On Liberalism - first posted August 4, 2005.
The Yarra river is not all that wide. In comparison to the Thames, Seine or Hudson, it would probably more suitably be deemed a stream, or better yet, a puddle. Similar to many of the world’s finest metropolises, it cuts right through the heart of the local inhabitants’ city, splitting Melbourne into north and south. And Melbourne—the first destination in my return journey home after four years—much like its primary waterway, also pales in size when compared to the Londons and New York Cities of the world. But it is this very compactness and small-town charm which provides Melbourne with her own distinct personality, offering visitors a microcosm through which to understand the enigma of Australia.
Melbourne, like all of Australia’s major cities, features a small, pedestrian-centric city centre (referred to as the Central Business District, or “CBD”) couched in a number of close surrounding suburbs. While there is a reasonably interesting mix of high street shopping and some of Melbourne’s well-documented café chic in the CBD, the soul of the city is found outside the clear bounds of the city in districts such as Carlton, a monument to Italian style and up-turned nosery, and Fitzroy, a former-boho-turned-yuppie hotspot.
My short stay in the city revolved around time spent catching up with my newly discovered second cousins, Grace and Michelle, running around the city for coffee (which I labeled as “thesis research”) with various Melbournites involved in work in East Timor and hunting down all the finer things we Antipodeans pride ourselves on, such as steak pepper pies and frothy lattes.
Upon arrival, I found myself in a state of subdued rapture, one heavily by my having spent the previous 15 hours in a cozy airplane cabin watching Qantas TV. I had giggled with over-enthusiastic ardor at “Cath and Kim” episodes; watched former Aussie cricketer Michael Slater spill his personal life with feigned interest and offered hostess-directed gratuity with grinning “Cheers mate” and “Good on ya!” Ockerism, all seemingly devoid of irony. And now I was here. Home. Five years since my bumpy transplant to the States, I found myself once more basking in the glow of the warm Australian sun, its cool breezy air, its lovable amateur television advertising.
And even better then that, there was family involved. After spending the first two decades my life believing the false notion that the only blood I shared in this country was that between my brother and our parents, two months ago my darling mother nonchalantly dropped the bombshell that her cousin Emilee and two daughters Grace and Michelle have been living in Melbourne since I was five. Now to most people, this might be something to say “Oh yeah?...That’s good” to before carrying on eating their low-carb chicken salad. To me, it was nothing short of an internal psycho-filial transformation; akin but slightly less revelatory to discovering that you have a twin sibling, while substantially more positive than being told that you’re real parents live in Nairobi and that you were raised by their mates from Karate practice.
And what family they are. Emilee, doting mother and expeller of the sort of Confucian wisdom I imagine her great grandmother learned while making rice noodles. Michelle, diminutive in stature perhaps but abundant in cigarette-enhanced relaxed cool and dry wit, a distance (vertical, mostly) apart from Grace, four years her junior but significantly bigger. She is arguably the largest Chinese girl I have ever encountered, standing a good 6-1 tall. Grace, the same age as me, is already manager of one of the more popular bars in the city, named “Lounge,” has movie-making friends and listens to Kraftwerk. “Could this girl be cooler?” I asked myself, jotting down an internal memo which read “Listen to more Kraftwerk.”
And so we newly united cousins traversed the city streets, me filling them in on American slang (“Yes, we really do say ‘blazing’”) and they dropping local knowledge on Australasian race relations, alleyway street art and the best local concert venues. Melbourne is a seductive city, all outdoor coffee consumption and bustling tram lines. Released from the cramped confines of the Mid-Atlantic, I cherished the open space and gentle pace of even popular thoroughfares such as Flinders and Swanson Street. A walk along the Yarra revealed a skyline and urban aesthetic indebted both to Victorian and Modernist schools; a merry marriage of olde British grace and glass-lensed future-facing orientation.
Melbourne is Australia’s city of the arts. As Carmela—a documentary-maker herself (http://www.talibancountry.com/) - informed me, Melbournites “prefer to sit inside and discuss film and books” while Sydneysiders dance with Eurotrash. I’m cariacaturising, but the distinction is apparent: the city overflows with independent bookstores, art houses and nightclubs such as “name,” which makes it a point to support local multimedia artists. Its street art scene is burgeoning; I read a feature article in one of the city’s major newspaper magazines whose spin was completely pro-artist and welcoming of Melbourne’s increasingly democratised wall space, a world apart from the hostile character assassination of “Borf” artist John Tsombikos in the Washington Post* (whose work I gleefully discovered outside of Melbourne).
