see his three children
and six grandchildren.
Joe speaks with no obvious bitterness about either his ex-wife
or the generational changes that, for all I know, have charred the
core of his soul. Rather he has endearing words of affection for his
family, and he brings understated humor to changes of the most
basic sort. All of his children speak Polish, and when he visits with
them they carry on in his native language. "But the little ones, my
grandchildren, they say, 'What you say?' when they hear us speak.
They don't know nothing what I say, not a word." Joe laughs at
this.
I tell Joe that I too am Polish, in a sense. "No mixed blood on
either side, far as I know, Joe," I say. "Though my mother has said
that a couple of generations behind her mother's and father's
Poznan roots someone got involved with a Spaniard."
He laughs, and he wants to know how I spell my name. I tell
him. He frowns. He pronounces it in a way largely foreign to my
ear. It rolls better in his mouth, the consonants don't sound so
harsh.
He surmises that someone has tampered with my surname,
dropped the z preceding the y. He says that Szymanski is a
common name in Poland. I nod and say that my father's brother
got the idea to change the spelling, to avoid problems with friends,
at work, because he was tired of being laughed at, having to spell it

out.
"I no understand you Americans. Poles in Australia no change
their name like that," he says. Scratching his stubble, he adds,
"You know about General Kosciusko? He the one whose name on
the highest mountain in the Australian Alps. Australians no know
how to pronounce it right. They say, Ko-see-os-co. The right way,
the Polish way, is Ko-choo-sco. How you pronounce it?"
"Like an Australian."
He laughs, pronounces it correctly, then booms it slowly a
second time to make sure that in the future I'll do justice to our
more or less common heritage.
Joe says that he speaks Russian, Ukrainian, German, and
Polish.
"You forgot English," I say.
"But I no speak it very well."
Arriving from the north by way of the Hume Highway, which

turns into Sydney Road and leads directly into the heart of the city,
we remember that we need food for our empty refrigerator.
We stop at a fresh fruit and vegetable market, one run by an
Italian who's been in Melbourne, and in the same business on
Sydney Road, for thirty-five years. The second stop, for milk, juice
and whatever catches our eye, is just up the block. It's a Take
Away that sells kebabs, all kinds of Lebanese delicacies that make
us drool. In broken English, the Lebanese take away owner
informs us that he's from Beirut, has been in Australia five years.
We cross the street and enter a bakery. I strike up a
conversation with the young girl behind the counter. She's got rich
olive skin and coal black hair. Full of good cheer and open to all
questions, she says that her parents are from Ankara, Turkey but
that she was born in Melbourne.
We stroll up the block and wander into the first fish n'chip
shop we come to. I buy two uncooked whiting fillets, then while
my wife wanders off I chat with a reminiscing owner who's a
Greek Cypriot by birth. He'd come to Melbourne by way of

London and Perth to open a business and raise a family.
The casual outsider's impression that Melbourne is a city
strongly spiced with a diverse foreign-born population is on the
mark. A run through statistics and comparisons in a social atlas of
Melbourne based on the l981 national census confirms what the
eyes see and the ears hear. Melbourne's population has roughly
doubled in the last forty years. A very good proportion of this
increase has come about through immigration.
While those of British and Irish origin are the major foreign-
born groups in Melbourne in the mid 1980s, almost a fifth of the
city's nearly three million inhabitants have come from non-English
speaking countries, mostly from southern and eastern Europe.
Altogether, including those from Great Britain, Ireland and New
Zealand, twenty-eight percent of Melbourne's population was born
abroad. Only Perth among Australian cities has a slightly higher
percentage.
But perhaps the one statistic that best suggests the uniqueness
and the special flavor of Melbourne, that brings forth vivid
pictures of the interdigitation of the Old World and the New all
around, is the l98l national census figure showing that slightly
more than half of the city's population that was born in Australia
had at least one parent born abroad. A different kind of cultural
cue to Melbourne's uniqueness, the spread of the city's ethnic mix
and its recency, comes to mind when you step into a public
telephone booth. There you're reminded that telephone interpreter
services are available in nine languages, and access is no further
away than the pound sign.
Heading the list of non-English-speaking peoples living in
Melbourne, and proportionately much more important in this city
than anywhere else in Australia, are the Italians. They arrived in
Melbourne in greatest numbers in the l950s and l960s, settled in
Brunswick, Carleton, Coburg, Fitzroy, and Northcote, and then as
they became more affluent and established themselves in law
firms, supermarkets, clothing stores and funeral parlors, they
moved to outer suburbs. To this day Italians retain a strong sense

of community; they remain much more geographically
concentrated than the city's immigrants considered as a whole.
Melbourne is also the Greek capital of Australia, with more
than 70,000 of its residents born in Greece. If one uses place of
birth as a measure, then only Athens and Thessalonica in Greece
are larger Greek cities. By this criterion, Melbourne is significantly
more Greek than Chicago, the principal city of choice in the U.S.
It is, admittedly, the recency of Greek immigration to Australia
that gives Melbourne this global distinction.
Not all that far behind Greeks, and Melbourne's third major
non-English speaking group, are people born in Yugoslavia. They
number more than 50,000 and are found primarily in the city's
western suburbs where most work as tradesmen and laborers. As
with Italians and Greeks, there are substantially more Yugoslavs in
Melbourne than in Sydney, or any other Australian city for that
matter.
Melbourne also has notable populations of Germans and
Turks and Maltese, and it has become home to an increasingly
large number of refugees from Southeast Asia who have been
given preferential treatment under Australia's humanitarian
immigration laws. Burmese, Indonesians, Kampucheans,
Malaysians, Filipinos, Thais, and Vietnamese are chief among
those Asians brought to Australia. More than seventy-five percent
of them have been in Melbourne less than a decade.
Just about all of these groups have initially settled either
somewhere in the near cities surrounding the central business
district (often in government hostels and flats), or close to the jobs
in manufacturing which brought so many of them to Melbourne in
the first place. Invariably they have clustered among their own
kind, thereby providing continuity with the past and a cushion for
the breakdown of traditional ways in an Anglo, English-speaking
culture. As their incomes and aspirations have risen, they have
dispersed, moved on to more distant suburbs. Some, like Germans
who mostly came as Displaced Persons after World War II, are to
be found virtually everywhere in the city today.
At the other extreme are the Maltese, who, despite their
arrival in Melbourne in the l940s, are still markedly concentrated in
northern and western suburbs.
He's dressed in black tails and a rich grey cravat, with a large silver
ring in his left ear. He's sporting a sparse beard. His hair is tied
into a stubby ponytail. He's carrying a black silver-handled walking
stick. Mark is his name, and he's the twenty-six-year-old
bridegroom who's now coming down the dirt road on horseback
toward the Eltham Uniting Church.
Not far behind and also dressed in black tails, matching cravat
and black brogues is the best man. The best man's riding Sinbad, a
huge dromedary with furry kneecaps the size of melons. Sinbad, a
full-blooded Australian, was born to feral parents in the Northern
Territory's forbidding Simpson Desert sixteen years ago.
Coming from another direction, along Eltham's Main Road
and the principal speedway through this northern Melbourne
suburb, is a finely-crafted black and white coach that was
manufactured in London in l896 and then shipped to India for use
by a maharajah. Two nearly identical white Percherons with
elaborately braided tails pull the Cinderella coach. The coachman,
an elderly gentlemen with a pink complexion, wears a long formal
red jacket, high black riding boots and a tan top hat. Inside the
covered coach sits Doxia, the twenty-five-year-old bride, her
father, and three bridesmaids. Doxia is wearing a simple floor-
length white satin gown and a pearl tiara that reigns in wayward
curls of silky brown hair.
While I stand outside waiting for the newlyweds to emerge
into a shower of rice and clicking cameras, a friend of one of the
bridesmaids informs me that Doxia's Greek-born parents have
tried their very best to accept the alien terms of the wedding. They
most certainly would have preferred a traditional Greek Orthodox
ceremony. And why should it be otherwise? The parents speak and
understand little English, and they cling to everything they were

born into and grew up with. Now for their benefit as well as that
of their close Mediterranean friends of like mind, a Greek
Orthodox priest is in attendance at the ceremony to translate the
Uniting Church of Australia services. Anything to attenuate what
they cannot really accept.
Mark is not Greek. He is not even of English or Scottish or
Irish extraction. "Mark," a friend says, "was born in Queensland.
He's Australian."
But Doxia, saving grace, was born in Geelong, Victoria, which
makes her Australian. Well, sort of, in the minds of her parents.
I'd seen several similar ads in the real estate section of The Age, but
this one in particular caught my eye, because of the hint of
intimacy, Victorian elegance regained. "A Little Charmer Offers
Privacy," read the heading, next to which was a drawing of the
Siamese-linked pair of adjoining South Melbourne Victorian two-
storey terrace houses, only one of which was up for auction.
If I was to believe the description, I wouldn't be disappointed.
Built in l884 and originally a tiny shop with residence behind, the
terrace house had a "cosy formal sitting room with wooden
louvered shutters; a formal dining room with a superb black cast
iron and heavily embossed fireplace and lovely wooden
overmantel; beige and white diamond-patterned wallpaper and the
original pulley-style light fitting; a well-designed kitchen with pine
bench tops, white cupboards set on an exposed brick wall,
including everything found in kitchens three times its size; a
secluded garden with mature trees and ivy-covered walls
[including] a barbecue and a raised hot tub; and upstairs, past the
deadlight window taken from a demolished country church, a
stripped pine door that leads to a sunny second bedroom."
Admittedly, it was "tiny, but what a charmer...."
Shortly after entering the South Melbourne neighborhood of
wide streets heavy with traffic and scrambled architectural styles, I
have no problem finding the house. I'm guided by numerous street
signs reminiscent of ads for Midwestern flea markets. And then in

front of the house I'm after there's a large red and white flag and a
glaring purple board with cream-colored lettering crowded with
sale details and promo come-ons.
The neighborhood isn't anything like what I'd pictured in my
mind's eye. Two doors east of the attached terrace houses is one
that looks similar. But it's rundown, boarded, and falling into the
street. A lusterless sea blue, the creaky hull's probably chock full of
ravenous Norway rats, I imagine.
On the other side of the house I've come to see, and up the
street, the effect is equally dispiriting: four tiny red brick
bungalows with tin bull nose porch overhangs and fenced front
yard gardens of Lilliputian dimensions. Panning to the west, my
eyes fall on a crumbling two-storey corner store. It's planked,
sagging, long neglected, ripe for the wrecker's ball. And then,
across the street lies an empty lot splotched and painted with
garbage, shrubs and high grass, rusting machinery. Just the sort of
hide-and-seek landscape I loved as a kid when playing cowboys
and Indians.
I walk a short distance and come upon a large sign drawing
my attention to another upcoming auction. This one of a house
described as a "classic Edwardian family residence." Yet another
label to add to my growing catalogue of cozy Melbournian house
types: "double-fronted home," "Victorian brick townhouse,"
"double-fronted classic Victorian terrace home," and, most
frequent of all, that seductive suggestion of something warm and
sunny and sprawling--"villa."
Greeted at the door with a brisk handshake by a suave young
real estate salesman with rosy-red cheeks and a pudgy nose, I'm
invited to see for myself that the house is, as he promptly lets me
know, "a really spectacular property!" He asserts that the 900
square-foot house sold for "around $A60,000" in l983, but "might
well sell at today's auction for $Al40,000 to $A150,000."
Gentrification, the agent goes on, began about ten years ago in the
neighborhood, and though the process had largely run its course,
prices up and down the block are still increasing at bull market
rates.
He takes me outside and points to the adjoining row of
detached brick terrace houses. "They'll all sell for $Al50,000 or
more," he says.
You're pulling my leg, I want to say. I had no idea there was
so much money in Melbourne for so little, I really want to say.
I put aside the mind-boggling anticipated sales price and try
hard to overcome a growing sense of claustrophobia as I walk
among the small rooms. And then I momentarily become
intrigued. The house has been furnished throughout with
restrained period antiques. The large stained-glass country church
windows fronting on the stairwell lend a refreshing rustic air, while
the wall of exposed brick in the kitchen gives an earthy and open
feeling, a sense that the inhibiting space is larger than it really is.
I mention something about "small touches," and the agent
begins bragging that the owner gets up every morning a five
o'clock to "prepare the house and make everything just right." In a
manner of speaking, he's not kidding. At the edge of the kitchen
counter is a bowl of artistically arranged fresh fruit. Nearby are
two white porcelain tea cups with dainty silver spoons, the cups
full of cold tea. My unrestrained hands grab one of the three
scones neatly arranged on a silver serving tray; it’s as hard as a
cricket ball. In the upstairs bedroom a silky peach nightgown is
fastidiously draped on the corner of the brass bed, suggesting
every bit as much as any middling imagination will allow.
Inside is a reflection of what to expect outside. In particular,
steaming water coming off a California redwood hot tub, two
towels ready and waiting at arm's length.
The auction about to begin, I make the acquaintance of a
young woman named Heidi. She's come to bid on the house, she
says. At first I think she’s teasing. She's dressed in tight blue slacks,
dirt red boots, a loose print sweater that’s seen a lot of wear. No, I
think, she sure doesn't look like someone with $Al40,000 to spend
on a Victorian house in a neighborhood that needs a whole lot

more than an intensive two-week-and-done facelift.
Fooled again by mere appearances and well disguised
histories, Heidi offers up the fact that she was recently the
beneficiary of a large alimony settlement. This, and this alone, she
says, has given her this first-of-a-lifetime opportunity to bid on
houses that otherwise would be way out of her price range.
"What is it about this one that catches your eye?" I ask.
"It's a nicer place than the one I have in Elsternwick, and I
like Victorian houses. I would love to buy it like it is, with all the
furniture in it!"
"This is larger than your present home?"
"No, smaller."
"But closer to your work in the city?"
"I don't work in the city," she says, her teeth chattering, her
legs now shaking like saplings in a storm.
Heidi, catching on to my watching her shiver and shake,
assures me that her flushed cheeks and palsy-like behavior have
absolutely nothing to do with the cold and the rain. She confesses
that she's simply anxious, overcome with the anticipation of
another lost opportunity. In the last couple of months, she'd been
to several auctions: in Elwood, Port Melbourne, St. Kilda, South
Melbourne. She had unsuccessfully bid on five houses, and,
believing that history was a flawless predictor of the future, she's
now convinced that she won't fare any better on this one.
"Maybe you'll be the only one bidding," I say, trying to calm
her nerves.
"I wish!" she exclaims. "There are probably seven or eight
people here to buy the house."
She pulls down on her new Akubra hat, huddles up her arms,
reaches in her purse for a cigarette. She lights one nervously. Then
her hazel eyes begin roaming among the twenty-odd informally
dressed people gathered near the gray podium in front of the
house where the auction is about to begin.
The rotund auctioneer in suit and tie begins listing the details
of ownership and financial arrangements that have to met upon
purchase. Then, in a stentorian voice, he says, "Ladies and
gentlemen, let me draw your attention to the location. If you look
around you, you can see the city behind you. We know that's
about eight minutes away. We know the West Gate Bridge is
round about six minutes away. The beach is about six minutes
away. And we also got Albert Park nearby, so you're right in the
middle of everything. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen, if you
want to run to work, we're about twenty minutes away, provided
of course that you don't catch the red lights on the way." He
laughs, alone, the crowd rather somber. "An ideal location, ladies
and gentlemen, certainly one that should be taken into account."
And it would have been taken into account--but perhaps for
other reasons, and a hundred years ago. Then, a mere dozen
blocks away on Beaconsfield Parade in Albert Park, the Victoria
Hotel was notable for its extravagant pseudo-renaissance Victorian
excesses--its Corinthian columns, its marble and brocade, its
massive mirrors, its abounding array of brass fittings and gas
chandeliers, every room fortified with mahogany. In the late
nineteen century the beach front was among Melbourne's chosen
places to drink and eat in urbane luxury. People came in hansom
cabs, to catch fresh breezes blowing off Port Phillip Bay, to
honeymoon, to socialize with famous boxers. All kinds of
cognoscenti were taken in by ads proclaiming that the Victoria
Hotel was "an incomparable summer residence...with a billiard
room, a splendid sea view, a telegraph office which may be used
by the public...everything of the highest order."
By the middle years of the twentieth century, Albert Park and
South Melbourne had fallen into disfavor. South Melbourne was
becoming home to mid-century immigrant groups, especially
Italians. Now that young people of more than modest means and
good education have begun to appreciate the advantages of
location, the social points to be claimed by owning a genuine
artifact of the Victorian era, and the money to be made in a
speculative housing market, prices are soaring. No matter that

there might be a disaffected minority in their midst. Yuppies
jogging along Beaconsfield Parade or a dozen streets that cut at
angles into the heart of South Melbourne can simply turn their
eyes or shut off their minds when passing bold graffiti demanding
more public housing.
With barely a pause, the auctioneer hurries on. "Be well
assured, ladies and gentlemen, that your investment in this
property will be a good one. Needless to say, the prices that are
being achieved in South Melbourne and surrounding areas are
fantastic, and I believe that that trend will continue. We're very
close to public transport here. We have the tram situated up to our
left. We also have the railway station within easy walking distance
of this property. If that's not enough, we've got excellent shopping
facilities. We've got Victoria Street, Albert Park, and the South
Melbourne Market. We have a number of schools and churches
which will cater to all of your requirements."
As if the house itself were suddenly somewhat beside the
point, that geography and neighborhood amenities aren't enough
to provoke hectic bidding, the auctioneer decides to appeal to the
health conscious fanatics among us. He chimes, "Ladies and
gentlemen, one of the things to enjoy with this property is the very
healthy lifestyle that it offers. Because you're in such close
proximity to Albert Park and Kerferd Road Beach, it means that
you can go for a late morning or a late afternoon jog if you wish.
Then one of the things you can do is come home and enjoy a
healthy piece of relaxation in the hot tub within the rear courtyard
area. Ladies and gentlemen, what a delightful area it is! There's a
hot tub there, you've got privacy, what more can you want?"
He turns to a description of the article for sale, specifically
"the l03-year-old bricks and mortar we're offering here today...the
louvered shutters at the front...the dining room that you've seen
this morning, and particularly that lovely fire that's going there
now...and the fireplace with that very attractive iron grate and the
timber overmantel....the kitchen, what a delight it is! Ladies and
gentlemen. You have new doors. You have laminated bench tops.
You've got brass sinks and brass fittings, and a dishwasher, a gas
stove and oven, all those things that people want these days...and
so what we're offering here today is a property fully renovated in a
superb location."
After a long fifteen minutes of hype sprinkled with the off-
again, on-again rain, the slick auctioneer wants to ask "the big
question." Measuring his words, he says, "Ladies and gentlemen,
what am I offered for this lovely property?"
There's a minute of head-shaking silence before an unkempt
young man in baggy chinos and sweat shirt and scruffy brogues
opens the bidding at $Al00,000. Heidi wastes no time and throws
up her hand and shouts, "$Al05,000."
It's soon a two-person show, the price rising in jumps of
$A2,500. Until Heidi, after considerable hesitation, makes her final
bid of $A127,500. The numbers out of her mouth, her lungs clear
of smoke, she sighs. And then again, more noticeably, when her
baggy chinos competitor pushes the figure to $Al30,000.
The auctioneer's got something else in mind, however. He
doesn't like the numbers he's heard. He returns to the house's
locational advantages, the charming touches, the investment
possibilities. And he says, "Don't miss this superb opportunity,
ladies and gentlemen. It is one of the best renovated homes I have
seen in this area. A delightful location, so close to everything. I am
looking for another $l,000, ladies and gentlemen. Will anyone at all
give me another $1,000?"
Heidi's cheerless, thoroughly dejected. She's made up her
mind and is now looking for a palliative, a familiar consolation
prize. She sticks her head into her full purse and grouses around
for cigarettes. She finds them, as much happiness as she can
expect at the moment.
When no one shows any interest in further bids, the
auctioneer announces that he has to confer with the seller about
her "reserve figure." He goes inside the house, returns shortly, and
announces that the bid price had been close but below the reserve
or asking price and that the property will have to be "passed in."
And then to assure us that this was all on the up-and-up, he adds,
"We will be negotiating with the gentleman with the high bid."
The crowd disperses. I linger. Heidi lingers, hopeful, she says,
that baggy chinos will change his mind.
Baggy chinos enters the house to negotiate a price with the
seller. He's gone only minutes before the auctioneer returns to the
street and seeks out Heidi. He informs her that there's always the
possibility that a price can't be agreed upon or that baggy chinos
can't meet the sale conditions.
Heidi's been through this routine before, her face says. On
every house she wanted and lost it was the same old story. She
shakes her head, it's not going to happen. The auctioneer leaves,
and turning to me or the space between us, to all the emptiness
she now feels, Heidi says, "I didn't think about going any higher.
To go any higher, I'd have to go over on Grey Street in St. Kilda
and prostitute myself as a street tart. That's the only way I could
get the money to pay for it."
I bid Heidi farewell and walk up to the corner and into a store
called the Victorian Wine Center. Amid the clutter of bottles is a
small sign noting that several wines are available for tasting in the
back of the store. Why not? I try two of the Rieslings. They strike
me as insubstantial, nothing special, and, at any rate, nothing I can
afford.
Returning to the front of the store, I see the manager
demonstrating a gizmo to a slim jogger type I judge to be in his
early thirties. He seems intense. From my half-interested
perspective, half way out the front door, it appears that the gizmo
is nothing more than a silver-plated frame device in which to place
a bottle of wine. The wine is poured by turning a crank, which tilts
the open bottle.
The perfect house-warming gift for baggy chinos.
Quiet, almost moribund by day, Melbourne's Chinatown, a three-

block stretch along Little Bourke Street, bustles at night. It's where
Melbournians go when they want the best of the city's Cantonese

food. It's not where anyone goes to appreciate a neatly integrated
landscape. For, in one sense, Chinatown is an eyesore. Stuck
between elegant Cantonese restaurants are parking lots, weathered
and rundown buildings of arcane historical significance, a Thai
restaurant, a Liquorland, an Italian restaurant, and a second-rate
department store.
No one today--and for more than one reason--would say as
one travel writer a hundred years ago wrote that: "A street scene in
this quarter is as picturesque as one in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
Paper lanterns swing in front of the shops, shedding soft-colored
light upon the people, most of whom are 'Johnnie Chinamen,' as
they are called, dressed in the long blue coats and loose trousers,
and wearing the dangling pigtail of their own country. An evening
walk in this neighborhood is the strangest experience anyone may
have, but no one should venture upon it without being guarded by
two policemen, at least, because, in addition to the Chinese
themselves, it is the resort of thieves, cut-throats, gamblers, and all
the most dangerous characters in Melbourne."
The Chinese first came to Melbourne during the Gold Rush
of 1849 to 1851. But it was after 1856 that their numbers, heavily
skewed toward males, increased dramatically, a surge that came to
an end five years later when a law was written to restrict Chinese
immigration. Between 1901 and 1956, the Commonwealth
Immigration Restriction Act allowed few Chinese who came to
Australia to remain permanently.
In the nineteenth century, Chinatown was geographically and
demographically much larger than today. It encompassed a
rectangular area that extended from Spring to Swanston streets
and from Bourke to Lonsdale. By the mid 1850s, Chinatown had
thirty-four shops, five hotels, two timber yards, a sawmill, a
bullock yard, a slaughter house and a livery stable. In addition
there were some 200 or so filthy and overcrowded houses made of
brick, wood, wattle and daub. The area was notorious not only for
thieves and drunken brawls, but for its opium dens, its gambling
halls, and "Little Bourke Street Ladies." In 1885, when some 2,500
people were living in Chinatown, and at a time when it was
reputed to have nearly 100 brothels, one traveler noted that "a
more hideous spot in any fair city could not exist."
Chinatown encompassed some of the city's "little" streets--
Little Londsdale and Little Bourke. This gave the area an aura of
congestion, and human and commercial densities not common
elsewhere, and to labeling phrases that were as much geographic as
ethic. Melbournians of British extraction spoke of "those narrow
lanes of the shuffling slipper-shod Orientals."
When Melbourne's street plan was laid out in the middle of
the nineteenth century, the principal streets were made ninety-nine
feet wide, whereas the parallel "little" streets--Little Lonsdale,
Little Collins, Little Bourke, Flinders Lane--were one-third this
figure. The central part of Melbourne was the design of Robert
Hoddle and his cadastral survey was the creation of an urban
geography of one-square mile squares. This grid could be traced as
roads a mile apart, one so generally regular that by 1885 the city
was a network of streets parallel to the original ones. History in
this instance was unusually determining, for the most outstanding
feature of Melbourne's suburbs down to the present is its
rectangularity, a pattern only disturbed here and there by terrain.
Unlike Sydney, this gave Melbourne the geometrical form of a
typical American town. The city planners shared the nineteenth-
century superstition that a gridiron was the ideal plan for healthy
living and proper social intercourse.
By the 1870s, the more industrious Chinese had gotten into
cabinetmaking and vegetable wholesaling. Some opened stores
selling herbal and other medicines. Forty years later the Chinese of
Chinatown controlled the wholesaling of tomatoes and tropical
fruits, in addition to vegetables. Along Little Bourke and Little
Lonsdale, they were also making chests of drawers, kitchen tables,
and "Adelaide" chairs. Those of the same clan often worked
together, and many shared a similar objective, that of remitting
money to relatives in China.
The Methodists, the Presbyterians and the Church of England

didn't make any significant inroads into the Chinese population
until the 1870s. A Chinese Methodist Church was built in the
district in 1872. Until then religion among the Chinese was a hard-
to-define blend of Confucianist, Buddhist and Taoist elements.
The first Cantonese restaurant opened in Chinatown in 1920.
More restaurants and cafés followed, and if increasingly they
served foreigners they were also social centers for many Chinese.
After World War II, Melbourne's Chinese immigrants came
principally from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the sex ratio was now
much less skewed toward males than previously, and the ties to kin
back home would not be nearly as strong as they had been
previously. Although nearly half of the city's Chinese still lived in
or near Chinatown by the 1950s, twenty years later the figure was
under twenty percent. New arrivals were heading directly for the
suburbs. These changes are now reflected in the fact that fewer
than twenty Chinese restaurants and cafés are found in Chinatown.
Another five hundred are dispersed throughout the city.
In 1976 city planners decided to reinvigorate Chinatown.
Traditional Chinese lamps were installed, and mercury vapor
lamps were put in to compliment the neon signs, making this short
quarter-mile stretch the best illuminated area in the entire city.
Pagoda style arches were built on both sides of Russell Street at
Little Bourke. The gateway is modeled on one built about the time
of the Ming Dynasty in the twelfth century.
Virtually all of the Chinese restaurants in and around Little
Bourke Street are now owned and run by members of two Chinese
family groups, the Liu and Lau clans. To cater to the fastidious
demands of a discerning public, they have brought in chefs from
Hong Kong and Singapore. Unlike Chinatown's restaurants prior
to World War II, when the walls were bare and rickety chairs were
the norm and the children of owners waited on tables and there
wasn't much more than dim Sims, spring rolls and chow mein on
the menu, now the interiors are richly decorated and there's
everything from spicy ginger lobster to dumplings in the basket. It
takes as long to read a Chinatown menu as it does to enjoy paper

chicken.
On virtually any night of the week after five p.m. in the Palace
Hotel in Hawthorne, the public bar is packed with men. They
squeeze and huddle together at the bar, at the high skinny tables
along one wall, at similar tables in the middle of the room, or
around the dart board. These men of all ages have pony tails, some
sport earrings, a couple are invariably barefoot. Behind the bar on
the wall there are a dozen or so colored photographs of attractive,
thinly clad young women in friendly poses with animals, or
advertising football teams. One shows the rear view of a young
tennis player, bent over, looking back, scratching her naked ass.
The language in the public bar is often raw and unrestrained.
The evenings I've been here I've never seen more than two or
three women, and those present are with husbands or close male
friends. They're invariably middle-aged, wearing pants and long
coats or uncomely downscale jackets. One evening I find myself
standing next to one of the lonely exceptions. Her name is Barbara
and she's got a genuinely iconoclastic sense of color: pink shoes,
red pants, a purple blouse, hair dyed Marilyn Monroe blond.
Barbara tells me she comes most nights, around five-thirty. She'd
been on the dole for some time, has no desire to work-and why
should she, she informs me, when she's getting by just find on
what the government gives her.
The Palace Hotel has two quite separate entrances, and
through one you enter into the hotel's public lounge and
restaurant. Here, by comparison, the bar business is anything but
thriving. Everything else is different too. There are almost as many
women as men. The clean-shaven men are dressed in suits and
ties, many of the women in dresses and high heels. Whereas in the
adjoining public bar nearly everyone drinks draft beer, in the
lounge bar it’s scotch, gin, and wine. Here the only thing of note
on the wall behind the bar is the large blackboard listing of wines
and their prices.
One night I'm standing alone at lounge bar, talking to no one

but myself, when a heavy-set young woman with short black hair
and luminous copper skin is suddenly beside me. Before I realize
what’s happening, she offers a hand and says that her name is
Quinea. She's from Western Samoa and on holiday, and she adds
that she's an Australian citizen.
I introduce myself, and I say that I don't quite understand
whether she's a Samoan or an Australian or somehow both.
"It's a long story," she says.
I tell her I've got plenty of time and big ears and would she
like another drink? I order two. This is the story she tells while we
drink.
In October of l986 while working in a post office in Apia, the
capital of Western Samoa, she was asked for assistance by an
elderly Australian couple who wanted to send some packages
home to Melbourne. She helped them, and they struck up a
friendly conversation. In the next week, the couple returned
several times to chat with Quinea. Then, just before they left to
return to Melbourne, they asked her if she would like to visit
Australia. She said that she would, but that she didn't have enough
money to do so. Only the year before she'd gone to New Zealand
to visit with sisters who were married to New Zealanders. The
couple said that they would be happy to pay Quinea's fare.
Quinea arrived in Melbourne in the first days of November
and was put up in the home of the elderly couple. Shortly after
arrival, the couple began speaking glowingly of Australia. They
told Quinea that it was a "very rich country" and that she could
have a happy and prosperous life here. Then they revealed that
their real purpose in bringing her to Melbourne was to convince
her to marry their thirty-year-old son.
Confused, her command of English marginal, Quinea
apparently didn't know how to say no. Nor did she know how to
tell them that she was several months pregnant by a Samoan
boyfriend who had been killed in an automobile accident not long
before the couple's arrival in Samoa. Although Quinea was well
into the second term of pregnancy, it was not apparent, and she
told no one. She could see the advantage of having a father for the
child on the way. Within a month of her arrival in Melbourne she
was married, in a large and ostentatious ceremony in the Salvation
Army church in the suburb of Hawthorne.
For their honeymoon, the newlyweds went to a large hotel in
the city. The night of their marriage, Quinea wanted to inform her
husband that she was pregnant. But she could find neither the
words nor, she says, the courage. Trying to inform him in a less
direct manner, Quinea refused to sleep with him. She lied that it
was Samoan custom that a marriage was not to be consummated
until the wife took the initiative.
She did not have sex with her husband for a couple of weeks.
Finally, the guilt more than she could bear, she informed him that
she was pregnant and wanted the child. Her husband said that it
did not matter that she he was not the father. He loved her and, to
his mind, the deception was of no great consequence. He had a
good job and could provide for her and the child. But Quinea
didn't love him, and one day she realized that she was romantically
attracted to a friend of her husband's.
Quinea had the child, whom she named Ann Michele--Ann
after her grandmother, Michele after her deceased boyfriend,
Michael--and shortly thereafter made the decision to separate from
her husband. Now Quinea and her daughter share a small flat with
a married couple and get along on the welfare money she receives
from both the Australian and Samoan governments.
She complains of a lack of privacy and wants to return to
Samoa as soon as she has enough money for the plane fare. She
doesn't like Melbourne's cold weather, and she doesn't like
Australian men. "They go out with other girls when they already
have a girlfriend," she says. "Samoan boys don't do that. They love
you more. They give you more care than Australian boys."
Until she's able to get enough money to return home, Quinea
follows a rather predictable routine. In the mornings and
afternoons she takes Ann Michele for a walk. For lunch she goes
to McDonald's. And for dinner, most nights of the week, it's the
bistro at the Palace Hotel. She comes here, she says, because she's
bored and lonely and wants to meet and talk to people.
The conversation trails off and Quinea says she's hungry and
is ready to eat. I'm hungry myself, and I say, "Is there something
special you like to eat when you come here?"
"Fish 'n chips."
Early morning Melbourne is proving to be frustrating. I've had a

hard time finding a restaurant where I can order fluffy pancakes,
and be damned if I can get a single waitress to refill my coffee cup,
a back home expectation as secure as stopping at a gas station to
use a toilet. So, wanting nothing more than a touch of the familiar,
I drive along Sydney Road to the city's northern edge. There I
remember having seen a Denny's.
Once inside I sense that if I didn't know better I could be in
Sacramento, California, Des Moines, Iowa, or Phoenix, Arizona.
It's all here: the high backed cushion booths, the cool tan and pink
decor, the neat uniformed waitresses, the long wrap-around
counter in front of the kitchen, the obvious sense of cleanliness
and order.
But then suddenly it strikes me that something's wrong. It's a
Wednesday morning, only a few minutes past eight, and there's
hardly a soul in the place. I look all around, for hidden rooms
behind unseeable doors. I find nothing. I count exactly three
customers.
"Why's business so slow?" I ask the pretty waitress with a
million dollar smile after she hands me a plastic menu.
"We get a few more customers on Saturday and Sunday
mornings. But most of our business is for lunch and dinner.
People like our sandwiches and deserts."
"It must feel like mass-produced Little America around here,"
I say, pointing out the window to the Hungry Jack's under
construction. She looks puzzled, so I note that across the highway
or down the street there's a Pizza Hut, a K-Mart, a Midas Muffler,
and a McDonald's where French fries are French fries and not
chips and where you can buy a cup of "brewed coffee," a
concession to all those high expectation Yanks who, before long,
come to believe that finding something other than cappuccino or
instant coffee within the core of this marvelous city is as hard to
find as are hopping kangaroos.
My listing exercise over, the pretty waitress with the million
dollar smile and the teeth to go with it says, "Did all those places
you named come from America?"
On the green and yellow sign announcing Preston, a northern

suburb of Melbourne, are the words: NUCLEAR FREE ZONE.
Curious about this declaration, I make some phone calls, follow a
few leads, and wind up in the office of John Elliott, a bearded city
administrator.
Sitting behind his cluttered desk, he tells me that the decision
to declare Preston and several other cities within greater
Melbourne nuclear free zones was suggested by the state labor
party in the early 1970s. The labor party was composed of a
number of small factions that philosophically ranged from the
extreme left to just left of right. One faction decided not to
support the use of nuclear weapons or nuclear power in any form,
and its voice proved strong enough to create a general awareness
that nuclear devices were sufficiently dangerous to everyone that
they should be opposed.
The nuclear free zone signs, Elliott says, are likely to remain
prominent for a long time, both because Preston, and several
other cities within the metropolitan area, are strongly pro labor
working class areas, and because there's no state law that controls
a local government's right to advertise as it pleases. That the state
government in power may not be a labor government is irrelevant,
Elliott claims. "But I wouldn't want you to draw the wrong
interpretation about what the sign means. It really means very
little. For example, there's the Preston and Northcote Community
Hospital just around the corner. I don't know, but I'd say that
some of the equipment they use contains radioactive material.

