Melbourne | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Aug

Upper West Side comes to Melbourne

It’s a sign of Australia’s enduring cultural cringe that Melbourne now apparently has an Upper West Side. Thank you, New York City, for helping us find new names for our city streets.

There’s always been that joke about ‘the Paris end of Collins St’, then there’s the Greek Quarter, Chinatown and the Spanish strip of tapas bars in Fitzroy. Let’s reclaim the streets: create our own Boganville, perhaps Gillard Grove, or Tonytown. Thank god for ACDC Lane, a shining light in the culturally confused wilderness.

Unfortunately, Melbourne’s Upper West Side is more mongrel than Manhattan. At the moment, our homegrown UWS is a scuzzy collection of building sites in the no-man’s-land around Spencer St, perilously close to the so-called gentlemen’s clubs (frequented by anything but gentlemen).

You can have your own slice of paradise for $342,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. Bargain of the century. I wonder how much it’d cost in NYC?

Jul

Butter and pounds: it’s all a bit rich

How’s that couple in the UK who won £161 million the other day? That’s a whole lot of pounds. Yet they’ll keep the car and the same house, but might go on a few holidays…

Just as well they were retired, as I don’t buy that line that people say they’ll continue to work. Yeah, right! Like I’m going to keep slogging it out for some bogan boss who can’t believe I still turn up at 9am every single day.

I don’t buy that line that money won’t change us. Hell yes. Change me, baby. Change me. Bring on the vintage champagne and pool boy, I say. Sort of like that Imperial Leather ad doing the rounds at the moment. That’s my style..

One thing I would do would be to continue to eat incessantly around Melbourne. And one place I’d continue to haunt would be Le Traiteur. People, if you haven’t eaten there, go immediately. The kitchen churns out fresh baguettes and pastries twice daily, so the cafe is constantly perfumed by the smell of fresh-baked bread – that smell so beloved of real estate agents because it immediately makes us wrap our arms around our (ample) selves, and say, ‘I love this place’ (and, if it is an Australian house, ‘ I want to spend the next 30 years working to pay for it.’)

Back to Le Traiteur, it’s deliciously French with an Aussie twist, with gorgeous mustards, relishes, lots and lots of porky things and now I know where I’ll buy my next lot of saffron from. I was willingly led there by G, who knows her onions, pates, terrines and brioches. I was uncharacteristically early, so watched the legals around me scoff the last remaining pies de jour (a sensational looking chicken and leek). Dammit, I wanted to rip the pies from their very plates. But I desisted, instead taking G’s recommendation for a brioche so buttery it should carry a health warning.

The service: charming (hey, they welcomed a pram into the cafe during the lunchtime rush and owner Nick came out for a baby cuddle). The coffee: fabulous. Stick your nose in; trust me you won’t regret it.

Le Traiteur: 552 Lonsdale St, Melbourne

Jun

Season to stay or stray

Where do foodies, culture mavens and adventurers go to embrace or escape the cold? To read the full story, click here

Embrace: Make like a Melburnian and don your big coat – black, naturally – for a cultural winter and no, the AFL doesn’t count. The State of Design Festival from July 20-31includes Melbourne Open House, which gives you a licence to perve at 75 of the city’s most beautiful and environmentally sustainable designs – free. The city’s best tagging, bombing, paste-ups and stencilling are seen on street art walking tours ($69 a person, melbournestreettours.com).

Otherwise, download free DIY tours of hot and hidden street art (thatsmelbourne.com.au.) or a guide to the city’s design hot spots (audiodesignmuseum.com).

The National Gallery of Victoria’s new shopfront window allows passersby to watch ‘zine artists do their thing from July 11-August 8, while the Gertrude Street Projection Festival transforms Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street into an open-air gallery with light projections cast across the streetscape (July 22-31, thegertrudeassociation.com).

Federation Square’s Atrium showcases more than 100 Victorian wines, with winemakers on hand and live jazz on Wednesdays and Thursdays from July 6-August 4 ($25, fedsquare.com/wine). For more jazz, grab a table beneath the heaters on Hardware Lane for cool tunes (Mon-Sat, from 7pm). Chill on Ice Lounge serves drinks among 30 tonnes of icy walls in its Russell Street digs until July 16, then reopens at Southbank in August with bigger ice decor.

