It’s now time to turn the tables, and although I’m not a born and bred Melburnian I have definitely experienced the culture shock of returning to my city of birth, and all that comes along with it.
For the record, I’m not especially biased towards either city; both have their strong and weak points. And as for the Melbourne-Sydney rivalry that gets talked about so much (especially in the southern capital), it’s worth remembering that Sydney and Melbourne are still much more alike than they are different – the week before I moved to Melbourne in 2007, I had been in Tehran. That was different.
However there are subtle differences between Australia’s two largest cities, and when I return to Sydney I find myself coming up against the following;
1. OMG the hills…
“But Melbourne has the Dandenongs, right?” Yep. But the Dandenongs aren’t in the middle of the city.
Sorry, there’s a cliff in the way…
There are parts of Sydney’s CBD which feature serious hills, and out in the suburbs some of the inclines are impossibly steep. It makes Sydney both gorgeous and difficult to plan, build and walk in. A short walk along the harbour could see you climbing giant staircases that in Melbourne really only exist in high-rise buildings.
2. Views everywhere!
The upside to all those hills is the beautiful views that appear down any street near or far from the harbour.
Oh that? That’s just our front yard…
One thing that always strikes me when I get back to Sydney is how I can be driving along, look to the right and there’s some stunning vista across to the harbour bridge, the opera house, or some beach. No-one seems to notice, life just goes on – it’s nothing special, it’s just another day in Sydney…
3. Landing in the city
Kingsford Smith Airport is a nightmare for many reasons, but one thing that most Sydney-bound Melburnians seem to appreciate is just how convenient the airport is.
At your service… (Image: MDRX)
You fly over either Sydney Harbour or Botany Bay when you land (beautiful), there’s a train station at the airport and it’s only 10 kilometres and three stations to the city centre. Meanwhile in Melbourne, the SkyBus and local taxis seem to run a racket rescuing people from the paddocks at distant Tullamarine.
Just don’t talk about Sydney’s airport traffic, or what it’s like to transfer between Sydney’s separate domestic and international terminals. Most Melburnians have at least one horror story to tell about transferring flights at Kingsford Smith, and thank God for direct international connections nowadays.
4. The humidity, the storms and the rain…
Living in Sydney, a lot of people don’t realise just how subtropical their city can be at times. Coming from Melbourne, it’s astounding just how much moisture there is in the air.
Here it comes… (Image: David Edwards)
Sydney might only qualify as a “warm temperate” city in climatic terms, but in summer it feels almost equatorial – the humidity is oppressive, a gigantic storm builds up in the afternoon, and the rain comes down in sheets.
Melbourne gets cold and damp and its seasons are upside down, but no-one does a storm quite like Sydney’s sky throws a tantrum on a January afternoon. If Melbourne’s weather has constant mood swings, Sydney’s is a drama queen.
5. What’s with the city centre at the weekend?
These were the exact words a Melburnian asked me when he returned from a week in Sydney. Initially I was taken aback – I didn’t realise Melbourne’s city centre was any more or less busy at the weekend.
Martin Place at the weekend: deserted
But then I remembered all those shifts at a cafe in Martin Place back in the mid-2000s where we were literally sitting around waiting for a customer to stumble across our shop. There, in what should have been the buzzing heart of Australia’s busiest city, was five blocks of empty grey granite tiles.
Melbourne has its quiet places at the weekend too, but nowhere is quite as starkly deserted as some of Sydney’s most important public spaces on a Sunday afternoon. I haven’t been out partying lately, but I’ve heard that things are even quieter at night since the implementation of “lockout laws”.
6. What’s the hurry?
Melburnians often accuse Sydney of being an unfriendly city, and although it’s a bit of a hackneyed stereotype, I believe there is something to it. Sydney is a city of businesspeople, and for them, time is money. Most people in Sydney don’t seem to have the time, or the money, or the care, or all three, to stop and chat.