Also there's no way we could tell whether a truck going through
Preston is carrying radioactive materials. Even if we did know, we
couldn't do anything about it. The statement was probably meant
more in a philosophical sense, that the city of Preston would not
support any nuclear activities of any sort."
Which, as it happens, isn't all that different than how the
Australian Nuclear Free Zones Secretariat (ANFZS) explains the
meaning of Nuclear Free Zone--appended to many of
Melbourne's city signs. According to the ANFZS the words are
not "ineffectual gestures" but rather "symbols of hope for the
future."
John Elliott goes on to say that the Preston city council is
more concerned with worldly affairs than most other councils in
Melbourne. "We're quite prepared to write to the prime minister
about things that, strictly speaking, don't concern local
government." As an example, he notes that in l986, the
International Year of Peace, the council spent a lot of money to
make people aware of its significance. Now Preston's city council
is working to establish a sister-city relationship with the city of
Faar in Tahiti. The reason: Faar is opposed to nuclear testing in
the Pacific. "If we have a common bond with this city, maybe
they'll be able to say something stronger, we hope. It's all very well
to exchange letters and to support each other, but what we can
tangibly do we don't know."
The conversation turns to the people of Preston, their
working class ethos, their ethnic backgrounds, the sense in which
they illustrate the profound changes that have occurred in
Melbourne, indeed in Australia, since the large southern and
eastern European migrations began in the early l950s.
Preston and Whittlesea, where Elliott previously worked in a
similar capacity, are both about thirty to thirty-five percent
"ethnic," meaning that the residents were born outside Australia.
Most have come from Italy and Greece, but a great many are from
Macedonia (Greeks and Serbo-Croatians) and Turkey. "They work
hard and they look to the future. The classic case is four families
living in one house. They all work together, and when they get
enough money they buy a house for one of them. But that family
with the house will remain in the group. Then when they get more
money, they'll buy a house for another one and so on. So the four
of them will work to set all four of them up, and then they will
move out. This has especially happened in Carlton, and as it has
the trendies have moved back in. Then the houses there
skyrocketed in price."
Preston, along with Coburb, North Melbourne, Essendon and
Carlton, is where many recent arrivals to Australia have had their
very first address. As they've acquired wealth and larger
aspirations, they have looked northward, to places like Whittlesea.
Although Whittlesea is strongly pro labor and working class like
Preston, many more of its residents have moved here from
elsewhere. Elliott adds that Whittlesea is more prosperous than
Preston; average incomes are significantly higher and families are
much more likely to have two cars and two working spouses. With
the purchase of what may be their first house, they have realized
"The Great Australian Dream."
Through this intra-metropolitan migration of Italians and
Greeks, and the influx of ten percent of Victoria's new foreign
immigrants in recent years, Whittlesea has grown spectacularly. In
the last two decades, its population has increased from 35,000 to
more than l00,000. Whittlesea is a major piece of the vibrant edge
of Melbourne's future. By the year 2000 Melbourne is expected to
add 400,000 people to its population. When this figure is factored
in with people leaving the metropolitan area's inner suburbs for
newer, upscale neighborhoods, more than half a million people
will be redefining the city's already mind-boggling geographical
limits by the millennium.
His left eye's as red as a cherry tomato. He has a long unkempt salt
and pepper beard. His face is crooked, noticeably weathered. He
could easily be mistaken for a character in a Dickens novel. As
soon as he hears my accent he wants to talk, not listen. "We don't

know anything about Americans," he begins. "Everything we
know comes from TV. Like the Six-Million Dollar Man. I resent
that. What are Americans, anyway?"
"People as varied as Aussies," I say.
He shakes off what I say. "Americans don't understand the
orange people, the Japanese. They invent everything. Everything
except beer. They don't want that, that's why the orange people
didn't invent it. They're workers. You ever notice they don't have
any pockets in their uniforms?"
"Hadn't noticed," I say, waiting for more profound insights
into Japanese culture.
"You should 'cause they're stuffing Australia just like they're
stuffing America. They own so much gold now...some day they'll
own so much our gold will be a piss in the ocean. This is a young
country, but we're stuffed."
"Looks pretty good to me here."
"You own a house? If you don't, buy one before the orange
people get it."
I might've missed them if I hadn't heard the squeal of someone

hitting the brakes and skidding. Turning, seeing nothing of note
on the road, my eyes land on the vast field of seamless grass,
edged only in the most insignificant way by four white soccer goal
nets. Then I notice something peculiar: hundreds of blobs of
brown, fidgeting with the randomness of a Brownian movement.
Suddenly, a dozen of the them lift several feet off the ground,
hover like helicopters, then alight among others on the sprawling
green. I've chanced on one of the larger flocks of birds I've ever
seen. I infer that they're searching for worms. The night before
there'd been a soccer match and the ground had been clawed and
broken, neatly prepared for a glutton's feast.
I park and cautiously approach the flock, close enough to
assure myself that the birds are indeed starlings. But when I get
within about sixty yards, all five or six hundred of them take to the
air as one. Not a single starling stays behind.
Effortlessly, they fly a hundred or so yards farther down field,
like a richly textured carpet gently following the winds of an
approaching storm. Then they softly touch ground, joining
another two or three hundred that are busily feeding, unmoved by
noises or motions too distant to matter.
Often such flocking is preparation for the migration to
warmer lands. I've been told that birds flock in order to find safety
in numbers; it's the smart way for a small individual to lower its
likelihood of predation by a larger winged carnivore. But birds also
flock in winter because territoriality during the non-breeding
season isn't advantageous or economical, and they do it for
information. Some know better than others how to return to
winter homes, some are more savvy about where food will be
most plentiful, roosting sites more enticing, the fear of lurking
death less pressing.
Will they be going to Queensland? I wonder. Or only as far as
New South Wales?
Who knows?
Does anyone around here care?
I ask a biologist at La Trobe University where the starlings of

Melbourne go for the winter.
"Nowhere," he says. "They stay here."
"Why then do they flock?" I ask, wanting to get another
viewpoint, another opinion.
"Nobody knows. And nobody really cares either."
Starlings are pests, he explains. They're alien to the continent,
brought by the bird-loving British. Because the starlings were not
here first, because they are not human and do not possess culture,
no one will lobby for their inclusion under Australia's multicultural
policy.
This biologist matter-of-factly confesses that when he catches
starlings in nets while trapping native species to do his science he
twists their necks until dead. "They don't deserve to live," he

opines.
It's a warm, blue sky Sunday, so I head for St. Kilda by the beach,
and a mid-morning stroll along the Esplanade. At the end of the
nineteenth century it was bordered by noble hotels and said to be
as wide as a cricket pitch. It was a favorite among Melbournians
for promenading, and a fashionable place to visit by foreign
notables. Then, St Kilda had the reputation of being "an
antipodean cockney and Lancashire paradise combined."
Presently, I'm heading inland, along Fitzroy Street and toward
the Sunday morning open air market, among mothers pushing
prams, young newlyweds hand-in-hand, teenagers with parrot
haircuts and Mohicans who have come to pass the day, eat pasta,
pizza, falafels, hamburgers, perhaps savor a gelati. At the market, I
weave my way among leather workers, brass pounders, weavers,
potters, carvers and bark painters. Their art is the ordinary art of
all street fairs. What they sell pays for materials, rent, food. For
some, the street time and the small returns are a weekend hobby, a
time to meet people, feed the artsy side of the ego.
Along the way I pass Leo's Spaghetti Bar, a youthful thirty-
year-old establishment and now recognized as the true heart of St.
Kilda. There, I stop for a delicious plate of rigatoni. I'm not up to
going upscale, stepping into renovated mansions for pricey French
fare at Tolarnos, or an over-priced Italian dish at Massoni.
There's already a big drinking crowd in the bar at the Prince
of Wales Hotel, and if I stay the day and into the night I can take
in the once-weekly transvestite show at the upstairs club called
Pokey's. This is, after all, infamous St. Kilda, long the focus of
media attention in Melbourne because of the sex shops and the
peep shows, the "Danish Blue" movie, the homosexual and
heterosexual prostitution, the trade in heroin and other mind-
altering drugs known as Secanol, Tuinal, and before that Mandrax.
Before the police got pushy, tired of the notoriety and
unbending media comparison between St. Kilda and Sydney's
notorious Kings Cross, hookers and sex-hungry gays satisfied their

needs in parks and the public toilets where Ackland and Fitzroy
Streets meet. Or one and all used the back seats of cars, stairwells,
mattresses on the floors of abandoned buildings, cubicles on the
beach-a favorite meeting place. When chased and harassed on
Fitzroy Street and other venues visible to family-minded folk,
young and old alike moved their dope needs and carnal appetites
around the corner onto Grey Street, or to the toilets and ovals
behind Luna Park.
St. Kilda, I'm reminded after a little street walking and
reading, does not have much to do with saintly virtues, or--Thank
God, church-goers would say--a saint by that name. This
sometimes sunny and always popular suburb along the bending
shore of Port Phillip Bay was named after the St. Kilda
archipelago, which is a deserted group of windswept islands off
the Scottish coast. In 1842, a schooner by the name of Lady of St.
Kilda was moored off the nearby coast for so long that it became
the name of the adjoining piece of land. This was at a time long
before St. Kilda fell from gentility, when whoring had not yet
diffused from the original settlement core into communities of
low-paid workers, those shifty and adrift.
In the early 1880s, Richard Twopenny, a shrewd observer of

Australian character and attitudes, took "A Walk Round
Melbourne," and after doing so he wrote that the city was "justly
entitled to be considered the metropolis of the Southern
Hemisphere." It was, without a doubt, superior to Sydney in
culture, intellectual life, size of its population, and perhaps, even,
"the prettiness of its young women."
He noted that nearly all of the country's major commercial
institutions had their headquarters in Melbourne. This was the city
to which an entrepreneur would go were he desirous of transacting
business "well and quickly," or were he eager to start a new
venture. The advantage held in spite of the fact that Victoria was a
small colony handicapped by protectionist duties, whereas Sydney

was a free port with an enormous hinterland.
Life in Melbourne at that time was, Twopenny claimed, lively
and bustling in a way that was altogether absent in Sydney.
Melbourne had a lot more "society": more balls and more parties,
more and better musical and theatrical performances, more
football and cricket and racing and athletic clubs, and better
educated and more intelligent people. To boot, Melbournians even
dressed better, and the women wore colorful, sometimes
ostentatious dresses. They were not, alas, dowdy as women were in
Sydney. Melbournians also used the language better than
Sydneyites, and they were much more civic minded, invariably
more likely to attend public events.
These differences, Twopenny explained, had nothing to do
with climate, or with being the oldest--that distinction went to
Sydney. Rather, the difference had everything to do with
geography and a certain kind of disposition. For Sydney had the
bad luck of being too close to a barrier of mountains, and no less
important the fact that "the first population of Sydney was of the
wrong sort." Melbourne, on the other hand, had the very good
fortune of being magically and quickly transformed from a village
into a city, all because between 1851 and 1861 the gold diggers
who flooded into Melbourne were "eminently adventurous and
enterprising."
Prior to the gold discovery boom, Melbourne was a quiet little
settlement known as Port Phillips District. There were more than
300,000 sheep in the district in 1838, and 800,000 two years later
when the region to the southwest toward Geelong was included in
the sheep census. These were numbers that dwarfed the 75,000
people who lived in the city at about that time. And the 800,000
sheep that defined a greater Melbourne region easily exceeded
Melbourne's population by the early 1860s when, because of the
attractions of its other hinterland riches, had risen to 550,000
inhabitants. Melbourne's population, of course, couldn't live off
just lamb and mutton. The city’s hinterland was planted to wheat,
vegetables and fruit trees to meet the needs of the urban

population.
Six of ten Melbournians in the 1860s had been born in Great
Britain and Ireland. This ethnic bias contributed to an almost
uniform allegiance to the motherland, and also to a kind of insular
xenophobia that persisted well into the middle of the twentieth
century. Melbourne's early dramatic growth was presaging just
how urban the whole country would be. By 1880 half of
Australia's population lived in cities and towns, then as now
making it one of the most urban countries in the world.
On the larger world stage of the 1880s--which then meant
England if not London, Melbourne, and Australia more generally,
left a lot to be desired in Twopenny's mind. Perhaps he could
never quite overcome his first impression of Melbourne, which he
saw as merely another Liverpool "bodily transplanted to the
Antipodes." Melbourne, like other Australian cities, could only
claim a "sad eminence" because of its very large number of public
houses. By Twopenny's account there were 1,120 in Melbourne at
that time. Its hotels, compared with those in London, had little
concept of how to provide comfort for the traveler. This, he
claimed, was because Australia's hotels derived the majority of
their income from bar traffic. Lodgers and their needs were an
afterthought. This emphasis given to male drinkers was
"particularly disagreeable for ladies."
As attractive as Melbourne's women were compared to those
found elsewhere in this continent so distant from the motherland,
there were no "beauties" in Australia. Nor, he claimed, was there
anything like the number of women with "pleasant features" that
one would encounter in England. Australia's men did not fare well
by comparison either. They were "generally very careless about
their attire, and dress untidily. The business men all wear black
frock-coats and top hats. They look like city men whose clothes
have been cut in the country."
Twopenny viewed Australian society as somewhat analogous
to lower-class communities in England. From this perspective, he
thought that marriages in Australia were more stable, and that

infidelity was less common than in London. And yet he believed
that Australian children were too much in the forefront of family
life. They should remain out of view, and quiet. And they also
needed much more discipline than their free-wheeling parents gave
them.
Eleni's young and self-possessed, loquacious in a charming sort of

way, and I wouldn't have made her acquaintance if I hadn't been
so snoopy about the ancient fire-engine red sprinkling system
controls that dominate the wall just inside the entrance to her
men's clothing store in Northcote. After she explains that the
controls are for the entire nearby mall, she says--with a beguiling
hint of mischievousness, "I don't have any sprinklers in here, but
wouldn't it be fun to turn them on one day?"
Oh yes! And what a mess...
I wander about the small shop, looking at her modest
offerings of suits, sports jackets, trendy shirts. Eleni follows me
around the shop pointing to this and that shirt or sale, at one point
cheerfully hinting that my cowboy shirt and herringbone sport
jacket aren't exactly fashionable in Melbourne.
We strike up a conversation and I learn that she owns this
store and another one. She's only twenty-one.
"How did you manage so much success at such a young age?"
I ask.
"My father has always been into manufacturing. He makes all
the clothes and that way I don't have to worry about buying at
wholesale."
She shows me a striking black and light blue check silk suit,
says that she's selling it for $Al85. But at a store in the heart of the
city, among all those places where high fliers make big money
deals all the time, the nearly identical suit--also made by her father
under the store's name--sells for a pricey $A800.
"But I didn't copy it," Eleni says. "Still, I have trouble selling
it. I can't depend on people in this neighborhood for business. It
comes from elsewhere, from people who know what they want
and hear about me. I get most of my business through friends and
word of mouth." To make sure I get the point, she walks over to a
rack of shirts and picks up a loud print and says that she's selling it
for $A30. "Downtown it sells for $A80 to $Al00. In this
neighborhood, people hesitate and think it's too expensive."
When Eleni began looking for her first store two years ago,
she tried to rent space in upscale Camberwell. The landlord
thought that she was too young and wouldn't be able to meet the
rent. Next she looked for a store in exclusive Toorak. This search
was also ill-fated, not least because Eleni wasn't sure that she'd be
able to attract customers in an upper class market where shop
loyalty is unusually important. But then too the rent in Toorak was
daunting. She would have had to pay $A700 a week for space
which--she illustrates by standing in the middle of her shop and
extending her arms to enclose a small space--is only a fraction of
what she has here in Northcote.
But, as Eleni tells it, these reversals were minor setbacks.
She's now looking to the future with confidence, imagining the day
when she'll have a shop on Toorak Road.
Successful as she is, Eleni admits to more than run-of-the mill
frustrations. They're the same ones I've now heard from other
second-generation Greeks. Eleni has had a boyfriend for three
years. Their relationship has been a continuing source of friction
and fights between Eleni and her parents. The parents wonder
why she's not yet engaged, when she's going to get married. "I feel
pressure all the time," she says. Then, sweeping a hand through
her loopy black hair, she adds, "I wish their generation was gone,
they're so old-fashioned! It really would have been better if I was
born and grew up in Greece." She points to the wall between her
shop and the one next door. "The girl there is Italian and she's got
the same problems I've got. The first generation Italians are as bad
as the Greeks!"
And "bad" from the viewpoint of a forward-looking young
Greek woman like Eleni might seem pretty bad indeed. Not until
1982 did anyone publicly speak out about the subject of sexism in
the Greek community. When it finally happened, it was enough to
ignite a small fire and lead to the formation of a Greek feminist
group, the Hellenic Women's Movement.
As I left Eleni I remembered an incident that occurred several
days earlier while I was in the library. Two students from the
University of Melbourne were sitting across from me. They
became curious about the notes I was taking. We talked briefly
about what I was doing, and then the conversation wandered, far
enough for me to learn that they were both Greek and in their
second year at the university. Presently, I left to get a coffee. When
I returned one of them said, "You missed it. It was a classic!"
The one who spoke then explained that in my absence a
Greek mother, one that very much reminded them of their own
mothers, had come into the library and was going around to all the
tables asking if they had seen her daughter. She described her
daughter and said was a student and was supposed to be studying
in this very library. She had told her daughter that she would pick
her up at six, but had come at four. She had come "to spy!" one of
the girls exclaimed. "She thinks her daughter is probably out with
her boyfriend at the cinema or doing something else. You know
what that something else is!" They both cackled, betraying a
generational divide greater, I suspected, than I was capable of
imagining.
The hold of one generation on another persists and finds its
way into everyday labels. Second-generation Greeks proudly refer
to themselves as Greek-Australians. Second-generation
Englishmen simply call themselves Australians.
We've decided to treat ourselves to an evening meal at a Thai

restaurant on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. We stop at a hotel and
buy a good bottle of Chardonnay, and as we leave I twist the
brown paper bag around the neck. Like most Melbournians, we're
going to a restaurant where customers are asked to BYOB (bring
your own booze). Melbourne, it so happens, is the BYOB capital
of the world, and apparently far ahead of Sydney on this issue.

This is because the state alcohol board requires a five- to six-
hundred percent markup on the cost of alcohol to a restaurant
owner who wants a license to sell on premises, an increase
ludicrous by any standards. No doubt, hotel bottle shops have had
a lot to say about the matter; they don't want to lose all their
business to restaurants. As a result, BYOB restaurants have
proliferated by the hundreds, and now you can even buy special
bags with BYOB printed on them, specially designed to carry two
bottles. The bag and the wine for the evening may be expensive,
but in many cases even good restaurants are poorly stocked in
befitting wine glasses.
The food this night is superb, the prices reasonable, the
environment good. Though the environment--or rather the people
who define it on this one night--is not exactly what I would've
guessed for a restaurant of this caliber. For shortly after our
arrival, four people across from us begin a birthday celebration.
Soon others arrive to join the party. After the group reaches seven
and the late arrivals catch up on the champagne, a young couple
with a baby in a bassinet joins them. The father places the bassinet
at the end of the table, mere feet from ours. He slides his long legs
beneath the low table, then reaches for a glass and one of the
bottles. He greets a female friend with a hug, while his wife
unwraps the infant and makes herself comfortable on a pillow
across from her husband. She takes off her sweater, opens her
blouse and begins breast feeding.
I'm so close to the woman I can smell the alcohol on her
breath. A one-time happening? Laid-back Aussies and different
cultural values? Would we find this in an upscale restaurant back
home? I don’t think so.
In the boisterous bar at the Railroad Hotel in West Melbourne, a

sun-weathered construction worker says to me, "Mate, go see the
Boat People on Victoria Street in Richmond and you gonna see
what a bloody mess we brought here. We have trouble with them
all the time. Those people are not like us. They eat dogs and cats
and go round driving big new cars. And they get all that
government pension money. Bloody gobs of it. Then they go take
all our jobs."
I turned and looked for another stool to sit on when he adds,
"They murder each other every day too. But Sydney's got it even
worse with all those Boat People, a lot more than Melbourne has."
I remember that two days earlier in The Age, Melbourne's
premier newspaper, I'd read an article saying that Arnold Blashki,
president of the Australian Legion of Ex-Service Men and
Women, had recently spoken to the legion's national congress on
the need to do something about ethnic groups that clustered
together in the city. Something had to be done, Blashki claimed,
because such geographical concentrations threaten the very fabric
of Australian society. "Some migrants are just setting up mini-
homelands in the suburbs with little intention of assimilation. City
councils should consider banning migrants from opening
businesses in areas where there are already enough migrant firms.
The answer to the problem is simple. You certainly don't tell a
fellow where to live, but councils can use their discretion to limit
the number of migrant businesses in a locality. Richmond, which is
full of Vietnamese shops, is a prime example."
I resolve to pay a visit to Victoria Street in Richmond, bite
into another enticing piece of this huge and fascinating multi-
ethnic pie that's on everyone's mind.
Melbourne's underground toilets, those in the central business

district, are perfectly safe and immaculately clean; there's no
graffiti. They make a good many restrooms in the U. S. look as
though Americans tenaciously cling to a frontier tolerance for dirt
and public displays of profanity. Melbourne has a cleaning division
that maintains the public toilets on a full-time basis.
Public toilet facilities were first installed in Melbourne in the
late l850s, after thousands of gold seekers came to the city to drink
and spend what they'd discovered. The first ones were pissoirs
made of rough iron and timber, modest imitations of the French

variety. Later the pissoirs were replaced by elaborate wrought iron
structures fringed with iron lace and surrounded by gas lamps.
Most were built over the gutter so that a man could use the facility
and hold onto his horse at the same time.
By the turn of the century there were some 200 hotels in
Melbourne's central business district. The hotels were under no
obligation to provide toilets, and most didn't. By World War I,
there was a pissoir on just about every corner, a civilized answer to
the city's hoteliers. The vast quantities of urine that poured into
the gutters added to the spread of diphtheria and other diseases
that plagued the city from time to time.
The public toilets reflected the values of a Victorian, male-
dominated society. There were virtually no conveniences available
for women. As early as l857, when the issue was first raised, it was
suggested that toilets for women be put on the upper floors of
shops, in places "devoted to such general business as ladies are in
the habit of patronizing." But the suggestion was just that; nothing
came of it. After the First World War it was decided that the city's
public toilets were unsightly and had to go underground. The first
below street-level toilet was built on Flinders Street in l918. Others
soon followed. Initially, the change seemed disastrous. The toilets
were vandalized, the heavy traffic cracked the walls, and they
received street water from passing vehicles. As these problems
were solved, in part by employing full-time attendants, hotels
either added toilets or improved the rather crude ones they had
installed. The last of downtown Melbourne's public toilets was
constructed in l940.
They're in their mid-twenties, I guess. They've just returned from

touring the U.S. By bus and train and car, they claim to have
traveled some l9,000 miles in more than thirty states. They like
what they saw, and they're eager to return.
One says, "Your average girls look pretty good over there.
They look better than ours. They put on makeup and do up their
hair, look real nice."
The other one says, "But it's fast over there. We're laid back
here, don't you reckon?"
I agree.
The first one now says, "You know what I like best about the
U.S.? ESPN. That sport's channel is great!"
The conversation turns back to women. I learn how easy it is
for young Australian males to get laid in Las Vegas.
I'm curious about what lies behind the high red brick wall that
runs for a long block just north of Merri Creek on St. George's
Road. The graffiti on the encircling wall grabs my imagination.
DON'T CLONE ME, BAN BIO-TECHNOLOGY
GREEK MILITARY POWER!
GEORGE + PATRIK
DISABLED PEOPLE, RIGHTS NOT CHARITY
STOP THE MISS VICTORIA QUEST!
DIE TURK!! CYPRUS IS GREEK
SAY IT WAS HERPES, GIVE HIM A TRIP!
WOMEN RECLAIM THE NIGHT
I drive through the open gates and onto the grounds and park in
front of a complex of modern tan brick buildings under
construction. The new buildings look jerry-built, misplaced, a
brazen affront to the massive ship-length, cream-colored stone

creation that dominates the hill above.
Aware that all of this has something to do with St. John's
Greek Monastery, I walk up a rising, winding road, past piles of
timber and cement blocks, a tractor, a line of new cars, until I
come to a vine-covered iron gate. I open the gate and enter and I
see that I'm standing at the edge of an exquisite little rose garden.
To my left is a large brown cross, the dying Christ on it. Here and
there about the garden are several white benches. At each end of
short parallel rows of neatly pruned rose bushes there are simple
wooden white crosses adorned with brass plates. It's a cemetery
for the Oblate Sisters of the Poor.
I wander along the pathways, pausing, stopping, trying to
imagine their lives, their sense of purpose, their dedication, exactly
what they'd done. One of the bronze plates reads: R.I.P. Sister
Gertrude Joseph, nee Alma Florence Clare. Died l6 March l983.
Aged 66 years. 45 Years of Religious Profession.
My eyes cut to other bronze plates: Sister Apolline de la
Pentecost, Sister Marie Veronique, Sister Marguerite...the years
they had lived or served: 62, 47, 75, 55, 43, 60, 94....
I sit on one of the benches and try to bring to mind the rose
garden in full bloom. My imagination fails me. I begin to feel like a
heathen among saints.
I leave the cemetery and head toward my car. Along the way I
catch sight of a tall figure with white hair. He's dressed in dark
slacks and a blue sweater. The leather around the toes of his black
shoes has been cut away. He's got large broken veins in his oval
cheeks. His hands are clasped behind his back. He comes toward
me and I introduce myself.
"Father Frank," he says, extending a firm hand, titling his
head. He scrutinizes my face and says, "Haven't I seen you come
in here before?"
"This is my first visit."
Presently, I point to the sterile brick and glass construction
before us. I wonder out loud why the Greeks are destroying the
beauty of their college by putting in buildings so formless, so out

of sync with the resplendent multi-storied stone structure on the
hill.
"We were there once," he responds, and points. "But it is no
longer suitable for a nursing home. So people told us we had to
get rid of it and build a new complex down here. Now we have the
Orthodox Church and the Latin Church in one area. The Latin
Church is here in front of us, the Orthodox Church is up there."
He draws my attention to the imposing monastery, and
somewhere up about the third or fourth story, the simple stone
crosses within circles. "That was St. Joseph's home for the aged
and the poor," he begins. "It is now the Greek Orthodox
Monastery of St. John's. It was originally founded by the Little
Sisters of the Poor. When they came to Australia, all this around
here was farmland. They got this land for a song in the early days.
The little sisters had the whole darn lot, right down to the next
street where you see all those houses.
"In the big days, during the war, they would have had over
300 people up there. When I came over eight years ago--I'm now
retired from full activity--there would have been about 250. Then
it went down to l00 or so. Just retired people now. There are eight
fathers here, all retired. We're just guests of the month, we pay our
way to live here."
He shakes his heavy head and slowly scans the horizon.
Pewter clouds are dancing, dissolving, trekking south toward Port
Phillip Bay. Now Father Frank curls his hands behind his back,
then drops his eyes to the new buildings before us. He goes on.
“They’re marvelous nuns, lovely nuns. Did you know they were
founded in Brittany?"
I shake my head.
He smiles and whispers something in Latin. Then he says that
I ought to take a walk through their cemetery, see the original
chapel, their first little cottage on the hill.
"I've just been there," I say.
"Their very first house in Australia was a little house that

stood where St. Vincent's Hospital is now standing. Then they
were given that little cottage above the cemetery. That was the first
home for the aged and the poor, and they had twelve people in
that. So tiny, and twelve people in that!"
"Why did they give up that gorgeous monastery?"
"The fire brigade and the Department of Health people
started coming around almost every other day. They said you have
to close up this, you have to close up that, there's a danger here,
there's no fire escape route. Blah, blah, blah.... It was a big, big
problem for the nuns. Poor old dears! They had to get out. If they
could have saved it, they would have.
"That big building couldn't be restored to take modern
nursing techniques. So they had to be rid of it, which was a big
heartache. They had to build this new one here, which is nowhere
near like that one up there. This one"--he points again and shakes
his head--"is a few bricks thick. Our new little place of worship is
like a shed. That one up there's got big blocks of stone, five feet
thick. It's lasted for a hundred years, and who knows how much
longer it will last. In ten years this one where I'm staying--not even
finished yet--will fall down. They're laughing at us!" He guffaws.
"The big building up there, it has been a Greek monastery for
the past year or so, maybe eighteen months. What used to be the
sister's big chapel, they've turned into a lovely orthodox church. It
is beautiful. Do go see it. And stop and see Father Abbot
Kurtessise. He is from Mt. Athos in Greece. He's been in Australia
for about thirty years. The monastery is going to be a big center of
Greek Orthodoxy in Australia. Father Abbot is directly under the
jurisdiction of the patriarch of Istanbul. He has no allegiance to
any Greek Orthodox Archbishop in Australia.
"They have a secretarial school going up there now. And they
have boarders who go to the University of Melbourne. They even
have theologians living there."
The Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria

owns five churches and runs forty-five Greek language schools. In
addition, there are another thirty Greek Orthodox communities
attached to the archdiocese. Although the first Greek groups came
to Melbourne at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until
1987 that a group of Greek men formed a welfare and cultural
organization called the Greek Orthodox Community of
Melbourne. One of the principal items on their agenda was the
requirement that priests for their churches be sent from Greece.
For those who belong to the orthodox church, religion and
the preservation of Hellenism are inseparable from daily civil and
political life. Giving up the church and its beliefs and rituals is akin
to giving up "Greekness." And this is expressed geographically
since Greeks are strongly concentrated in the city's inner suburbs.
Their Melbourne population doubled in the 1960s, and a good
many in this doubling process were unskilled laborers. Sticking
together ethnically, they were easy recruits for unions; Greeks have
one of the highest union membership rates of any ethnic group in
the city, around seventy percent.
But Greeks have shown others kinds of like-minded behavior.
Among non-English speaking groups they have had a
disproportionate impact on the city's councils, where about fifty or
so of the councilors are Greek. Of course, it is worth nothing that
there were 200,000 Greeks in Melbourne according to the 1981
census.
Whatever solidarity may seem apparent in union membership
and in the voting ability of ethnically similar people to shape city
policies, Greeks are anything but monolithic. Almost as soon as
they arrived in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century,
brotherhoods or syllogos emerged. There are now hundreds of
them in the city's Greek strongholds of Prahan, South Yarra, and
Richmond. It is these brotherhoods to which men turn inward to
receive and pass on gossip, and where women go to make friends.
And it is their brotherhoods that facilitate the maintenance of
homeland customs and slow the learning of Australia's
predominant language. Greeks have the highest language retention

rate of any group in Melbourne.
A measure of this kind of ethnic solidarity and remembrance
of the heritage left behind is evident in dozens of Greek bars and
coffee shops found hither and yon in the city. There you'll see
walls covered with postcards showing vistas of quaint Greek
villages, an arch in Thessaloniki, the Parthenon, the Aquarium
beach in Rhodes. And near the cash register invariably there'll be a
rack full of birth and christening announcements. Usually in
Greek, sometimes in both Greek and English.
I ask Father Frank what kind of relationship he and the other