Do your best Torvill and Dean impersonations on the ice outside at the Melbourne Museum, then work on your apres ski skills at the Winter Festival, from August 18 to September 4. Highlights include free ice skating shows, too. (winterfestival.com.au, visitvictoria.com.)

Escape
Bare all in New York’s great parks for a season of festivals, concerts and hot summer nights outdoors until September. Opera buffs flock to the Metropolitan Opera’s summer recital series, held from July 11-28 across the Five Boroughs – free (metopera.org/parks). Indie groovers make for the Village Voice’s July 16 Four Knots Festival, headlined this year by the Black Angels (free, villagevoice.com), while jazzsters take in the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival on August 27-28, also free. It’s part of the city’s massive Summerstage arts festival (summerstage.org).

Shakespeare in the Park presents Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well in Central Park (free, until July 30, shakespearein thepark.org) and Lower Manhattan’s River to River Festival celebrates public art and music along the river’s edge (free, until July 16, riverto rivernyc.com). Meantime, the Latino Cultural Festival in Queens’s Flushing Meadows is the place to go for pulsing dance, theatre and music from July 25 to August 7 (queenstheatre.org, nycgo.com).

Jun

Squared up with the Third World

Are you a closet knitter? Or are you loud and proud, knitting in the car, trackside at the motorbike races, at the beach?

Today, people around the world raised their knitting needles in public for the World Wide Knit in Public Day (www.kipday.com) The movement started in 2005, and last year, there were 751 knit-ins around the world on the day.

Image from Save the Children

From Amsterdam to Melbourne, knitters came out for some plein-air action, the Melbourne event contributing to the Save the Children’s Born to Knit campaign, holding a knit-in where your knitted squares (apparently however dodgy) are joined up to make blankets for vulnerable children.

Now, I haven’t knitted since I was 11, and I remember being told that I had ‘tension issues’ – I think that meant that my knitting alternated from a loopy fishing net to something as tight as a duck’s bum. But I digress. What got me was the photo of a little child of the third world, eyes darkened with kohl, clutching a beautiful blanket donated by these generous spirits. It caught me right at my newly-minted mummy’s heart, along with the event’s motto, “Better living through stitching together”.

So the Child Prodigy (CP) and I wandered down to Federation Square to see what was cooking. Much of the square was dominated by a busker busting moves, and the big screen broadcasting a speech delivered by the Dalai Lama during his visit earlier this week.

The Fed Square event was organised by wool manufacturers Australian Country Spinners. The lounges and bean bags scattered around the area were filled with eager knitters, mostly pros, but I managed to snag a set of needles and coax an old hand to teach me how to cast on, then a nice Greek lady helped with the first row, another lady talked me through correcting the stitches I’d added while she dandled CP on her knee as the Dalai Lama roared about peace in the background.

Volunteers collected the finished squares which they will stitch together into blankets to send to their programs in India, Cambodia and Laos. Some women were flipping the squares out like wildfire. Me? I had tongue firmly stuck out as I battled through four rows (I have added this pic as evidence). People, I have to get 88 rows to complete the square in my chic mauve wool. I think it’s going to take a little longer than an afternoon.

If you’re knit-tastic (and I personally know some extreme knitters) but missed out on the knit-in, they are looking to create 15,000 blankets, made of 16 squares each. You can knit your square (88 rows of 44 stitches) and drop it into any Spotlight or Lincraft store, post it to 42 Dight St, Collingwood Vic 3066, or visit Save the Children

Apr

Open-air drama in Melbourne’s skies

ONE of my pet hates is staying in hotel rooms where you can’t open the windows. I understand, in extreme circumstances, that annoying hotel guests might muck up the aircon, say, in a Dubai summer or a Helsinki winter. But in balmy Australia?

Ok, so ‘balmy’ might be pushing it in autumnal Melbourne at the mo, but it was deliciously sunny the days I visited the Langham Hotel, on Southbank. To read more about the hotel and its new terrace rooms, click here.

Feb

Liquid diet only at Ponyfish Island

Ponyfish Island – this pic should help you find it!

In my continued (and futile) quest to stay with the pack on new Melbourne café openings, I finally got to Ponyfish Island.

The signs were good: a sunny day, the Yarra River flowing brownly past, my café companion, GG, found the place under his own steam. This is no mean feat. Try describing where Ponyfish Island is: it’s on a pylon supporting one of the footbridges that runs across the river between Flinders St Station and Southbank.

Yeah, easy.

