Open sesame
Melbourne is finally drawing the gate, and now there’s an immense burden to recreate what once was. Unsure whether I was the only one feeling the pressure, I journeyed across town to find out.
There’s opening and there’s opening, and if you’d asked me a week ago whether Melbourne was ready for it, I wouldn’t have known what to say. At this point, to try and make sense of the kaleidoscope of impulses running through us feels somewhat like paddling against rapids, or digging for a worm in a boggy marsh. It’s all too much and it’s all too dim.
However, there have been certain illuminations within this confusing array. Conversations over the past few weeks have seen the consistent expression of a singular, unmistakable desire. I am talking about a desire not just to leave our nests, but to explode them – a desire both unsurprising and perhaps overly rhetorical. Can we really drop it so readily? Can we put it all behind us? For some, this promises to be more difficult. I was at my local park a couple of weeks ago, lounging on a bench, reading a book, when somehow I sensed a dangerous figure was coming my way. I looked up. It was a woman, 60 or so, grey sweater, cankles. She saw that I was maskless. And as she passed, she made a conspicuous harrumph, a petulant shake of the head, and walked on. I was astounded – until I saw the back of her jumper where, printed in white, it read: “SOCIAL DISTANCING. #ITSATHING.”
Despite my sincerest hopes, this lady does in fact represent a non-negligible proportion of our population. The afraid, the virtuous, the aggressively risk-averse. The people who tweet sneeringly about rule-breakers, as if divinely ordained as the paragons of obedience. The people who have secretly (or not so secretly) loved battening down the hatches.
Much has been made of the predicted bifurcation of the populace into the obediently jabbed and the unvaxxed masses. (This, of course, assuming someone even can get jabbed.) But when we’re at 95% or so, as we’re predicted to be, this split simply won’t matter. The final 5% will give in, especially if it’ll still be another 14 months before they can live like the rest of us. Rather, the schism is popping up in other places, suggestive of a different kind of bifurcation. The cleavage lay somewhere in that 95%, and it divides the vaccinated who suspect something, and the vaccinated who suspect only the suspicious. That is, a new face on a well-worn conflict. The sceptics versus the believers, the cigarette smokers and the workout addicts, the maskless readers and the slogan-toting passers-by. This is the real two-tiered society.
But then, haven’t we all secretly loved our exile? Leviticus deems that expulsion is the only appropriate punishment for disobeying God’s commandments. “And you I will scatter among the nations,” reads Chapter 26, “and I will unsheathe the sword against you. Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.” Except, in our case, the reverse is true. We have to lesser or greater extents played along, so that many of us have found niches within our exile that we’d prefer not to relinquish. Morning routines have been formed, new hobbies discovered, superfluous friendships discarded. Are we so willing to put our new assurances to the test?
I also suspect an element of social fatigue which will sneak up on us and catch us unprepared. In conversations with two friends from London, I have registered, in both cases, a fatigue with the newly liberated way of life. Both independently expressed a similar desire, furtive yet undoubtedly present, to shut the doors again and go back to the simpler ways of yore, if only for a week or two. This in a country whose lockdowns have been nowhere near as strict as ours, nor as persistent. My hypothesis is that, in Melbourne especially, we’re all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome in one form or another, lambasting the severity of isolation in one breath while pining for its simplicities in the next. I mean, who in their right mind wants to go back to paying rent by actually working?
But the overarching question is a more fundamental one. I remember that, during my final year of university in 2019, I was growing increasingly cognisant of a special kind of hum around Melbourne. A reverberating energy, diffused beneath the broad cultural life that the city was supporting. Theatres were teeming. Live music was reaching its zenith. It was impossible to find a genuinely bad restaurant. When you’d go out for coffee, you’d spot at least three familiar faces. And then it all vanished – the food, the faces, the hum – gone and unseen ever since. On the week of September 20, 2021, we hit rock bottom, as if we were stuck in an unscalable pit and were too stupid to dig up. The unexpected protests on the Monday and Tuesday, the earthquake and the fracas at the Shrine on the Wednesday, the silent and still MCG on Grand Final Saturday. In that week, something snapped, and we discovered that our digging had only made things worse.
Now, we’re asking ourselves to set it all right. It’s understandable. But I can’t shake the impression that somewhere, there’s a premise going uninterrogated. As it stands, Melbourne is a city hollowed out to its core. It is a city whose main cultural attractions have been the most pitilessly targeted by lockdowns, whose populace has been utterly battered by a never-ending isolation, and whose return to form is speculatively scheduled for 2024. Is it really feasible to bring Melbourne back to how we once knew it?
These were suspicions which I held dimly, almost unconsciously. They were begging to be tested. So, in the last week, I offered them out to the world.
What I got in return was at once confirmation and rebuttal. Confirmation that it probably wouldn’t be the grand return some had envisaged. Rebuttal, however, of my assumption that whatever we had in 2019 no longer existed, because over the course of this last week I’ve witnessed, with my own eyes, certain familiarities which have inexplicitly suggested to me that all, in fact, is not lost.
