moved to Melbourne

-- journal, April 09

It's been almost a month since I moved to Melbourne. Packed everything into a rented car and drove across, staying overnight at the coastal towns, had a little whirl around Canberra, and then savouring that long-awaited moment of seeing the Melbourne skyline rising in front of my eyes, beneath its rusted southern sky.

That's the way with Melbourne, the city will change, but its light will remain. That's the way with old friends you first met right here, and whom you meet again after all these years. That's the way with memories, that once lived in time and were real, and that come alive once more, but are never quite the same again.

Never quite the same again indeed, that time then has now gone. But it's still Melbourne, the laneways, the cafes. The coffee, the bookshops. The university, the trams, St. Kilda, the Melburnian air. I cannot even begin to describe how much I love this city, and how absolutely happy I am to be back. Everyday I walk the streets I collect myself with this city before me and that I am walking these streets that I've always dreamt about since I first left it, since then.

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the cold and grey of this morning were unexpected, this being april. it reminded me very much of those shivering and wet melbourne mornings i used to trot through to get to class, snug in my trusty levis and woollen jumper, invigorated by the wintry air. i had lived behind lygon street, the italian alcove famous for its cafes and restaurants. very few things change at lygon, though the crass and the vulgar (e.g. starbucks) have lately begun their invasion. but most of the cafes that had sprouted along it after the war still stands, run by the same quibbling italian families dashing around with pasta and pizza and shots of expresso. and then of course, there are the students and artists - keeping alive the spirits of generations of impoverished melbourne university students, ex-students, faux-students, angry-students, refuse-to-graduate students, struggling writers, dishevelled poets, apprentice philosophers. all who have, over the decades, indelibly left their artistic and intellectual marks - along the sidewalks, by the shopwindows, in the coffee cups. one could almost still hear echoes of their debates, conversations, commiserations. echoes, because like the invasion of fastfood and fastcoffee, so too the harlequin yuppies have begun their intrusions. but it is of course, always easy to pick out these philistine poseurs. the genuine lygon intelligentsia and literati are somehow invariably unkempt and beggared - there they would sit, swigging strong coffee, scribbling into unintelligible notebooks, peering furrowed brows into tattered copies of camus, kerouac and kafka, exhaling cigarette smoke and discarded thoughts, cogitating with the auburn evening as it tanned into the night.

-- journal, April 06