Melancholy Melbourne Still Loitering
The Age
Saturday July 12, 2003
I was 20 when I first read The Great Gatsby. When I read this passage below, I stopped, put down the book and took a breath. God I wanted to write like that. And so I did. I wrote it down, word for word, in a blue exercise book that I used to keep, labelled ``Quotes". I'm going to republish it in full, because to my 20-year-old mind it said everything I wanted to shout about cities, about life.
``I began to like New York, the racy adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
I had never been to New York, but even in Melbourne, even at the age of 14 or 15, I had a sense of what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant. The city, you had to be in the city! And if our great journey there was a tram ride from the suburbs on an empty Saturday afternoon, for us it still had urgency and furtive hope. I'd meet some other boys at Flinders Street, with no particular plan except to hang around, often in one of the Greek cafes along Swanston Street, with mirrors and juke boxes at the booths, and wait for something to happen.
But nothing ever did happen. So we'd traipse off to play snooker at Lindrums. Or we'd see a movie, and catch the evening tram home. We were young clerks in the dusk, in Wrangler shirts and desert boots. We'd smoke cigarettes, a small, illicit thrill but not the thrill we wanted, which, of course, though we didn't know it then, was love.
Fired by fantasies of American and European cities, I saw Melbourne as a dud, an empty chest, a dead heart. Life was elsewhere and if you wanted lights, if you wanted soul, if you wanted Gatsby, you had to leave. I don't think I held this view alone. And today, still, I think a lot of us want to ``improve" Melbourne. We're delighted with the city-living boom, the rise of great restaurants and dark bars and clubs that close at dawn. Melbourne lives, at last! It could almost be a city overseas.
That's all true, and all good. And yet . . . I wonder if the city has changed as much as we like to think. To me, the melancholy Melbourne I knew still loiters, stubbornly resistant to all our efforts to move it on.
Little Lonsdale Street, 6pm. After work I walk the length of it, from Spencer to Spring. You couldn't call this street one of our glamour streets or lanes, like Flinders Lane or Little Bourke. There's not much buzz. There are a lot of backs of buildings - buildings when they're not looking their best.
It's cold, the sky is turning blue to black. There's a sharp half moon, a 20-cent piece jammed into a slot. I'm walking between six and seven, which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald knew, is the city's magic hour. It's the change hour, when the occupying armies of the day march out and the partisans of the night creep in. The day people go over the edge in ranks, down the holes at Flagstaff and Parliament and Melbourne Central. At six they're still marching, by 6.30 they're gone. Night people aren't so predictable: they scurry, they slouch, they sway. They linger alone at a bright window. They bellow in groups, or close in on themselves.
In the 1870s the Little Lon area had brothels, in the 1980s the ``clap clinic", as a friend called the STD clinic that used to be just west of Queen. Tonight the windows are fogged in the gym at Dockside Tower, one more ``live-the-dream" residential high-rise west of King. Three Asian guys are reclining in the gym's pool, near a poster of a big-breasted, big-haired blonde in a leotard. A block away, the last office smoker lights up beneath the building that houses the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That's vice for you in the noughties.
The car park near the Children's Court has smashed windows and graffiti tags. An alley frames the apartments in the prow of the Republic Tower. You see a desk, a pot plant, a TV. A man paces, a woman pours a drink and gazes out.
Even at this hour you can walk a block and not pass a soul. A cafe just below Queen is still open, perhaps for overseas students. Quite a few young Asians walk by. To the public at large they're mostly known for propping up the CBD property boom, but they must have quiet adventures here, and maybe some sadness, far from home. I'd like to hear their tales of the city. And those of the older, European-looking man who cleans the office across the road. In the lift he leans on his mop and stares back at me before the doors close into darkness.
The street runs past the barber shop with the red-and-white pole and the old Peony Garden Chinese take away, now a camera shop. Batman Records is shut, and about to shut for good. The dome of the State Library looms like a 19th-century spaceship. I pass a motor repair yard, a couple kissing in a doorway, a white-coated waiter slumped on a red milk crate having a fag. Air-conditioners whir. The lights are on but everyone's gone. Believe me, it's beautiful.
And it's not all forsaken, by any means. At least three bars are strung out along the street. The drinkers peer out, the walker peers in, sensing the heat, the laughter. Coco Chanel once said that no one ever says anything interesting after midnight. But when you walk into a bar at six o'clock, the night has endless possibility and everyone is funny. Or at least that's how it was at 25. At my age, 42, you just walk into the bar.
It's no doubt because Little Lonsdale is a little lonely that such bars can afford the rent. Will it stay that way? Bit by bit the old goes down, the new goes up. As concrete and glass replace brick and wood we risk getting the shiniest, loneliest city of all. I'm old enough to dislike parts of the new world. Still, I love my mobile phone.
Just this week I walked out of Little Lonsdale and raced to catch a tram. I clambered on in an elated rush, saw everyone checking phones and so pulled mine out, jabbed at the face and called my wife. Meet you in ten, I said. Like we said, she said. Of course, I said. But I'd called to feel young again, part of the surge, the city.
Once, I would never have walked down a back street. I'd always take the main street, looking for that constant flicker of men, women and machines. But I see now that the other side of Gatsby is here, too, as I guess it always was. So long Fifth Avenue, hello Little Lonsdale. And the melancholy of what might have been, and the beauty of what is.
© 2003 The Age