Catholic priests have with the Greek Orthodox Church.
He beams. "The relationship is lovely. Oh, we're lovely
together! Oh, yes, I go to their services regularly. We worship the
same God. We were the same church until we split. Until some
stupid politician stuck his nose in where it didn't belong. It's
always some stupid politician, not church law, that tears us apart."
"Why have you retired here?"
"I came because it's near to my old church of St. Patrick's. So
I get the tram here, it's very handy."
He drops a paragraph marker in my lap, and says, "Did you
know that Mother Teresa has about eight or ten of her nuns in
Fitzroy?"
"No, I didn't."
"You know Mother Teresa? Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize
Winner?"
"I've heard of her Calcutta work."
"Well, her family is there in Fitzroy. She takes care of the
drunks and the dregs of Melbourne. Somebody has to do it. You'll
see her nuns on the street, in the saris. They've got a convent
house somewhere there in Fitzroy. Mother Teresa has been here
three times visiting them." He looks at his watch, and he says,
"I've got to go now. It's time for us to put on our bibs and eat."
He shambles off. A dozen steps along the foot path he

abruptly stops and turns. He shouts, "Don't forget to take that
lovely walk up to the cemetery and the chapel."
I huddle up to shield myself from the biting wind running down

Elizabeth Street. My mind wanders beyond what I can see, to
commuters getting off at stations like Oakleigh and Ivanhoe, Royal
Park and Elsternwick. They're on their way home to faithful
spouses, adoring children, chilly flats. A strong drink to calm their
nerves from another rending day at the office.
I hurry across busy Elizabeth Street and walk west on Collins,
through a canyon of steel and mortar. Where insurance companies
and banks bludgeon the public, where a goodly portion of the
city's money is transferred from one account to another with a
couple of rote strokes on a computer keyboard. I'm in the heart of
the city's financial district.
A chipper, colorful head shot of Sherlock Holmes catches my
attention. Needing a respite from the cold, I follow the steep steps
down into the pub and soon find myself facing a human wall of
cloying smells, a promiscuous mix of alcohol, perfumes, and
human body odors.
Assaulted by surging shoulders and heavy sour breath, I
squeeze through the upscale gaggle. Laying my eyes on some
unframed architectural drawings on the raw brick walls near the
toilets, I wonder if I'm really among the city's shakers and movers.
How many of them are mere pretenders, those on the way up,
secretaries forever secretaries?
Presently, I find myself engaged in lively conversation with a
leggy blond woman in white hose and a comely Prussian blue
dress. She's daintily sipping on a glass of Riesling. Allison is a self-
described sixth-generation Australian of Scotch-Irish heritage. She
was born in Perth and lived there until she was twenty-one. A
month after her birthday she took a vacation to Sydney and met
her future husband, Sean, at the beach. Their mutual interests in
fun and sun, surfing and bushwalking and travel, ignited a long-
term live-together relationship. Over the next six years, Allison

and Sean traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, and
then they worked in England, New Guinea, and New Caledonia
for extended periods of time. In early l986, upon their return from
Noumea, New Caledonia, Sean was offered a promising job with
an engineering firm in Melbourne. The money was good, and so
were the opportunities for advancement. "It was something that
no one would let sail by," Allison exclaims.
But now after almost a year in Melbourne, Allison thinks that
maybe they should have let the job sail by. "I hate it here! I really
do," she cries. "I hate the rain and the cold and...just feel my
hands!" She puts an open palm on my cheek and rubs it back and
forth to make sure I get the message. "I'm cold all the time in
Melbourne," she goes on. "I never felt this way in Sydney!"
Animated, Allison continues her monologue. "I used to think
that when I heard people talk about the rivalry between Sydney
and Melbourne, it was something that was made up by the
newspapers. I don't believe that anymore. People in Melbourne are
always saying to me, 'This is how we do it,' or 'This is why we're
better than....' They say it and stick up their noses, just like Poms
do when they brag about their country being better than Australia.
"What is there in Melbourne, anyway? People in Melbourne
go out of their way to tell you how nice and special their trams are.
And people are always telling me about the great restaurants in
Melbourne. 'Allison,' they say, 'Go up on Lygon Street or Sydney
Road and you can have a Turkish dinner. A little farther on you
can get great Greek food. And so on and so on. So!" She laughs
sardonically.
"You can have the same in Sydney. Believe me, all the same
restaurants. Turkish, Lebanese, Greek, Vietnamese...anything you
want you can have. And you get it without this awful weather that
makes you freeze and shiver all the time.
"People in Sydney are different. They don't bother making
comparisons. They say, 'I like this' or 'I like that.' But they're not
thinking about Melbourne when they say it. People in Sydney
know what they are and they don't care what people in Melbourne
think."
Leaving the Sherlock Homes, I try to remember how many
times I've now heard bits and pieces of this prolonged Sydney-
Melbourne rivalry story. About staid and proud Melbourne. Lots
about upstart and unrefined Sydney. The one growing and vibrant
and young and looking across the Pacific and making comparisons
with Los Angeles and other global metropolises. The other one
stagnating, ingrown, and above caring about the happenings in
New York and London. But not above caring about Melbourne--
Sydney comparisons, the heavyweight fight for city supremacy on
this very distant island continent.
Above the archway of the grand and magnificently ornate

Collingwood Town Hall on busy Hoddle Street hangs a huge baby
blue and white banner that reads:
SAFE SEX AND AIDS
CALL FOR A FREE BROCHURE 417 5300
Victoria AIDS Council
Curious to know why the City of Collingwood is preoccupied

with AIDS--more so than any other city in the metropolitan area
to judge by this banner--I stop at the town hall and ask a few
questions and find out that the decision to put up the banner was
made by the city council. The AIDS banner had been promoted by
a member of the Victoria AIDS Council, who was also on the
Collingwood City Council.
I amble over to the nearby AIDS Council and learn that the
soft blue on the banner had been selected to assuage panic and
fear. Has it done so? No one seems to know. But six weeks or so
after the banner was hoisted, ten to twenty people a week were
calling the hotline number. No matter. Other city councils in the
metropolitan area are still to be convinced that AIDS deserved

such blatant attention before they follow the Collingwood
example. Some city councils, I'm told, disparage the idea because
of the stigma of AIDS. They don't know of that many cases in
their city, so why make much ado about nothing?
A recent sex survey in Melbourne throws some light on the
soundness of this sentiment. About forty percent of a thousand
Melbournians surveyed claim they have never thought of having
an affair, and another thirty percent say they do so only
infrequently. The generality, however, isn't quite so neat when
broken down into more homogeneous categories. Sex, the survey
finds, is much more on the minds of recent immigrant men than is
true of native-born Australians, and homosexual males give sex
their highest priority.
Those at the Victoria AIDS Council note that during one
two-week period, the council paid for an ad for a free AIDS
brochure to be placed on Woodruff Farms milk cartons.
Woodruff Farms accounts for about ten percent of the milk sold
in the city. While the milk carton ad ran, between 300 and 350 calls
a week were being received by the Victoria AIDS Council.
To judge by these figures, people were either largely
indifferent to further information on AIDS or, if sufficiently
scared, they joined the thousands of Melbournians who ran to
their doctors during the Grim Reaper ads and got blood tests to
see if they were positive for the HIV.
In April of l987 the Australian government conducted a two-
million-dollar campaign to educate the public on AIDS. Much of
the money went for a television ad that depicted men, women and
young children as bowling pins indiscriminately knocked down by
the Grim Reaper. The ad was a blatant scare tactic; little useful
information was conveyed. Someone in the right place understood
this and the campaign was cancelled.
But the ad wasn't terminated before public officials and
others in Melbourne had gotten out the message that sex without
condoms can be a bad idea, flirtation with a death sentence. At
Melbourne airport condoms are being sold in vending machines in

the women's toilets in five colors--purple, green, yellow, blue, and
red. Administrators at Melbourne University are less imaginative.
They give young males only three choices--thin, ribbed and
colored.
The city's pubs and hotel bars want nothing to do with
condoms. People at the Victoria AIDS Council say that because
the attitude is so strong about making loud noises about safe sex
they've only insisted that condom vending machines be installed in
the city's twenty or so homosexual venues. To date, virtually all of
Melbourne's AIDS cases are proving to be confined to
homosexual and bisexual men and intravenous drug users and
their partners.
At the ornate Russell Street police complex, where a year earlier a

car bomb killed a female constable, injured another one and also a
magistrate, I enter into the Magistrate's Court to see what's in
session. I stare at the list of names and charges that'll be heard in
the next couple of days: conspiracy to defraud, theft, forgery,
robbery, attempted murder, indecent language, unlicensed driving,
exceeding .05%.
The large number of people charged with drunk driving
catches my eye. Melbourne has a law that if the alcohol in your
blood level exceeds .05% you're in trouble, real trouble, as I soon
discover after sitting in a small bustling courtroom and hear a
journalist who had been randomly stopped receive a $500 dollar
fine and a one-year suspension of her driver's license for exceeding
the permissible limit. Her case is followed by that of a young kid
with long golden curly hair and wearing a cutoff biker's shirt. He
gets slapped with a $250 fine and suspension of his driver's license
for two months for causing "undue noise" one recent Saturday
night.
I'm not sure why the court is so hard on the unattractive kid--
other than that he's unattractive and inappropriately dressed for a
court appearance, but it's easy to appreciate the concern with
drunk driving. Especially after you've watched half a dozen

segments of Melbourne's evening news broadcasts and seen the
twisted wrecks and the dead bodies being carried away. It's not
hard to conclude that either Melbournian news readers have a
ghoulish sense of what ought to be shown night after night on the
evening news, or that they've concluded this is the only way to
shock the city's often reckless drivers into waiting until they get
home to begin pouring down the alcohol.
More than a few of the city's heavy drinkers have apparently
concluded that it's far too expensive to lose a driver's license for
bad drinking behavior. In a couple of the city's pubs bartenders
have told me that on weekends their light beers outsell their
regular beers by as much as five or six to one. Now light beers are
just about the only ones on tap on Thursday, Friday and Saturday
nights. To get around the image problem, that of appearing to be a
sissy among macho mates by drinking light beer, the men order
draft, by the glass. Swan, at .9% alcohol and with a pretty decent
taste, is outselling competitors in the city by three to one. To boot,
Swan Gold has fewer calories and this has made it attractive to the
growing health-conscious population.
Distracted by the disarray in the courtroom--recent immigrants

nervously thumbing through their passports and incessantly
talking with kin loud enough to make it hard to hear what's going
on--I leave and walk down the street to the National Museum. Out
front a couple of days earlier I'd seen a large advertisement for a
special dinosaur exhibit. It now seems like something worth
seeing, the best idea of the moment. But I don't get that far. Just
inside the doors, I get all caught up in an enthralling exhibit of
Victoria's once prosperous aborigines.
I leaf back and forth through a large photo album of
members of the Echuca tribe, the Goulburn tribe, others. Attired
in European dress (but invariably without shoes), holding tight to
spears and other stone age implements, they seem innocent, naive,
as unsuspecting of their fate as if European contact had been
made only last week. As if there were nothing to fear for their
lives, their hunting grounds, their cultures. And yet as I continue
to stare at these striking black and white photos a second and a
third time, my prejudices force me to conclude that I see in their
dark eyes a hint that they knew what was in store for them. That
their cultures were doomed, that no war against whites could be
won, and that like their spears and their baskets and the images of
themselves they were now giving up they were headed for the
museum.
But then this thought: Maybe the Wawoorong, the
Boonoorong and the Wantourong tribes, who originally occupied
Melbourne, thought they got a good deal when they sold 600,000
acres for a pile of blankets, tomahawks, beads and scissors?
It's a group photo of seemingly happy and unaffected
aboriginal youths dressed in rags that holds my attention for the
longest time. How sad the fate of their urban relatives of a
generation yet to come, I muse. Not until the 1960s did large
numbers of aborigines move into Melbourne. Now Melbourne
harbors about half of all those in Victoria, roughly 3,500 for the
city.
Two years before my arrival, the Victorian Aboriginal
Development Association did a survey and found that long-term
unemployment was so serious in the state's aboriginal community
that seventy percent of them depended on government benefits. A
mere one in forty was employed by a private firm. In addition to
discrimination based on race, lack of education stood out as a
major problem. Only about ten percent of the aboriginal
population had completed pre-university education.
The present sense of who aborigines are and where they're
headed is profoundly impregnated with deep-seated historical
prejudices, often an all-too-secure sure sense of their fate. A
hundred and twenty-five years ago one traveler in the city noted
that "the aborigines are savages, have been known to eat human
flesh, and it is with great difficulty that they can be expected to
have anything like a civilized life."
These thoughts linger in my mind as I try to bring these

aboriginal youths of another time into the present, compare them
with the boisterously energetic uniformed school children running
around the museum. For most, their knowledge of Australian
aborigines will not go much beyond what they learn in history
books, or what they surmise from occasional glimpses of
aborigines in the city's ghettos and housing projects. What, I
wonder, do their parents pass on to them as half-truths, prejudices
and ill-informed gossip disguised as truth?
Suddenly I find myself staring in disbelief at the awe and
fascination of one little blond boy who has his nose glued to a
glass exhibit of stuffed gray kangaroos. Has he never seen a real
one on the fleeing hop? Is this possible in a nation that has more
kangaroos than people? Yep, it sure is. Australia is eighty percent
urban, the most citified nation in the world. Most of the
continent's vast and forbidding outback, where red and gray and
other species of kangaroos multiply and roam free and are
wantonly shot for pet food, will be no more familiar to most
Melbournians than Utah and New Mexico are to most east coast
city-bred Americans.
In a scruffy pub in Footscray, I meet a woman named Clare.

Overweight by a potato sack, Clare at one point complains that
her sixteen-year-old son had just kicked her out of their flat
because his girlfriend, Lisa, was coming over and they were going
to do you-know-what. The bile gone, she pushes her glass at Ed, a
longtime friend. And she says, "It's your shout, Ed."
Ed gets up and goes to the bar and Clare turns to me and says
that she's lived in Australia nineteen years. Nothing, she says,
could entice her to return to her native Scotland. Even two
marriages to Australian-born "ratbags" and a job as a sales clerk
that she hated so much she was thinking of going on the dole
hasn't watered down her infatuation with her adopted country.
"What a marvelous land Australia is!" she cries. And who would
not believe her listening to her grab and spit out these words with
real gusto.
Ed comes back with drinks and the conversation turns to
Footscray, where Clare has lived for the past seven years. "I'm
thinking of moving out of here," Clare says. "It's gotten so full of
Vietnamese I can't take it anymore. You can't go anywhere you
don't see them. They're taking over my neighborhood and buying
up all the shops. The government should have known better. They
should send them back to Vietnam. They don't belong in
Australia."
Ed raises his eyebrows and cracks, "Clare, you got that birth
certificate I keep asking you for?"
"Oh Ed, cut that bloody crap with me! You think a person's
not born here, he's not true blue Australian. I took out my papers
a long time ago and I'm Australian just like you. I can speak out
too, so shut up."
She puts her arm around my shoulder and snuggles up to my
ear. "Don't listen to him. He's that way all the time with me. He's
like that with anybody not born here."
"What have you against the Vietnamese, Clare?" Ed says.
"The yellow skin?"
Clare sticks out her tongue at Ed and edges closer to me.
"You know what I really hate about them people? They buy these
stores and put up signs saying what they sell. I can't read them.
Now do you think that's right? It's not. They have no bloody right
to do that. They have to live in Footscray, they can do it like
everybody else. Put their store signs in English so us Australians
can read them."
A study conducted in Melbourne in 1976 found that Melbournians

had the following preference for new immigrants. From most to
least preferred they were: British, German, Italian, Greek, Chinese,
and Black. Moslems didn't figure into the ranking at all even
though at this time there were 150,000 of them in Australia,
almost half of whom lived in Melbourne. Presumably people from
Islamic-speaking countries, and those from southeast Asia, ranked

below blacks--or were not included on the preference list in the
survey. Those people most concerned about the arrival of new
immigrants lived in neighborhoods that had large numbers or
recent immigrants.
As soon as I pass under the train trestle just east of Hoddle Street,
there can be no doubt that I've entered a neighborhood as
distinctive, as strongly defined as any I'm likely to come upon in a
world-class city renowned for its ethnic diversity.
After walking four blocks east on Victoria Street, the
municipal boundary between Richmond and Abbotsford, I've
counted half a dozen Vietnamese restaurants and three or four
video shops advertising titles in Vietnamese. I've also passed the
Saigon Gia Biet (Goodbye) men's hairdresser, Quang Thuan's
Asian Groceries, and several other shops that reek of spices and
herbs. Their windows are stuffed with tea, slippers, Oriental
crockery, incense sticks, laughing porcelain Buddhas, fire engine
red prayer altars. I've also seen six large fabric stores, all of them
wall-to-wall with upright bolts of richly colored silks and
synthetics.
I enter one of the fabric stores, and, in a mix of halting
English and sign language, am told that the fabric is not sold to
women making clothing for family members or other
Melbournians. No, it's bought by local Vietnamese and shipped to
their former homeland, because there comparable fabric is either
unobtainable or prohibitively expensive.
Is this all there is to know about this glut of fabric stores? I
wonder as I charge into another one and come face-to-face with
an overripe Asian woman seated behind a counter spooning soup
into her mouth. The fish head in the middle of the bowl, one eye
missing, peers up at me like an ophthalmologist scrutinizing the
rivers of my retina. I apologize for the intrusion, then realize that
it's more or less for naught; the woman doesn't understand
English. But then just as I'm about to leave, a sprightly young girl
in a brown school uniform comes out of nowhere.
She seems excited at the possibility of assisting the tall white
stranger. Eagerly translating my questions, she informs me that
most of the store's fabric is shipped to South Vietnam. People
back home send the silk with the elaborately embroidered dragon
designs that hang on the wall behind her seated mother, she says.
After her mother sells the reworked silk, she sends more fabric to
South Vietnam.
What I don't hear in these stores is something I've recently
heard from social science professors at Monash and Melbourne
universities: that Vietnamese women, like the city's Malay and
Greek and Italian women, work with these kinds of fabrics on
industrial Juki and Singer sewing machines at home. They labor on
a piece-work rate. Their hourly pay is a pittance of what they'd get
if sewing under union contracts. Their employers are often other
Vietnamese. After all, who knows better how much exploitation
the women will tolerate?
Farther down the street, I edge into a food market and
browse, graze for additional clues to the soul of this mock Asian
landscape. The shelves are loaded with canned goods: chick peas
in brine from India, clam curry from Java, lotus roots from China,
green jackfruit from the Philippines, rice sticks from Thailand. My
eyes fall on several shelves crowded with herbs and spices, then on
plastic bags full of something about the size of kosher pickles.
They're dull black and moldy looking. There are no labels, so I ask
and am told that it's bêche-de-mer. Trepang or sea cucumbers,
that coveted treasure found on tropical reefs.
Trepang figured prominently in the early history of Australia's
north coast. Each December Indonesian seamen were pushed
south by the monsoon in their small proas. At low tide their crews
fished from canoes or waded into the water to spear the long sea
slugs. On shore, in stone furnaces, they boiled them in cauldrons,
dried them in the sun, cured them in smoke houses made of palm
leaves. When the southeast monsoon returned, the trepang cargo
was carried north to the Celebes to be traded with the Dutch and
the Chinese. Most of the trepang went on to China to flavor the
soups of the rich.
Of the 20,000 or so Vietnamese that have come to Melbourne
since the fall of Saigon in l975, significantly more than half are of
Chinese extraction. Mostly from Saigon, the Chinese Vietnamese
are professional sorts. They're renowned for their entrepreneurial
acumen, equally for their aggressiveness and frugality. By contrast,
those Vietnamese without Chinese blood are allegedly less
ambitious, more proletarian in outlook, disadvantaged by
reputation if not by culture and inclination. The Chinese feel less
affinity for their Vietnamese countrymen than they do for their
cousins in the city's not-so-distant Chinatown. Indeed, the bonds
of blood are so strong that Melbourne's Chinese, who began
arriving from Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia in the mid-
nineteenth century, are accommodating financial backers to the
Chinese from Vietnam.
Contrary to what one often hears in Melbourne, the
Vietnamese have not flocked together in places like Richmond and
Abbotsford and Footscray because of an irrepressible need to be
near friends or among those who speak the same language. A
Victorian Ethnic Affairs Survey found that geographic clustering
of the Vietnamese is principally a matter of economics. Shopping
and child-rearing needs, cheap housing and proximity to work
have been the principal determinants of where these Asians
locate. Once the Vietnamese get adequate resources they're as
likely as any of the city's ethnic groups to become footloose.
I cross the street and enter the Chinese Tea and Herbs Store.
Filling one wall almost to the ceiling are seventy or eighty finely
polished wooden drawers. I wildly guess at what's in them--the
animal parts, herbs whose names I've never heard, somewhere in
there just the cure I need for a persistent fungus I picked up in
central Australia while chasing down zebra finch colonies for my
wife.
I drop my eyes into a glass display case, onto many-sized

boxes of Essence of Chicken.
"Good for everything," a short Oriental woman with gold
teeth and a disarming grin says. "Best when you tired, worked too
long. You want it?"
I shake my head. How can I tell her that I'm merely overcome
with curiosity?
She mumbles something about my looking tired and
overworked. She picks up a box off the shelf behind her and
pushes it at me. On one side of the box, written in English, I read,
"Anti-ageing Tablets."
The woman says, "When you weak make you stronger,
younger. They prolong your life. Very good for you, you like live
long."
I nod and smile. Always eager to find the fountain of youth, I
read on, learn that this box of eighty pills for seventeen dollars was
the imperial nostrum of the Yongie Imperial Hospital of the Ming
Dynasty. By way of Hangzhou, China.
I thank the woman for her trouble and return to the street.
Here and there I stop someone and ask the person to translate the
inscrutable characters or words on a storefront. More often than
not I'm ignored, thrown a steely gaze of incomprehension.
Distrust? A misreading of my motives? Who knows? All but an
ample handful of these people have come to Australia within the
last decade. A good many of the women still can't fill half a page
with English words they know. The men have more facility,
because they work at General Motors, Ford, Nissan, on the city's
renowned trams, in textile factories. Many have had to take jobs
that make no use whatsoever of their considerable professional
skills.
In Melbourne it's said that the Vietnamese are three times as
persistent as any other nationality when looking for employment.
When they can't speak English well enough to present their case,
they hire an English spokesman and apply as a group. Still, they
are enormously disadvantaged; the unemployment rate among
Melbourne's Vietnamese is more than twenty-five percent, several

times that of the city and the national average.
The Vietnamese encounter particularly strong antagonism
from second-generation Greeks, who reportedly see the city's
factories as their territory. The proportion of factory workers of
Greek extraction in Melbourne remains high; sons and daughters
are replacing parents who, without skills, had no place else to turn
for employment twenty-five or thirty-five years ago when they
came to Australia. Today Greeks have one of the highest levels of
trade union membership of any ethnic group in Melbourne, a rate
in excess of seventy percent.
Employers maintain that the Vietnamese strive to please even
harder than the first Greeks and Italians who came to Melbourne
after World War II. Even Vietnamese women, who rarely worked
in their pillaged land, take jobs. They do so because they feel it is
their duty to support parents and relatives who stayed behind or
couldn't leave Vietnam. A single male with a factory job in suburbs
like Footscray and Sunshine may support ten or more relatives
back home, perhaps as many more in a kinship network that
fingers out into other Vietnamese enclaves in Collingwood and
Flemington.
I wander on, until I come to Tran Van Thanh's sprawling
gaming hall. Immediately something about the place strikes me as
eerie, other-worldly. Van Thanh's is poorly lit, there's no music, no
life at all in fact. Several video games are huddled together against
the front wall, but no one's bent over them. Nor is anyone at the
ping pong tables.
Across from the tables, high on the toneless wall, is a life-size
poster of Clint Eastwood, scowling, ready to chalk up another kill,
just as he appeared in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." Not
far away I spot a poster of Brooke Shields, looking as pretty and
virginal as ever. But the effervescent naïf is forced to compete
with mundane matters: an ad on yellow paper in Vietnamese for
"Viet Pages;" a calendar, sheets torn off to show the current
month, from the Greek Orthodox Church, everything written in

Greek.
Until five or six years ago, this neighborhood belonged to
Greeks and Italians. Their deliberate exodus started not long after
the Boat People began their perilous southward drift to freedom.
Once accepted as permanent settlers, the Vietnamese were given
government assistance and lodged in hostels and high-rise
government flats near and far in this fetching city of more than 2.7
million people.
Before long, frugality and hope their ruling norms, the
Vietnamese were buying the shops and houses, just about
everything that came up for sale along this several block stretch of
Victoria Street. Now there's still a Greek restaurant and a Greek
wholesale fish dealer in the heart of Little Saigon, and on the
eastern edge a Turkish Take Away and a stylish Tex-Mex
Restaurant. But all these food merchants seem like afterthoughts,
at best adventuresome outliers.
The nearby Valhalla Theater has fared no better. The theater
was opened more than a decade ago by a couple of Sydney
University students who wanted to bring short film festivals to
Melbourne. They began with classics featuring the Marx Brothers,
Mae West, Humphrey Bogart. For some time the theater was just
about the only venue in the city where films of offbeat European
directors were shown. Now, however, the Valhalla is dying, and to
get resuscitated it'll be moving north to Northcote. Valhalla
owners can no longer afford the rent. The theater isn't getting the
family business it once did. Too many non-Asian Melbournians
can't handle the startling changes in the neighborhood; they're
unable to unclog subsurface veins of xenophobia.
Australians don't have a enviable history of race relations.
Prejudices in Melbourne against Asians go back to the 1850s, to
Victoria's gold rush era. The state's Chinese population jumped
from 2,000 in 1854 to 17,000 a couple of years later. The high
visibility of the Chinese and the fervent competition they provided
in the gold fields made it easy for provincial northern Europeans
to claim that the peculiar-looking foreigners were a threat to

material standards, certain to debase cherished Anglo-Celtic
values.
Simmering wariness and envy finally boiled over in the
outright prohibition to import "colored labor." Its justifications,
according to Manning Clark, Australia's esteemed historian, were
embedded in "comparisons with the American Civil War which
seemed to prove the follies and evils of using slave or semi-slave
colored labor. The Asians and the Pacific Islanders, it was argued,
were doomed for the wall, while the Europeans must avoid the
fate of Humpty-Dumpty. The workers were convinced that the
use of colored labor threatened their standard of living and their
privileges. The middle classes were afraid of the threat to
European civilization and to British political institutions, as well as
of the evils of miscegenation."
In 1901 an Immigration Restriction Act became law; to the
world it became known as the White Australia Policy. The White
Australia policy prohibited entry into Australia of any person who
could not upon command of a government officer write a passage
of fifty words in length in a European language, a test that the
federal Parliament agreed was to be given only to non-Europeans.
The policy remained in effect until 1973.
From 1961 to l970, eighty-three percent of Australia's
immigrants came from Europe, a mere seven percent from Asia.
In the next decade the Asian percentage almost quadrupled. There
are now more than a quarter of a million Asians in Australia, more
than half of whom have arrived since the mid l970s.
Not long after a sense of justice and equality became the
norm in Canberra, the national capital, the government began
welcoming notable numbers of Asian refugees: Cambodians,
Laotians, Malays, especially Vietnamese Boat People. But it wasn't
long before timeworn embers of mistrust and suspicion were
refueled by an otherwise respected academic historian, Geoffrey
Blainey, for some time the Dean of the School of Arts at
Melbourne University. In newspaper articles, in speeches, and in a
thin paperback laced with self-serving apologies, Blainey came

forth with a valise full of ad hominem arguments to restrict Asian
immigration.
While Blainey remains a champion of "fair dinkum"
arguments in the nation's blue collar pubs and among those who
feel threatened in their jobs or neighborhoods by an Asian
presence, he has been anything but a hero on his own campus.
There young men and women whose acquaintance I've made are
quick to declare him a racist, an embarrassment to the tolerant
spirit of the city's oldest and most prestigious university. They saw
him as not just racist toward the Vietnamese but toward other
immigrants, including Greeks and Italians. As one student,
perhaps speaking for many, put it: "After he was no longer Dean
of Arts, we were happy to see him go back to writing books. That
is, as long as the books were not about new Australians."
My eyes and my mind on everything except where I'm going, I

bump into a lumpy and bruised fat man in crumpled overalls
pushing a cart half full of crushed beer cans and garbage. In a
coarse voice, thick with alcohol, he asks me not if I'm blind or
drunk but rather if I'm trying to find the German Club.
"German Club?" I say, trying to fathom what prompted him
to ask. Then I nod when he points down the street, to the long
cement wall and the glass doors, no sign anywhere that Germans
do indeed meet in Little Saigon to revive memories of what they
left behind.
As best I can I talk with this amiable street collector of
garbage, desirous, it seems, of company, my conversation. I seek
information about the neighborhood, the Vietnamese.
He tells me, "Mate, we bring 'em here, the government give
'em money to come here. They come here and they push the other
people out. The people is the government, mate. They bloody paid
to bring them here. They gotta take it."
I leave my acquaintance of the moment and walk half a block
before pausing in front of a Vietnamese restaurant, there to read a
newspaper review taped to the window. Spring rolls and bean curd
soup are highly recommended. But then who really can say what
should be recommended? There are seventy-eight dishes on the
menu.
I recall another review on another window across the street.
There it isn't diversity to pull you in; it's the quantity of "good
food" for the money, just about the best buy in the city, the
gourmand for The Age claims. How can anyone, knowing almost
nothing else, avoid the conclusion that the Vietnamese are recent
arrivals? That they're eager to please and attract business. That
unlike Melbourne's Italians and Greeks, the Vietnamese have not
been here long enough to have learned how to spruce up the
decor and charge rip-off prices for forgettable food.
To get out of the bracing cold, I detour to a newsstand and
buy a newspaper and strike up a conversation with a round-faced,
rosy-cheeked clerk. Business is dead and he's loquacious. I ask
what he knows about changes in the neighborhood.
"The Vietnamese don't speak English," he says. "Half of them
don't want to. Only time they know how to speak English is when
they wanna Herald or a Sun."
"What do you know about the high rise flats a block south of
here?"
"There's everything in those flats now. Where me mate was
living, they had these two blocks together. There was four adults
and fourteen kids living in a two-room flat. They didn't speak in
English. They are from Vietnam, I don't know exactly where. But
I don't care about them, what they do. As long as they leave us
alone, we leave them alone."
The clouds thicken, begin to resemble baled cotton. I want a
beer, so I choose the Bakers Arms Hotel. I'm into number two
before it dawns on me what's wrong. It's the hour for guzzling and
there's hardly anyone at the bar. There's not a single Asian in the
pub. I ask the bartender about this, and he tells me that the
Vietnamese rarely drink in public. "A little cognac, a little beer, not
much," he says.
I never get around to asking him about the closed hotels up

the street, The Duke of Albany and The Royal Oak. I decide I
know why.
I head south on Hoddle Street, which turns into Punt Road, and I
look for a hotel, a pub. I imagine I'll get a quick beer before
returning to the apartment and dinner. The Royal Hotel comes
into view. I park, walk around the corner and near the entrance see
a sandwich board that reads: TOPLESS BAR MAIDS.
And so it is, I quickly discover. They work Wednesday,
Thursday and Friday nights, but only between the hours of five
and eight. This evening, around six, there are two of them serving
drinks. One is blond and in her twenties and of medium height.
She has enormous firm breasts. She's wearing a black tight mini-
skirt, and nothing else. The bartender on the other side of the cash
register is younger, a lot taller and much thinner, and she has long
brownish hair gathered and pinned on top. She's wearing black
leotards and gold strap high heels. Her breasts aren't enormous,
but then no man I know would describe them of average size
either.
This is not, as I might've expected on entering, a vulgar
working man's bar, at least not to judge by the dress. The young
and middle-aged men are well groomed and wearing slacks, suits,
ties, and brogues. Only two of the twenty or so present look like
they don't work in offices. But to a blind man the one-liners I
overhear might suggest that my eyes are deceiving me.
"Are you married?" one guy shouts at the thin bar maid.
He's ignored.
"Do you want to go to a footy game?" another one tries,
looking in the other direction.
"Not with you," Golden Shoes says, not missing a beat as she
gathers up several empty glasses and walks away.
"You're built better than Lady Godiva."
"Who's she?" comes the response. And then, "Is that a
compliment?"
Out of the side of a mouth, a young male wearing a pin-stripe

dress shirt says, "They had uglies in here last week. Good thing
they're changing them all the time."
On the other side of me, a loose tie, seemingly talking as
much to himself as to Lady Godiva, says, "You want me to tape
measure 'em?"
He's ignored, and the drinking friend sitting next to him says,
"Let's go, I gotta get those tits out of my mind. Otherwise, I won't
be able to look at my wife without laughing."
I finish my beer and am about to leave when I see that I've
not been the observant anthropologist I've been pretending. At
the far end of the bar are two women who look like they're in their
mid- to late thirties. They're well dressed, in plain skirts and
blouses, hose and high heels. They're engrossed in a conversation
with each other, and they seem perfectly oblivious to the ogling
males and their unsolicited comments.
Swagman. A tramp carrying his belongings in a 'swag.'
Swag. The pack carried by the traveller, usually some essential

belongings rolled in a blanket. (A Dictionary of Australian
Colloquialisms)
"The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land-of

the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the
land of Self-reliance, and Never-give-in, and Help-your-mate...
"Travelling with the swag in Australia is variously and

picturesquely described as 'humping bluey,' 'walking Matilda,'
'humping Matilda...." (Henry Lawson, The Romance of the Swag)
I drive thirty-two kilometers from downtown Melbourne through

an endless string of suburbs to visit a place called The Swagman,
because of the frequent hype I've been hearing on the car radio,
and the fact gleaned from a newspaper article that The Swagman
has the second most expensive liquor license in Victoria. The top
honor, apparently, goes to a pub or restaurant somewhere in
Geelong, a city southwest of Melbourne.
Since the annual fee paid for a liquor license in Australia is
indicative of the amount of alcohol sold, I imagine that The
Swagman must be a large public bar that caters to young
suburbanites.
All of these misconceptions are quickly dispelled when I get
to the nondescript, red brick restaurant on the main highway in
the far eastern suburb of Ferntree Gully. Huge tasteless signs out
front advise that The Swagman is a licensed restaurant that serves
smorgasbord and has nightly floor shows and dancing.
I'm too late for lunch and too early for dinner, I discover
when I try the locked double front doors. But my curiosity doesn't
go completely wanting. I see a booking office in one corner of the
baseball stadium parking lot. Open from nine in the morning until
ten in the evening six days a week, the office is staffed by two
harried women.
While one women adeptly shifts from one telephone call to
another, I pick up one of the restaurant's brochures and learn that
The Swagman was built on the site of an old quarry. The interior is
meant to evoke "the pioneer spirit and atmosphere of yesteryear.
Oregon beams stretch across the main dining area to the white-
washed fireplace stocked with logs and flanked by the greatest
smorgasbord in Melbourne. Waitresses are dressed in the style of
the l900s and the decor is of the same era."
The smorgasbord, the brochure claims, includes more than a
score of appetizers (mussels, German caviar, Bismarck Herring,
sardines, asparagus), several soups ("six at one time!"); some
fifteen varieties of cold salads; and sweets that include Swagman
Special Pavlovas, Apple Strudel Vienna, and three kinds of ice
cream. Diners are treated to a six-piece band, followed by a
floorshow featuring "regular artists and special guest artists, noted
for their dynamic fast-moving variety."
Freed from the phones, one of the agents informs me that

