Heritage

I spent my first full day in Melbourne just wandering about, window-shopping and coffee-swilling, acquainting myself with my environment. While in Melbourne I’m staying in the neighbourhood of Brunswick, an area in which I haven’t spent a lot of time. But I like it. It’s a little further from the city than my usual haunt of Richmond, but it still has interesting shops and cafes, a couple of tramlines running through it, and at least two jazz clubs, so I’m happy.

The last time I was in Melbourne I noted that the trend among shop names was for cutesy phrases that sounded like the title of hipster children’s books (eg Myrtle and the Magic Ocelot). Four years later, after two years of pandemic-induced social brutality, there’s no patience for whimsy any more. The trend now is for good old-fashioned Gen X irony. There’s a shop called Mud which sells extraordinarily expensive dinnerware, presumably because said dinnerware is primarily made, in a very basic sense, of wet clay. But that’s a little like having a pet store called Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen. Meanwhile the Concrete Jungle Trading Company doesn’t sell products made by inner urban street people, but rather overpriced sneakers made by rural peasants in China. The Main Street Cafeteria sells $27 organic yoghurt, not sausage rolls or mac and cheese. I haven’t yet found a shop called Stop Wasting Your Money On Stupid Shit, which probably sells minimalist designer doorknobs, but it’s only a matter of time.

Like many older Melbourne suburbs, the back streets of Brunswick are filled with rows of almost unbearably charming 100 year old cottages, except for the occasional spot where one burned down in 1974 and an Italian immigrant thought to himself, “Now here’s an opportunity to work my concrete and onyx magic!” Fortunately the remaining cottages are generally bought and restored by privileged white people who understand and value their cultural semiotics. Modern immigrants tend to look at them once and then figure that there’s more space, for less money, in the outer suburbs, where they can build their giant sterile boxes with acres of cold grey tiled floors and space for family dinners for 800.

However, sometimes land value increases so much that not even charm can save the old cottages, and a brand new building goes up. New buildings in Melbourne are not without their little bits of style and flair, but unfortunately they tend to follow the less (effort)-is-more (profit) principle set by Sydney. I’m staying in a townhouse that’s a veritable symphony of corner-cutting and architectural hostility. The rooms are as small as the developers thought they could get away with. There are little signs, like the bathroom wall tiles stopping an inch short of the windowsill, or an inch-wide ledge interrupting an otherwise featureless wall, or a backyard that’s literally two feet deep, that betray the lack of care and attention to detail in the building. That, and the fact that the cheap doorknob on the front door keeps falling off. Perhaps I should go to Stop Wasting Your Money On Stupid Shit and get a new one.