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Produced and published by the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Published July 2008
Published July 2008
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I date my love affair with the City of Melbourne from walking up Collins Street in the Spring of 1965. I was going to see The Nutcracker. I was 11. I was wearing a new dress, a dropped-waist beige confection with brown and orange spots and a very stylish brown cord belt. Melbourne was wearing dark stone with crenellations and green leaves as soft as skin.
It was love at first sight.
Working-class children did not commonly go into the city, though after this I went every Saturday on the train from Footscray to wander and explore. My mother let me go only after I could faultlessly recite the Grid Litany: Spencer, King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell, Exhibition, Spring, and the cross reference which meant that, even if lost, no child of hers had any excuse in staying lost: Flinders, Collins, Bourke, Lonsdale, La Trobe, and the little streets between.
I had never been given a plaything so endlessly fascinating as a whole city. It was full of surprises. Just when I thought I had memorised the stretch of Lonsdale Street between, say, Elizabeth and Queen, the City would yield me Hardware Lane leading into Little Bourke with a map-maker's and a costume jeweller's and odd government offices with unknown functions. Across Elizabeth is a gloomy building which still says that it is the registry of Foreign and Alien Debtors, peopled in my imagination with Gothic heroines and vampire bats.
Later, I read the end of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment sitting on the massive bulwarks of the GPO, because reading it anywhere else had driven me into misery.
But on the day we first met, it was sunny, I was very happy in my new dress, and we walked up the impressive slope of Collins Street through patches of shade. From Swanston Street: me, my cousin, my grandmother and my sister. I was impressed by the vast bulk of the Town Hall and the Athenaeum Library with Real Gentlemen inside. The Greek pillars of the Baptist Church went past, a milliner's window with just one hat and no price tag, Georges deco-lettered name over a circular arcade full of gowns on plaster ladies. On up the hill past the Assembly Hall. A bookshop with steps that went down and a window full of fascinating and unreadable tomes. The Scots' Church and then, at the Independent Church, we crossed the road into a forest of green leaves and brass plates and entrancing little shops.
There were iron lace tables and umbrellas - on the pavement! We sat down and I sipped from a glass of orange crush and a fully tonsured miniature French poodle called André trotted out of the hairdresser's and sat down with his head in my lap.
He had curly apricot fur.
I have probably never again been so purely happy since I sat in the dappled light in the Paris End of Collins Street and patted André and sipped orange crush, and fell in love with a city.