The Swagman is completely booked up for the next two Saturday
evenings, with more than a l,000 guests expected each night.
"And the rest of the week?" I say.
"About eight hundred on a Friday night. Between three and
five hundred the other nights of the week. Would you like to book
something for one of these nights?"
I shake my head and thank her for her time. As I head for the
parking lot, along the way passing several people obviously headed
for the booking office, I'm reminded of a question I'd recently
asked a woman behind the counter in one of Melbourne's better
restaurants. I'd said, "Is there a distinctive Australian cuisine?"
"Four'n Twenty Pie?" she said, laughing. "I don't know.
Shrimp on a barbie?" She laughed again, this time harder. "I don't
think there is one, is there?"
It seems that even Melbourne's restaurant critics can't decide.
Perhaps the most satisfying answer I've gotten so far came from a
third-generation Australian of British extraction I met in a pub. He
said, "We don't really have one yet. But when we do it'll be some
picking and choosing from all the ethnic dishes that now make
Melbourne famous for its food. Or, if you want to be cynical, you
can already see what it is. Fish n' chips, pizza, McDonald's
hamburgers, schnitzel, smorgasbord...not much different than
what I remember from my travels in the U.S."
I head north on busy Lygon Street, recently mired in controversy

because a stand of eucalypts, planted in 1976 along one barren
stretch and attractive enough to win a Victorian roadside
environment award in 1981, was recently chopped down at the
behest of the Melbourne City Council. It was decided that Lygon
Street would be much brighter with some European imports,
deciduous trees which would, the city council claimed, give "that
autumn and spring effect, shade in summer and light in winter."
Too much of Melbourne, it was decided, was dull and damp and
cool for too much of the year, and eucalypts only added to the
problem.
I inadvertently turn off Lygon and am looking for an easy way
to get back to where I was when, to my surprise, I see several
seagulls. Then a concrete wall and a high cyclone fence and a
sprawling block of garbage and paper and broken concrete
scattered hither and yon come into view.
The land strikes me as shattered, as if by mortar shells. Here
and there it seems to be sinking, festering like a neglected sore. I
slow down, and I catch a glimpse of a sign that reads, "City of
Brunswick Tip."
I turn the corner and follow the east edge of the tip. Yellow
paper and garbage are seeping beneath the fence, taking root and
flowering. Across the street, there's a row of rundown detached
houses. One's boarded, apparently abandoned. Large army green
garbage bins on black wheels are parked in front of several of the
houses.
Farther up the street, near the Brunswick Velodrome that
adjoins Merri Creek, is a cardboard box stuffed with empty 750
ml. Carlton Draft bottles. The box is sitting near the curb. Not ten
yards away another eight bottles lie scattered beneath a sign stating
that there's a $200 fine for depositing garbage.
Just up the block, a man and a young boy are taking hemp
bags and shovels out of the trunk of an old Austin badly in need
of paint. I stop and park some distance from the pair, and for a
while watch as they carry their bags and shovels over to a waist-
high pile of dirt not far from the sidewalk in the empty lot
adjoining the tip. The boy, with a great mane of black hair, gets
down on his knees in the dirt and pulls weeds. Then he holds one
of the bags open for the older man, who shovels dirt into it. As
soon as a bag is full, the old man in baggy pants and a long sleeve
shirt with holes at the elbows looks up and down the street, waits
until there's no car or pedestrian traffic, then says something to the
boy who then carries the heavy sack to the trunk.
After they'd filled and loaded several bags, I approach them

and say that I'm curious about why they're taking the dirt.
In badly broken English, the man explains that someone has
dumped this dirt here, probably in the middle of the night, and
now he and his son simply want to use it for the family garden.
"People come to Brunswick from Coburg to dump garbage," he
says. "Thata way they no pay two dollar charge. I justa help take
away this nobody want."
"Do you use the Brunswick tip?" I ask.
"No," he says, showing off his yellow teeth. "It close years
now. They gonna make park or something in it."
"You live in Brunswick?"
"No, no. We have nice home in Coburg. You know Coburg?
Very nice city." There's a long pause, then he says, "Australia
marvelous country. Very, very good country for my sons. I hava
five sons. It good for them live here, but me, I wanta return to
Malta to die."
"Have you been in Australia long?"
"Me, I come with my wife when I twenty-seven. Long, long
time, we here now. Australia beautiful country for my sons, you no
agree?"
I agree, and a beaming smile covers his face. His gangly son in
a green velour jacket and blue jeans and tennis shoes, much taller
than his humped back father, is also smiling.
Before I can find something to say to continue the
conversation, the father's again kneeling in the sloping dirt,
breaking clods with his hands and pouring them into a shopping
bag.
It's a bright and warm Sunday morning when we decide to visit

Melbourne's Zoological Gardens. We're not, as it happens,
without lots of company. For while we tour the well-kept grounds,
I can't remember ever seeing so many couples with young children
at a zoo, an impression that's only strengthened when we leave the
Gardens a little after noon and see a line of people holding tight to
children and prams that extends for more than a block beyond the
ticket office.
With my aversion to zoos, some initial impressions are
uplifting. Small primates are housed in wire enclosures more
spacious than two-storey Victorian terrace houses. Few efforts
have been spared to provide plenty of trees and plants appropriate
to their native settings. A wooden ramp, nearly a storey off the
ground at some points, weaves its way among the black and white
ruffed lemurs, the squirrel monkeys, the black gibbons, the
emperor tamarins. The view for the zoo-goer is as good and yet as
unobtrusive as it can be. It takes no effort to get a close-up of
darling marmosets with fluffy white ears snuggling side-by-side on
a tree limb eating and sharing pieces of oranges and watermelons.
Or of Venezuela's mustard yellow squirrel monkeys patiently
grooming one another, their pinkish faces and hands more
endearing than those of a puppy.
Shortly after leaving the small primates, we find ourselves
face-to-face with a long bank of rectangular aviaries for Australian
parrots--yellow rosellas, scarlet-breasted parrots, hooded parrots,
princess parrots, and many more. The aviaries have a depressing
and desolate look about them. They're dark, unappetizing for sun-
loving birds, and certainly not designed for good viewing.
We shake our heads and grumble and hurry on, trying to
imagine how a country whose riches in birds are equal to its
marsupials could do this to its avian fauna.
Before exiting the zoo, I see a pair of parrots on the wing. But
this isn't reassuring enough, and I find it hard not to conclude that
because parrots are generally so plentiful and easy to see in
Australia, though certainly not to that eighty percent of the
population that lives in cities, they're treated with little regard.
Familiarity, I have to remind myself, breeds not contempt but
indifference; in this case, it seems, in zoo keepers toward one of
their country's unique treasures.
My friends back home are often surprised to hear that Australia

has about the same land area as the United States excluding
Alaska. This fact in hand, it then comes as still another surprise to
learn that Australia's population, about sixteen million, is roughly
two-thirds that of California. So Australia is at once much larger
and much smaller than common perception or geography
suggests. These thoughts come to mind when I pick up the
weekend edition of the newspaper, The Australian, and see a large
ad on smoking featuring Dick Smith.
Dick Smith, who owns a chain of electronics stores in
Melbourne, is an Australian millionaire, and a highly visible one.
It's hard not to know what he looks like, since his smiling,
bespeckled face adorns the facade of most of his gaudily painted
stores. Dick Smith is a strong believer in the value of self-
promotion, and one of his more notable approaches to keeping
himself in the limelight is through his own glossy magazine,
entitled not simply The Australian Geographic, but The Australian
Geographic, Dick Smith's Journal of Adventure and Exploration.
Established in l985, the magazine has had, so Smith claims,
unparalleled success in Australia. The magazine has proved ideal
for depicting Dick Smith's image as a global explorer and
adventurer. Thus far his most outstanding feat has been that of
flying a helicopter to the North Pole. It earned him a huge spread
in his own magazine, appearances on nationally televised talk
shows, and for all I know the feat may well have contributed to
him being named Australian of the Year in l986. Whatever may be
said about Dick Smith's electronics and computer products and his
desire to be continually before the public, there's no denying that
he's probably Australia's premier purveyor of Norman Vincent
Peale's positive attitude toward life. If a story's not upbeat, then
Dick Smith probably doesn't want to hear about it; he certainly
wouldn't publish it in his magazine.
Nor is there any denying that Dick Smith has no qualms
about public moralizing, using the profits from The Australian
Geographic to try to convince others of their wrongful ways. One of
his more recent campaigns is to rid the nation of its sizeable

population of cigarette smokers. Apparently he believes that he
alone can cure the nation of its awful habit. I come to this
conclusion after picking up the weekend edition of The Australian
and seeing the large ad depicting a stern-faced Dick Smith holding
up a magazine ad for Peter Jackson 30's. In the inset cigarette ad in
Dick Smith's hands, a young smiling teenage girl is sprawled across
her father's legs. The father is about to put a cigarette in his
daughter's mouth. Nearby are the words:
"CONGRATULATIONS PHILIP MORRIS! for the increase in
the market share of your Peter Jackson brand for the 14 to 16 year
old age group from 1% to an amazing 27% in just three years."
Below this, again in bold type, are more messages, one which
proclaims: "Great Marketing!" At the bottom of the ad it's noted
that it was placed by The Australian Geographic, "in the public
interest."
Do Melbourne's readers--most of them--understand the
irony? Or are they on the whole no different than people
everywhere--literal minded to the core?
It's yet another of the city's English weather days, and after more
than an hour of walking through cold wind and the intermittent
rain, I step into a McDonald's on Burke Road for a cup of coffee.
It takes me a good fifteen minutes before I place an order, such is
my fascination with some twenty large photo prints covering three
walls. They depict the changing landscape of Burke Road and
other streets in Camberwell. One is a bird's eye view of
Camberwell Road in the l890s when two-thirds of the surrounding
land was vacant, when simple same-style Victorian bungalows
clustered like plums on a tree. This was a time when the railroad
and lots of cheap land and good scenery and the absence of
factories made Camberwell one of Melbourne's most popular
suburbs, allowed it to be "developed before it's time."
Another print shows hooded, horse-drawn carriages crossing
the tram lines at Camberwell Junction, the two-story buildings and
ubiquitous shop front awnings sewn together with trellises of

wires coursing with electricity. Electric trams were introduced into
Camberwell in l9l6 to service what was then one of greater
Melbourne's most active commercial areas. Electric trams were not
the first mode of public transportation to connect the old and
original city and its accretions. All through the l860s it was said
that trams of any sort would damage the local economy, that
streets in suburban shopping centers were too narrow to
accommodate them, that they would take away local business, that
were steam used to power them they would frighten horses and
pollute shops with noise and smoke, soot and grime.
Nor did Melbournians want trams that would be pulled along
by horses. Up to ten were required for this task, and their piles of
manure were not welcome. Let Sydney and Adelaide have them!
was a sentiment of the times.
By the l880s electric trams were being developed, but they
were seen as noisy and disruptive to animals. The debate was
finally resolved in favor of cable trams, an American invention in
which a grip car and an attached trailer car were pulled along the
city's wide boulevards by an endless cable running beneath the
street. Despite the slowness, the trams pleased the city's residents.
They were described as "gliding through the streets;" and people
claimed the only noise they made came from the tram bells on
approaching street crossings.
Cable cars were available by l873, but Melbourne did not
install its first one until l885. Most of the city's forty route miles
were in use by l89l. At the peak of the cable tram era in l923, when
the system was the largest of its kind in the world--larger even
than those in San Francisco and Chicago, the city had 592 trams
operating. Ninety percent of the lines ran east of Sydney Road,
thereby ignoring the fattening lower rung of the city's working
class population that was dispersing westward and southward
around Port Phillip Bay. Though the tram lines only went as far as
what could now be called the innermost suburbs--Richmond,
Fitzroy, North Fitzroy, North Carlton, Clifton Hills--they played a
major role in encouraging an easterly and northeasterly movement

of peoples. And in eliminating an old custom that is best in
evidence today in Russell Street, that of parking cars in the middle
of the street.
Melbourne's last cable tram rumbled into Clifton Hills on
October 20th, l940. But the primitive system had been dying for
decades, since 1911 in fact when it was recommended that an
electric tram system be developed. By l920 electric trams were
snaking their way through the spreading suburbs. For a long time
there were two incompatible systems, which meant that passengers
frequently had to change from one system to another.
Buses came to Melbourne in the l930s, most notably for
routes into Carlton and Collingwood. In l939, when war seemed
imminent, the city ordered a fleet of double-decker buses.
However, by the middle years of the war, few Melbournians were
happy with buses. They were stuffy, they swayed, they were
cramped. Even boarding and alighting left a lot to be desired. The
electric tram didn't possess great speed, but then no one was in a
big hurry, and the trams had precisely those attributes that buses
lack; they were open and airy, more stable, and only occasionally
cramped.
The photographs prove to be a refreshing break from the

bustling shops along Burke Road, too many of which, this
morning, seemed indicative of spendthrift, wasteful times.
Everywhere up and down Bourke Road I bumped into boutiques,
florists, health food stores, travel agents, clothing stores,
restaurants specializing in seafood, a "New Yorker American
Deli," other shops where one can buy Rumanian pastrami, dried
boereworst and South African Biltong at more than $25 a kilo.
"The Biltong, what you call jerky, is made in Brighton by a
South African for our local Cape Town and Johannesburg
population," the store manager informed me.
At a fruit and vegetable stand, I picked up several heads of

lettuce, gave each one a squeeze. The center of every head was
soft, hardly distinguishable from the outer leaves.
"Can I help you there?" a voice said, coming at me from the
rear. I looked up and saw a portly, balding man wearing an apron.
He had a clip board under his arm.
"Where can I find a real head of lettuce? One with a hard
center. I don't mean to be rude, but everything you've got here
shouldn't have left the field."
He shook his head. "You must be an American. I've been in
the vegetable business thirty-five years and every time I get what
you Americans want hardly no one buys it."
I left empty handed, thinking of the Rio Grande Valley and
the last time I was there and the thousands of heads of lettuce
rotting in the scorching sun. Left to rot because their centers were
as soft as Jell-O.
When I finally get coffee, I sit down near a thick-chested man with
a sagging face and huge hairy ears. He's wearing a gray suit that
looks like a Salvation Army reject. Unscrewing the back side of an
old Seth Thomas clock with a round face and no frills, he's so
thoroughly absorbed in his possession that he seems not to have
noticed my presence.
I sit for several minutes staring at him, taking note of the care
with which he opens the clock and makes delicate adjustments, the
admiration he showers on it. After he replaces the last of the
screws, he sets the clock beside a cup of coffee which he hasn't
touched. Then with even greater childlike fascination than I'd
observed previously, he moves his head up and down, from one
side to another, takes out a small dog-eared notebook from a
jacket pocket, and runs his finger down a column. He checks
something in the notebook against the clock, then grins with
obvious satisfaction.
"Do you collect clocks?" I ask, moving closer.
His heavy head comes up slowly, a hand drops on the top of

the scratched steel casing. He nods. "Many, many I have," he says.
He picks up the small blue notebook and waves it at me.
"Do you collect watches too?"
"No. Old clocks, no more. Have to be fifty or sixty years old
or I don't like them. Like this one." He pats it, lovingly. Almost as
if it's human.
I look over at his coffee, guess that it's as cold as ice. "Would
you like another cup of coffee?"
"No, I go now," he says. He puts the notebook away and gets
up slowly, holding the clock with two hands as if it were priceless
crystal.
As he shambles past the historical prints and larger-than-life
wall paintings of hamburgers splashed with smiling faces, I notice
that he has a long tear in the back of his pants. At the door, his
head down, his mind apparently elsewhere, he's almost run over by
two young boys screaming and pushing one another. Seemingly
frightened by all the youthful energy around him, he clutches the
prized clock and pulls it to his chest.
I reach for my coffee and take a sip, and when I again look
toward the glass doors he's gone. For a brief moment I want to
run after him, ask him if he lived in Camberwell when the photos
on the wall were taken.
I get a second cup of coffee and sit down at one of the side
tables. Shortly, a smart-looking Oriental couple with a three- or
four-year-old son comes in, orders two Big Macs, a Junior Burger
and French fries, and then takes the adjoining table.
I overhear them talking in a language of which not a single
word makes any sense to me. They seem happy, as if they've just
received some good news. Their small-eyed son is off in his own
world. Sitting on his mother's lap, he's playing with the bag of
French fries, wiping them one by one before putting them in his
mouth. His parents seem amused, adoring, perfectly tolerant.
I get up and return to the photos, began examining some of

them again. The rain doesn't stop and I linger, looking for small
details that lead to some larger truth.
A young woman full of energy scurries behind and around
me. She's clearing away trays, wiping the tables. On a return trip to
the kitchen, she stops and says, "Do you like the photos too?"
I nod.
"They're really neat, aren't they?"
I agree and say, "Do other McDonald's in Melbourne have
similar exhibits?"
"No. The manager got the idea and went to the city council
and got them made." She smiles. "Now we have a lot of older
people in Camberwell who love to come here. They come to
remember."
I walk out into the misty rain and wait for a tram that'll take me
into the city. I recall three or four occasions on which Aussies
have told me that the single most distinctive feature of Melbourne
is its trams. And who am I to disagree? I've had a similar thought
as I've watched the hulking, clanging trams rumble up Collins
Street, now and again one splattered with ten kinds of paint in the
service of advertising a beer.
In find that I can no longer disassociate these mahogany-lined
oblong boxes from my sense of Melbourne anymore than I can
imagine this city without its gray skies, its spacious green parks, its
Victorian buildings, its marvelous and varied restaurants, its
multitudes of Old World peoples to whom English still poses
considerable difficulties.
If there's a drawback to living in the past or remembering it
with too much fervor, it would seem to lie in the myopia of
metropolitan planners. With the exception of the Tulamarine
Freeway, which extends from the edge of the inner city northwest
to the airport and the northwestern suburbs, and the Eastern
Freeway, which begins east of downtown and then abruptly ends
well before the last of the buzzing suburbs are reached, movement
by car into and out of Melbourne is a tortuous exercise of stop

and go, often along bustling shopping arteries jammed with parked
cars and stop-and-go trams. Travel east and west in the city is
equally inefficient: slow, tedious, and often nerve wracking. The
problems of access to downtown Melbourne by automobile have
been exacerbated by upscale trendies wishing to protect the
tranquility of their inner-city neighborhoods. They've convinced
their city councils to install speed bumps and large concrete
roundabouts at intersections that encourage drivers to stick to
major streets already overloaded with cars and trucks. Take the
tram or the train until things improve, people say whenever I
express exasperation.
A foreigner, the city not my city as home, I hold my tongue. I
seek consolation in the words of a long-time Melbournian who
informed me that the city had a Master Plan as early as l954 for
improving the flow of traffic--and nothing came of it.
I could not recall ever having gone to a Polish restaurant, and now
in this multi-ethnic city with few equals anywhere I was not about
to miss this opportunity--if I could find one. And I finally did, the
Café Polonia in South Yarra which advertised that it had "Polish
Home Cooking."
I arrive around seven, and the restaurant is completely empty.
I have my choice of ten or so square tables with simple red chairs
and red and white tablecloths, the colors of the Polish flag. The
lights are low, and I hear a Frank Sinatra tune that I can't identify;
it's coming from a rear area that I take to be the kitchen.
A hefty middle-aged woman in a plain print dress and short
curly blond hair that looks dyed brings the menu. I have no idea
what to expect, other than to perhaps see dishes that my mother
has often prepared. Marinated herring with onions is one that
catches my eye. My father love to eat herring, piece by piece,
finger to mouth right out of the jar. I've always hated the taste.
There are several pork chop dishes, and grilled polish sausage, and
cabbage rolls with potatoes. All of these are favorites of mine,
though the polish sausage I have for breakfast or dinner is

invariably boiled. There's hardly a dish on the menu that doesn't
include potatoes; this most of all suggests to me that I'm among
kin. I often think I could eat potatoes every day of the week. I
often joke with my wife that the desire for them is in my genes.
I order the cabbage rolls with potatoes, and a glass of red
wine, and before either comes an old bald man in a dark suit and
tie comes in and looks around, trying to decide where to sit. I
invite him to join me. He's initially hesitant, until I tell him I'm an
American and have Polish parents and am trying to learn
everything I can about Melbourne.
After an exchange of pleasantries, he tells me that Australia is
a "marvelous and beautiful and free country," and that for him it is
"the best country on earth." By way of comparison, he says that
his niece once got stabbed in New York City, that a brother got
mugged in Las Vegas, and he knows a Polish woman who got
raped in South Africa.
He doesn't tell me when he came to Australia, or how long
he's lived in Melbourne, or even what he does now. Rather he
notes that he once owned a cattle station in northwestern
Queensland where he ran Aberdeen Angus and Herefords, and
that in the best of times he was putting two-and-a-half pounds of
beef a day on his cattle. He remarks that he didn't like the way
other station owners treated aborigines, nor was he happy that so
many station owners he knew wouldn't hire them. He said he felt
defiant, and he hired several on his station, only to regret the
decision. He found aborigines to be "thieving, lying, and cheating
drunks." He got rid of all of them, and he now confesses to having
nothing but contempt for the way they live and everything they
represent. "Here they're no better," he says. 'In Fitzroy on
Gertrude Street they piss on the streets and on the cars, and they
get drunk in public and they act awful. I just hate them."
I want him to tell about Melbourne's Poles. I begin by asking
why this is the only Polish restaurant I've so far been able to find.
The reason, he says, is that Poles are not "industrious." He

explains what he means by way of saying that they came to
Australia in three waves. The first, he says, was about thirty years
ago. Those that came then, "they still wear the same suits they
came in. They go to the same churches. They have no culture, and
they have no interest in learning English. They work in factories.
They're peasants too."
The second wave of Polish immigration began about fifteen
years ago. These Poles, he asserts, are no different. "They're
peasants."
The third wave began arriving about six to eight years ago.
"They want to be millionaires, but they prefer to live on the dole.
They're lazy and stupid. They don't want to work."
His final words on Melbourne's Poles are: "We have 40,000
Poles in Melbourne and thirty-five Polish organizations. This is so
because if you say you don't like this or that, they throw you out!"
I don't ask him which one, or two, or half dozen Polish
organizations he's been thrown out of. I'd heard all I want to hear
of sour news, hateful gossip, perhaps self-hatred and more. As I
leave, happy to have discovered the Café Palonia and satisfied
enough with the meal to want to return, I remind myself that
characterizations of the sort I've just heard about aborigines and
Poles may well contain large elements of truth. But how, short of
anthropological immersion in these communities and perhaps
some serious survey work, am I to know where one ends and the
other begins.
I felt good for the rest of the day after reading the following
graffito on a two-story brick wall adjacent to a parking lot in
Williamstown.
JEMIMA ANN RICHMOND BORN 7.9.l984
CONGRATULATIONS TO MY DARLING ANN

MANY THANKS TO DR. BELLA & DR. MAK & ALL THE
STAFF INVOLVED IN THE SAFE AND HEALTHY
ARRIVAL
OF OUR DAUGHTER AT WILLIAMSTOWN HOSPITAL
To one side of the proud father's declaration, someone added:
SHE WAS BORN A WOMAN, THANKS TO HER MOTHER

FOR HER STRONGEST EGG
Those who want to express their thoughts and artistic inclinations

by turning to graffiti have put most of their energies not into
billboards and other public viewing places but rather into defacing
Melbourne's trains. They have been covering them so thoroughly
that train engineers have been refusing to run those they consider
to be excessively painted or splattered with too much obscene
graffiti. In one case there was a train running out to suburban
Melbourne with a large penis painted on it.
As I browse among the several hundred Greek titles in the Galaxy

Video on Lygon Street, a bald, primly dressed man in his fifties
comes in, picks out two cassettes, then goes to the counter and
starts talking in Greek to a young woman with curly black hair and
sparkling green eyes. The young woman grabs a video from the
shelf, pushes it into a nearby VCR, then turns up the volume. The
customer stares at the video, then gazes at the ceiling, as if looking
for cracks, a missing high note. He shakes his head and retreats to
the wall of cassettes to resume his search.
I approach the woman and ask her if young Greeks are
interested in videos from their homeland.
"Rarely," she says. "All they want are those over there." She
points to sections with English titles, labeled "Horror," "Comedy,"
"Martial Arts." She sighs and shakes her head, then says that the
bald customer behind us comes frequently, always insists on
hearing how a video sounds before renting one.
"I see you have some videos in Turkish. Much demand?"

"Greeks like to look at Turkish films, but Turks don't like
what us Greeks have."
"Do Turks have their own video shops?"
"I don't know if there are many Turkish movies. I know
Turks own four video shops on Sydney Road."
Several more customers come and go. I'm struck by the ease
with which the woman moves back and forth between Greek and
English. When there's a lull, I say, "Are most of the young Greeks
in the neighborhood equally fluent in Greek and English?"
"I don't really know. I'm from Greece and only here on
holiday. I came in l985 for five months, but look what happened.
I'm still here!" She laughs, then adds that she was born in St.
Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, left with her parents to return to
Greece when she was eleven, and had not been back to Australia
until returning in 1985.
"When I came there was not much for me to do here. The
Greeks in Melbourne think differently than Greeks in Greece.
They're old fashioned here and you can't go out alone and all that.
So the only thing I could do to not be bored all the time was find a
job. When I was looking, I found this one and also one in a Greek
school as well. It was real easy to find a job. It was easier than in
Greece, and the wages are higher here too. So I thought it might
be worth staying. To take the job in the Greek school, I had to
stay for a year so they didn't have to find another teacher in the
middle of the year.
"Then I decided to stay here another year, because if I stay
two years I can take all my things back--videos and irons and that
sort of stuff--without paying taxes. If I go home now, I have to
pay one-hundred percent tax on everything."
"Have you thought of settling permanently in Australia?"
"It's all right here and I've got a lot of friends and relatives.
But I can't stay. I can, because I'm an Australian citizen, but I
don't want to. I've been living in Greece too long and I'm used to
the lifestyle there. I like it much better in Greece. It's the same old
routine here. You go to work, you go home, you go to bed--it's the

same thing every day. In Greece it's different. Everyone goes out
someplace different every day. Maybe it's only to the square for
coffee or to a disco, but you go out, you don't stay at home.
"And I don't like the weather here either. I've been here two
summers and the sun hardly ever seems out. It's so different at
home, sunny all the time. It can be so depressing, the clouds and
the rain all the time.
"And the people here are so conservative. You can't say
anything here, you've always got to watch what you're saying. In
Greece, I want to say something, anything, I'll say it. I won't say to
myself, 'Oh, I won't say this!' If I want to swear, I'll swear. I can't
do that here. In Greece we're more open and honest to each other.
We talk freely."
"Do you have non-Greek friends in Melbourne?"
She shakes her head. "Here you have to be a hypocrite. I
don't like that. If I say something and sort of swear, my cousins
and my aunt say, 'Oh, God, she swore!' You want to swear once in
a while. You want to be yourself.
"Greece is much freer, it's not like it was in old times. Greeks
from here go to Greece and they can't believe what they see, and
they want to come right back. They don't like the lifestyles there.
They know that the life in Greece is good, but they can't get
adjusted to it.
“The girls here are so innocent at home. The parents say,
'What a good girl she is, she doesn't do anything wrong.' In
Greece, girls and boys go out when they're younger. They have
more experience. Here girls the same age as me don't have any
experience. I don't understand this. There we go out when we
want to, whereas here the parents want to know who you go out
with and where you go. They ask so many questions. They want to
know everything!
"Here if you bring someone home they expect you're
engaged. You don't bring your date home otherwise. No way! The
parents still think like they did when they first came here twenty or
thirty years ago. The Greeks here don't change at all.
"The first time I went out with my cousins, I was shocked! I
couldn't believe it, what they did! When they go out with their
friends they're so outrageous. And they like teasing the men a lot.
They like acting stupid, doing things you don't expect them to do.
How can my cousins be like this? I thought.
"Before Christmas, I took a holiday to Queensland with my
cousins. I didn't want to go, because I knew I wasn't going to
enjoy it. It was their first time away from home and you could
understand how they acted. They wanted to go out every night and
then come back in the morning. Every day, they did that...ah, I
can't do that now! If I go out one night and stay till late in the
morning, I have to sleep the rest of the day.
"My cousins always go to the same places, the same discos,
and I get bored with that. I don't like that at all. So I always work
on Sunday, because at least I have interesting people to talk to.
People always come in here and talk about themselves and I like
hearing what they say. I've also got a job two days a weeks in a
deli. With these two jobs, I'm able to save a lot to take back to
Greece. When the two years are gone and I don't have to worry
about the Greek taxes, I'll go back."
It's the prominent cluster of large gravestones topped with white

stone figures of the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ that catches my
eye. The statues strike me as regal and haughty, then, upon a
moment's reflection, as an anodyne of sorts to the headlong roar
and clang of jammed trams and market garden trucks rolling south
along Plenty Road on their way into the city.
Presently, I find myself following seventy-five or so stoop-
shouldered mourners spreading like a viscous lava flow toward the
cemetery's southern corner, into a disarray of freshly laid cement
slabs, planks, buckets, shovels, piles of dirt and fresh wreaths. The
women are dressed in black, in shapeless print dresses, in lavender
slacks and pink plastic pumps. Few seem concerned with their
figures, or with fashion. Motherly, grand motherly, protective,