Anyway, Ponyfish Island has actually been around for a while, but despite its amazing location in the middle of the river, it just hadn’t taken off. New owners and a liquor licence have fixed all that, and last Thursday afternoon, the place was heaving. Literally heaving, with good music and happy punters enjoying an after-work jam jar of wine (tres egalitarian, what, serving wine in a jam jar).

We’d planned to hit the island for lunch, so popped in on Friday, scoring a table by the water at 12.30pm. We ordered: GG had the gnocchi and I went simplistic with a toasted sandwich with spinach, cheese and tomato. We had plenty to talk about but when a youth wandered past with gnocchi and sandwich, we hailed him over.

No, this can’t be your order. You haven’t been waiting long enough, he told us.

Fifteen minutes for a toastie isn’t long enough? I asked.

Not in this place, he said with a little laugh, oblivious to the two journalists committing his nonchalance to memory for future blogging.

It turned out it was our order. Reader, before we ate, we played ‘spot the spinach’ (I won, espying two tiny, wilted leaves tucked in one corner of the no-name white bread offering) and GG’s gnocchi was cold.

The day was sunny, the conversation good, the food queue was long; we gave up and ate.

It may have been a fool’s errand but we also ordered coffee. I placed the order at the counter and then asked, will it be long, as we’ve got to get back to work. The barista heard us and grinned. I’m all over it, he told me. Nevertheless, ignore all the other orders and make ours first, I suggested blithely.

Two seconds later, he appeared with my flat white and GG’s double piccolo, both beautifully executed in delicious Niccolo coffee.

The moral of the story: put nothing solid, I repeat, nothing solid, in your mouth on Ponyfish Island, and treat it like the beautifully ambient bar that it is.

Open 8am till 1am.

Feb

Greetings from the world’s second-most livable city

We Melburnians were disgruntled on Facebook this morning: 11 degrees and raining…in February, our summer. If we’d read the newspapers before the weather report, we should have been happier, as Melbourne has been voted the second most livable city in the world, after the perpetual chart-topper, Canada’s Vancouver which, incidentally, was today experiencing temperatures of just one degrees, and rain .

I like Vancouver: the food is amazing, the scenery beautiful, snowfields and ocean close by. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d still choose Melbourne. It’s those extra 10 degrees. In Vancouver, joggers wear full bodysuits and having been there in December, I can tell you that Melbourne does not have snow drifts like Vancouver has snow drifts.

In the comments following this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I note that no Sydneysider was begrudging Melbourne its position – Sydney was down in 7th place, just above two more Australian cities, lonely Perth and suburban Adelaide, in tied eighth place. That makes four of the top 10 cities as Aussie hotspots. In fact, most Sydneysiders were laughing at the idea that Sydney’s such a great place to live, quoting bad health and transport systems and outrageous costs of living: true, true and true. Those blissful beaches give a lot back to the city.

It could be worse, Sydneysiders. You could be living in one of the bottom 10: say Harare, Dhaka or perhaps Port Moresby. Poor Tehran, there it is as the eighth-worst city in the world, when it actually has good food, shopping and marvellous scenery nearby.

If you’re interested in the full story of the world’s most livable cities, click here to read the Sydney Morning Herald’s take on it all.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s top and bottom 10 cities of the world:

1. Vancouver, Canada

2. Melbourne, Australia

3. Vienna, Austria

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Helsinki, Finland

7. Sydney, Australia

8. (equal) Perth, Australia

8. (equal) Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand

The bottom 10 cities were:

1. Harare, Zimbabwe (worst)

2. Dhaka , Bangladesh

3. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

4. Lagos, Nigeria

5. Algiers , Algeria

6. Karachi, Pakistan

7. Douala, Cameroon

8. Tehran, Iran

9. Dakar, Senegal

10. Colombo, Sri Lanka

Feb

Tagging, bombing, paste-ups, can control… street art in Melbourne

Pic credit: Metro Gallery

If you thought that all that graffiti along the train lines was just kids wasting time, being destructive, you are just soooooo last century. This is art, baby, art.

Well, that’s the point of view if you’re a street artist/graffiti artist/urban artist – whatever you want to call yourself.

“Those kids tagging (leaving their signatures along the train lines) are creating their identity, and they’re learning such skills as can control,” one street artist told me recently. So tagging’s the street artist’s equivalent of the schoolkid’s ‘Goz woz ‘ere’ engraving on trees and desks, I guess.