These poor people are so busy, they even lost their faces… (Image: Wykymania)
It’s not that they’re unfriendly, but they’re just always on their way somewhere – the actual importance of said rendezvous is another matter. They’re also not particularly interested in where you’re from – in Sydney, everyone is from somewhere, and is probably going somewhere. No-one bats an eyelid if you say you’re from Melbourne; the same would apply if you said you were from Burkina Faso. Call it uninterested, call it busy, it’s a certain brashness that Melbourne lacks.
This was most visibly brought into focus for me when transport card stopped working at the barriers at Sydney’s Town Hall station in peak hour. The same thing had happened to me at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne a few weeks earlier, and the guy behind me leaned over to see what the hold up was. In Sydney, the guy behind me gave me kept walking as if I wasn’t there, and when I tried to step back out of the barrier, he seemed pissed off that I existed.
Have you been to Sydney? What did you notice about the city’s character? Comment below!
Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s two biggest cities, and like the two largest cities of many countries, they have built up a rivalry over the years which has become the stuff of legends. I lived in Sydney for the first 23 years of my life, then moved to Melbourne, so it’s definitely something I’ve thought about over the years.
For those who aren’t familiar, the two cities are thought of by many as having very different ‘personalities’, at least within the Australian psyche. Sydney is considered by many as being bigger, richer, bolder; beachy and brassy. Melbourne was once larger than Sydney, fell behind in the population stakes, but is rapidly catching up. It is characterised as being moody, stylish, cultured; refined and sophisticated.
Whether there’s anything in it, Sydney’s sister city is San Francisco, while Melbourne has Milan, among others.
This article is not going to do that. It’s not a piece to elect a favourite city between the two – God knows I might get chased out of either city by torch-weilding villagers if I did. It’s simply a collection of observations of my domestic culture shock in a city just an hour’s flight from my birthplace.
1. Does winter go forever?
My birthday on the 1st October in Sydney was often a great day to do something outdoors – I even remember it being too hot to go for a picnic, some years.
4pm on any Melbourne December day
In Melbourne, on the first of October I’m still at least two months from the end of what I’d consider to be winter. When there is a day which is clear (without the threat of rain, or some gale blowing), Melburnians run outside like they haven’t seen the sun in months. Which isn’t true because Melbourne does see the sun between April and December, it just doesn’t usually last longer than an hour.
2. The weird half-lane on roads with trams and parked cars
I don’t have an issue driving with trams, but roads which feature tram lines and parked cars, particularly in inner suburbs, seem to feature this weird half-lane between the parked cars and the tram lines.
Can someone explain this to me? It’s not really wide enough to get a car through… but a bike perhaps? Is it a lane?
3. AFL is religion
Everyone in Sydney seems to think that AFL is like Melbourne’s version of the NRL – a game draws people every week, and colleagues tip their teams every Friday in the office.
It’s so much more than that – it’s religion. A large number of people arrange their weekly schedules around football matches, which team you support is an inquiry about your place in society (sort of like when a Sydneysider asks which suburb you live in), and I’ve heard of at least one case of someone having major issues with their daughter’s choice of husband because of the football team he supported. They weren’t even joking.
4. Small city? Or big village?
I grew up in a city where something could be happening in one part of the city and we, in another part, wouldn’t even know about it, much less care.
(Image: Chris Phutully)
In Melbourne, everyone knows what’s going on, and everyone goes to see it. There’s an exhibition on at the NGV? A lot of Melburnians would know what it was, and whether they wanted to go or not.
It could be a sign of Melburnians being more involved in their “liveable” city than Sydneysiders, or it could be a certain tribalism from being a smaller city. There’s a public holiday for a football final, and a parade of horses for a horse race. As the horses and jockeys make their ways down a Swanston Street lined with cheering crowds, squint for a minute and it almost looks like race day at a country town, and everyone has frocked up and come out to say hi. Quaint or cosmopolitan? I’ll let you be the judge.
5. Pub culture
I’m not one for the pub anyway, but I was really surprised by Melbourne’s pub culture when I arrived.
Some days it feels like everyone in Melbourne has “a local” (especially in the northern suburbs), and they might even know the publican, or have gone to school with his children. Or maybe that’s just who I started associating with when I arrived in a new city?
6. Shabby chic
At least until the rise of hipster chic, I knew a lot of people who would squirm or roll their eyes if they ended up sitting next to someone on the train who was wearing 70s or 80s op shop fashion.