indulgent, overbearing are words that come to mind as I grope to
characterize them.
The men are wearing dark suits, open sport shirts, chinos, a
few the grubby clothes of their blue collar trade. The older men
are stocky, balding, jowly, most of all short. These are people from
a childhood land of inferior diets, I think as I move around the
outer edge of the gathering and close in on the hearse. Then
became privy to careworn words of family history.
I strain to understand the Italian, drawing inferences from the
Spanish I know not quite up to the task.
While preparations are being made to unload the casket, my
eyes wander northward through Preston General Cemetery,
toward La Trobe University and the uphill slope of plain gray of
lowly headstones. It's all very unlike the crowded and showy
Italian section that caught my attention and brought me into the
cemetery. What my eyes now pick up is neglect, the dead
obviously long forgotten. There are no flowers, not even those
made of brittle plastic and harsh primary colors. Headstones and
bases are broken. Candy wrappers litter the dirt paths.
The casket is a radiant purple, with brass arms and prominent
lugs. Its modernness, its newness seem contrived, just plain wrong
for what I judge to be the historical experience of the stout
squarish widow in black dress and shawl. A woman--anyone would
conclude--thoroughly peasant, probably born and raised in a
brooding corner of Sicily.
Her head bent low and a handkerchief to her face as she
follows the casket to the grave site, she pauses every couple of
steps to sob. Each pause is longer than the one that preceded,
each sob more pronounced. She trudges onward, as if an eternity
lay between her and the large wreaths and the pulleys, and that
ominous forever hole in the ground.
The priest sprinkles holy water and reads in Italian from a
prayer book. The widow, now kneeling next to the coffin, begins
to wail and wave, and slap the lid panel. I feel something inevitable
about her wailing and waving; then that I've stayed too long, my
intrusion perhaps unwelcome.
I walk away with the widow's wailing ringing in my ears,
imagining her saying, Take me with you, my life is over too!
I begin wandering the constricting dirt paths. I stop to examine
dates and names; conclusions come easy. This had once been a
burial ground for those of Anglo-Saxon roots, those with
surnames like John and Humphrey and Clayton and Shaw. But it's
fast becoming a final home to the likes of Zagari, Speziale,
Cauicchiolo, Appamo, Ghidella. It's easy to conclude that an
earlier tide of immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland had
thought that a stone slab and a spartan marker were perfectly
adequate for those on their way to an eternal kingdom. And then
found it no less easy to conclude that after some meager number
of years, visits with flowers and a spade for weeds and a bucket for
litter are meaningless, so why bother.
What a contrast with these Italians with their extravagance
toward their loved ones in death! Small oval pictures on the
headstones, almost timeless in their half smiles. Tiny locks
comically adorn the glass doors imbedded in the headstones,
ostensibly to safeguard a statue of the Virgin Mary or the Christ, a
cluster of plastic flowers. Paired graves heighten the sense that Old
World Italians have inherited a special and profound sense of
community, family, marriage. Beside many graves, the adjoining
plot has been prepared to receive the still living spouse, right down
to carved inscriptions of date of birth and a colored photograph
encased in glass.
None of this for my parents, I think as I leave the cemetery.
Catholics though they are in spirit and practice, they have long
insisted on being cremated. They have done so out of principle, a
protest at the ridiculous cost of an American burial. "Why support
a business that never knows recession and feasts on shattered
emotions?" my father once remarked.
After the mourners leave the cemetery, I walk across Plenty
Road to buy newspapers and get lost in mundane temporal
concerns. But the images of what I've just seen lingers. Handing
the blond, blue-eyed woman at the newsstand counter a two-dollar
bill, I point through the open door and say, "Do you know of any
other cemeteries in the city that seem to cater so to Italians?"
She shakes her head. "Everyone comments on this one. It was
not like this twenty years ago. Then it was very different. I
remember because my mother and father would go out for a walk
and stop at the cemetery to see my dead auntie. Now I hear that
the Italians have bought some land over there." She points to a
grove of trees not far south of where the burial had taken place,
beyond the fence that now defines one border of the cemetery.
"They are going to build mausoleums or grottos for their dead.
Some of them will be two or three squares big, more than six feet
high."
"I didn't know there were so many Italians in the area."
"There aren't. But you know how the Italian Mafia is in
America? It is a little like that here. They stay together, and they
get what they can for their own." She pauses and looks at me
suspiciously. Then, intimating that what she's about to tell me is
only rumor, she says that all new graves dug in the Preston
General Cemetery are for Italians, because a powerful Italian
funeral director on the city council had been allocated a
disproportionate share of the remaining land in the cemetery.
“And he will naturally use it for Italians," she whispers.
"But for those from the local area, I assume?"
"Not at all. The Preston General Cemetery is in the City of
Kingsbury. Most of the Italians buried over there are from Coburg
and Northcote and Fairfield."
Italians came to Melbourne because it had a well-deserved
reputation as the country's premier manufacturing center, and in
the post-war expansion in Australia unskilled laborers were in
strong demand. Later many worked their way into law firms and
the building trades. They bought supermarkets, clothing stores,
funeral parlors.
Melbourne received a disproportionate share of the Italians

who immigrated to Australia, and today the city has about twice as
many as Sydney. The greatest boom for Italian immigration was in
the l950s and l960s. Despite having lived in Melbourne for a
quarter of a century or more, Italians, in general, are much more
geographically concentrated than the city's other foreign born
immigrants. They have gathered together in several contiguous
municipalities north and west of the city--Footscray, Essendon,
Brunswick, Coburg, Northcote, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond,
and Carlton. Carlton or "Little Italy", has come to epitomize this
larger concentrated implantation, what some describe as Australia's
"Italian Crescent."
Even these catchphrases, however, do not do justice to the
shared sense of local history and culture that these Italians brought
to the antipodes and sought to preserve through propinquity. The
great majority came from northern Italy, from the Seven
Communes of Asiago in Vicenza, or from Viggiano and the Upper
Agri Basin in southern Italy. By the early 1960s the Italian
Crescent contained 50,000 Italians, two-thirds of all those in the
metropolitan area, one fifth of all of those born abroad and now
calling Australia home.
Hard work, prosperity, a generation of Italians born in
Melbourne, and now mounting numbers of deaths in the
immigrant community, have mutated the personality of many of
Melbourne's Italian strongholds. Carlton, once a rundown low-
class neighborhood, is now the first choice among upscale yuppies
in search of a peachy inner-city address. To these young, well-
educated people origins and family histories are irrelevant. Their
values lie in refined categories of understated conspicuous
consumption, proximity to the city, ownership of classy two-storey
Victorian terrace houses built during Melbourne's nineteenth-
century boom period. On a casual walk through Carlton, the eyes
are drawn to polished brass name plates, refurbished iron lace,
stripped antique front doors, freshly painted exteriors, manicured
gardens, and new cars. On trendy Lygon Street, where fortyish
yuppies and young lovers from Melbourne University go on Friday

and Saturday night to be seen eating Italian food, one in four
businesses is a place to eat; in other inner-city suburbs the figure is
about one in ten.
The pace of change in the Italian Crescent has quickened
since the mid l970s. Since then a growing number of immigrant
families have found enough money to spend their remaining years
in a new brick bungalow in a distant northern suburb. Those who
have remained behind and refused to sell at enormous profit,
putting community ahead of newness or closeness to job, lament
the loss of the corner milk bar, the newsstands, the cozy clothing
stores, the intangibles--money they could once borrow at the
grocer down the block to buy petrol across the road.
I return to my car and read the headlines in The Australian
and The Age. I turn pages in The Age--more on crime, fatal road
accidents, anomie the world over. My thoughts return to the first
generation Italians whom I'd briefly joined in their moment of
grief. I feel a twinge of regret, and loss. I wish that I too was of the
first generation, not the fourth; and that I'd been brought up in a
family and a community abundantly rich in tradition.
He's short and portly, bearded, with old eyes and thinning hair. As
soon as he realizes that I'm an American, he says, "You should
visit Sydney. It's alive. It's got lots of people who take chances. In
Melbourne everyone stays inside. It's the weather that makes them
like this. Not long after we got here I felt like I was at the edge of
the world. I've never changed my mind and I've been here sixteen
years now."
I'd enter his store out of curiosity, because of the paintings of
Australian landscapes and gum trees on glass that I'd seen in the
window. The semi-abstract paintings in amber and turtle green and
pale yellow have a warm, liquid flow about them. Some of them
are as large as wall panels.
I ask him if they're his own creations. He nods, and then I ask
about the process of making them.
He provides a brief explanation, then says, "I don't have a

name for them. They're just paintings on glass. They could be put
in frames, used to cover bathroom or bedroom walls, or for
wherever your imagination goes."
"Do they sell well?"
"Hardly at all. People around here aren't open to new things.
It's not at all like Sydney. If I was there, I would be doing a big
business in these glass paintings. There's no interest in them in
Melbourne. People are satisfied with those." He points to several
oil landscape paintings in cheap wide frames. He snickers.
I think I know why. The paintings bring to mind Archie
Bunker, model homes in blue-collar suburbs, K-Mart and red tags
marked ON SALE.
He goes on. "I can paint them in two hours with my eyes
closed. I don't like doing them, but I have to. They keep me in
business."
"Why not return to Sydney?"
"I would, but my wife's from Melbourne. She has her family
here. But I'll return one day, I have to. Nothing happens in this
city."
Melbourne has some l50 red-light cameras, and thought most of

the metropolitan area's camera boxes are empty at any one time, if
you're unlucky enough to be caught on camera going through a
red-light the fine is $135.
A recent newspaper articles highlights a new survey showing
that the number of rear-end collisions goes up by thirty percent
where red-light cameras are advertised. But the survey also claims
that the number of "right angle accidents" falls by about the same
percentage at these intersections.
Fear, well-founded or not, works wonders.
While I feel uncomfortable with facile comparisons between cities

that are as large and diverse as Melbourne and Sydney, I
nevertheless collect them. Here are a few that I have come across:
That Melbourne encapsulates the late nineteenth century,

while Sydney does the same for the late twentieth century.
That Melbourne is more intellectually aggressive and solid,
while Sydney is more Californian (which, I gather, means relaxed,
health and sports conscious, not as serious).
That Melbourne has an inferiority complex, while Sydney is
self-confident.
That Melbourne is parochial, while Sydney is cosmopolitan.
That Melbourne, whatever it is or is not, is not as "Australian"
as Sydney.
That Melbourne is best described as a mix of Boston and
Edinburgh, while Sydney is more English.
That Melbourne in the nineteenth century was brash and
exciting and self-confident, while Sydney was, in all respects, much
less so.
That Melbourne may "think" its got culture, but Australian
culture is definitely centered in Sydney, and the proof is that this is
where film studios and television schooling is found, its where you
find the opera, and the Australia Council, and the headquarters for
most of the media empires.
That Melbourne has the class that Sydney only thinks it has;
for its got the country's most exclusive club--the Melbourne Club,
and its got the richest suburb--Toorak; and its got the most
prestigious private schools--Melbourne Grammar and Geelong
Grammar.
On a large billboard on busy Hoddle Street in Collingwood there

was an advertisement for Greg Pearce, the anchor of Melbourne's
Channel Seven evening news. The ad proclaimed: "All You Need
to Know." The graffitist had amended this to read:
ALL THEY WANT TO TELL US
Increasingly fascinated with Melbourne's ethnic diversity, half-

convinced that the city's future lay less in its Anglo-Saxon past
than in the dreams and hopes of its southern and eastern

European immigrants, I think I've found the perfect theater show
to take in: "Wogs Out of Work." It's playing at the Athenaeum
Theater on Collins Street, a Mormon-wide thoroughfare long a key
venue in the cultural heart of the city. Yes, wog--Aussie lingo that's
often used to refer to anyone of European descent. To some,
"wog" is a putdown, an ethnic slur, every bit as much as "dago" or
"spic" or "Mick." Yet for many, wog is an endearing term
connoting friendship.
The audience doesn't leave too much doubt as to why it's
come. For release, to laugh at itself. At the frustrations and tears
shed over fighting with parents who are parochial, old-fashioned,
don't understand; at the anger and pain of being different,
unwelcome, wanting to be liked and accepted, mostly desirous of
being truly Australian.
The trio of comedic actors seems perfectly attuned to the
prejudices that create the divide between first and second
generations. They're equally adept at mocking and parodying cruel
innuendos, commonplace teenage jibes about penis size and sexual
prowess, xenophobic preoccupations that are exchanged daily
between the city's Greeks and Turks, Italians and Anglo-
Australians, all Caucasians and Vietnamese, the latest, the most
conspicuous, the least acculturated of Melbourne's immigrants.
One scene, set at a beach, involves a Mediterranean youth in
wet suit who wants nothing quite so much as sexual bliss in the
arms of a blond, light-skinned beauty who prefigures in his wildest
dreams a girl with a name like Susie or Diane. Will a blond wig do
the trick? he asks. It seems to work, but then, oh my God, what do
I do now that she's asked my name--my name, after all, is Spiro!
In another skit, a matronly woman from Greece explains to
her Spanish coworker that she changed factory shifts to
complement her husband's work schedule, so that two children
wouldn't be left alone either day or night. The audience responds
with knowing laughter when it's revealed that the "children" are 22
and 24 years old. Later the same woman confides that she'd been
rustling through her daughter's dresser and discovered that she has
a drug habit, and it concerns her greatly. The evidence for the
addiction: a package of pills with each day's dose clearly labeled.
Another scene goes something like this. Angelo, still living
with mom and dad at twenty-two, is treated like a child of twelve.
Daily mum follows him around with a broom, reminds him not to
mess up the doilies that adorn the overstuffed furniture, constantly
asks him how he likes his job with the "big salary," when he's
going to return home to Calabria to open a business. What'choo
thinka that university degree for, Angelo?
Several of the jokes fly past me, and as "Wogs Out of Work"
slips into slapstick and pathos and loses the bite of its early scenes,
my attention wanes. I momentarily close my eyes and think that
what Wogs offers outsiders are poignant reminders of the strains
and tensions endemic to a multi-cultural society. Of how difficult
it is to be numbered among the second generation. Or, no less, the
first: of having to watch the disintegration of a cherished culture in
the person of one's children.
I've been reading Anthony Trollope's Australia. Trollope visited

Melbourne in l873. He had this to say about the city's down-and-
outers.
"One cannot walk about Melbourne without being struck by
all that has been done for the welfare of the people generally.
There is no squalor to be seen--though there are quarters of the
town in which the people no doubt are squalid. In every great
congregation of men there will be a residuum of poverty and filth,
let humanity do what she will to prevent it. In Melbourne there is
an Irish quarter, and there is a Chinese quarter, as to both of
which I was told that the visitor who visited them aright might see
much of the worst side of life. But he who would see such misery
in Melbourne must search for it especially. It will not meet his eye
by chance as it does in London, in Paris, and now also in New
York. The time will come no doubt when it will do so also in
Melbourne, but at present the city, in all the pride of youthful
power, looks as though she were boasting to herself hourly that

she is not as are other cities."
Trollope in mind, I go looking for the city's bums, its
homeless people. But it's not easy finding them, and I begin to
wonder: Where are the saggy-eyed bag ladies of New York's
Lower East Side? The leftovers and broken ones I'd seen some
months before in Sydney's Kings Cross? How will I ever forget
the one with purple carbuncles on his bulbous nose, black rubber
bands weaving in and out of cheap rings, bloating his weathered
fingers. Or the toothless one wearing a wool hat the color of sewer
water who was sprawled out on the Kings Cross walkway to the
train, his raincoat polka dots of grease and grime. Not least the
emaciated one slouched in the recessed doorway, snoring,
seemingly oblivious to the cold, the wild honking and hustling, the
laughing derision. Does Melbourne hide its down-and-outers so
well? Or is Kings Cross merely that seedy, the favored home for
Australia's lost souls? Is Australia that bountiful, that
magnanimous to those near the edge of thoroughgoing physical
and emotional debasement?
The statistics that I've been hearing on the radio lately belie
such a generous assessment. It's claimed that every night between
300 and 400 Melbournians between the ages of fourteen and
twenty-five are without shelter. They sleep in parks, condemned
buildings, in garbage bins, on the street. Housing in general is
scarce; more than 100,000 people in the city have difficulty finding
places to rent in the private market, and a person can wait several
years to get into public housing units.
One in five Australian children lives below the poverty line.
Twenty-five percent of Australians own sixty percent of the
country's wealth; the comparable figure for the United States is
sixty-eight percent. But then...perhaps it's just that Australians
don't let their downtrodden sink as low as we do? Or, with the
evident exception of their aborigines, do they?
On a large brick wall on the Nepean Highway in Chelsea, I could

almost hear the cry for help when I saw this:
THAT IS INCEST DAD!
I've been walking for over two hours on the fringes of

Melbourne's central business district. Now I'm just beyond those
splendidly redone Victorian Oldfleet Buildings woefully hemmed
in by steel and glass modernity.
I turn south onto Spencer Street and stroll past an adult book
store, a cluttered newsstand, an empty parking lot of sea birds
puffed up against the wind. On the corner of Flinders and Spencer
my eyes fall on the rates at the Hotham: $l7/day; $60/week. What
are the rates at the Menzies at Rialto that I'd just passed on Collins
Street, a mere two blocks away: $l50 a day?
I back up to appraise the Hotham. A painted sign proclaims:
Bigger than Normal Rooms; A Very Friendly Atmosphere.
Three young girls in high heel pumps and tight black leotards,
all of them with bottle blond hair, flagrantly swagger past me.
They have no bags, only one purse among them. Are they ladies of
the night here to rent rooms for business?
The thought barely has a chance to coagulate when the three
girls barge through the front door. The one in a striped black and
Day-Glo orange sweater and princess blue suede shoes sighs, flicks
a cigarette into the air, and exclaims, "Bloody hell! What we gonna
do for a room?"
"Try another one up the street," a companion says.
To my right another sleek train from the Flinders Street
Station rumbles around on the high overhead track, heading along
the Upfield or the Broadmeadows or the St. Albans line, into the
proletarian suburbs.
I walk around the corner onto Flinders, looking for derelicts
and drifters, the plight I fear for all ageing people, sometimes
myself. I want to find a flop cheaper than the Hotham, one that's
eight dollars a night, colonized by cockroaches and bedbugs,
guaranteed to have adjoining walls so thin you can pick up every

heartbeat, every last retching cough of your dying neighbor. But I
find no bums, a mere handful of broken beer bottles, no hotels
that I know will satisfy my darkest expectations.
I look up, to the south face of the Hotham. There I see comic
pugilistic renditions of Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson,
Cassius Clay. They're painted red and yellow. I stare at Cassius
Clay, remember his catchy street poetry, his cheetah-quick mouth,
how he'd predict the exact round of a knockout. He was, after all,
"The Greatest Ever." But now it's another day--many years later--
and he's been Muhammad Ali for longer than I can recall. Now he
can barely speak; he's had his brains beaten out.
I start down Flinders Street. In the shadow of the Hotham a
wedge-shaped mural on the concrete support of the overpass begs
for attention. It's a big city street scene of the l950s. It's meant, it
seems, to be a fragmentary mirror image of the buildings along the
sidewalk I'm traipsing: a pub, a tattoo shop, baggy old Holdens,
middle-aged women in quaint hats, wharves and water and sailors,
everything splashed in jaunty colors.
I return to the Hotham, push through the leaden doors. I'm
expecting bad smells, bruised and broken couches.
The expectation goes wanting. On the wall behind the
reception desk hangs a large Australian flag and a gaudy velour
painting of a sailboat in high waves. To one side of the desk
there's a prospering potted rubber plant, and seated beside it a
sunny looking part-aboriginal woman. She's wearing a flowery
dress--roses and begonias. She's smiling, a broad and big smile of
contentment.
A fat balding man at the reception desk has an ear pinned to a
radio.
"Have you got a room?" I say.
He turns to the aboriginal woman and says, "Almost won the
quinella!" He shakes his head and rolls his eyes and then turns to
me and says, "Only have singles." He points to a sign behind him.
"There are the rates. A bed, a dresser, a place to put your clothes.
That's all you'll find in the room."
"Can I see one?"
He comes up with a key, gives it to me as he drops his head
onto the radio and turns it up. He motions to his right. "Third
floor."
It's about like he says. It's clean, I don't see any cockroaches,
and if bedbugs call the room home I'll have to stay the night to
find out whether they're German, American, or some hybrid
Aussie species. There are no smells of disinfectant, or urine, or
puke. Nothing like I'm accustomed to finding in well known
down-at-heels places back home. The desk manager had only
forgotten to tell me that I'd have a hell of time reading after
sundown. There's a single low wattage bulb dangling from the high
ceiling.
I go over to the window and tug at a curtain and stare at
another train screeching and swaying and curling around the
trussed bend. I wonder if I could sleep with the constant pounding
and screaming of the mammoth machines regularly passing by in
the night.
I shut off the light and leave the room and cross the hall to
snoop. I find a bathroom, large and clean, very clean, in fact--not a
single insulting smell to force an easy judgment.
I walk down a hall and come upon a spacious kitchen. There
are two four-burner stoves, a large metal sink, a long stainless steel
table, washing machines in a smaller adjoining room. Clean,
spotless, immaculate. No matter that everything's been around for
thirty years, or more.
I drop down a floor and follow a dimly lit hallway and ease
my way into a long uncluttered television room. A dozen or so
leather chairs hug one wall. Above the chairs are conspicuous
signs that warn that no alcohol is permitted in the lounge.
Three men, one middle-aged and two younger ones, raise
their heads and size me up. I'm no one to worry about, so they
return their bloodshot and teary eyes to the stuttering color TV.
The men strike me as surprisingly ordinary, bums only in my

mind--then only because of the room prices posted downstairs,
what my history tells me must be the case.
I return the key and thank the manager and say that the
room's not quite what I'm looking for. I start up the street, but get
no farther than the corner's edge of the hotel when a bony square-
jawed man wearing a lavender beret and baggy pants thrusts an
imitation leather watch band in a plastic case at me. The price tag
inside the broken case reads: $l5.95.
"No thanks," I say.
"Give me seven dollars for it," he says. "I need the money to
get to my sister's. I lost my pension card and can't get my half fare
on the train." He scratches the back of his neck, then the three- or
four-day growth of gray whiskers that unevenly cover his heavily
lined face.
I shake my head and look down at his feet, then at a brown
plastic gym bag with clothes sticking out.
He persists, so I show him my watch, tell him that I have no
need for another watch band. He shakes his head and mumbles
something, then a familiar obscenity. He steps around me, and
before my feet begin to move me up the street he's trying the same
routine on a suit-and-tie sort headed for the front door of the
Hotham.
I stop for a sandwich and cup of coffee and then head west
on Flinders Street, among stone-faced businessmen, harried
shoppers, trendy teenagers, geriatric tourists. Six blocks from the
Hotham two blue-clad policemen are escorting the man in the
lavender beret toward a police van. I stop and throw one of them
a puzzled look and say, "What's he done?"
"He's one of our local drunks."
"What'll you do with him?"
"We'll take him to the Magistrate's Court over on Russell
Street. Probably release him after three or four hours."
"He has a home, someplace to go?"
"If not, we'll take him to one of the city's hostels and get him
a room."
"Where are these homes for the City's homeless?"
"Try Flemington Road. St. Vincent Dapple."
The Oznam House, St. Vincent Dapple on Flemington Road, is

easily missed. The homeless souls are also easily missed, because
the Exhume House is hidden from the outside world by high brick
walls.
Strolling along the pathways of the flower-filled courtyard, the
men strike me much as homeless men everywhere have struck me:
listless, broken, distracted, full of memories that shouldn't be
remembered, suffering from alcoholism, a killing disease in the
mind. Dressed in worn and dirty clothes and bill caps, the men
slouch or lay on cement benches. They smoke, they talk to
themselves, to a tree, a wall, the clouds behind the visible clouds.
I sit beside a muscular man in a open short-sleeve shirt and
spotted slacks and shoes without shoelaces. He has no socks. His
face is the color of a red marking pen, there are deep black lines
beneath his poached-egg eyes. His hirsute chest is a carpet of gray,
more ample than what remains on top of his head.
He begins talking incoherently, swaying from one side of my
face to another, as if trying to decide who or what I might be. The
words are thick as day-old gruel, they tumble out jumbled. I catch
sentence fragments.
I begin to pick up his story. He claims he has no idea how he
found himself in Melbourne, or why he left his home in
Queensland, or why he had no job and no money, or whether or
not he'll be able to get a bed for the night.
"And do you have a cigarette, mate?"
I shake my head and he tells me why he loves Australia but
wants to be buried beside his mother in his homeland. He says
he's Macedonian, and that he came to Australia thirty-three years
ago, at the age of twenty-nine. His life has been reduced to a single
compelling desire, that of returning to his place of birth. But
fulfilling this desire isn't going to be easy. "I got no money, mate.
Last night I slept in the park. I had to share a blanket with another
bloke."
He asks again for a cigarette, that little piece of satisfaction
that will make this day bright and sunny, almost complete.
"I don't smoke, " I say.
He shrugs his shoulders, tugs at a patch of gray hair on his
chest. I'm of no use to him, it's obvious. He slowly rises, a man of
eighty-two not sixty-two to judge by the grunts and groans, the
motions. He crawls away. Upright but crawling.
A boomerang, I think, thinking no other word would quite
capture the image.
I soon find myself in a auditorium-like room littered with
cigarette butts, squashed Styrofoam coffee cups, betting ticket
stubs. Three raggedly men are sprawled out the floor, curled up,
mouths agape, snoring. What comes natural.
I look across the room, to another pitiable soul, who's shaking
violently, as if suffering from hypothermia. More likely it's the
d.t.s, perhaps withdrawal.
My feet are glued to a spot just inside the entrance, near a
large aluminum coffee maker. I search for something to do, to
briefly turn my mind away from all these depressing corpses. I
look up at a sign above the coffee machine and read it once, twice,
three times.
"Leave the past to the mercy of God, the present to his love, the future to
his providence." --St. Augustine.
I remember why I left the Catholic Church. The idea of

leaving anything to the providence of God puts me in a bad mood.
I return to the courtyard. Near the rear I take some steps that
lead down to another large room that forms an L. Here and there I
see a couple of ping-pong tables, a score of plastic molded chairs.
Two men are listlessly swinging at the white ball, shadows in slow
motion. Most of the rest of the breathing bodies are humped over
their edge of a table, playing Patience, Solitaire, blowing smoke

rings, staring at their thickly veined noses.
I don't know why but I think these men are more settled, like
this room's a home within a home, the only home they now know.
Like maybe they've already passed through the real nut house
upstairs and spent their obligatory time asleep on the floor. Maybe
long ago they said goodbye to all those out there beyond the high
red brick walls that they'd never come to terms with. The best
thing they ever did.
Some of these men have combed their hair, I notice. Some
have shaved this very morning, I also notice. I might find them
anywhere and think them no different than me.
I wander down Smith Street, the geographical divide between

Collingwood to the east and Fitzroy to the west. It's a street of
coffee shops and places to buy health foods, macro pizzas, Madras
tops. With hundreds of retail business, Smith Street is an
unpatterned mix of Greek and Vietnamese shops, and others that
are neither and hard to label. Once thick with Italians and Greeks,
the Vietnamese moved into the area five years ago. Change,
transition, flux are common themes in the history of Collingwood
and Fitzroy.
In the nineteenth century, Collingwood along with Richmond
to the southeast specialized in noxious industries: tanneries, soap
and candle works, slaughter yards, the night-soil trade, breweries
and brickworks. To encourage entrepreneurs to come to these
communities along the Yarra River, businesses of all sorts were
allowed to use the slowly flowing waters as a sewer. Richmond,
with a large pool of poor working class people who found the area
attractive because of cheap rent, became known as the Manchester
of the South. The Yarra was considered its shipping canal. The
river was also used as a kind of collective bathtub, since into the
1860s private bathrooms and bathtubs were a rarity in Melbourne.
Bathrooms only became common in houses built after 1880.
Fitzroy at this time had a different story to advertise. It prided

itself in the number of gentlemen who had money and were
among societies best citizens, bragging points that when added to
distance from the polluted Yarra made them feel superior to the
"flatties" who lived in Collingwood. Many then thought that
Fitzroy would long be home to everyone that mattered. But about
the best it was able to do in this regard was produce Australia's
second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin.
By the 1870s, Fitzroy's image had declined; it became known
for its murderers and thugs. A hundred years later the image and
the reality has worsened considerably. Fitzroy was now inhabited
by all manner of criminals, including the best safe-crackers to be
found anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. It was also notable
for its "moveable brothels"--young women who plied their trade
in vans along the worst maintained streets in the whole city.
Criminal activity was heavily concentrated in the area around
Gertrude and Brunswick streets. Here there was some forty clubs,
famous for their strip shows, for young and old criminals alike,
and for down-and-out and take-what-comes loose women who
had no need or desire for vans to do their business. Yearly arrest
figures for this area alone ran into the thousands. Not surprisingly,
Fitzroy was also a slum, and because of low-cost housing it
became a magnet for recent immigrants who were so poor and so
eager to save money that they shared beds in shifts. And yet for all
of Fitzroy's notoriety, it was a geopolitical miniature within the
larger urban landscape. It was just over 900 acres in extent, giving
it the distinctions of being the smallest of Melbourne's twenty-
eight municipalities, and with more than 30,000 people, the most
densely populated suburb in the entire country.
I step into the Spiral Book Store and quickly discover that I'm
surrounded by rows of paperbacks on feminism, lesbianism,
metaphysics. I leaf through this one and that one before I'm
approached by a short round-faced butch woman in a loose
flowery blouse and matching skirt that covers her shoes. She asks
if she can help me with something, recognizes my American

accent. Soon we're chatting about this store she owns.
Rachel turns to what she sees as one of the "big" issues in
Australia at the moment--choice of lifestyle. "Being whatever you
want to be," she says, "is what's important today." Concretely,
single when at another time every would say you should be
married. Or married and without kids and heading toward forty.
Or being lesbian or gay or transsexual, if that's what you want to
be.
"Do I want coffee?" she says, the conversation picking up
steam..
We amble down the street and find an outdoor coffee house,
and before the coffee comes Rachel turns to who she is. She
informs me that in the Melbourne that she knows no one cares
about women loving women, showing affection in public, having
lesbian relationships. It's just no big deal, she says. "But it isn't that
way with gay men. There's been a long and intense hatred of them
in Melbourne and it's not changing. It's all very primitive."
The lesbian community is doing well, very well, Rachel says.
It's got a "very strong community network," exactly what she and
many of her like-minded friends need. The lesbian community is
Rachel's whole life, or most of it anyway.
Now we’re talking about men, and what Rachel describes as
"your average Australian male." Average or not--and talk of
average anything always makes me uneasy, Rachel's not charitable
toward the "average Australian male." When I press her a little bit
for her reasons, she can't think of a single reason why she should
be charitable. "They're just plain hopeless," she says. They can't
cry, and they won't get emotionally involved with women." But if
I'm to believe that the average Australian male is hopeless, Rachel
lets me know that they're really okay blokes compared to first-
generation Greek and Italian men. "They're beyond hope," she
cries, loud enough to bring the waiter to ask if we want something
else.
I had called Michael, a friend from way back, to make

arrangements to go to a football game between Carlton and
Fitzroy. We agreed on a time and place to meet. Before we got off
the phone, he said, "Do you want to see the epitome of Australian
life?" His voice was loud, an odd mix of good cheer and toneless
depression.
"Sure," I responded.
"Then go down to Elgin and Lygon Street in Carlton and
look at the guard in front of the ANZ Bank. He's sitting down!"
As I left the telephone booth, I recalled an incident that
occurred in early August of l986. A Picasso painting had been
stolen from the city's National Gallery of Victoria and the
directors, wishing to tighten security, ordered the guards to spend
less time sitting down and more time patrolling the premises. They
threatened to remove the chairs. The guards promptly went on
strike and the gallery had to be closed to the public.
Michael doesn't have what one would call an unbiased eye, yet
he can surely be described as sympathetic toward Australians.
Born in England, the winner of a First at Oxford, he earned an
advanced degree at the Australian National University in Canberra,
worked in the capital for a while, then, eager to discover the limits
to his talents, he moved to North America. There he worked for
the next fourteen years, rising to the top of his profession. By his
early forties, he had few peers anywhere in the world. Then,
because his second wife is an Australian by birth, because he has
children by a previous marriage living in Canberra, and because of
his considerable affection for Australia and Australians--he and his
wife returned to live in Melbourne. They both got well-paid, high
visibility jobs in their professions, they started a new family, and
they bought a charming two-story Victorian house in Carlton.
Over the years, after Michael left Australia in the early 1970s,
he made frequent trips to Australia. On a couple of them he spent
several months in the country. Thus, when he and his second wife
gave up their enviable positions in North America to return to
Australia, where, it was once envisioned, they would spend the rest
of their lives, there was little for which the two of them were not
prepared. And now after two years, and far from the epicenter of
all that had given both of them high social and intellectual status in
an international community of like-minded people, they have no
regrets. That they need to made some adjustments to maintain
professional contacts in North America, they will both readily
admit. "But it is only a matter of being strategic, figuring out how
to do it," Michael now says.
Michael can't be easily situated anywhere near that category of
individuals that native-born Australians derisively refer to as "the
whingeing Pom." And yet, give Michael a couple of drinks and
before long he'll bemoan the fact that those in his profession
working in Australia are ten to fifteen years behind the times. Most
are, he says, "brain dead." They're not willing to work hard, they
lack the competitive edge, they're satisfied with being second-best.
They prefer sitting to standing or running. And yet, by a
circuitously clouded road, Michael will admit that the very things
he despises in his colleagues have a lot to do with why he and his
wife returned to Melbourne. In a word, people in Melbourne are
human, he says; The city is a humane city. These are differences
that matter greatly to him.
They're differences that have a way of smacking a native-born
American in the face. In how many First World cities, I've asked
myself, will people consistently hold open a door to a public
telephone booth after exiting? Or extend the courtesy of allowing
you to make a call midway through the three or four they've got
on their list? Or take time to explain the history of the product
you're buying in a central city department store, just because you
asked? Or speak with civility when you ask for directions, and then
walk with you for a block or more when you hint that you're lost?
A brief visit we recently made to Sydney reinforced the often-
voiced generalization that that city is more aggressive, less friendly,
more North American in style and tempo than "sleepy, dour"
Melbourne. Ockerism, that uniquely Australian word that seems to
be used both to describe an uncultivated self-satisfied oaf as well
as a laid-back state of mind, may not be nearly as apt for

