The view from here
As a dark winter passes and spring rolls into our lonely little city, I discover I'm not the only one who's losing his mind
“It’s all about the vibe,” I saw in CBD News not long ago, and thought to myself, okay, that’s all well and good, but what happens when there’s an absence of vibe? In summing up how it all stands at this sorrowful point in our city’s history, I tried to encapsulate it all in a vibe, a common feeling, and instead concluded that we were utterly bereft of one. Melbourne is without air and without consequence. One day earlier this week, at about 9:30 in the morning, I had just rolled my bike from the driveway when I saw hordes of police cars stationed around my local tram stop. A man, bare-chested, was being wheeled into an ambulance, while a woman, hands cuffed behind her back, sat on a bench, surrounded by cops, her head bowed to the ground. Turns out the guy had been stabbed only twenty minutes beforehand. But none of it really mattered; I rode to work and forgot about it.
Because I work in the Hoddle Grid, I often find myself walking around the alleys and laneways and long streets, getting off the tram a few stops later than I should and taking the circuitous way to work. On these excursions, I am greeted by the haunted and the forgotten of our town. A couple of weeks ago, a bearded man standing beneath an empty carpark asked me if I would like to buy some ice off him. As it stands, this is the only way to have a conversation in the Hoddle Grid.
But the airlessness has spread far beyond the CBD. On all sides, trains plough on, carrying no one. Now that I live south of Kew, I don’t even see buses anymore – just trams, old tram doors squeaking open, bells dinging incessantly. For 17 hours a day, empty trams roll by my window, and I wonder: who’s ever catching them, and where are they going? This is the question on everyone’s lips. “Who’s ever catching them?” a friend also said to me not long ago, as we heard the empty carriages clatter by. But then, that’s what it’s come to. We now all ask the same questions, because there are few new questions left to ask.
This is also why I stopped journaling. It might seem like lockdowns are a unique chance to reflect, but after six of these things I was finding there really wasn’t much more to say. My journals were enburdened with aimless questions, scrawls I could barely even read. In an entry dated August 5 2020, I used the phrase “total spiritual anonymity”, and when a whole year later I found myself leaning into the exact same phrase, I decided it was best to probably put the pen down for a while. I started focusing on art criticism instead – it feels good to at least be able to make sense of something, even if it’s seemingly inconsequential. That nobody read Tarantino’s new novel, nor saw the MIFF movie about the young star of Death in Venice, matters less to me than the sense of completion I incurred from the simple act of writing about them. They cohere for me in a way that epidemiology and curfews no longer can, and, therefore, constitute one of the only remaining mechanisms with which to reasonably interpret the world.
Winter is difficult enough on its own; but this has been a particularly hard one, because nothing within it has made sense. Disputed curfews and banning kids on swings have captivated our attention, but they’ve never pretended to cohere in any meaningful way. They’ve just occupied us until the next thing came along – like SlugGate, or the Carlton review. There have, however, been moments of escape; the only problem being that there aren’t enough unique moments to go around. Parks, for example, have become the nexus of the universe. The paths are swamped after 5pm, and on weekends it’s all you can do to go for a walk without being bludgeoned with a stray football or getting pounced on by a young couple’s dog or, worse, their toddler. The park behind my house, which stretches undulatingly for about 650 metres beside the Yarra, is 90% of the time a total clusterfuck. From certain perches around its edges, you can stand and gaze down into the park as if it were some kind of petri dish, watching a horde of tiny organisms engulfed under the despair of the winter sun.
“It’s all about the vibe,” they say. Well, maybe despair is the vibe. Or maybe it’s not. Walking through QV the other day, picking up cartons of mineral water, I was stopped in my tracks by a succession of gorgeous people, dressed impeccably and strolling along the empty galleries like they were Travolta in Bay Ridge, circa 1977. Moneyed though they obviously were, their appearance transmitted a kind of indiscriminate joy to me, one both achingly pure and finite. Seeing such beauty on the street gave me a momentary saccharine pleasure which I ingested and burned off in an instant. Then it was back to work, lugging my mineral water up Bourke Street, hoping to avoid the guy who wants to sell me ice.
Another reason despair doesn’t quite cut it: In the hours before my trip to QV, I asked to a friend of mine, a truck driver, how he’d been faring amidst lockdown. My workplace, whose offices are in Sydney, had warned us that our Victorian warehouses were being shut down (it’s now weeks later, and they’re still open). I wondered whether he’d heard anything about this, or whether he’d been affected at all by the seeming precarity of the transport situation. He said that, though his business was significantly reduced, the thing that annoyed him more was the lack of compliance amongst truck drivers. He mentioned a rally in which some of his colleagues were planning to participate, and which eventuated a couple of days later in a co-ordinated series of protests that ignominiously “fizzled out.” My friend was somewhat speechless. “Ridiculous” was a word he used numerous times, before concluding: “It’s all comedy, dude.”
Absurd comedy or spiritual impoverishment? Well, whatever it is, it’s getting to everyone. Truckies, faced with increased COVID risk and 16-hour days, are out of ideas; so too are artists, whose lives, apparently, are imperilled. The Melbourne Writers Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival were both squashed, unveiled to the public one day and gone the next. The Melbourne Podcast Festival, which I didn’t even know existed until three minutes ago, was cancelled too. One can only presume that the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, slated for October, will be the next to fall. Reports that “business has never been better” for auctioneers and the high-art industry cannot possibly cohere with the lived experience of many artists, particularly those in the Nicholas Building, which is now up for sale. There is, quite literally, nowhere left to hide.
Forget about trying to generate some energy towards making things make sense. This, we’re told, is a public health risk; better to freeze society than to overcook it. However, in recent weeks we’ve seen the unplanned revelation of a particularly desultory hypothesis: perhaps lockdowns no longer achieve what we thought they did. Other countries more quixotic than ours decided months ago to take this theory and run with it, not bothering to rely on science or data to back up their claims. As a result, their populace is in motion, while ours remains stagnant. So what do we do? Do we mimic them, or stay the course?
This is the question which, as winter gives way to the blossoms of spring, lies tantalisingly in the distance. If we remain under stay-at-home directives in some form until the end of October, it will be a combined 273 days since the start of the pandemic that Melbourne has been locked down. (I’m putting this stuff at the bottom, because it’s relevant but not interesting.) Yet the prospect of an end to lockdowns has us planning our very own Freedom Day. We keep hearing things from over there, seeing things from over there, and it’s hard not to be influenced. High-profile bacchanals which fly in the face of COVID safety, often organised by even higher-profile figures who had previously advocated for strict compliance with restrictions, are just the sort of the thing that happen over there.
True to form, we saw our northern allies hogging all the fun and so we tried to forge a bacchanal of our own: a pathetic engagement party in Caulfield North. Keep in mind that we don’t have people as callous or narcissistic as Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom; we only have people who are mildly self-centred and indifferent to government directives. Less severe though the perpetrators may have been, the result was equally embarrassing. What the Caulfield North engagement party lacked in decorum or flair, it provided in needless consequence: a couple of transmitted COVID cases, in-fighting within the Jewish community, and a video which makes the whole thing seem excruciatingly lame; this, as we know, is the worst crime of all.
Indeed, spring is here, without much hope of a reprieve. But stories continue in our city, even if the BBC has all but given up reporting on them. And yes, you may ask: why did the BBC even report on Melbourne in the first place? Well, in case you’ve forgotten, Melbourne used to move, used to flow, had a certain rhythm to it which locals intuited and newcomers learned to love. Every now and then I get reminded of that rhythm, and start believing it isn’t so lost after all.
Enjoyed this ..keep
It up !
Great piece mate