Summer in the CBD

For the last two years, I have written descriptive articles for a city building’s in-house magazine about summers in Melbourne. It’s been an opportunity to breath in some inner city heat, and to roll our some adjectives like I’m a Year 11 student doing an option entitled ‘I got a thesaurus for Christmas’,

Hot in the City Vibe Magazine, 385 Bourke Street, Issue 4

Sounds of the City Vibe Magazine, 385 Bourke Street, Issue 1

Hot in the City

The air is too hot to be local air. Surely it is air that’s been sucked out of smelters in Mount Isa or the dry river beds of the Centre. Scorched January air that burns cheeks and packs a sensory punch as it’s inhaled, warm at the back of the throat like a coffee.

Every year it comes, carrying with it the waft of eucalyptus and grassfires and vast tracts of brutal Australia that many Melbournians never see. It’s a wind that clears a city. It drives some towards the peninsulas. Others the west coast. A good number of urbanites — the brave, the unlucky and the leave deprived —stick it out. Two months in the kiln.

The CBD has some charms during those summer months. There comes a day in January each year when parking spaces open up in Collins Street that have generally not been free since John Brack did his painting. In coffee shops and restaurants, the stranded catch the eyes of the stranded, quietly celebrating 3pm lunches. Your boss away? Yep. My boss is away too.

Shoppers play air-conditioning hopscotch, scattering their itineraries with drink stops and department store cut-throughs. In subterranean electronic wonderlands, salesmen have to sift the genuine purchasers from the hot people standing in their stores cooling down. Where shall we try next? The cinema? What’s on? It doesn’t matter. The air conditioning is on.

In the early afternoon, the city is without shadows, without respite. Brave tourists stand in front of St Paul’s Cathedral and Flinders Street Station and the Arts Centre spire, taking bright forgettable photos, pulling grinning, sweaty faces that will recall a temperature as much as it will a city. Federation Square is the brightest place of all. The zinc panels and the undulating Kimberley sandstone reflect white light, a terracotta terror for those without sunglasses. St Kilda Road, all stately and shady, beckons us southwards. The beach is this way, pilgrims. And Mr. Whippy is this way too.

There’s been talk of a CBD beach, a slap of sand on the boat shed side of the Yarra that would mirror the Paris Plage project. The naysayers say (apart from nay) that we already have beaches — beaches that become increasingly swimable with each traveling kilometre away from the CBD. The yea-sayers say that palm trees are fun and that a CBD beach would provide a summer focus. Hopefully they build it. Sand is cheap. Sandcastles are good for the soul. So what if they can’t hold the Bells Easter Classic there. It’ll be a place for reading books, and watching sunsets, and spying on co-workers having affairs.

The late afternoon serves as a countdown to early evening, the golden window when the air is warm, the drinks are cold, and the ordeal of summer day yields to the loveliness of summer night. People seem to appear out of the footpath. Some clutching picnic rugs striding purposefully for the Botanic Gardens. Restaurant-goers dodging spriukers in Chinatown, telling white lies about having already eaten. There’s dancing at Trades Hall, theatre at the Arts Centre. Rooftop bars and beer gardens enjoy their seasonal advantage over laneway grottos. Coins are dropped in barbecues and the smell of sausages floats across the water, across Melbourne Park, across to the ‘G. When the cricket is on, the sausage smell front collides with a donut and hot chip front, an olfactory event that could one day lead to it raining saturated fat.
Taxis collect at ranks, green tops joining their all-yellow brothers in desperate numbers. The drivers aren’t happy. This is nothing like the pre-Christmas rush. Too many taxis. Too few people. The car smells of hot January work. Say the wrong suburb and the disappointment is clenched in the driver’s jaw. The radio is tuned to a classic hits station. ‘Hot in the City, Hot in the City tonight’. Billy Idol crooning for summer Melbourne as he croons for summer everywhere. Over the final bars, a DJ who has spent a career sliding down the demographics sizzles the good times and the classic hits. ‘It’s a hot one out there in Melbourne town tonight. And strap in for tomorrow people because the folks at the bureau say it’s going to be even hotter. And speaking of hot summer nights, can you say it any better than Meatloaf …?’

The fragrant summer air blows in through the window. Heavy eyes, home now just around the corner. Finally, the weather is perfect — for everything except sleeping.