Enter Melbourne, where rocking op shop wear is vintage fashion, and being ironic is the norm.
7. That’s not a beach
It’s not that Melbourne doesn’t have beaches…
…but if you’re from Sydney, 30 metres of damp sand do not a beach make.
8. Everything looks grungy
I know that’s the Melbourne cliche, but it’s true. Even heading out into the suburbs, I’m yet to find anywhere that matches the white sandstone spectacle of Sydney eastern suburbs, or the palatial leafy boulevards of the north shore.
Part of this is due to geography, which can’t be avoided, but part of it is also architecture. There are neighbourhoods like Toorak and Brighton, but they still seem to err on the side of faded Victorian grandeur rather than plush grange estate.
9. Concrete jungle in the city
For the capital of a place which used to call itself “the Garden State”, Melbourne’s CBD is conspicuously devoid of green spaces.
Yes, there are stately gardens around the CBD, but if you work in the city centre there simply aren’t that many gardens in the city centre where you can take a sandwich to have for lunch.
10. Where is the ________ area?
Sydney is a city divided by money, class, ethnicity, religion and train lines. Where you live probably says a lot about you, in a lot of people’s eyes. Therefore, if you are looking for a suburb with a particular social make-up, it’s easily identified and found.
Melbourne, on the other hand, is much more integrated. When I first arrived in Melbourne I asked someone where the Arabic area of the city was (I was looking for a grocery store), and got told that “there are a lot of Arabic shops on Sydney Road… or anywhere…” Ethnic enclaves, in Melbourne, don’t seem to exist in the way they do in Sydney.
11. The rivalry matters
Call it arrogance, call it ignorance, living in Sydney I never used to think about Melbourne or the supposed rivalry that much.
From my first day in Melbourne, I was told that “I had made the right move” and that “Sydney is a great place to come from“. Some were less jovial about it; in one conversation with colleagues about where to find quality coffee, I was told that being from Sydney I probably wouldn’t know what they were talking about. It’s not that I minded that much, it’s just that I never realised being from Sydney meant so much, and that the rivalry matters as much as it does to some.
…and if you’re worried that this might be totally one-sided, fear not – here is my Melburnian in Sydney post!
What is your favourite thing about Melbourne? What about your least favourite? Comment below!
Lakemba is a much-maligned suburb of southwestern Sydney. About 20 kilometres from the city centre, it was a typically working class area until the mid-1960s when increasing numbers of Lebanese migrants began to settle there. By 1977 Sydney’s most prominent mosque, the Lakemba Mosque, was opened on Wangee Road just to the north of Lakemba’s main business precinct. In the late-1990s Lakemba shot to the headlines as a centre of gang-related violence, and in the 2000s as stories about alleged Muslim extremists became the flavour of the month.
I lived in Lakemba from 2003 – 2004, and spent much of 2005 and 2006 there too. My memories from this time have very little to do with extremism or gang violence; rather, it was a time of fun, freedom and friendship. From when I first moved to Lakemba, when I had friends like Ali and Mustafa by my side, to 2004 and later when I spent most nights hanging out with my friends Samer, Walid and Abdul, I have almost nothing but happy memories from the era. It was hedonistic – going for movies at 11pm, followed by coffee in the city or Burwood at 3am, then breakfast back in Lakemba. I’d scrape myself off the bed a few hours later to get to work at Starbucks the next day, or if it was a university day I would probably just sleep through.
My life has since taken me in a very different direction; now, living in Pakistan, 33 years of age, I often reminisce about those times. I think about when Samer came to Sydney Airport to see me off when I was heading to Pakistan for the very first time in January 2006. I think about the time that Abdul very kindly tried to refer me to a prominent Sydney journalist that he knew, only for me to turn it down due to my own lack of interest (and perhaps confidence). I think about my first flat that I rented on Macdonald Street, and nights during Ramadan at the Lakemba Mosque just a short walk away. And I think about the countless nights that I spent at Walid’s place sleeping over during summer. Come morning (read: midday or later) we would head out into the muggy Sydney heat to Jasmin’s Restaurant for a breakfast of labneh (strained yogurt) and fatteh.