Excitingly, Melbourne is currently hosting the only Australian exhibition of US street art poster girl Swoon (yes, they all have nicknames, as the same guy told me, who wants to sign themselves ‘John’? Mind you, with a real name of Caledonia Dance Curry, she’s got plenty to work with here.)

Swoon has been doing paste-ups in the US for the past decade – that’s where she’ll draw or block print something on paper and stick it up on a public wall, as opposed to getting out there with the aerosol cans. Her work is lyrical, feminine and very beautiful. In the gallery setting, it was sprinkled with gold and layered with stencils and paper collages. Much of the work was already sold before the exhibition opened, with the gallery’s minions hopefully wielding red spot stickers. And to prove there’s money in art, the most expensive piece (at the time unsold) was priced at $25,500.

She turned up in jeans, sneakers and a white painted singlet with a bumbag (yes, really), while Jeff Kennett, who I accidentally banged into, looked positively unhip in his suit with a floral-clad wife in tow.
Get in quick, the exhibition runs till just 3 March at Metro Gallery, 1214 High St, Armadale.

And if you’d like to see more Melbourne street art, click here for a pix from a walking tour I did recently through the CBD’s laneways.

Feb

Hot pants, chilled bourbon and an absence of ladyboys

Worth the drama of getting here…

Bizarre sights on my recent Melbourne to Noosa (Qld) flight:

The couple opposite who have brought stubbie coolers on board with them to keep cold the Jim Beam & Coke they’ve ordered from the hostesses. Obviously seasoned Queenslanders.

The non-Japanese girl in denim hotpants, white knee-high socks and thongs. An over-enthusiastic exchange student?

And why the rush to the loo the moment the seat-belt sign is off? The flight was delayed 45 minutes – surely you’d address this while cooped up in the aircon-dripping extension at Melbourne Airport?

If only Jetstar took a leaf out of the instruction manual of a new Thai airline, which has hired six transsexuals as flight attendants in “’what they felt is an effort to promote an equal opportunity agenda for what they consider the ‘third sex’”, reports eTN travel news.

Jan

Fashion not the passion at the Aus Open

Gilles Simon’s flapping lime-green shorts.

January has to be the best month to visit Melbourne. Quite often, the sun is shining, birds are singing. There’s cricket at the MCG, photography exhibitions along the river’s edge, and, more importantly, The Tennis is on.

The Australian Open is the kick-off for a year of international tennis, and the streets are full of fans in various stages of sunburn, clad in sports paraphernalia and body paint, especially if you spot a herd of Croat guys, shirts off and bodies covered in elaborate red, white and blue heraldic flags.

The fashion is on the field, as well. Long black socks, pulled up to the knees (in 40-degree heat), are a definite statement at this year’s tennis, the Williams sisters’ outfits always are under heavy scrutiny, and it was a bit of a shock when French player Gilles Simon strutted his seemingly fragile little legs, clad in apple-green floppy shorts and shoes whose reflectors glittered and flashed as he dashed across the court, losing by the slimmest margin to Roger Federer the other night.

Riveting sports TV: Czech republic’s Barbora Zahlavova
Strycova has a drink…

The fashion doesn’t always inspire passion: my heart went out to the ballkids (who fetch towels and balls for the gods of world tennis). WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CLOTHES? The poor kids. They run, jump, slide and watch attentively, and their reward? To be clad in the nastiest bile yellow, teamed with shorts in a soft 80s grey, which does nothing for anybody. Add to this the bright blue centre court and the TV lighting, which turns white skin tones to a muted canary yellow, and it’s a visual dog’s bowl out there.

Bright ballboys.

Thank god the tennis was so good (though seeing the perpetually sullen Australian child-woman Jelena Dokic defeated once again by a unseeded, thigh-strapped and strapping Czech, Barbora Zahlavova Strycova, made no-one happy).

In the subsequent men’s singles match, the crowd called out between points: ‘Allez Simon!’ or ‘G’arn Fedo!’ (Federer has a loyal Australian following), as the crowd munched on $6 bags of Maltesers to keep its strength up during the five hours of tennis.

The ever-dapper Federer changed his shirt twice during the five sets of tennis, whipping it off quickly and discreetly. The ever-watching cameras and crowd were always ready, wolf-whistles ringing out across the stadium whenever they spotted a glimpse of flesh. Well, it’s not every day you get to whistle a man who has earned $61 million in tennis alone (not counting, of course, his lucrative advertising gains).

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