The art, however, is but an extension of the city’s philosophy of fully embracing socio-cultural liberalism. Voted the world’s most liberal city multiple times, Melbourne is a current haven for the unusual, the inventive and the Left. Traditional stronghold of the country’s unions and influential post-Marxist journal “Arena,” it now offers a politically receptive breathing space. In a global climate that is increasingly xenophobic and hostile to cultural (symbiosis), Melbourne’s inhabitants offer hope that Australia’s great ship Multiculturalism will sail soon once again. On a bus headed for suburban North Melbourne, I witnessed an elderly Chinese woman, clearly lost, asking for directions in loud, thick Mandarin. She was animated, smiling, laughing and at turns lambasting the bus driver for not being clear enough, apparently unaware of the fact that nobody had the faintest what she was carrying on about. Having been on the receiving end of much racist carry-on and banter as a child, I mentally braced myself for the impending storm:
“This could be interesting…he doesn’t understand her, and she doesn’t understand him,” noted a man sitting near me to the bus at large.
He received several nods of what seemed to be good-natured amusement. Though the bus stood still for several minutes, the lady walking back and forth and continuing to cheerily orate in Mandarin to the whole bus what seemed to be her plans for the day, not one person made a disparaging remark. No “Get off, gook!” or “Fucken boat people” mutterings, but rather, only the patience and humility which for me has always characterised the finest Australian traits. Though late for my appointment with John, a freelance journalist whose kidnappers had recently released him in Iraq (“If I was American, they would have killed me” he told Radio Australia), I felt fortunate to have observed such a gratifying encounter.
As an introduction to many a visitor and a “welcome home” to one earnest son curious to see how his Motherland is aging, the city on the Yarra comes through with flying colours. Be they the studious Asian hitting out in the cricket nets at Melbourne University, the Greek party crowd at Stalactite standing in line for two A.M. souvlakies, or a lighthearted world-recognised academic eating breakfast with an American undergraduate she has never met before, Melbourne’s populace makes this country proud. Like my cousin Michelle, she is undersized in comparison to her Western peers. But, like my other cousin Grace, who has since set off to spend a year touring Europe and the United States, she has much to teach the world about what it means to be “Liberal.”How good it feels to be home.
*William’s article actually approaches Tsombikos in a far more balanced way than other Post writers have attempted to, and I should highlight the fact that he is from Oxford, not a journalist for the Post.
The Yarra river is not all that wide. In comparison to the Thames, Seine or Hudson, it would probably more suitably be deemed a stream, or better yet, a puddle. Similar to many of the world’s finest metropolises, it cuts right through the heart of the local inhabitants’ city, splitting Melbourne into north and south. And Melbourne—the first destination in my return journey home after four years—much like its primary waterway, also pales in size when compared to the Londons and New York Cities of the world. But it is this very compactness and small-town charm which provides Melbourne with her own distinct personality, offering visitors a microcosm through which to understand the enigma of Australia.
Melbourne, like all of Australia’s major cities, features a small, pedestrian-centric city centre (referred to as the Central Business District, or “CBD”) couched in a number of close surrounding suburbs. While there is a reasonably interesting mix of high street shopping and some of Melbourne’s well-documented café chic in the CBD, the soul of the city is found outside the clear bounds of the city in districts such as Carlton, a monument to Italian style and up-turned nosery, and Fitzroy, a former-boho-turned-yuppie hotspot.
My short stay in the city revolved around time spent catching up with my newly discovered second cousins, Grace and Michelle, running around the city for coffee (which I labeled as “thesis research”) with various Melbournites involved in work in East Timor and hunting down all the finer things we Antipodeans pride ourselves on, such as steak pepper pies and frothy lattes.
Upon arrival, I found myself in a state of subdued rapture, one heavily by my having spent the previous 15 hours in a cozy airplane cabin watching Qantas TV. I had giggled with over-enthusiastic ardor at “Cath and Kim” episodes; watched former Aussie cricketer Michael Slater spill his personal life with feigned interest and offered hostess-directed gratuity with grinning “Cheers mate” and “Good on ya!” Ockerism, all seemingly devoid of irony. And now I was here. Home. Five years since my bumpy transplant to the States, I found myself once more basking in the glow of the warm Australian sun, its cool breezy air, its lovable amateur television advertising.
And even better then that, there was family involved. After spending the first two decades my life believing the false notion that the only blood I shared in this country was that between my brother and our parents, two months ago my darling mother nonchalantly dropped the bombshell that her cousin Emilee and two daughters Grace and Michelle have been living in Melbourne since I was five. Now to most people, this might be something to say “Oh yeah?...That’s good” to before carrying on eating their low-carb chicken salad. To me, it was nothing short of an internal psycho-filial transformation; akin but slightly less revelatory to discovering that you have a twin sibling, while substantially more positive than being told that you’re real parents live in Nairobi and that you were raised by their mates from Karate practice.