The Sounds of Melbourne

Beyond the glass, beyond the balconies, Melbourne’s Docklands jackhammers to life every morning. The earth is not quite shooting buildings like it is in Shanghai, but cranes and trucks and girders and wolfwhistles are aural signposts to a city that has put in the backyard pool, and is now building the gazebo.

The Dome is across the way, giving to the city’s west what the Holiest of Holies gives to its inner East — faintly muffled sirens, the shouts of the Record boys, that joyous anticipatory hum of tens of thousands walking to an event — voices analysing and dissecting, a cocktail of hope and anticipation. And afterwards, shuffling feet and immiscible collisions between the happy lurching ones and the sad angry ones, to a soundtrack of club songs played too fast and too often by opportunistic trombonists.

But it’s the trams that are the real soundtrack to the city. Once they clacked and rattled, crunched and rocked, but now they glide down the streets with a futuristic whirr, saving the rattles for intersections and other special occasions. At the stops, there’s the wheeze of air-lock doors —a touch Battlestar Gallactica —while alongside, cars line up for Melbourne’s own indigenous right-hand turn. For the locals, it’s a part of life, as natural as brown rivers and floral clocks. For those with interstate plates, their lips move and hands slap against steering wheels, but the sound stays within their vehicles, silent feedback on the notion of edging left to turn to right.

Everywhere, there are snatches of conversation. ‘Get in the taxi Kerrie, we’re going to Metro!’ ‘You can have that table sir…’ ‘If the market keeps doing what it’s supposed to… ‘Sorry I’m late, couldn’t get a park’ … ‘Buddy did alright on the weekend, didn’t he?’ …’We’ll see you for after work drinks at Double Happiness’. Homeless people asking for change, barristers muttering sweet privilege to juniors pushing trolleys, waiters taking orders, business people doing deals, Kerrie still not getting into her bloody taxi.

Around the Mall, buskers plug in their amps and people who hate buskers plugging in their amps shout ‘Judas!’, as though Dave from Richmond at the door of David Jones is Bob Dylan from Massachusetts at the Royal Albert Hall. The amplified guitars and drums drag in the easily distracted - shoppers, tourists, escapees recovering in the fresh air after the fumes of the Myer cosmetics department.

The clock on the GPO building chimes. It’s stern on the half hour and the hour, playful on the quarter, as if encouraging Melbournians to rendezvous at the playfully oversized purse beneath. On Swanston Street, there’s the clip clop of hooves, as grand nags drag tourists around the Town Hall and Federation Square, where the architecture is grand and koalas are available 5 for $10.

The spriukers are here too. Arthur Daley’s Clearance Centre has one, shouting at Emo kids too young to have watched ‘Minder’, telling them about bicycle pumps and mobile phone cases and vacuum cleaner bags, an amped-up evangelist with the volume too high to avoid distortion yet not high enough to drown out the handbag spriukers, also distorted, also turned up to eleven. Underneath all that amplified enthusiasm there is a tiredness. How did life come to this?

At Queen Victoria Market, the energy is real. Words roll off tongues without gaps. Onedollarthirtyabunch. Twelvedollarsfiftyakilo. The frantic ripping of plastic bags. Different accents everywhere. Greek, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic— all shouting some form of truth. There are no microphones here. In the meat pavilion and the deli, the concrete walls and floor make the perfect echo chamber, the last specials bouncing around until after close, to be mopped up with the blood and brains.

At Parliament a policeman stands at attention, only the sound of his breathing to keep him company. Whereas around the corner, in Flinders Lane, every emerging alley is an invitation to a party. Short blasts of music and frivolity that jut into a grey thoroughfare of carparks and cement. The people are in there too but you can’t hear them — drinking, talking, laughing. Shouting over the top of a CD that nobody particularly loves, but everyone agrees makes the place sort of work. The speakeasies for a new millennia.

At the bottom of the hill is the muted sounds of the Yarra, silent most of the time, drowned out by the business of the city. Occasionally, a boat drifts by with churning water and rumbling engines as guests sip their drinks and soak up the view of a mustard-coloured station that was meant to be built in Kolkata and a Ferris wheel that became a permanent fixture without anyone really noticing. Within the vessels, tall men are bent forward, chins on chests, bemoaning the short bridge builders of another era who never imagined the booze cruisers of the twenty first century would want 190 centimetres of clearance.

Up above, cameras click with the fake shutter sounds of the digital era, tourists being asked to hold smiles while photographers maneuver to get the MCG in the background, attempting to capture the scene for all time.

It’s another beautiful night in a beautiful city.