Sydneyites as for Melbournians, speaking generally.
Generalizations are always dangerous, of course, but after
spending six months in the Northern Territory and another two
more on a farm in northern Victoria before coming to Melbourne,
I do know that ockerism does seem to be the closest thing to a
national Australian characteristic, as valid as any typification can
be. At least it's valid, I'd venture, in its more benign form, that of
admitting to a certain lack of drive, of not being willing to go full
throttle. It is this sense of pause and contemplation in an everyday
quotidian life that Melbourne comes across as a truly gentle city, a
fine place indeed to live.
Prior to coming to Melbourne, I'd spent nine months in the

immense dry center of the continent. Part of the time I'd worked
closely with the Conservation Commission of the Northern
Territory on the issue of controlling brumbies or feral horses that
ran free on sprawling cattle stations and did considerable damage
to native flora and fauna. Now, memories of that experience still
fresh in mind, I'm eager to hear about the priorities of the
Australian Conservation Federation-or, at any rate, the Melbourne
version.
After I've revealed my involvement with the wild horse issue
to the youngish middle-aged director, my curiosity about the ACF
position on this and other matters is well received. I learn that like
me and the majority of ecologists in the outback, the AFC, though
eager to avoid any kind of divisive confrontation with animal
rights groups, supports shooting feral horses as a way to control
their explosive numbers. This said, however, the AFC wants the
shooting to occur from fixed or stable platforms rather than
moving helicopters as is often the practice. Killing them humanely
is the issue.
I learn that the city's AFC members recognize that while
degradation of the country's arid lands--some two-thirds of this
continent the size of the continental United States--is recognized
as the most important issue, the organization’s principal workload

is elsewhere. The main reason is that contributions are targeted for
issues closer to home. Melbournians like other Australians are
more focused on coastal and wetland problems. But here as
elsewhere in conservation issues, the AFC is usually dealing with
symptoms rather than larger systemic causes. On the one hand it's
got a lot to do with the failure of the country's environmental
groups to organize nationally, and, on the other hand, I'm told, a
general apathy among Australians about conservation. The AFC
has a total membership of about 14,000, whereas, it's claimed, a
comparable organization in New Zealand has about 50,000
members, a country with a much smaller population.
What about conservation issues in Melbourne, I wonder out
loud.
There are, I learn, several on the AFC agenda: air pollution,
the disposal of chemical wastes, electro-magnetic radiation, and
what to do about a number of "bushland" areas along the Yarra
River that have received far too many insecticides. The air
pollution issue is particularly vexing because so high a percentage
of the Australian population is urban. Air pollution first became a
major local concern in the 1970s; by the 1980s it was on the
national agenda. In the array of Australian urban places,
Melbourne is the country's fourth worst city in air pollution. At
present, almost nothing is being done to improve the situation.
The issues of the future? Perhaps biotechnology and its
impact on the environment. But exactly what this all means is
anyone's guess. The need, I'm told, is to anticipate.
As I leave the AFC office and return to the bustling
consumer-defined thoroughfare where I'm parked, I sense that
once again it's the familiar Sisyphean predicament: a step forward
on one pressing environmental front only to lose a full step or
more on another one that's equally urgent; and the continual day-
to-day hustle for money from the membership and the public,
without which there can be no copy machines and flashy of-the-
moment fliers and funds for office rent and salaries for those
willing to fight the environmental wars in the midst of an apathetic

public.
On national television it was announced that more than a million

flowers had been sold in Melbourne on the weekend of Mother's
Day. It wasn't hard to believe. Everywhere in the city, it seemed,
the major roads and highways were chockablock with vendors
selling chrysanthemums, carnations, roses. The roads were equally
aglitter with cars, all of them full of loving sons and daughters--it
was easy to imagine--on their way to a visit to celebrate their
mothers. If not at her or their home, then, just as reverently, at the
cemetery. Passing by a couple of them around midday, I thought I
was looking at large and festive lawn parties in which, to gain
entry, everyone had been required to bring a bouquet of flowers.
This afternoon, returning to Melbourne from lunch with
friends, we were driving through the rolling hills of Diamond
Creek. On a rise above one of the hills, I saw a restaurant that
resembled a whimsical fortress and, curiosity always beckoning, I
stopped. After several hard bangs on the huge wooden door, I was
greeted by a stringy kid with Quaalude eyes. He mumbled that
they were closed. He mumbled this just as I asked to see the menu.
Another beleaguered-looking, red-eye with his shirttails
hanging out appeared and said that he was the manager and yes,
he'd show me a menu and the dining area too if I was interested.
He explained that he and his staff had just finished with a six-
course meal for eighty people. "The only day of the year as busy as
Mother's Day is Christmas," he said, laboriously.
All his tired words didn't really register until we passed into
the gigantic dining hall with thirty-foot wooden beamed ceilings
and I saw what I took to be the rest of his staff. There were seven
young and middle-aged men and women sitting off to one side,
slouching, hanging onto or over the dark tables and chairs. Two of
them looked positively dead. Three or four others were headed for
the same fate.
I began to feel like I'd just barged into a bedroom full of

sleep-deprived primates who had been forced out of bed and now
had every possible reason imaginable to take offense at my
unwelcome curiosity. And in another minute or two they surely
would take vocal offense.
I made a fast exit. I left thinking: what a job, and not one that
a one of their mother's will appreciate this day.
I drive west on Blyth Street in East Brunswick, my intended

destination that of the Melbourne Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable
Market. Suddenly my eyes are drawn to two competing signs on an
old red brick church with matching baby blue wooden doors
defaced with graffiti. One black sign with gold lettering reads,
"Blyth Street Uniting Church." The other one, higher and to the
left, proclaims in Italian, "Independent Pentecostal Italian
Church." Well, which is it? I wonder as I drive on.
I'm two blocks from the churchly confusion when I brake
and swing into a careless U-turn. I park near the rear of the
unprepossessing Victorian building and begin searching for a
clergyman's residence. Finding nothing more than a wooden door
in need of paint that looks like its been closed for years, I head for
the front of the church. Halfway there, a gray block on the long
sidewall of weathered deep red bricks catches my attention. The
inscription notes that the first stone was laid in l888. Not far away
is another sign, this one giving the hours of service for the
Pentecostals. Sundays and Thursday nights, in Italian; Tuesday
nights are for bible reading classes, in English.
I start back for the car when a shambling woman passing on
the sidewalk stops and throws me a puzzled look. I momentarily
stare and she says, "Are you Casi?" Her accent's as thick as week-
old pea soup.
"You've got me confused with someone else," I say.
"You know he looks like you, I thought you was him." Her
voice is insistent. She moves closer, as if trying to get beneath my
bush hat, behind my yellow sunglasses. She’s wearing a thick open
purple knit sweater and carrying a plastic shopping bag full of

groceries. Her hands remind me of old tissue paper. They're
generously leavened with liver spots.
Thinking that she might be from the neighborhood, I say,
"Do you know anything about the people who attend this
church?"
"Oh no! Any church is good with me. With you too?"
"I'm not a church goer."
She ignores the remark and says, "When I go to church, if I
pray I pray. I don't care what kind of church it is. It doesn't matter
what name they put on it, yeah?"
I learn that she was born in Berlin, but has lived in Australia
since l950. I ask her if she likes Melbourne.
She moves her pallid face in close to mine and puckers her
lips, like two half open fans meeting along their spreading edges.
She shakes her head and whispers, a secret about to be revealed.
She says, "Do you want to know the truth? I'll tell you the truth, I
don't like lying. I never did like Australia. I stay because my
husband wants to stay." She throws back her head and laughs,
then smiles with her frog-like eyes through pinkish plastic frame
glasses.
"No, I don't like the life here," she continues. "Everybody
greets you like a stranger. The Australians stay with the
Australians, the Greeks with the Greeks, the Italians with the
Italians. Yeah? Everybody is for themselves, even in the shops. In
Germany the people really make you welcome. Here you open the
door and they look at you through their fly wire. In Germany you
open the door and invite people in or you go out and talk with
them. Yeah?"
"You and your husband are both from Germany?"
"My husband is from Poland. I left after the war. Germany is
full of good people, you know. Almost everybody was good there.
They were fighting for their country. I worked in the Volkswagen
city during the war. I was young then, only fifteen. Then when the
bombs came down on Wolfsburg, I had to go to Czechoslovakia.
When the war finished, I walked from Czechoslovakia to

Germany. I walked five weeks to get home."
I tell her that I have Polish ancestry, that one of my
grandparents was born in Poznan.
"My husband is from Poznan. He's seventy-five now. He
loves it here. He loves to bet the horses and the trots and the dogs.
Anything he bets. He likes the football, soccer, everything." She
laughs heartily.
"We left because my husband was a prisoner of war in
Germany. I met him after the war, then when we married he didn't
want to stay. He didn't have much opportunity there. But my
father said...he was an anti-fascist, he never was in the war. My
father could have got my husband a good job, but my husband
was too proud. But I don't know why we come here. We could
have gone to America. He already had his papers from...what do
you call it? The immigration? Then if we wanted, we could go to
Luxembourg to work on a farm. But I said, 'I wouldn't like the
work on a farm.' We could also go to England. But my husband,
he doesn't want to go to England. So we come on the ship to
Australia. On a British ship. It used to be an airplane carrier.
"We came out like slaves, you know. They put the boys in one
side and the girls on the other side. Then when we arrived in New
South Wales, they put the men in one block and us in another
block and we just didn't know where our husbands were. And in
the morning, a big search was on, everybody looking for their
husband or their wife. Oh, my God! It was something!
"So before we got to the employment office, these people tell
us, 'You take the first job they offer and you get out of the camp
that way.' So that's what we did. I was a cook in the camp kitchen.
I cooked for 250 children and twenty-five sisters and nurses. And
my husband, in the camp he was in charge of the swimming pool.
A real good job he had. We had a contract for two years. But we
stayed after that. My husband wanted to stay. Nearly three years
we stayed in New South Wales. We should have stayed five years
or six years to make money and then go back to Germany. But he

wanted to stay."
"Why did you come to Melbourne?"
"The contract was over and we had some friends in
Melbourne and they asked us to come live with them. We lived
with them for two weeks and then I found a job working in a
nylon stocking factory. But I didn't like it. My husband, he worked
for the Victorian Railroad. He done all the fluorescent lights in
every station around Victoria! He knows every station there is
everywhere." She reaches in her purse and takes out her wallet and
proudly displays the pass that gives her and her husband special
rates on the Victorian Railroad.
"My husband, he's retired now. We are pensioners. But I
would still go back home. Oh yes! I been over there one time on
holiday. In l968, for four months. They were the best months of
my life! I come back, but I hated it. I didn't want to come back. I
told my mother and she said, 'Why didn't you stay and write him a
letter and tell him to come back?' He wouldn't do that." She
lowers her voice and squeezes the plastic bag.
"No, you better off in America. More life there. Here there's
no life. Sundays people cut the lawns and wash the car. And then
they might go to a picnic. The men are in the pub all day long on
Saturday, yeah? And on Sunday they are looking at the football all
the time. I don't know, I don't like it here.
"All my friends have died. All my husband's friends too.
There is only one left and he is in Sacred Heart Hospital. He is
already sick for one year. He is dead here." She points to the left
side of her head. "He had a hemorrhage. A very nice man, he is.
He lies there and sometimes he knows you, sometimes he doesn't.
His eyes look very funny. Sometimes I think he knows his name,
but he can't answer nothing. Oh well! Terrible, you know?"
I nod, then say, "Your husband has other friends? Polish
friends?"
"He has two, but we don't communicate with them. They are
alcoholics and they don't know how to celebrate. They have to
drink too much to enjoy themself. Then they act stupid. We

Germans, we drink, we dance, we have good food, yeah? We
know how to drink, have a good time."
But tell me about your husband. About Poznan. "Does your
husband remember--"
"I can't stand it without good music, and when my husband
goes out to the TAB, I play the German music like crazy! Ah... My
husband, he is worse than alcoholics, you know. TAB, that is
gambling. He loves it, he's possessed! He's absolutely...when they
run, the horses or the dogs or the trots, he wouldn't know how to
sleep, he wouldn't know how to think, he wouldn't know if
anybody was there. He's completely gone into a trance then. Oh,
my God. My husband, he loves Australia!"
She said she had to go home. I asked her name.
"Mrs. Weskoviak," she said. She smiled warmly, like we were
old friends who shared a deep secret. "Now I look at you and I
know you're not Casi. You look like him. But he is a bit older, you
are a bit younger, yeah?"
I parked and went for a stroll on the eighteen-hole course in Kew.

Soon I found myself drawn to the abundant bird life: willy wagtails
browsing on the ground, crested pigeons dancing to their own
tune, two pairs of chirping red-rumped parrots, strutting magpies
the size of small chickens. Then, just as I came upon a small clump
of gums, a squadron of sparrows alighted in the trees and
disappeared within the leafy tangle. With each approaching step,
the sparrows fled in twos and threes.
On the walk back to the car, I stopped and struck up a
conversation with a caretaker trimming the roadway grass. I said
that I'd seen several species of birds, and I asked about others. He
mentioned several that I hadn't seen.
"You haven't mentioned sparrows," I said. "I saw one good-
sized flock near the practice fairway. Are they uncommon here?"
He scoffed. "Those! We have them here too."
So he too among others I'd met in the city disliked the

foreigner, the invader, the profligate breeder, the "junk bird."
Several days earlier I had been talking to two professional
biologists. They clearly love birds; indeed, in a manner of speaking,
birds are their life. And yet at the mention of a sparrow, they too
scoffed. They told me that when they find a sparrow's nest, they
destroy the nest and kill the young. When they mist net their
native study birds in the field and find a sparrow in their delicate
black mesh, they don't hesitate to wring its neck. This may not
please anyone who loves animals or holds sacred all life, but the
biologists claim that sparrows are aggressive colonizers, and slowly
but inevitably they are taking over the habitats of native Australian
birds. Nor are these professional biologists the first Melbournians
to destroy sparrows. For a long time Melbourne zoo keepers
trapped sparrows along with doves and used them as food for
snakes and other small carnivorous animals.
Sparrows were introduced into Melbourne in the early l880s
by Frederick Row, an Englishman who was nostalgic for the
charms and memories of his native land. Row was a rich
Melbourne wool broker who had built a home on l,000 acres in
the foothills of the nearby Dandenong Mountains in l882. Not to
be deterred by the fact that the first wagon load of sparrows from
England perished soon after arrival, Row imported a fresh
consignment of the birds as soon as he could. This time they
survived and soon began multiplying at an astonishing rate. They
quickly advanced into the habitat of one of the Dandenong's most
charming native birds, the melodious, ornately-feathered and
showy lyrebird.
Sheila: A girl or woman. Not derogatory, although no woman

would refer to herself as a "sheila." From Patrick White (the
Australian Nobel Prize Winner): In Four Plays: "We used to lie and
talk about what we was goin' ter eat. An' the sheilas we was goin'
ter do." (A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, 1985)
*
It's a good half hour before the doors will open and already they're
an anxious-looking lot. Shuffling about between the bar entrance
and lounge couches, looking at their watches, nervously lighting
cigarettes, folding and refolding the expensive tickets. Jockeying
for position to be the first through the door. Repeatedly asking the
ticket seller: "When's the bloody sheila show going to start?"
Five past eight and the scraggly bearded bouncer and ticket
taker in shorts and thongs at the door says, "Okay, easy at it, don't
step on your mate's face getting to a table."
They're off and running: nudging, shoving, eager to get the
table right in front of the stage.
"Get the chair looking at the stage," someone says. "You get
the sheila at your back, you might've better stayed home and
watched Mother and Son on the telly.
Someone else shouts, "Hey, mate, make it two green cans.
Don't want to run dry just when she's down on the floor and it's
getting good."
A tall lanky guy in a Hawaiian sport shirt on my left says, "She
can come right up to the table, she wants. Put it all in my lap."
His friend turns to me and says, "Where you from, anyway?"
"The U.S."
"Damn Yank!" He grins, grabs his beer. "People here's from
everywhere. Bet we got all Australia here with us tonight. You ever
hear of Warrnambool? Out west of Melbourne. Nice quiet sheep
country out there. That's where I'm from. Hey, I got a friend in
Los Angeles. You know...?"
The compère prances onto the stage. He's wearing a red
bandana and black silky tights. He's got a hairy chest full of Jesus
medals, a yellow mop that's puffed and curled in front. He picks
up the mike and says that one of the "leg girls" can't find her
bottoms or Act One top or props or something like that.
"Where'd you get up that bloody rag on top of your head?"
someone shouts.
"Just trying to make a quid, matey," he purrs, all lips. He

whips the cord of the hand mike into a figure eight and two-steps
through a loop.
All the tables now occupied, a balcony above just about elbow
to elbow, latecomers squeezing one another for the best standing
room only view between the bar and the tables, someone decides
they'd better take the restless crowd's attention off the late start.
On a large TV screen Mr. T. comes on in the middle of an A-
Team episode. That trick not working, someone turns up the
volume on some Beatles preening and mixes it up with Donald
Duck cartoons.
Five long minutes pass. The guzzling crowd gets antsy. "Hey,
ratbag," someone yells at the compère, "give us the bloody
sheilas!"
Lots of cackles and laughter. The minutes drag on. Then
suddenly Donald Duck and two of the Beatles die in mid-
sentence.
"...annnd hereee she is! Sabina from Yugoslavia!" the compère
screams into the mike.
Blond, tall, buxom, in pink and white pussycat boots, black
silk stockings, and a silk nightie with silver sequins, Sabina rides
the rhythm of the strobe lights and pounding music to the glare of
250 steadfast eyes.
Sabina is no forever-and-two-song tease on the way to letting
go of the G-string. Her top is off before the chorus is finished, her
patch strap quickly follows, and before anyone can down his
second or third beer Sabina's opened her legs and is bending low
for an feigned grind. A pair of hands from a lip-licking, long-
haired kid beckons Sabina to come closer. Just a wee bit closer, he
begs with his eyes.
Sabina throws him a kittenish smile as she shakes and shuffles
toward him. Inches from his outstretched hands, she blows him a
two-bob kiss and leaves him to his fantasies.
Looking for a new round of cheers, Sabina turns her back,
straightens up, spreads her legs, then slowly bends over and gives
front row gawkers all they came for. Act one of round one over,
Sabina picks up her clothes and boots and scurries for the curtains.
"More, more!"
"Hold it tight, matey," the compère says, jumping up onto the
stage. He waddles to and fro. "Everybody ready for our luscious
little Queen of Virgins, Samantha?" To the tune of Madonna,
coming on Like a Virgin.
Hardly a response.
"Come on guys! Get those hands together for our lovely little
Samantha!"
The Queen of Virgins cheerily, boldly struts forth. She's
plump and round all over. Not exactly sweet sixteen, but then not
a streetwise King's Cross twenty-five-year-old hooker either.
Inside her skimpy bridal veil Samantha is beaming, teasing,
cutting a self-mocking smile.
"Samantha, oh Samantha, give us more, Samantha!" a tenor
croons.
Samantha tips, she poses, she wiggles, she thrusts and she
struts. She spreads her arms and closes her eyes, and then her head
disappears between her firm taut legs. Now, popping up like a
clown sprung from a box, she kicks her high-heel pumps behind
her. She reaches behind and drops the G-string.
Pleased with herself, Samantha swings around and approaches
a leering Fu Manchu. She stoops and shifts to allow for a furtive
peek.
He peeks, a long peek.
"Enough there, guy!"
She grabs his beer, raises it above her head, then slowly pours
it into the well of her neck, all over her high stacked breasts. Her
taut skin sparkles.
"Oooh!"
"Aaah!"
"Everyone put your bloody hands on the table so we can see
what you're doing!" the compère barks.
Before the compère gets the laugh he's after, a tall comely
brunette in cowgirl getup comes on stage and begins throwing her
hips about, jumping back and forth to something by Huey
Newton and the News.
"Our own Randy Rachel for all you raunchy maybe ringers!"
While Randy Rachel struggles to get out of the chaps and
cowboy boots, a drunk with a handful of beer cans in his hand
shouts into my ear, “Excuse me, mate."
Randy Rachel excites almost no one. She leaves on a fast
gallop.
Now it's time for a satiny nightie and fishnet stockings.
"The deliciously exotic Talia from Melanesia by way of
Tahiti."
"My blood hell that abo is!" someone shouts.
Talia ignores the denigrating remark that implies she's a
downtrodden aborigine. She gives a tantalizing, rip-roaring
performance. The best of the night. She gets her rightful share of
cheers and hand clapping.
More sheila shows. Repeat performances. More of the same.
Then the finale. Six strippers climb in and out of a bathtub
full of water. Then they come together and hug and kiss and jump
into lusty lesbian sex.
The Australian national census does not recognize Macedonians as

a legitimate ethnic category alongside Germans, Poles and Italians.
It does not recognize them because Macedonia is not a sovereign
nation. Therefore in looking at an atlas depicting the distribution
of ethnic groups in Melbourne, one will find Greeks and
Yugoslavians, but not Macedonians. Yet in the suburbs north of
the inner city, there are thousands of people who think of
themselves first as Macedonians, only secondly as Yugoslavians or
Greeks. They speak to their spouses and close friends in
Macedonian, they pass on Macedonian customs to their children,
and yet, to the unsuspecting--Melbournian or other--there is no
such people living in the city.
"Real Macedonians have last names like Polish people," Milan

Lozankoski from Yugoslavian Macedonia said to me while
standing near the bar at his New Europe Restaurant in Preston.
"The Greek Macedonians have last names like Papasoulis and
Matopoulos. They forced to change all their names from real
Macedonian. They don't like the Greeks, but they under the
Greeks back home. All the streets and cities that had Macedonian
names long time ago, they got Greek names now.
"I got lots of Macedonian friends from Greece here," he went
on. "Their dialect is a little different, but I speak to them in
Macedonian. We get along good, but one thing very different.
They donta let us have big contact together, because they not used
to have freedom. They don't have it over there, they can't say they
are Macedonians in Greece. They think they are Macedonians
when they come here, but they are scared. I say to them, 'Why not
change your name to Macedonian? What it supposed to be, like
real Macedonians. You now free here in Australia. You don't care
about what you was over there.' I say, 'You want to go back?' 'No,
I never want to go back,' they say. 'Then why not change your
name to Macedonian?' I say. 'I gotta my cousin, my uncle, my
auntie over there. I change my name, they squeeze them. That end
of them, so I no change my name.'
"Do you know any Greek Macedonians in Melbourne who
have changed their name back to the original spelling?" I asked.
He shook his head several times. "I don't know none in
Melbourne." He shook his head again, then said, "In Yugoslavia,
somebody make a mistake, nobody care. The Macedonian people
from Yugoslavia, they are the people who have the freedom." He
smiled, his gold teeth gleamed. He turned around and gave his
cook instructions, told him to hurry up with the order of chevapa
and grilled paprika salad.
Here are some things I learned one morning while wandering

around Melbourne's Wholesale Fish Market. In the last decade, the
amount sold in the market in a given month has increased more
than two fold, from a little over 400,000 kilograms to more than
950,000. Since this dramatic jump can't possibly be attributed to
population increase, it suggests that Melbournians, among the
biggest meat eaters in the world on a per capita basis and with one
of the higher rates of premature heart attack in the Western world,
are discovering the virtues of fish in their diet. More than ninety
percent of those who deal in the wholesale buying and selling of
fish are men; one has to look hard to find women in the fresh fish
section of the market, and when found they look more masculine
than feminine, like seasoned bread winners. The men are
unfailingly of Greek extraction, and it's a good bet that a high
proportion of them are first-generation Australian. Walk around
the market anytime between five and seven o'clock in the morning
on a Tuesday or Thursday when business is booming and you'll
have a hard time picking up more than a few words if you don't
speak Greek. If you can't distinguish Greek from Italian or
Rumanian, but know something about the sanitary habits of
traditional Greek men, then you can make a pretty good guess
who's mulling about in rubber boots and aprons. There are a
couple of prominent signs in the market that read: NO
SPITTING ALLOWED.
Greek though the fish market may be through and through,
many of the fishermen who supply the market and sell their fish
through one of the large commission agents at the market are
Italian. But they fish as Greek wholesale merchants tell them to. If
the market is glutted in a particular fish, then they're commanded
to "lay off" and bring in something else.
I asked one of the fish market officials why these groups
dominate the flow of food.
He said, "Because when they leave their home country, they're
told to get into food. Eating is like dying, everyone does it."
Orange roughy is the latest fish to catch the imagination of
both fishermen and distributors. Although New Zealand has been
exporting the ugly, and yes--genuinely orange, deep-water forager
for some years now, Australia only discovered the potential of the
roughy for the domestic and overseas market in the last year or so.
It has proved to be an expensive fish, partly because of the deep-
sea fishing equipment required, and partly because of the high
percentage of wastage, sixty percent or more. But the orange
roughy has a lot going for it. Other than what might be claimed
for its smooth bland taste, large fillets can be cut from the fish.
This allows for good presentation, a one-piece meal on the plate.
Furthermore, orange roughy fillets have no bones, which makes
them ideal for fastidious mothers worried about unwary children.
The hundreds of fish and chip shops that mottle Melbourne
like measles primarily use gummy shark for their deep-fried fillets.
On menu boards, shark is called flake. Thus flake, or gummy
shark, is one of the largest items of trade in the wholesale fish
market. There shark is brought out in large plastic bins weighing
on average thirty kilograms. Already beheaded and gutted
(necessary to avoid poisoning of the meat), when the bins are
turned upside down and the eight or ten leg-length carcasses are
spread out for examination before auctioning begins, the fish
commands a good price. So good, in fact, that from time to time,
the bidding heats up to the point where buyers, angry at one
another for pushing the price beyond what they consider
reasonable, shout and cuss and throw punches, even occasionally
take out their always handy knives. Many of the fish and chip shop
owners come to the market to buy sharks whole. They do so
because they can get one or two additional fillets from each one
they cut themselves. When they buy fillets already cut, they not
only pay more, but also wind up with pieces hard to fry or sell.
Finally, I can't forget the European carp, that golden, slimy,
all-eyes lunker that, as one buyer whispered in my ear during the
auction, "tastes exactly like mud." They're abundant in Victoria's
rivers, and they're deemed such a undesirable breeder that there's a
thousand dollar fine if they're not immediately killed upon being
caught. The day I visited the market, carp were the last fish to be
auctioned. It fetched one tenth the price of shark.
*
At an Sunday afternoon dinner party in an upper middle class
section of Elwood, I overhead the following conversation between
a seventh-generation American female raised in the Deep South
and a third-generation Australian male of Yugoslavian descent
from western New South Wales. Both have university degrees,
both have good jobs, and both are sensitive to racial issues and
social injustices. The Australian, who was hosting the dinner party,
had his six-year-old daughter sitting on his lap. She was coloring
and singing, "Ennie meenie minie mo, catch a nigger by the toe..."
"No, Shana! Say, 'Catch a...catch a boy by the toe." He turned
to the woman and said, "What do you say?"
"Catch a tiger by the toe."
"I like that. Shana! Say, 'Catch a tiger by the toe."
"Eenie Meenie Minie Mo, catch a nigger by the toe." She
giggled, shook her head and laughed, then sang the refrain one
more time.
Melbourne has four main racetracks: Flemington, Moonee Valley,

Sandown, and Caulfield. The most well known is the Flemington
Racetrack where the famous Melbourne Cup is held. The race is
notable not just for the festive dress and the heavy drinking and
betting, but also for its memorable history. The important piece of
it is writ large in the Old Melbourne Hotel on Flemington Road,
and perhaps in several other bars throughout the city. In the Old
Melbourne Hotel, while drinking a Malibu Surfboard, you can gaze
at a large board that lists all of the Melbourne Cup winners going
back to 1861: horses with unforgettable names like Comedy King
(1910), Peter Pan (1934), Russia (1946), Hi-Jinx (1960), Rain Lover
(1968 and 1969), What a Nuisance (1985). But this most famous
of Down-under races is also known for the fact that the Victoria
Racing Club tries to insure that when the yearly event takes place
the entire mile or so of continuous rosebushes at the track is all in
bloom.
I'm not much of a betting man or one with an interest in race

horses, but one Saturday morning I decide to spend the afternoon
at the Caulfield Track. It's a day when there will be eight races, and
another thirty-two elsewhere in the country that will shown on TV
monitors. I figure that if nothing else the experience will open a
small window in my mind on why Melbourne is acclaimed as the
racing capital of Australia, one that must be more than idle
boasting, to judge by the hundreds of betting agencies around the
city that cover metropolitan, county and interstate races for horses
and dogs.
It's raining when I arrive, and it's raining for the couple of
hours I stay, and so--like everyone else--I stay inside and drink and
eat Four 'n Twenty pies with gobs of tomato sauce and stuff
myself with Churchill's Victor Ovens baked potatoes, all the while
standing up because there's so many people around I can't find a
stool on which to sit. And, besides, standing and then walking
around proves to be too much fun.
My eyes wander to the men in tuxedos holding tight to
"stubbies" and doing their forms. My eyes and thoughts get stuck
on middle-aged made-up wives and those who are gorgeous
singles-on-the make in red pumps and white patterned hose and
purple wool dresses, queuing up at betting windows to place a
"punt" on a quadrella. Out of the Club Reserve saunter and glide
men in thousand dollar suits and bland ties and thinning gray hair,
the women alongside them wearing dish hats of every imaginable
shape and size and color. I shamelessly tally those in black whom I
identify as widows, no doubt spending inherited fortunes, nary a
thought of the husbands they recently buried.
The rain continues, and it pours, and at one point when I find
myself sitting on my haunches in front of a eskie full of beer, I get
treated to another take on Melbourne.
"Mate," he begins, "the weather here is awful. Look at it
raining again today, how cold it is now. People hate this rain so
much they leave Melbourne, and then before long they come back.
I don't know what it is. People go to Queensland and it's too hot
there. The people there aren't friendly. You can always find
someone to talk to in Melbourne, and I don't even try. Sydney is
cosmopolitan, more than Melbourne. But I don't like it there.
People in New South Wales call us Mexicans, because we're south
of the border."
I finish my beer and amble on, listening to the names of
winners and losers--names like Midnight Fever and Glory Girl.
And then I head for the mad jostling crowd mulling around the
bookies and their big black chalk boards. I'm looking for a winner,
not the loser who said, as he walked away from one bookie,
already with too much alcohol working on his brain, "I think I'm
doomed to spend the rest of the day at the bar."
Wet to the bone and about to leave, I find myself rubbing
shoulders with a skinny pock-faced Chinese kid, maybe all of
twenty. He's wearing a ratty gray sweatshirt, blue running shorts,
tired Nikes. Nonchalantly, as if this were a regular event, he's
collecting $7,500 in small and large bills, all of them coming out of
large white suitcases at the feet of the bookie. The kid won on
Lord Reims, a 40 to 1 shot, said the Racing Form. He may have
simply been lucky. But then maybe he's one of those famous
Chinese punters I'd been hearing so much about, and he knew
something too elusive for the minds of the ten "experts" in the
Australian Racing Form who picked Lord Reims to neither win
nor place. After all, they'd been rational; Lord Reims had placed
no higher than tenth in three previous races.
It was nine-thirty on a Saturday night and the only hint of life on