It started in the days before opening up. The city was swept out by a cold and impassionate air, and you had to look relatively closely to see any outward signs of excitement about our forthcoming return to life. Through dark windows, I could see the staff at Roule Galette arduously screwing in table legs. I mosied over to the corner of Little Bourke and Elizabeth, where a couple of suits were sharing cigarettes and laughing about a sale worth “30 mil’.” I felt like it was just us on the street, because it was. There was no buzz. There was only a cool breeze.
Then the weekend rolled around, and we opened, and it warmed up. That is to say, the old images re-appeared. On the corner of Glenlyon and Sydney Road in Brunswick, I was waiting at the tram stop next to a youngish woman. She had long curly hair and glasses placed low so that they didn’t fog from the mask she was wearing, and she was holding a bunch of bok choy, nothing else. She suddenly examined her bok choy with fastidious attention, and picked something off one of the leaves. It was a slug, which she placed, ever so daintily, onto the leaf of a nearby Sparganium. I stood back and wondered at this perfect Brunswick moment, the sublime hippie compassion of it, and thought to myself: I’ve missed this.
Which I again thought when I went walking around the city that night with some friends. Here, I was presented with an array of majestic Melbourne banality so convincing that it had an almost prophetic quality, as if the city itself was calling out to me. To see a redhead slumped over an electricity box with a pile of vomit next to him, to see his two friends crouched nearby in attendance, and to hear him make a garbled attempt at speech before turning his head away, it was like Melbourne was accusing me of harlotry: what, you didn’t think this sort of thing happened anymore? This was the question posed over and over, by each successive image. The mid-20s woman, looking glowingly made-up, holding her margarita aloft and pronouncing, “Oh my God, this drink is orgasmic.” The alarm ringing outside the Universal Store, to the concern of precisely zero passers-by. The three older men swinging jumbo KFC bags around, soggy chips flying across the sidewalk. The trios of wannabe influencers miming lyrics into a phone camera. The garishly dressed 15-year-old girl walking with her friend, gleefully going on about how “my dad doesn’t know shit.” The busyness of the intersection at Lonsdale and Swanston, which was so unexpected to me that I felt like I was watching a beautiful dream from the past.
Perhaps most revealing of all was the scene in the inner-north. The CBD end of Lygon Street was a phantasmagoria of foreign tongues and revving engines and shisha smoke. It was beautiful. Huge groups were splayed out across three or four tables hastily pulled together, for a dinner starting at 10pm. The Greeks, the Lebanese, the Arabs, the Indians, the Sri Lankans. Everyone was out, everyone was family. A succession of souped-up Nissan Skylines and Mitsubishi Lancers thrummed down Lygon, the cars weaving in and out of traffic. The screech of tires, the growl of engines, the pulse of someone’s Soundcloud feed. So forceful was the showing that, when I passed by the Cairo Nights restaurant, I was convinced that it was in fact an Italian restaurant, or used to be, and that my eyes were playing tricks on me. Why is there shisha outside an Italian restaurant?
Contrast this with Gertrude Street, which was utterly desolate by comparison. Nary a stray figure wandered by. Outside the Fitzroy Beer Garden there wasn’t even the obligatory crowd of 18-year-olds from Nunawading. Perhaps this had something to do with class, and obedience, and social orientation. Perhaps it’s because Lygon Street is a nexus of disparate cultural existences, while Gertrude Street principally serves the gentrifiers and the bourgeois-aspiring. Perhaps some communities have a communal primacy that others don’t. Perhaps lockdown affected a certain socioeconomic subsect in one way, and affected another subsect quite differently. In any case, as the ethnics dropped another coal in the bowl, the white yuppies across the park knew nothing of what was going on because they were all asleep.
That night I arrived home exhausted. It was like I’d been given too much of a good thing, like my cup was overfull. But then again, I was redacting the passage, choosing to focus on the Lygon Streets of my mind. Of course, the Gertrudes were still there, and their looming shadow became increasingly conspicuous the more I processed what I’d seen. After all, London had had that same euphoric gesture. If our “Freedom Day” didn’t promise to be so gaudy as theirs, perhaps it promised to leave that same metallic taste in the mouth – the taste of having too much.
But I wanted to – still want to – believe so badly that all can be salvaged. Earlier that week I’d been to the tobacconist on Swan Street. The shopowner had insisted I buy a pack of apple-flavoured “Juicy” papers, which I did to shut him up. When I went to pay for my things they were put in a small, jet-black, brand-new plastic bag. The kind of cheap plastic bag which marginal convenience stores order by the 10,000-pack. The kind you used to amass from visits to the milk bar, the kind now looked upon as immoral to even offer out. And when I told him I already had a bag and he withdrew it with vague antipathy, I thought to myself: God, some things really don’t change.
But the real dread of it all is knowing the fatigue is coming. I can sense it already – the crushing weight of hope, the ease with which we can let go of it. When my London friends told me about their desire to recede, it registered with me because it’s a desire I understand. But that doesn’t mean we should relinquish the opportunity we have to actually make something of our time. Isn’t this moment the reason millions of us got vaxxed? Indeed, the last four months have accrued into a new responsibility to do, to really open up. To say yes to everything. To head north to Lygon, rather than east to Gertrude. Because, in the end, the wave will hold us for a while and then it will break, and in that moment, London won’t seem so far away after all.