And what family they are. Emilee, doting mother and expeller of the sort of Confucian wisdom I imagine her great grandmother learned while making rice noodles. Michelle, diminutive in stature perhaps but abundant in cigarette-enhanced relaxed cool and dry wit, a distance (vertical, mostly) apart from Grace, four years her junior but significantly bigger. She is arguably the largest Chinese girl I have ever encountered, standing a good 6-1 tall. Grace, the same age as me, is already manager of one of the more popular bars in the city, named “Lounge,” has movie-making friends and listens to Kraftwerk. “Could this girl be cooler?” I asked myself, jotting down an internal memo which read “Listen to more Kraftwerk.”
And so we newly united cousins traversed the city streets, me filling them in on American slang (“Yes, we really do say ‘blazing’”) and they dropping local knowledge on Australasian race relations, alleyway street art and the best local concert venues. Melbourne is a seductive city, all outdoor coffee consumption and bustling tram lines. Released from the cramped confines of the Mid-Atlantic, I cherished the open space and gentle pace of even popular thoroughfares such as Flinders and Swanson Street. A walk along the Yarra revealed a skyline and urban aesthetic indebted both to Victorian and Modernist schools; a merry marriage of olde British grace and glass-lensed future-facing orientation.
Melbourne is Australia’s city of the arts. As Carmela—a documentary-maker herself (http://www.talibancountry.com/) - informed me, Melbournites “prefer to sit inside and discuss film and books” while Sydneysiders dance with Eurotrash. I’m cariacaturising, but the distinction is apparent: the city overflows with independent bookstores, art houses and nightclubs such as “name,” which makes it a point to support local multimedia artists. Its street art scene is burgeoning; I read a feature article in one of the city’s major newspaper magazines whose spin was completely pro-artist and welcoming of Melbourne’s increasingly democratised wall space, a world apart from the hostile character assassination of “Borf” artist John Tsombikos in the Washington Post* (whose work I gleefully discovered outside of Melbourne).
The art, however, is but an extension of the city’s philosophy of fully embracing socio-cultural liberalism. Voted the world’s most liberal city multiple times, Melbourne is a current haven for the unusual, the inventive and the Left. Traditional stronghold of the country’s unions and influential post-Marxist journal “Arena,” it now offers a politically receptive breathing space. In a global climate that is increasingly xenophobic and hostile to cultural (symbiosis), Melbourne’s inhabitants offer hope that Australia’s great ship Multiculturalism will sail soon once again. On a bus headed for suburban North Melbourne, I witnessed an elderly Chinese woman, clearly lost, asking for directions in loud, thick Mandarin. She was animated, smiling, laughing and at turns lambasting the bus driver for not being clear enough, apparently unaware of the fact that nobody had the faintest what she was carrying on about. Having been on the receiving end of much racist carry-on and banter as a child, I mentally braced myself for the impending storm:
“This could be interesting…he doesn’t understand her, and she doesn’t understand him,” noted a man sitting near me to the bus at large.
He received several nods of what seemed to be good-natured amusement. Though the bus stood still for several minutes, the lady walking back and forth and continuing to cheerily orate in Mandarin to the whole bus what seemed to be her plans for the day, not one person made a disparaging remark. No “Get off, gook!” or “Fucken boat people” mutterings, but rather, only the patience and humility which for me has always characterised the finest Australian traits. Though late for my appointment with John, a freelance journalist whose kidnappers had recently released him in Iraq (“If I was American, they would have killed me” he told Radio Australia), I felt fortunate to have observed such a gratifying encounter.
As an introduction to many a visitor and a “welcome home” to one earnest son curious to see how his Motherland is aging, the city on the Yarra comes through with flying colours. Be they the studious Asian hitting out in the cricket nets at Melbourne University, the Greek party crowd at Stalactite standing in line for two A.M. souvlakies, or a lighthearted world-recognised academic eating breakfast with an American undergraduate she has never met before, Melbourne’s populace makes this country proud. Like my cousin Michelle, she is undersized in comparison to her Western peers. But, like my other cousin Grace, who has since set off to spend a year touring Europe and the United States, she has much to teach the world about what it means to be “Liberal.”How good it feels to be home.
*William’s article actually approaches Tsombikos in a far more balanced way than other Post writers have attempted to, and I should highlight the fact that he is from Oxford, not a journalist for the Post.
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