Plenty Road in Preston came from the half dozen or so Chinese
restaurants that shone like medieval inns along the mist-shrouded
shop-littered road. Even these, however, appeared empty, open
more out of habit than reason, willing to see profit in a single
couple. We stopped at the first hotel we came to, the Gowerville.
If one were to judge it by its size and busy corner location, then
we should have soon found ourselves amid a boisterous crowd.
The parking lot out back was full, and as we hurried through the
rain around the corner to a side entrance two fetching teenage girls
huddled inside their jean jacket collars beamed at us. But just
inside the doors, it became apparent that whatever we'd missed
out on earlier in the evening, now we'd be lucky to get a drink.
Tables had been pushed to the wall, steel chairs with black
upholstery were stacked one on another, and a young man with a
gold cross dangling from his right ear and a towel draped over his
shoulder was sweeping up cigarette butts and potato chip bags.
What remained of business was clustered around two pool tables:
seven more or less scruffy men in need of some new blue jeans,
three women in skin-tight pants. One woman, tall and pathetically
anorexic, was swaggering about with a cue stick under her arm, a
cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, Bogart-style. And
then there were three children.
As we sipped our wine, sitting to one side of the pool tables,
it was the children who captured our imaginations. A girl of maybe
nine or ten was wearing a blue bathrobe and furry slippers. Golden
brown hair covered her forehead; her longish hair was pulled
behind and tied with a rubber band. She strolled freely among the
tables, she hugged a male waist, she stole the blue chalk and
giggled, she collected beer blotters and then returned them to the
tables she had taken them from. Then, seemingly bored, she
dropped to her knees and crawled beneath a pool table to tease an
even younger barefoot boy in pajamas who was sucking on the
end of a cue stick. The bottom of his elfin feet were black, his toes
curled like a hand gripping a lifeline rope. Not far away was a third
child in faded brown pajamas. He was sitting cross-legged at his
mother's feet. Again and again, he stacked beer glass on beer glass,
bottom on bottom, then unstacked them. He smiled and laughed
to himself, tugged at his mother's too-tight pants. His mother,
ignoring his pleas, was sipping on an ale beer, playfully arguing
whether she'd just lost two or five dollars in the last pool game.
I went up to the bar to get our glasses refilled. I remarked to
the bartender that one very rarely sees children in bars in the U.S.,
that it’s not permitted. He shrugged his shoulders and asked if I
had any children. I told him I did. He took my money and

shrugged his shoulders again and walked away. I understood the
context of the question, but I couldn't help remembering how
many times in Melbourne I'd been asked this question about
having children. In bars, on the street, while buying a shirt or
paying a restaurant bill, at parties. The urgency of the question
often seemed as important as that of knowing my name and
occupation, or my impressions of Australia and Australians. Was
all this nosiness about children a way of marking me as a family
man rather than a loner on the prowl, perhaps someone not to
trusted? Or was it a statement of values, one seemingly of lesser
importance in the U.S.?
She was short and stooped, wearing dark support hose and clunky
shoes, an unfashionable black and red wool coat buttoned almost
to the top of the neck, a cheap scarf to which was pinned a yellow
and green glass-studded butterfly, a malt-colored ski cap that
covered her forehead and was pulled tight over her ears. A long
shock of gray hair stuck out on one side of her face and gave it a
lopsided look, one that at a brief glance appeared to have taken on
all the ugliness that comes with neglect and old age. She had puffy
wrinkled cheeks that sagged below the chin like old worn curtains,
a strong black mustache, and a row of six yellowish bent teeth in
her lower jaw--all that she had left--that resembled a crumbling
fence. I noticed all of this during the hour or so that Doris held
me rapt, so enthralled me that by the time she got up from the
table to run off to a lecture in biochemistry I had concluded that
she'd probably be the most interesting student, if not person, I'd
meet in Melbourne.
Our meeting came about like this. I was in the cafeteria in the
student union at the University of Melbourne. I'd just bought a
bottle of grapefruit juice and a bowl of rice with vegetables and
was about to bury myself in a new novel that I'd just bought when
Doris asked if she could sit across from me. She seemed anxious,
almost beside herself, about joining a table of cackling twenty-
year-old students. I said yes, and pushed a tray and some dishes to
one side. Before she'd even put down her sandwich and large
coffee, she mentioned a prize by name. "A friend of mine won it,"
she said. "Have you heard of it?"
I said I hadn't. Then I added that I was trying to learn a little
about Melbourne.
Her eyes lit up and her hands came up, and that was just
about the last thing I said or the last time I took my eyes off her.
For the better part of an hour she gave me an absorbing lecture on
anti-communism, why we must value freedom in the West, how
the Russians and Germans divided up Poland and sent people like
herself and her husband (Polish Jews) either to the ovens or the
gulags, what it was like living in Siberia in the forties, how she and
her husband managed to come to Australia, and more.
I wander south along Acland in St. Kilda, stopping for a long

pause at Cosmos to browse among a great offering of paperback
books. Presently, I continue on, until I come Carlisle Street, and
before long find myself at the St. Kilda Town Hall and the center
of Jewish Melbourne. I pass bearded Orthodox Jews with black
coats and large black hats. They talk among themselves in Russian,
Polish, Yiddish. Yiddish most of all, I surmise. Some are going or
coming from the Balaclava Fish Supply, a dozen or more carp
attractively displayed in the front window. Here and in other
nearby shops they can buy European Jewish delicacies: blintzes,
gefilte fish, latke. And, of course, plenty of kosher food. Carlisle
Street, I'll soon discover, is home to four or five kosher butcher
shops, half of all those in Melbourne.
Within a radius of five miles or so where I walk along Carlisle
Street, some seventy percent of the city's Jews live: Russians,
Germans, Austrians, Poles. The visible imprint of the Jewish
community is everywhere. It’s impossible to miss: synagogues,
special flats for the elderly, yeshiva, Jewish day schools. Eighty
percent of Jewish children attend Jewish primary schools.
Since 1947, Melbourne has been home to somewhat more

than half of the country's Jews; a very significant portion of the
rest live in Sydney. By one unofficial estimate Melbourne has
about 35,000 Jews out of an official total of around 60,000. The
real figure for Australia may be as high as 80,000 to100,000,
however, since many of those who escaped the Holocaust have
preferred to keep their past hidden. Melbourne's Jews constitute
one of the city's longest standing minority communities. The first
ones arrived in Australia in 1788 on the very first fleet; there were
fourteen of them among the ship's 751 convicts. It was another 48
years before another group of Jews of any size came to
Melbourne. They were from Great Britain. Those who emigrated
after 1850 were primarily from Austria and Germany Few came
from eastern Europe prior to 1920.
Initially, Melbourne's Jews clustered close to the shops in
Elizabeth, Bourke and Collins Street, and it was on Bourke St., in
1848, that the first synagogue was consecrated. It was known as
the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation. By 1871 St. Kilda had
become a favored home among Melbourne's Jews. Later, and until
the 1920s and early 1930s, Carlton was the geographical center of
Jewish life in the city. The most important and most recent
destination for Jews within greater Melbourne has once again been
St. Kilda. And if not St. Kilda then nearby Prahan to the north,
and Caulfield and Brighton to the south.
Melbourne received about 4,000 German, Austrian, and
Polish-speaking Jews in the late 1930s when Australia opened its
doors to refugees. Many were middle-class, and the Austrian Jews
in particular would play a major role in developing the city’s
symphony. These pre-war years were a time when the city was
known for its "crude provincialism." Then--but not just then--they
faced discrimination in name and fact. They were seen as "reffos,"
because of their distinctive long overcoats, their two-tone shoes,
brief cases which, in the local vernacular, were known as "reffo
bags." When war broke out in Europe, Jewish refugees in
Melbourne were required to report weekly to the police, they
could not own yachts, radios, telephones, and maps, and their
travel was restricted. To many Jews at that time, Melbourne's
principal virtue was its distance from Hitler.
After World War II, Jewish immigrants to Melbourne were
principally Poles and Russians with few children. They were largely
concentration camp survivors with few skills, and upon arrival
they gravitated toward the city's Jewish controlled garment trade.
They settled in St. Kilda because of the cheap, rundown flats.
After 1960 the number of Jews coming to Australia dropped
dramatically. For a while many, particularly doctors, came from
South Africa. But once the demand for physicians no longer
seemed pressing, immigration authorities looked elsewhere to
meet labor needs.
Melbourne had three pubs before its first church as built. The
churches of this era would be headed by preachers who saw
drinking as a social evil and would therefore work to close hotels
cum pubs. And yet these very preachers might well have had their
churches' local origins if not first meetings in such hotels. In truth,
Melbourne's early pubs were multi-functional, serving as venues
for housing council meetings, election rallies, club and reform
movement gatherings.
Like most Australian pubs, from the earliest days of the city
those in Melbourne combined the features of the English inn and
public house, where, on the one hand, food and accommodation
for travelers were provided and, on the other, alcohol was for sale.
Not only was this distinction kept separate in England, but the
Australian pubs--perhaps playing their convict history to the hilt--
were, by comparison with their homeland counterparts, vulgar and
vile environments.
Down to the present, pubs have been among the more
architecturally eye-catching buildings in the city. They're large,
often ornate, and, until insurance companies and banks with all
their money wanted more prominence, they invariably
commanded the best sites--street corners. As indicative of their
status, the earliest art works often appeared in pubs. In the 1840s
the most extensive series of painting available were shown in Port
Melbourne's Marine Hotel.
Pubs were so important to travelers and locals alike that by
the 1880s there might be a dozen of them with a couple of
hundred yard radius. In 1885 the state of Victoria had some 4,300
licensed hotels. In order to accommodate the heavy traffic, many
of them had to install a second bar. Though the second one was
labeled as private, both were freely open to the public.
A dramatic change occurred in 1916 when pubs in Victoria,
South Australia, and New South Wales were ordered to close at six
p.m. This was a law that would remain in effect in Victoria until
1966, and which until then had a couple of generations of
Australians reflexively speaking of the "six-o-clock swill," the last
minute rush for drinks. The Australian author, Donald Horne in
The Next Australian, referred to the ten minutes before closing as
"one of the continuing tests of masculinity."
Motels were introduced to Australia in 1955, ten years after
they began appearing in the United States. They came into
competition with pubs, and for the latter to be able to keep the
business of in-country and foreign tourists buildings were
renovated, bars were carpeted, walls were painted in warm colors,
waiters and waitresses in suitable attire appeared, and it was no
longer necessary to drink standing up. Another change was the
conscious attempt to eliminate the class-conscious nature of bars,
brought about loosening or eliminating the distinction between a
public and a private section and by renaming them: cocktail bar,
snack bar, garden bar. Long gone, and gone forever, were the
"café bars" of a hundred years ago, rather sordid places where
rooms could be rented for men who wanted to be alone with "gay
ladies."
Peter Rawlinson is a biologist at Melbourne's La Trobe University.

He is a member of a federal advisory committee on kangaroos and
is regarded as the Australian Conservation Foundation's expert on
kangaroo management. In the early l980s Peter wrote a sixty-page

letter to the federal government arguing that Australia's
international trade in kangaroo meat and skins should be ended.
The industry, he argued, was poorly controlled, the kangaroos
should be protected just like Australia's other wildlife, and not
nearly enough is known about kangaroo numbers and habits to
allow a million or two to be killed each year.
Australia has millions of red and gray kangaroos, the principal
species killed for meat and skins, and only the most irrational
alarmist could claim that these species are endangered. Other,
lesser known species of kangaroos might be, but not the reds and
grays. As long as kangaroos are killed humanely, many argue, there
is no good reason why red and gray kangaroos cannot be
harvested just as one harvests fish or domesticated animals.
Peter had no tolerance for this argument. He points out how
so-called solutions to environmental issues are often just problems
in a different guise. He tells the story of how a number of years
ago in the Flinders Range of South Australia feral goats were
found to be quite numerous, and there was no doubt that they
were seriously damaging the environment. Elimination through
removal was seen as the only viable solution. A helicopter and a
mustering crew were sent it and thousands of goats were
successfully captured and sent to slaughter houses. Many of the
goats were sold to buyers from countries in the Near East. They
wanted the goats to cross with less hearty breeds, or merely to
increase their herds.
The profits from the effort were so good, however, that
rather than eliminate the goats as initially planned, their numbers
were purposely increased to meet the new demand. Today, Peter
claims, the feral goat problem in the Flinders Range is worse than
ever. The losers have been the range's native flora and fauna.
A related kind of problem has arisen with kangaroo shooting
in Queensland, where the greatest number of Australia's kangaroos
are killed each year. There, because shooters are paid by size and
weight of the animal, and male kangaroos are up to twice as large
as females, eighty percent or so of those shot are male. Were

females larger than males, it might well be that Queensland's
kangaroo populations would be a mere fraction of what they are,
perhaps even endangered. This is because of the simple biological
fact that were there few females then there would be few young to
harvest in future years. As it happens, because so few females are
being shot, the kangaroo population may actually be growing in
some areas of Queensland. Thus the biology of the species and
economic interests have combined to worsen an alleged "kangaroo
problem," not alleviate or eliminate it as intended by federal
legislation, the purpose of which was to allow the shooting of
kangaroos to protect pastoral interests.
As Peter is quick to point out, there's more to the story of the
kangaroo issue and why he's against any harvesting of them. So-
called conservationists profit from the exploitation of kangaroos.
Because they are such an emotional issue with the public, large
sums of money can be raised by animal lovers and liberationists by
continually telling the public that kangaroos are being “inhumanely
killed" or "threatened with extinction." That the facts bear little or
no relationship to reality is beside the point; most people have
neither the time nor the interest to find out the facts, and what
matters to kangaroo advocates is the money received from their
alarmist campaigns. Although they will claim that contributions
received on behalf of protecting kangaroos is used solely to further
the cause of eliminating the kangaroo industry, in fact much of it is
spent to support other environmental issues about which the
public is apathetic and unwilling to back with contributions. Thus
it is often in the interest of conservationists, animal liberationists,
and others working under conservation umbrellas that the
exploitation of a highly visible and loved animal like the kangaroo
continue, despite disclaimers to the contrary.
The day was cool and blustery and the sky was full of billowy blue
clouds. Young and middle-aged couples in wind cheaters, some
with dogs on a leash, strolled arm-in-arm along the wet pathways.
Out in the brownish bay I could see two or three red and yellow
sails, windsurfers braving the choppy waves, the unpredictable
gusts of Port Phillip Bay. Joggers and girls and young women on
bikes in shorts, their legs and cheeks the color of pink sherbet,
weaved around me. I walked on as I had for a half hour or so, and
then suddenly, unaware of his crouched presence, I scraped his
backside with my knee.
"Excuse me," I said.
"Forget it," he said, without moving or looking up. He was
sitting on his haunches, facing the waves. The light spray was
intermittently hitting his face, wetting his richly woven brown
sweater, his dark blue jeans, his scuffed red and white tennis shoes.
"It's a cold day to be getting wet."
"I suppose. But does it matter?" He paused. "I once lived
around here. It's been more than twenty years now since I've been
back. I'm trying to remember, but it all comes back slowly. Or not
at all." His words seemed light and insubstantial, far away. I tried
to recall where I was twenty years ago, wondered how much I
could remember if I put my mind to it.
"Canadian or American?" I said.
"Same as you. Probably from the same part of the country
too."
He got up and wiped the water off his face, combed his hair.
He was tall and lean with a rather angular and long face, high
cheekbones, penetrating green eyes. He had a tailored beard, light
brown hair, a golden mustache and a slightly graying beard
chiseled out on the cheeks. I couldn't be sure of his age, but I
guessed he was in his late thirties or early forties.
"Got some time?" he said.
I said I did.
"Come on, then, I'll show you. I'll show you and tell you what
time does."
We walked north. He insisted on taking the bay side, getting
wet. He said that he couldn't remember whether it was his idea or
his wife's to come to Australia for a year or so before they settled
into careers in business. All he could remember was that one of

them had heard about Australia's assisted passage scheme, in
which the Australian government would pay their fares. Available
to those who intended to settle permanently in Australia.
"It was a lie, unfair what we did. But we badly wanted the
adventure, and who's knows? We might've stayed. Anyway, it
wasn't exactly going to be two people traveling about like hippies.
I had to work to support us and we had a two-year old son at the
time we came. I guess we knew we wouldn't travel much in
Australia. The country would be Melbourne for us.
"We'd both had good jobs in the states, but they seemed
beside the point. I think we imagined getting stuck in middle age
before we'd even seen our own country, much less a piece of the
world. So we just kissed them off and put our possessions in
storage and came. It was marvelous, cutting loose like that!
"There were so many jobs when we arrived, I could've done
almost anything. But I took the easy route and got a job with a
large finance company in the city. You know what I remember
most about that job? Feeling frozen in the legs by mid-morning
because there was no damn heat in the offices. So this is what they
inherited from the Brits! I thought. I'd bet most of the offices
downtown are still unheated.
"Another thing I remember was eating steak and eggs for
breakfast when we worked out of town. I thought it was great. It
kept me going the whole day, and probably kept me from really
freezing to death at my desk. How could I know then that steak
and eggs are one of the all-time great diets for the heart. About as
good as that Aussie original--eggs on pizza. Ugh!" He laughed,
heartily. A memory he'd never forget.
"I also remember the long tea and biscuit breaks in the
morning and the afternoon. How can this country possibly be
competitive? I remember thinking then. In the job I had before
coming, I'd go in early, take coffee at my desk, and worry about
how I was going to account for my time if I got constipated and
spent fifteen minutes in the john. It wasn't just slow here then. It
was so slow I couldn't concentrate.
"Tell you something else. I've come here now and I hear
about Australia's huge national debt and I want to say, I knew it'd
happen. But saying this doesn't convince me. Look at all the
affluence here, much more it seems than what I remember from
twenty years ago. Then the place seemed quaint, out of date,
isolated. This place then struck me as indifferent to the rest of the
world, even though you could find all kinds of examples of
Australia imitating the U.S. I remember my ex thinking the
difference could be neatly summed up in the absence of
supermarkets. She really liked the fresh fruit and vegetable stands.
She thought the little corner milk bars--what a name for corner
grocery stores!--were cute. But where was the efficiency? How
long could Australia...well, I think we were way off the mark.
There's some magical chemistry at work here that still makes you
believe this is, as they say, the Lucky Country. It's amazing how
well it works, given the overbearing unions. Since I've been in
Melbourne this time I get the distinct impression that there still
aren't many people willing to kill themselves for an extra buck.
Not if they're gonna miss a round at the pub or one of the Aussie
rules football games.
"We loved Melbourne for its parks, its sparkling greenery.
Everything always seemed so fresh and alive, like it had just come
up out of the earth or had been freshened up for sale at a nursery.
On the weekends we'd catch a tram along St. Kilda Road and get
off near the Shrine of Remembrance. We'd walk and walk and
then wind up somewhere near the Yarra River where we'd have a
picnic. I wondered then and I wonder now if Melbournians know
how lucky they are to have all these big and nicely maintained
parks. Oh, we've got parks in the states too, but they're always
overrun or full of garbage or derelicts or people and their dogs
chasing after their Frisbees. Few of our city parks are as lush and
full of bird life as what you'll find here. I suppose the British
heritage is responsible for all these parks."
There was a long pause, and I asked "What do you remember

of Melbourne's ethnic groups?"
"Nothing. Almost nothing. Everyone I worked with came
from a British or Irish or Scottish background. All the friends we
had were in one of these categories too."
"Did you and your wife get over into places like Fitzroy? Or
along Sydney Road or Brunswick Street where you find so much
ethnic diversity today?"
"I don't think we knew those places existed. We didn't have a
car...well, we knew there were Italians around, running their
vegetable stands. I might've been more sensitive than that. I can't
remember. Either I didn't see all the foreigners here or I didn't pay
much attention. See, I think we had a pretty simple idea then that
Australia, and especially Melbourne, was just a British colony.
Stuffy, formal, class-riven. Let me give you some examples. The
first night we went to a movie we nearly died laughing when
everyone stood up and they played some silly tune to the Queen.
My ex and I were caught somewhere between the staid
Eisenhower fifties and the irreverent hippie sixties. But there was
no way we could identify with colonial nonsense and the idea of
kings and queens. Paying allegiance to someone who lives in a
castle and now and again puts a lot of diamonds on her head. It's
great to see so many Aussies who now think all this is stuff for
history books.
"Then there was another incident. A beauty, really, and one I
could hardly imagine happening today in Melbourne. We got a
baby sitter one Friday night and got all dressed up and decided to
go to the theater and a nice restaurant in the city. Well, I should
say that while I put on a suit, I wasn't in the mood for wearing a
tie. Anyway, we got to the restaurant and we were told we couldn't
get in the door unless I had a tie on. At that point, I was willing to
call it off. Walk around town all night if necessary until we found a
restaurant that didn't require a tie. My ex, however, wasn't about to
let something like this spoil her evening. She convinced me to put
on a tie that the doorman had for people like me.
"Try to imagine that restaurant incident happening today in

ninety-five, maybe ninety-nine percent, of Melbourne's restaurants!
Just wouldn't happen. This city may be cosmopolitan in its
restaurant offerings--I can't imagine a better range of restaurants
anywhere, especially for the price--but you'd hardly know it from
looking at what's sitting at the table beside you. Melbourne, it
strikes me, has been taken in as much as any Western city by blue
jeans and tennis shoes and casual dress. These are slob times. But
that's okay with me. That's good, that's great--anything that breaks
down the class distinctions that I remember in the Melbourne
when we were here."
We passed a long-haired, muscular, barefoot kid unloading a
power lawn mower from a small trailer behind his car. Jack, the
American who had my rapt attention, squeezed my shoulder and
stopped me. "Watch," he said, "he's probably gonna take out a gas
stove. Five to one says that before we get where we're going, he'll
have taken a break and is sitting on the grass heating up a meat
pie. Then he'll charge the little old lady he's cutting the lawn for his
sitting and eating time. That's the kind of extras that Australian
unions demand and get. It's amazing this country's as competitive
as it is."
A little farther on we stopped to talk to a small redheaded kid
who was sitting on a pile of boulders, fishing. He was wearing a
black visor cap with a yellow label on it that read: CAT. The kid
was shivering. Jack asked him if he'd caught anything. The kid said
no, and wasn't likely to either. "You don't catch nothing when
there's a full moon."
"Then how come you're fishing?" Jack asked.
"Same as you walking, I reckon. I like to."
Jack and I laughed hard. Then Jack said, "You need any bait?"
"I always need bait when I fish."
"You a good capitalist?"
"What'ya mean?"
"You a fair dinkum Aussie?"
"Fair dinkum!"
Jack smiled and pulled on one of his lip whiskers and looked
over at me. Then he told the kid to hold the edges of his palms
together and make a big cup. Jack reached in his pocket and pulled
out a handful of change and poured it in the kid's hands. The kid
said thanks. Jack turned to me and said, "He'll make a good union
man. Let's go. I wanna show you the place I can't even
remember."
We turned east on Cole Street, a long block cluttered with tan
and red brick bungalows, new and expensive cars, brick walls
several feet high that Jack said he couldn't remember. "Or if they
were here then, they were smaller. I vaguely remember the street
being nothing special, not like what it's probably become. The fact
is I don't know if I could have found the street on my own, if you
can believe that. I had to write to my ex and get the street name
and address from her. She said she could still recall them by heart.
That's some memory on her part. Or some real brain damage with
too much drinking!" He laughed. "She had to remind me how
much we paid for the rooms we rented. Seven guineas a week, she
said. This was before Australia changed to the dollar and the
metric system.
"There's only two things that really stand out in my mind
about living on Cole Street. One was this great stack of quart-sized
beer bottles in the backyard. Every one of them was green labeled,
Victoria Bitter. They were stacked just like a chord of wood. I
think in the seven or eight months we lived there the people on
the other side of the house put together another chord of beer
bottles just like it.
"The other thing that comes to mind was wearing a sweater
all the time. I think I wore a sweater more that winter in
Melbourne that I had up to that point in my life. I'd come home
from work cold, and I'd go to bed cold. The friends we made in
Melbourne would laugh at us, like there was something
constitutionally wrong with Americans."
Just before we crossed St. Kilda Street, Jack put his hands in
his pockets and dropped his head and shook it several times. I
gathered something had suddenly come to mind. We walked in

silence into the middle of the next block of Cole Street. Presently
Jack stopped, in front of a brick veneer cream-colored, two-storey
house with dark brown trim. He forced a smile and said, "Here it
is. Here it was, I should say. There was a large red brick bungalow
here, I think. Now, as you can see, if you look down the driveway,
which I don't even remember, there's five detached units. Homes.
They built them the year after we left. Sold them for $20,000 to
$25,000 apiece at that time. Now, I've been told by one of the
owners, each one of them would go for $l25,000, $l50,000. Maybe
more."
We strolled down the driveway and Jack drew my attention to
the Greek portico columns, the high black wrought iron doors, the
two car garages, the rich black stone terracing in the gardens, the
full blooming camellias. He pointed out the house where he
guessed their rooms had been. He smiled to himself and laughed
lightly, then said, "Georgian townhouses, they call them. Georgian
townhouses, and these prices--if only I were able to so inflate my
memory!"
Atop the Savor Plaza Hotel in downtown Melbourne a marquee

announces:
COUNTER MEALS
BISTRO MEALS
UPSTAIRS RESTAURANT
The counter meals are served only in the "public bar." Day or
night, the customers, as in most public bars in Melbourne hotels,
are predominantly men. Most of the time the ratio of men to
women hovers around nine to one, rarely dropping as low as seven
to one. Many of the men come alone.
They're content to sit on a high stool at a short table attached
to the wall and have a beer or two while eating a plate of spaghetti,
fish 'n chips, chicken schnitzel. The public bar has the cheapest,
the least diverse, and the least interesting menu at the Savor Plaza.
At lunch time in the adjoining "Lounge Bar" (or Savor Tavern
Bistro), there are usually as many men as women, and on some
days, or during the afternoon, women may outnumber men.
Frequently the women come to the lounge bar for lunch with
several other women, taking a long table together. Or women
come with husbands, boyfriends, or business associates. There are
no dress codes in the public bar, but in the lounge bar the
following sign warns that not everyone is welcome:
"GENTLEMEN MUST WEAR SLEEVED SHIRTS AND
FOOTWEAR." In the lounge bar, alcoholic drinks cost fifteen to
twenty percent more than in the adjoining public bar or in the
upstairs restaurant. The bartenders in the public bar are always
male; they're a mix of male and female in the lounge bar.
That the environments of the public bar and the lounge bar
are meant to attract different social classes, or sexes, and to cater
to different needs, is obvious. Tables in the public bar are round,
and the chairs--most of them--are made of molded plastic. Tables
in the lounge bar are larger, and there are no stools or narrow
tables jutting out from the walls. The chairs in the lounge bar have
leather cushion seats and backings. The cardboard prints on the
walls in the public bar depict championship Australian, English,
and West Indian cricket teams through the years. Those in the
lounge bar picture vineyards and wineries. The public bar has four
video games, two TVs, several dart boards; in the lounge bar you
can find only a single video game, one TV, and no dart boards.
I'm told that the sharp distinction between the public and
lounge bar in Australian hotels is not as great today as it was two
decades ago when there were unwritten rules that women were not
permitted in public bars. Today such rules are, as far as anyone is
willing to admit, nonexistent. But distinctions die hard, and I've
wondered: What would feminists eager to stamp out social
injustice conclude about current distinctions between public and
lounge bars? That things haven't changed all that much, and public
bars illustrate the fact that sexism remains widespread in

Australian society? Or would they say that the distinction as such
doesn't mean much, because women have a choice? They have
lounge bars to frequent, and if they want to enter public bars and
be subjected to abusive, often sexist language, then that's their
business, their choice. Or might some say that there really is no
choice, that change from two decades ago is superficial? How can
the conclusion be otherwise, they might go on, when the ratio of
men to women in public bars is so skewed? When men in public
bars abuse women with their language? When women are
portrayed as objects for men's pleasure? Or would many feminists
conclude these drinking and gathering patterns aren't even worth
commenting on? That focusing on patterns in public bars is
merely diversionary, that to do so cheapens the significance of
more important issues such as the degrading way in which women
are daily portrayed in newspapers, magazines, and television ads
throughout Australia?
Tens of thousands of Melbournians send their children to private

schools because they believe, with justification I'm told, that they
get a poorer education in public schools. A private school in
Melbourne can cost several thousand dollars a year, a public
school is free. In both public and private schools, students are
required to wear uniforms: blue, brown, green, black. Not long
after we arrived in Melbourne I was struck by how short some of
the skirts are, no less by the uniform-matching stockings that,
when new, reach almost to the knee. But the more I looked at the
effervescent young girls mobbing the streets and trams and trains
when schools let out, the more puzzled I became with their dress.
On most of them the stockings sag, almost to the ankle, in fact. As
if the uniforms weren't unflattering enough, the worn and
gathered stockings made them seem even more so. Odd, I
thought. If parents would spend so much money for tuition, surely
they could come up with another couple of dollars now and then
for new stockings.
But once again my eyes proved to be a poor measure of what

I was seeing--or rather the meaning behind the picture in my head.
Yesterday, I told a young school girl about my puzzlement.
She said, "The girls wear the socks the way they do because
it's trendy to look messy. If you don't do it, you'd be considered
straight. It's also trendy to have the shirts long. If you don't, then
that also means you're straight. Or it means you probably go to
public school."
More snooping, and I'm told that the droopy sock trend
began about 1983. It takes off about grade four.
As we chugged up the Yarra River in the twenty-eight foot, thirty-

year-old fishing boat by the name of Strathallon, Ken told this
story. In September of l985, he and fourteen of his mates and two
young and amply-built strippers boarded the Strathallon in
Williamstown and headed for the Yarra River and the Grand Final
of the Victorian Football League, Australia's Super Bowl. On
board, with enough alcohol to keep them all in a drunken stupor
for a week, they began drinking and playing cards for money. The
strippers, getting less attention than they thought they deserved,
took their show outside and, as Ken tells it, alternately went fore
or aft to bare breasts, and sometimes more, to the everlasting
delight of fishermen on shore. At one point, just after they left
Port Phillip Bay, they passed an Australian warship and "she nearly
rolled, they gave 'em such a show!" Ken exclaimed. Farther up
river, near the central business district, the women spotted a
policeman in his car. They saw no reason to deprive him of a long-
distance look at their considerable assets, and he apparently saw
no reason not to follow along the shore for several blocks. Upon
arrival at the Strathallon Bridge, they tied up and most of them
took the short walk to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the
Grand Final was to be held. One of the men, well-lubricated, made
it no farther than shore, where he lay down on the grass and fell
asleep. Another member of the party, eager to illustrate the
profound truth that alcohol makes the human body work like a
buoy, had to be restrained from jumping into the middle of the

Yarra from the Morrell Bridge. Others figured they were too
besotted to make it to the football match; they stayed behind and
watched the game on television in the cabin. As we neared a spot
along the bank where a party of men in l986 had shouted, "Hey,
where are the girls?" Ken said he and his mates were the only ones
in Melbourne who went to the Grand Final by boat. As for the
strippers, well, the organizer of this annual ritual had forgotten to
line them up in l986. For that, Ken assured me, he'd been sacked.
I'd met Ken and his mate Clem the previous afternoon in the
pub of the Steampacket Hotel in Williamstown. I'd been in and
out of several pubs earlier in day, in search of one of "Willy's"
(Williamstown’s) working class crowds with a little life in it. I
found it in the Steampacket in spite of myself. For as I walked
around the main bar and into a rear room, someone shouted out,
"Who the bloody fuck invited you?"
"This is part of the pub, isn't it?" I said, innocently.
"You're in Blunt's Room, mate," he said, leaning into me,
tipping his glass of beer and breathing like a man very much in
need of oxygen. "That there sign over there, see it!" He drew my
attention to a small wooden sign propped on the trim in the
corner. It read: "Blunt's Room." Then he pointed to the table and
a man with a huge veiny hooked nose and glassy blue eyes. "That
there's Blunt and this is his room," he said, waving a finger. Blunt
dragged on his cigarette and waved and motioned for me to join
him. I took a step in his direction when someone grabbed my arm
and said, "You a Yank?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"Ain't no Yanks around here," Blunt said, raising his glass.
"We don't let no cunt Yanks in Blunt's Room. But you look like a
American best I can tell. Come over and have a drink."
I sat down and Blunt order a round of beers. "They named
this room after me," he said, "because I drink here four, five days a
week. No, make that fucking six days a week. You see that thing
over there." He pointed to a tiny green and yellow wooden model

of a yacht's hull and keel. "You beat us for the cup."
"No, we didn't beat you," I said. "We kicked your ass."
"Kicked our ass! Hear that! Fair dinkum. Fair and square, I
reckon Connor's did it. But we'll get it back, fair and square. Fair
dinkum, we will."
"Have another beer, you cunt Yank," Ken said, now sitting
across from us.
And this is how I met Ken, an auto mechanic who lives in
Williamstown, and Clem "Bobby" Blunt, a fourth-generation
Australian of British extraction who owns "Blunt's Boatbuilder"
on the Strand in Williamtown and lives in nearby Newport. By
drink round three, and drinking fast, I still didn’t have a prayer of
winning the race. Blunt and his mates had been drinking hard for
two hours when I arrived. Whatever, now that Ken and Bobby
had taken a liking to me and decided I wasn’t a cunt Yank after all
they invited me for a Sunday morning cruise up the Yarra River.
By the 1840s, pumps had been installed along the banks of
the Yarra; they were leased to water carriers who sold 120 gallon
barrels for household needs. Then, and for more than a decade,
fishing was good in the river and people drank the water. The
Yarra was described as "beautifully clean and sweet." But then the
river began to be noticeably polluted by human excrement, glue
factories, fell mongers and wool washers, the latter cleaning
thousands of sheepskins a week by the 1870s. At one point, it was
claimed that two dozen people a week were dying from a
mystifying disease called "colonial fever." The assumed culprit was
the polluted river. One result of all this poor sanitation, cavalierly
using the Yarra as a "flowing manure depot," was that Melbourne
became known as "Marvelous Smellbourne."
People were advised not to make trips up and down the river,
a journey difficult in any event because of trunks and branches of
trees that choked the waterway and made it difficult for boats to
maneuver. Still, private and chartered houseboats were commonly
seen along the banks of the Yarra. People partied and drank
champagne. They got entertained by watching aborigines dive for

pennies they threw from their boats.
In 1904, an imitation of the English Henley-on-Thames races
began; they were called the Henley-on-Yarra races. Soon there
were Maiden Fours, Maiden Eights, challenge cups, even races for
canoes and naval cutters. By the 1930s the races were so popular
that a couple of hundred thousand people lined the shores to
watch the yearly festive events. When not rooting for the fours
and eights, spectators could gaze at the occasional long-legged
ibises, black swans, the swarming seagulls. Or turn with delight
and amusement to stare at all the young women sporting colorful
new dresses and hats, Melbourne's version of a festive Easter
Sunday in Manhattan.
Not until 1981 did the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of
Works recognize the Yarra River as an important part of the city.
Greater effort was now made to improve the image of what
Melbournians will still jokingly say is "the only river that flows
upside down." Some who know the Yarra more intimately will not
only acknowledge that it gets cleaner the farther up you travel, but,
as Clem told me before we departed, "the upper region it just plain
bloody beautiful."
The house sits on the corner of a one-way street just up the block
from the venerable Railway Hotel and the North Melbourne train
station, which is used daily by hundreds of young students coming
and going to school. The house adjoins Mudgeway Motor
Wreckers. Its cars clutter the street and often are parked on the
sidewalk in front of the house. The brick on the one-story
Victorian house is painted dull black, and on the long side wall
that faces a concrete support for busy Dynon Road is a freshly
painted sign showing an Australian flag and the bold campaign
words, "Incentivation, The Liberal Plan for Australia." The front
door to the house and the veranda's iron lace are painted white.
Beside the front door in large white letters on the black wall is the
address: 20 Anderson Street. Other than this elusive clue--if a clue
at all, only a tiny red light in the middle of the overhang iron lace
hints that the house is a brothel.
A kilometer away, on the northern edge of the central
business district and a short walk from the High Court, lies
another brothel, this one classier and more expensive, but equally
deceptive as to purpose. A two-story brick building of no
particular distinction and unrevealing as to period of construction,
its black brick facade is patterned with eight windows covered by
blue-striped cloth awnings. On an awning to the right of the front
door are the scrolled words, "Top of the Town." To the left of the
door on another awning and below the familiar Rolls Royce logo
are the words, "Rolls Royce Catering."
I happened upon this brothel completely by accident one day
when I'd parked to visit the nearby Queen Victoria Market and
remembered an important phone call. Thinking the brothel was a
food catering service, I rang the doorbell, was invited in by a
charming middle-aged woman, and then presented with a menu of
prices and possibilities: one or two ladies for half an hour, for
three quarters of an hour, or an hour; and with options such as
French, Spanish-style, voyeur, or golden showers.
Brothel prostitution has been legal in Melbourne since l984.
Wandering along Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, I stop at a hole-in-