On a recent trip to Sydney I went back to Lakemba. Some things had changed a lot, while others had remained the same. The streetscape was much more overtly ‘Muslim’ than I remember it being – huge hoardings proudly proclaiming the shahada demarcate prayer halls and Islamic book stores in a way that they wouldn’t have in the early 2000s. Arja Patisserie, my favourite pit stop for baklava, had closed down. And the previously Arab-dominated demographic seems to have been diluted by a new influx of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims who call Lakemba home.
It was a typically sticky Sydney summer morning, and I couldn’t pass by Jasmin’s without stopping in for breakfast. Of course I ordered my old favourites, and as I dug into the fatteh, the slightly warm, sour yogurt coating my tongue, I was transported to another place and time. I closed my eyes… some (often prejudiced) people say that coming to Lakemba is like stepping out of Australia and into a Middle Eastern country. However for me, that morning, it was like coming home to a place I had lost touch with – the Australia of my youth. Suddenly everything went into rewind – Pakistan, books, blogs, India, teaching, travel, Melbourne, relationships, Iran… and I was 20 again, about to face a new day in Lakemba where on my to-do list I had… nothing.
Fatteh at Jasmin’s Restaurant
I opened my eyes and snapped out of it. I knew what I had to do. My days in Lakemba existed perhaps only in the memories of those who were present – in the days before social media and camera phones, simple memories like these went undocumented, simply consigned to the annals of a person’s life. That’s not particularly a bad thing – not everything must be hyper-documented in the way that modern social media urges us. However it’s also a tragedy, because whenever I hear the name Lakemba uttered, my sentiments are restricted to my mind, while the faces in the room around me register a very different emotion, oblivious to my world of youthful bliss. I wish I had more of my fun times in Lakemba to share with the world.
I decided to feature fatteh, Jasmin’s, Lakemba and the Lakemba Mosque on my Recipes for Ramadan video for this week – because while the mosque itself is not particularly remarkable, Lakemba holds a very special place in my heart, one which is so different from that which most people envisage. Lakemba, in this way, is one of the most Australian places I can think of. Lakemba is the Australia of my youth.
Have you ever returned to a place to relive memories? Comment below!
(If you’re interested in making fatteh, I found a good recipe online here at Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail)
This week, I’ve been a little bit obsessed with the new Qantas inflight safety demonstration video. It is, in a word, beautiful. For me, Qantas’ new inflight video is more than just a safety demonstration, or even a clever tourism campaign.
Frequent readers of this page will know that I’m not a huge fan of the country in which I was born. The cultural trajectory of Australia in my lifetime seems to have swerved in a direction that I don’t identify with; one where the unquestioningly patriotic, mindlessly crass, drunk alpha male is held up as the quintessential “Aussie larrikin” – and therefore something to aspire to.
(Image: David Jackmanson, Wikimedia Commons)
And occasionally Australia gets it right, and when they do, it’s incredible. One excellent example of this, in my opinion, was the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Love or hate the Olympics, the opening ceremony was culturally rich and for the times, spectacular beyond words. It didn’t shy away from “iconic Australia”, while glossing over the parochial stuff that we could really do without. Those crap inflatable kangaroos from the Atlanta Olympics closing ceremony only made a brief, self-deprecating appearance in 2000 – long enough to be endearingly laughable, but not too long to make us cringe.
It is arguably one of the best showcases of what can be contributed to the canon of “Australian culture”, a notion that so many people used to (and still do) snigger at. Qantas’ new inflight safety video, I believe, falls into the same category. If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is;
A multiethnic cast of otherwise “ordinary” Australians going about their daily lives, creative reimaginings of otherwise banal safety procedures, a modern-yet-classic-sounding backing track and the stunning natural beauty of Australia on show for the world. This is a refreshing approach to the vision of Australian identity; varied, warm and articulate, with no Lara Bingle, racist redneck or drunken yobbo in sight. The idea is not completely new, as it’s actually an upgrade to the Qantas inflight safety video from last year which had a similar theme. There’s something about the new video however which, in my opinion, takes it to another level – I just can’t quite put my finger on what it is.
