Jan 27 2008
Melbourne
Melbourne, where the Yarra flows into Port Phillip Bay, is a city of narrow beckoning laneways, wide boulevards, unexpected cul de sacs, lovely old arcades and lots and lots of glorious food.
It’s a wonderfully livable city. I know, I live in it.
You can talk of those who come to Melbourne to escape the monsoonal northern summer, or come for the cricket, the football, Spring Racing Carnival or one or the other of the interminable sporting activities. The attraction is not the sport, but the food. Put simply, the best food in Australia is in Melbourne. There are more places to eat than there are people.
The climate is Mediterranean, with a hot, dry summer and a warm, wet winter, although the weather is fickle here. But whatever the season, it’s always mild and comfortable and a cold snap or a heat wave will very rarely last more than three days, although temperatures reaching 112F are hellish to go through.
Autumn is the mildest and the most comfortable season of all. I love Melbourne in Autumn.
Conmen for City Founders
A young city by world standards, Melbourne is distinguished by being an illegal settlement.
A smart conman named John Batman claimed to have signed a ‘treaty’ with Aboriginal leaders in 1835, giving him ownership of almost 250,000 hectares of land. Weeks later another conman, John Pascoe Fawkner, sailed up the Yarra River and established the first permanent settlement.
The English Governor declared Batman’s treaty illegal and the settlers to be trespassers but within two years, more than 350 people and 55,000 sheep had landed, and that was that. Then in 1852, thousands landed every day chasing the dream of gold.
The world comes to Melbourne
It was a century, two major depressions and two world wars later, before such a large wave of immigrants arrived again in Melbourne.
From continental Europe came people with distinctive cultures who made the city not just the gastronomic capital of the country, but the second largest Greek-speaking city in the world. This is when the cafes, now eveywhere underfoot in inner-city Melbourne, first appeared, and the reputation of cross-cultural cuisine flourished.
Whatever you want to eat, Melbourne has the best. It’s not just about great food, but the relaxed informal style of dining and drinking outside all year, that is a peculiarity of Melbourne.
Apart from the fine dining in the city, there are eating precincts just minutes from the CBD displaying the variety of food and cooking styles for which Melbourne is acclaimed.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