the wall, eager for an away-from-home hamburger. When I place
my order I'm asked if I want the tomato cooked on top of the
meat, to which I respond: Leave it off, if you don’t mind. I find a
stool near the rear and when my hamburger comes, I'm handed a
large Kleenex box--napkins. On leaving I chat with the owner,
who's Macedonian. He says he's been in Melbourne since 1945.
He loves the country, Melbourne; this is home, love it, he declares.
Sometimes it's the little things that make walking the city an
unending adventure of minor discoveries. Two nights ago I was
also in Fitzroy, at the Loaded Dog Pub Brewery. There I had a
cloudy rice beer that went by the name of Yellow Mongrel. Later I
had a fruity flavored beer called Cobungra Bitter.
Now I'm again on Brunswick Street, drinking coffee out of a
small juice glass at "Rhumbarallas," and thinking of last Saturday,
in the Provincial Hotel. There I sat on the floor for over an hour
listening to well-rendered amateur poetry readings. Ageing hippies
still searching for Nirvana. Yes, the Provincial. Always full, I’m
told, and didn’t have to be told forever seedy, smoky, downbeat,
upbeat, full of oddballs and drunks, weirdos with purple and
yellow hair, and the pounding jukebox music of Ray Charles or
Willie Nelson wailing for Georgia.
One evening I stopped in for a beer, and before I'd gotten
half way through my first one I struck up a conversation with a
New Zealander perched on a stool, his back against the wall.
Gordon said he was a musician, played the piano, and was living
on the dole. Soon he'd be returning home to Christchurch. The
dole was running out; he'd had the free money for two-and-a-half
years and now the Australian government was saying no more. He
was forty-four and wasn't anxious to see his father, who thought
his son was a degenerate no-good bum who'd best stay away
forever. I thought maybe I could see his father's point of view.
Gordon looked awful, like a slob, ten, fifteen years older than the
age he gave me. His eyes were glassy and red, and there were
lumpy slabs of loose skin under his eyes. He chain smoked, and he
drank deeply from the bar well. But like so many Aussies or Kiwis
I’d met when full of the piss, Gordon had no problem at all
carrying on a conversation, and coming up with stories.
Gordon said that A. J. Johnson, who was bartending that
night and had just poured himself a double scotch, was happily
dying of cirrhosis of the liver. He'd been in the hospital four times
so far this year, twice in intensive care. It didn't show, I thought.
Rather, what was evident to my eye was that A. J. Johnson, if he
was indeed dying, was leaving this life in real style: all smiles,
plenty of swagger, and a be-damned generosity. The last thing he
was going to make amends for in the hereafter was being a hard-
drinking Aussie.
Australians and beer are nearly synonymous. Indeed, beer

competes with the kangaroo as the nation's symbol. In the
nineteenth century, one observer noted that so many Australians
were drinking and smoking that it could be concluded that this
was "evidence of both prosperity and an explanation of the
destitution that prevails." Doctors in mid-nineteenth-century
Australia had their own definition of prosperity, believing that
alcohol was good for pneumonia, fevers, and using plenty of it was
the easiest way to recover from a major illness. Thirty years later
they changed their minds; being healthy had more to do with
abstinence.
Early Australian beers were often "pepped up" by the
addition of copper sulfate and tobacco juice. These adulterants,
and the lack of a good malt liquor which had many depending too
much on "spirits," had many complaining of "grog fever." Until
the 1880s, Australian beer was a heavy type of ale. But imported
lager beers from Germany were increasingly popular, and it was
Victoria, and its capital Melbourne in particular, that became the
nation's leader in meeting this new demand. Lager beers would
become the Australian standard.
Melbourne's first brewery was opened in 1839, one year after
the city got its official name. In those days the penalty for getting
drunk in public depended on one's history. A convict would
receive twenty-five to fifty lashes, a freeman a fine of five shillings.
A different kind of social legislation had come into play by the
turn of the century. Then bottle shops were closed for business on
Sunday; bars were similarly shut on the Sabbath. Atheists,
agnostics and women at this time pushed the issue further. Their
fierce opposition contributed mightily to the closing of 37 of
Melbourne's 217 hotels in 1902.
In 1888 the Foster brothers from New York established their
first brewery in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. The beer
was so popular that before long Foster's had a monopoly, and

though the brand is but one of many well-known beers in
Australia, Foster's is easily the best known internationally. It is
now sold in more than sixty countries, with the United States and
Great Britain the largest markets. Melbourne also has the
distinction of being home to the country's largest brewer: CUB or
Carleton United Breweries.
Alcoholic tastes have changed in Melbourne and elsewhere in
Australia. In the 1930s and 40s, those who drank wine were
known as "wine dots" and "plonk addicts." Plonk is an Australian
term for cheap wine--a beer drinker's point of view. In the early
1960s there were a mere half a dozen restaurants in Melbourne
where it was legal to sip wine. But tastes are changing. White-collar
workers and Yuppies increasingly prefer something other than
beer, one of those preferential changes that both distinguishes
them from their beer-guzzling working class countrymen and puts
them closer to Americans and Europeans of similar social
standing.
Way down Brunswick Street, toward the city, on the other side of
the block, is a TAB office. It's one of scores of such places for
betting on the horses or the dogs or the harness races. What I saw
the few times I went inside was lots of fifty dollar bills being
pushed across the betting counter, more in fact that I saw
anywhere else in the city. I also saw plenty of resolve, and eyes
everywhere glued to TV monitors and racing sheets, getting the
line or the latest on the races in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and
Adelaide.
Melbournians are a betting people, and if the horses are
important the numbers game, called Tattersalls, is even more so.
Established in Tasmania in 1899, it didn't make an appearance in
Melbourne until 1953. In addition to the nightly numbers games
on television, on Saturday night at 9:30 when there's a drawing for
Tatterslotts, the centerpiece of Tattersalls, more than sixty percent
of the adult population is allegedly watching to see if their number
has come up. In Victoria, a third of the Tattersalls take goes to the
government, and when added to other gambling revenues, adds
$A300 million dollars a year to the treasury. Only payroll taxes and
stamp duties provide more state revenues.
But Melbourne has its proverbial conservative side here as
elsewhere, and unlike other states there are no poker machines or
casinos. The Victorian government claims there's not enough
demand for them, an assertion that doesn't ring true for the
thousands of Melbournians who regularly cross the border into
New South Wales to play "pokies" and other casino games of
chance.
By one estimate, each year nine of ten Australians gamble,
and in the process unofficially spend sixteen billion dollars. More
than a third of the official figure of around ten billion goes to state
and federal governments for health programs, hospitals and
charity. Unfortunately, though for sound financial reasons, none
of these monies are spent on the country's 150,000 compulsive
gamblers, or on other problems associated with the addiction.
The large apartment blocks were public housing. I knew this much
and not a lot more, not at any rate until I met Karen while walking
among some of them in Prahran. Whether Karen was in anyway
typical of those who live in these mass housing units that seem so
unappealing I had no way of knowing. Whatever, what she told
me this sunny afternoon as we chatted on a sprawling lawn
surrounded by playing children had a rather familiar working class
ring about it.
Karen had left school at fifteen, got married at nineteen, and
before she could have any kids she left her husband because he
was physically beating her all the time. Which, for Karen, wasn't
the worst part; "the worst part was the threats of what he was
really going to do to me."
She lives with her forty-year-old aunt and splits the thirty-five-
dollar a week housing bill. To pay her bills she makes and sells
blankets, something she'd like to get better at. She'd heard that
“somewhere” in Melbourne there are twenty-seven courses that

can dramatically improve her skills. But because she did so poorly
in school, she's isn’t sure that she'll be able to take any of these
classes.
Still, Karen is a lot happier than when she was working as a
maid in Toorak for all those rich people. They were too old for
her--fifty and above--and they read all morning, and they knew too
many things she didn't. Worst of all, she hated them always say:
"Common people this, common people that...."
Melbourne was okay as a place to live, Karen said. She liked
the trams and all the old buildings. But she missed Perth, where
she was born and lived until she was thirteen. She missed the Swan
River and Kings Park and the beaches and the sun, the latter of
which there's never enough of in Melbourne. From the way she
spoke it was clear that she was defensive about her native city,
more than a little angry with Melbournians who claim that Perth is
"backward and primitive."
She exclaimed: "It's not!"
She confessed to having only one addiction, and that was
bingo, which she played often, at $A.20 a card. She once won
$A800, and this, she said, was just about the luckiest thing that had
ever happened to her. Recently, she had cut back on bingo
because it was costing too much, and also because she had started
doing a lot of aerobics. She had to do something for the persistent
pain in her lower back. But she also wanted to "redistribute the fat
that won't go away or always comes back at Christmas." There was
hope for her weight problem, she said. She believed in the occult,
and that was going to help her slim down and make her more
attractive for her next husband.
I asked her if she liked living in public housing.
"It's okay," she said. "It's better than the other place I lived in.
That was 100 years old and very cold all the time."
The one major complaint Karen had about public housing
was "all the fights and shouting and knifings." If this was what
people wanted to do instead of playing bingo or doing something
healthful like aerobics, that was their business--as long as they did
it somewhere else.
"Art is long, life is short, is the cry; and therefore Australasian pleasure-
seekers, in town or country, under the influence of benign skies, certainly enjoy
life to the full while it lasts." (MacGregor, Fifty Facts About Australasia)
On a starless night in Carlton, in a pub not all that far from the
University of Melbourne, the People for Nuclear Disarmament
were having an event to raise money for students from the
university to go to Pine Gap in central Australia to protest police
brutality and to get the United States out of the infamous spy
installation. Three different bands would be playing.
At the door I was met by two seventeen or eighteen-year-old
girls dressed in black mini-skirts and black sweaters and wearing
black berets. One was holding tight to a suitcase, the purpose of
which I couldn't fathom and couldn't bring myself to ask when I
saw their dyed purple hair. I paid the seven dollar cover charge
and stepped into a dark room where I came face-to-face with a
short, overweight young man who had a bottle of Jim Beam in one
hand and two glasses in the other. He said to me: "They're running
late." Then: “Have a drink.”
By ten o'clock, an hour and a half after the first band began
playing, three people in addition to me had arrived. There were ten
people in the band.
I stayed another hour and waited for a speech or a few words
about just how brutal the police are and how long my CIA
countrymen have been making themselves at home in the
Australian outback, spying on the Russians, the Chinese, anyone
else in Asia that could be monitored. But I waited in vain. I had to
settle for a simple flier with fewer than two dozen words that I
found on a small table in one corner.
Toorak Road in Toorak is a world unto itself. You can buy sandals
for $A200, women's shoes for $A350, $A700 wool dresses,
ground-fired pots from Zimbabwe, steel cocktail sets from Alessi,

Italy, Chevy Chase Chocolates, all manner of antique and estate
jewelry, and buttons expensive enough to support Buttoni, an
exclusive button store. Toorak Road in where you're likely to see
more cruising and parked Mercedes than on any other street in the
country.
On Toorak Road one Saturday afternoon I find myself in a
gift shop alongside an attractive young women in her mid twenties
who has decided to buy a leather bound notebook for $A265. I
screw up my face when I see the price. She casually reacts by
saying, "But it would cost twice this much in London. Besides, it
will last a long time."
In The Deli, not far from the gift shop, attractive and young
and slim twenty and thirty-somethings dressed in pressed denims,
bright-colored tops, designer sunglasses, Nike running shoes and
sporting manicured Louis XIV hairstyles or gelled curls sit and sip
cappuccino. They pick at cream mousse cakes. They chat about
skiing conditions in New South Wales or Chile, new business
ventures and their global possibilities, changing fashions, the latest
society gossip.
Established in 1978, The Deli is what might be called a
“frontier change agent,” and an active one with brisk business
every day of the week, particularly between nine and midnight.
The Deli is said to sell more bagels than any other deli in the
whole of Australia. Its fame has spawned imitators in other states,
and it has been responsible for getting all kinds of Australians
eating bagels, people who ten years ago hardly knew what they
were.
A walk through Toorak reminds me that Australia, no
different than anywhere else, has its share of inequalities. Twenty
percent of Australians own seventy percent of the country's
private wealth. Those who live in Toorak are not in the top twenty
percent, but in the top one or two percent of those with money.
Toorak has Melbourne's highest percentage of millionaires. Most
are professionals: businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and almost
seventy-five percent are Australian born. Not a single person who

can call himself a true native Australian, an aborigine, lives in
Toorak. Herein lies a small irony in that Toorak is an aboriginal
name meaning reedy swamp.
Toorak, a mere four square kilometer patch of land with
13,000 people and no town hall, is not just a name, but a badge, a
symbol of wealth. Those who live in suburbs further down the
social scale use Toorak's postal code, believing that a few days
delay in receiving bills and letters is well worth the prestige of
pretending to be more than they are. The image is not confined to
Greater Melbourne. Japanese tourists are eager to pay for a bus
tour that allows them to gaze at the Georgian and Edwardian
Tudor mansions behind six- and eight-foot stone and concrete
walls, now and again peering through wrought iron gates to admire
the showcase private gardens. They learn that one measure of
privacy and how it flourishes among the rich is the fact that
Toorak has the fewest public parks of any of Melbourne's suburbs.
When a house sells in Toorak, it is prominently displayed in
the newspaper. To be noted is not just what it sold for, or who
lived in it, but whether or not it will be yet another addition to the
National Trust Register. Toorak has hundreds of such listings in
the register. A working class suburb such as Yarraville may have
fewer than half a dozen.
The Victorian State Historian, Bernard Barrett, has said that
"Toorak is not just a place, it's a way of life and a state of mind."
Its residents are overwhelming conservative in their vote. The
suburb has produced two of the nation's prime ministers--Gorton
and Holt--and several of Melbourne's Lord Mayors.
In an earlier time acceptance in Toorak meant going to the
right school, having money, possessing good manners, having a
place on the right family tree. But the noblesse began to loser their
hold as early as the 1930s, and while money still counts for a great
deal, lineage and social graces are of less importance. Time and the
changing composition of Melbourne have meant that Toorak is
increasingly less a home to old British stock and more one for
those with proven entrepreneurial skills who have done more than
just okay.
I continue west along Toorak Road, in the direction of the city. At

Toorak and Chapel Street, in South Yarra, I stop for a bite to eat
at the Chekabag Take Away, which sells Shawarma (spicy sliced
lamb), foule medamas (cooked beans and tahina), and Makanek
(spicy pace Lebanese sausage). At the moment, business is slow
and I get to talking with Robert, the Turkish owner.
He's short, with a brushy mustache, curly hair that's graying at
the temples. Robert's in his early to mid-forties. He's got large bags
under his eyes, and he looks tired. I understand why when he tells
me that he works sixteen to eighteen hour days, often until five or
six in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. Business is
invariably brisk after ten in the evening; sometimes ten to twelve
teenagers and older people out for a late snack are lined up waiting
their turn. Robert's had his business here for five years, and he's
doing well. He drives a new BMW, he's got money in the bank,
and three years ago he bought two race horses.
Robert is happy with his considerable success, and he says,
"Australia is very good. Very good for me to make dollars. But I
no stay. I have no family life, no respect. Here you bring up your
child and they no around. I no like that. No can take."
He says that he doesn't like it when young people won't let
older people sit down on the trams. He doesn't like it when he
sees kids ten and eleven smoking. He doesn't like life in Australia
because kids disrespect their parents. And because they kiss and
fondle each other in his shop; he sees this as showing disrespect
for him. Nor does he like it when women show off their legs on
the city's trams.
He has more complaints that have him pining for his
homeland. "In Turkey, you need help, you knock on door and
everyone gives you food, bed. But not here. There you're short
with money on groceries, they say nothing. They give you what
you need. Here they squabble over one cent."
He knows no one in the apartment in which he lives. "In

Istanbul," he says, "you don't see a friend or neighbor for three
days and you worry. You go find out what happened."
Robert calls his mother and father every Saturday in Istanbul.
He has never missed a night calling since he arrived. He takes a
vacation every year to return home, and after he took his last one
for two months he didn't want to come back. He only did so
because he has a daughter here. But as soon as she's old enough to
be on her own, he plans to return to Turkey. "Now the money is
not enough."
The young people that Robert sees so much of and so dislikes
for their disrespect of what he finds socially acceptable come for
the games at the "Fun Factory," nearby, on the corner of Chapel
Street and Toorak Road. The Fun Factory is just what it says: a
playland of bumper cars, pinball machines, a merry-go-round,
roller skating, a shooting gallery, and miniature golf. Among these
teenagers there's plenty of “attitude,” and it extends much beyond
haircuts and tattoos and raggedly clothing. I get one taste of it
when I sit for a quiet moment to work on my journal and am
joined by a fidgety teenager who says, "I'm eighteen today!"
"Congratulations," I say. Something makes me add, "What
does it mean to you?"
"I can legally go into pubs now and get drunk! I can get my
license."
I'm aimlessly wandering south on busy Swanston Street in the very

heart of Melbourne when suddenly I'm brought up short by two
hustling Hare Krishna disciples, their hands and arms jammed
with rings and gold-plated bracelets. One of them opens with, "Hi,
I'm a spirit soul, a servant of Krishna. Did you know that you're
not eternal, that only your soul is eternal?"
"Not something I think about," I respond.
"You should, you really should." he says earnestly.
"Everything in this life is conditioned by your previous karma,
your activities in your last life."
I stare at the shaved heads and long gowns, little yellow

designs on the bridge of the nose, the forehead, that thing called a
tilak, which signals that one is a Hindu, or a devotee of Lord
Krishna. Presently, I learn that I'm standing right outside Gopals,
one of a couple of Hare Krishna Melbourne gathering centers.
Gopals is not all that far from their magnificent temple across the
Yarra River in Albert Park. Which I should visit the first chance I
get, I’m exhorted. I've heard bits and pieces of the Hare Krishna
message before, but usually in airports when I'm in a hurry to
catch a plane.
Minutes into some guiding words about the need to get in
touch with my karma, the shorter of this smiling pair of
missionaries tells me that I’m welcome to ascend the nearby stairs
and have a free plate of potato pea curry and brown rice, and take
whatever I want from a table full of free books with titles like:
Coming Back, The Science of Self-Realization, Planting the Seed.
Inside the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, I
sense I'm without a compass or a vocabulary with which to engage
those around me. And when I put my eyes on the food I decide
that I have no appetite.
I wander around, eager to snoop, overhear conversations. But
a young, unusually thin devotee with pink cheeks and large eyes
corners me. She proceeds to tell me about all about the sixteen
rounds she daily makes on the 108 beads. "It only takes me an
hour and a half to do it," she says, time apparently of no
consequence.
I sit with her on the floor, against a wall, my arms wrapped
around my knees because I'm unable to sit so effortlessly with my
legs crossed as she does. Hare Krishna acolytes and people not yet
converted to this eastern way of thinking come and go in front of
us. Lots of torn blue jeans, earrings, sandals, dirty feet.
Unwelcome smells. Some, to judge by their forlorn and long
mouths, appear to be desperately in need of puts their bare feet on
a new road to salvation.
I try my best to listen to this young woman who has latched

onto me. She says, "Animals can't understand god. They don't
have consciousness, only humans have that."
"Humans aren't animals?" I say.
She ignores me, marches on. "Animals evolve and evolve to
higher animals until they become human. If a dog eats a cat he
doesn't feel any karma or get negative karma. But if a human eats a
dog or a cat he gets negative karma and he'll come back in the next
life as a dog or a cat."
Poor Asians, I think, trying to remember where or when I saw
a documentary on Asians in marketplaces trying to decide which
live dog or cat to buy and take home to eat.
She turns to what is required to be initiated, become a Hare
Krishna. I'll have to do without eggs, without meat, without fish. I
won't be able to drink alcohol, or have illicit sex, or gamble.
I want to ask her what she means by "illicit sex," but instead
say, "I can’t do without fish and meat. And alcohol--I'll have to
think about that one. That's a tough one."
"This is the way it is," she says. But not dogmatically. She
smiles sweetly, with sincerity. With love in her eyes.
Presently, my mind wanders, and now I feel lost, about like I
remember feeling as a child when trying to understand the
mysteries of the Holy Trinity. I feel a craving for a cup of coffee,
solitude, quiet. This young Hare Krishna about whom I know
nothing at all rattles on. Now something about my spirit soul and
eternity and the need to cut my hair, as a sign of reincarnation.
I can take no more. I like the comforts and the satisfactions
of who I am, how I eat, what I do. I abruptly get up and thank the
young very earnest woman for her instructing words and head for
the door, and fresh air, thinking only about that coffee that I can
already smell and taste.
The coffee is everything I imagined. Reenergized, I walk past St.

Paul's Cathedral. With its arresting Gothic arches, it is
architecturally one of finest English Victorian churches to be
found anywhere. But its very construction has long been a major
problem, for it was made of sandstone and limestone, materials
that reacted badly to the many pollutants in the Melbourne air.
Half of the stones have had to be replaced. Still, the church is not
only a conspicuous monument to the city's Victorian image, but it
continues to serve the very purpose for which it was built. There
are some twenty services a week, and several times a week taxis
stop at its front doors to unload choirboys from around the city
who have come to practice.
I cross Flinders Street at St. Kilda Road, a mere block away
from the Yarra River and what was once seen as a social divide in
the city, that between inner city working class suburbs such as
Fitzroy, Carlton and East Brunswick to the north and the so-called
mansion suburbs such as Kew and Toorak to the south. This was
a kind of very gross intra-city regionalization that has broken
down. Now, to the extent that such generalities are at all
meaningful, the social divide is more an east-west matter, in which
Melbourne's "deprived west," its working-class suburbs, are
clotted with light and heavy industries. They lack the rolling
"bush" topography, the white collar money that allows for larger
homes and bigger lots and long commutes.
Thinking that I'll take a train out to one of the suburbs I've
not visited, I walk into the Flinder's Street Station, what one
traveler once described as "that long tin shed wit the big red and
yellow building at the corner." It is what others, more prosaically,
have claimed to be the busiest and finest railroad station in the
world. And this may well be the case since it is the only station
that serves the entire city.
Construction of the Flinders Street Station began in 1901, and
in the following year the nearby municipal fish market had to be
destroyed to make room for buildings and tracks. Its design was
that of a round-arched Byzantine style, one very popular in main
terminal stations of the nineteenth century. The station bears a
resemblance to the Westminster Catholic Cathedral in London,
even though it has a good amount of art nouveau detail.
In the 1850s when Melbourne was flush with the riches of

gold and it was about to open its first railway line to Port
Melbourne, the city opted for the Irish gauge of 1.6 meters, rather
than the English gauge of 1.4 meters. It was then erroneously
believed that the city would grow to such importance that Sydney
would follow suit. It did not do so, and Melbourne eventually
returned to the English gauge.
Melbourne switched from steam-run trains to those driven by
electricity in the early 1920s, a time when there were fewer than
75,000 automobiles in the whole of the country. If this was the
early heyday of the train in the city--within ten years the number of
cars in the country would increase tenfold--it was also a time of
daring innovations. Daring, at least, for Melbourne. Station signs
for toilets were changed to read "Men" instead of "Gentlemen."
But "Ladies" were still ladies; it would be some time before they
were ready to become merely "Women."
Back to the carefree days of my childhood, I think as we stroll

arm-in-arm beneath the stately date palms, past the two-penny
Moorish tower aglitter with Christmas tree lights, under the
sneering teeth, the hairy eyebrows, the spiky top reminiscent of
that glowing crown on the Statue of Liberty. The other side of the
turnstile, I squeeze her shoulder and smother her cheek in a
lingering kiss.
"What'll it be?" I say, a dreamer, always. "Pink fairy floss?
Sugared popcorn? Or how about rosy red toffee apples?"
"All of them!" she cries.
I drop her hand and break away. I hop and jump, then point
to the encircling roller coaster that zooms out of a tunnel, sways
and clatters into full view, then snakes around us and disappears
into the inky blackness of the starless sky.
Wow! That track and those cars are so small. And these
bumper cars on my right look smaller than small. The merry-go-
round with the prancing glass-eyed horses--would you believe it
was built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Co. at the turn of the
century? And over there, that Ferris wheel. So tiny, so enchanting-

-what a wonder this dwarfish playland, this St. Kilda dreamland of
fact and fancy.
What's wrong? I ask, dropping my eyes to her, asking for an
answer to words as yet unspoken. Have I grown so big,
remembered so little? Does time so distort and miniaturize? And
where are all the people, young and in love, wildly spendthrift, out
for an carefree first date fling? Look again at that merry-go-round:
no one's on it! Look! Over there, at that wild west shooting gallery.
Not a gun in the air! No one's there to take the money and pass
out prizes. Listen to me! Why is this place so empty? Why is
almost no one here?
She can't hear the voices inside my head. She smiles at me
invitingly, and I know exactly what she's trying to say: Squeeze me
again and give me another teddy-bear kiss, exactly like that last
one. And then she adds, purring in my ear, "Will you play
seventeen with me all night long if I buy you ice cream and cotton
candy and fill your hands with money?"
Of course I will!
We bounce on. Now my eyes fall on the leaning pile of silver
coins, all of it needing only the slightest nudge to drop into the
dark slit that I just know funnels to my pocket.
"Let's try it." I say.
"Give me ten and I'll get change."
She hands the bill to a pimply teenager in high-cut gym shoes.
"How much do you want?"
"Three dollars for now."
He gives her change and pushes three neat stacks of twenty
cent pieces toward her. She fills my hand, and one by one I drop
them into the long metal slot and aim the arm. The money rolls
and wiggles, it crashes and comes to rest, and then the metal bar
brooms forward and comes to a sudden stop. I gaze in
anticipation, waiting to claim all that silver precariously leaning on
the edge.
Darn, I just missed!
"Eighth of an inch more on that one!"

Too far to the right on that one.
"Really blew it there!" she merrily crows and throws up two
splayed hands.
"We're out of coins already?"
She nods lovingly and grabs my hand, pulls me into another
kiss, and more games.
"Go ahead, try the basketball. You were good once, that's
what you're always telling me."
“I told you that?"
She laughs and snuggles up and says with her lips, I'll take
another one right there, just like before. "We're seventeen,
remember? And I want you to show me how good you really
were--star!"
I remember all right. Then I was good.
The thought vanishes; I return to the present.
He's short and pudgy and has a punk haircut, and he's just
about seventeen. No basketball player, this one.
"Show me how," I say.
He deftly takes the ball in his small paws and under hands it
softly toward the hoop. Swish!
"See that!" she says.
Oh, how easy these guys make it seem; how easy it'll be for
me too.
Ha, ha! Hahahaha! I hear the echo after three shots. After
throwing cement, overshooting by two feet from four feet...and,
time oh mournful time!
I know she doesn't like heights and random swaying and she's
already told me, "No way on the roller coaster, buster. You wanna
go, go alone."
"How about the Ferris wheel then?"
Up go her eyebrows, and to my surprise down comes her
guard.
I buy two tickets before she can change her mind.
An Asian youth with a beguiling smile beckons us forward

and shows us the seats. He swings and locks in the bars that holds
us in. And then he says, "Tell me when you want to stop."
We can do it all night long. It's ours alone.”
But how can this be? After all, this is a pleasantly cool Friday
night, it's ten p.m., and this is Luna Park in famous St. Kilda by
the beach. Luna Park: "Melbourne's #1 Family Entertainment,"
announces the billboard outside the gates. Luna Park--where once
there were two penny slot machines, a Giggle Palace, and best of
all, I muse, a "How to Get a Rich Girl" booth.
Time oh mournful time!
We reach the car and she hunches up her shoulders in a
fetching shiver, and I bend over to kiss her. I whisper, "Wasn't all
of this marvelous?"
She nods knowingly, and we embrace. It's our last night in
Melbourne.
Select Bibliography
Adams, F. 1892. The Melbournians. London: Bannow.
Beed, C. 1981. Melbourne's Development and Planning. Melbourne:

Clewara Press.
Cole, C.E. 1980. Melbourne Markets: 1841-1979. Melbourne: Wilke

and Company.
Davidson, J., ed. 1986. The Sydney-Melbourne Book. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
Davison, G. 1978. The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne.
Docker, J. 1974. Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in

Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
Franklin, H. M. 1881. A Glance at Australia in 1880. Melbourne:

Victorian Review Publishing.
Freeland, J. M. 1966. The Australian Pub. Carlton: Melbourne

University Press.
Giles, J. M. 1960. Migrant Australia. London: Mills & Boon.
Grant, J., and G. Serle. 1983. The Melbourne Scene: 1803-1956.

Sydney: Hale & Iremonger.
Greater Melbourne: Street Directory. 1987. Glen Iris, Victoria: Melway

Publishing.
Kiddle, M. 1961 Men of Yesterday. Melbourne: Melbourne

University Press.
Lyne, J. A. 1974. Greater Melbourne. London: Cambridge University

Press.
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Victorian Review Publishing.
Saunders, D., ed. 1966. Historic Buildings of Victoria. Melbourne:
Jacaranda Press.
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University Press.
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Sydney University Press.

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87 Days in the Gentle

The Immoral Landscape

Improbable Fictions on the Road to Poona

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

No part of this book may be reproduced in any matter whatsoever

my reservations aside, I love reading her essays, and I return to

Chicago views; the real Melbourne only comes to one little by

mystery. As far as I can tell, it's merely a prejudice that he brought

woman, or a child, or someone new to the city or someone born

different from every other city, we have not the geography of a

A large city as I envisioned getting to sort of know it presents

what I could find in libraries when it rained, or I wanted some

an orange and purple wool cap. He smiles and approaches and

"Did you live in closer at one time?" I say, my curiosity

There's a long silence, and I imagine Peter and his girlfriend

It rains off and on most of the day, and by mid afternoon a

atmosphere. Where Collins Street met Spring Street stood the

Joe Lachowicz has lived in a boarding house in Canterbury for

possibilities. "I wanted to go to Venezuela," he says, grinning.

at work, because he was tired of being laughed at, having to spell it

Arriving from the north by way of the Hume Highway, which

Greek Cypriot by birth. He'd come to Melbourne by way of

moved to outer suburbs. To this day Italians retain a strong sense

understand little English, and they cling to everything they were

signs reminiscent of ads for Midwestern flea markets. And then in

on a Victorian house in a neighborhood that needs a whole lot

speculative housing market, prices are soaring. No matter that

Quiet, almost moribund by day, Melbourne's Chinatown, a three-

Melbournians go when they want the best of the city's Cantonese

The Methodists, the Presbyterians and the Church of England

takes as long to read a Chinatown menu as it does to enjoy paper

One night I'm standing alone at lounge bar, talking to no one

Early morning Melbourne is proving to be frustrating. I've had a

On the green and yellow sign announcing Preston, a northern

some of the equipment they use contains radioactive material.

soon as he hears my accent he wants to talk, not listen. "We don't

I might've missed them if I hadn't heard the squeal of someone

I ask a biologist at La Trobe University where the starlings of

twists their necks until dead. "They don't deserve to live," he

notorious Kings Cross, hookers and sex-hungry gays satisfied their

In the early 1880s, Richard Twopenny, a shrewd observer of

small colony handicapped by protectionist duties, whereas Sydney

vegetables and fruit trees to meet the needs of the urban

thought that marriages in Australia were more stable, and that

Eleni's young and self-possessed, loquacious in a charming sort of

We've decided to treat ourselves to an evening meal at a Thai

of the world, and apparently far ahead of Sydney on this issue.

In the boisterous bar at the Railroad Hotel in West Melbourne, a

Melbourne's underground toilets, those in the central business

made of rough iron and timber, modest imitations of the French

They're in their mid-twenties, I guess. They've just returned from

DON'T CLONE ME, BAN BIO-TECHNOLOGY

GREEK MILITARY POWER!

DISABLED PEOPLE, RIGHTS NOT CHARITY

STOP THE MISS VICTORIA QUEST!

DIE TURK!! CYPRUS IS GREEK

SAY IT WAS HERPES, GIVE HIM A TRIP!

WOMEN RECLAIM THE NIGHT

brazen affront to the massive ship-length, cream-colored stone

beauty of their college by putting in buildings so formless, so out

"Their very first house in Australia was a little house that

The Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria

predominant language. Greeks have the highest language retention