Creative, warm, diverse, refined but free-spirited. Isn’t this another (potential) narrative of Australian culture?
What do you think of the new video? Do you like it? Comment below!
This post is not anti-Australian, and nor is it seeking to lay blame. It is simply wondering out loud about the direction of society after a horrific incident which terrorised the nation’s second largest city on Friday afternoon.
I had finished work and was walking home when I was stopped at the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets by a crazed man doing burnouts in his car. It was clear that he was not in his senses – whether he was high on drugs or mentally disturbed was not clear, although we would later find out it was probably both. Groups of thugs roamed around the intersection, some in the roadway, some among the crowds, goading both the driver and the police for fun. At least one woman was apprehended at the scene for obstructing the police operation – standing in the middle of the street screaming at the police, and then finally telling a police officer to “suck my cock”. The woman in question can be seen cavorting in the intersection in a blue top at the 0.43 mark of the video below.
The crowd which had gathered wondered aloud if it was a drug deal that had gone wrong, but then mostly began to go back about their regular business. Later, we would find out that the deranged driver had ploughed his car into Bourke Street Mall, the city’s premier pedestrian street, killing three and maiming many more. Two more would die in hospital.
The front pages of Melbourne’s most popular newspapers the day after the attack. (Source: Twitter)
Then it emerged that the massacre was the culmination of a string of anti-social and violent behaviour that had begun almost a week earlier. The perpetrator had been released on bail the previous Saturday after being charged with violent offences. In the week that followed he;
assaulted his mother’s ex-partner, thrusting a burning Bible in his face and threatening to “gouge his eyes out” unless he handed over the keys to his car;
It appears that only after the stabbing incident did the police begin to pursue him again. My question in all of this is; is so much of what else happened considered normal? Consider that until he began driving over people in the mall;
the assault and car theft was thought of as a routine crime incident
smashing the tables of patrons at a bar was the typical “loutish” behaviour you might see at pubs
displays of erratic behaviour by the perpetrator on live television was written off as the normal idiotic stuff you might see whenever a news camera is rolling;
anti-social behaviour by bystanders at Flinders Street Station, baiting both the perpetrator and police and interfering with the ongoing police operation was “the usual stuff you see going on in that part of the city” and
the rest of the crowd at Flinders Street Station largely went back to their usual business, thinking that they had just seen “a drug deal gone wrong”.
When did such disturbed, anti-social behaviour become so normalised? Why was all of this not just normal, but common enough not to raise the attention of society? Indeed, when I saw the burnouts at Flinders Street Station I figured the situation was a notch above, but not completely out-of-character for that part of the city; I witness drunken violence, street side intimidation and/or public assaults on an almost daily basis, and life goes on because, well, what else are you supposed to do?
And it’s not just Melbourne. I’ve been assaulted twice in Sydney, and both times the general reaction from the police and wider society was more casual than I would have liked – “getting rolled” is not unusual, I was told. I don’t know what the solution to this is, because clearly alcohol, other drug use, psychological issues and family violence are so deeply ingrained in the national culture that Australia is clearly never going to become Japan or Singapore (where these people might be a danger to themselves, but social mores mostly keep their troubles from being played out in public – and that’s certainly not to downplay the tragedy of suicide and other mental issues). Nor is Australia about to become Iran or Saudi Arabia, where the law prohibits the consumption of alcohol and drugs such that anti-social behaviour would raise the eyebrows of not just passersby, but also the law.
Whether it should or shouldn’t, Australia will never become one of those countries, because it is Australia – that’s what makes it what it is. So the question how to fix a society which considers domestic violence, and loutish, anti-social behaviour normal.
News reports are retrospectively calling Dimitrious ‘Jimmy’ Gargasoulas’ actions before the carnage as “ominous” and “chilling”. These actions didn’t make news before the attack, and there are many more people out there who continue to behave in exactly the same way today. Should we be concerned about them too?
Postscript: an article published a few hours after this piece went online describes the “failure of mental health services” as responsible for the Bourke Street carnage. As it is in a similar vein to my article, I have decided to include a link to it here.
