Melbourne, “Truly English it looks as yet, at first sight at any rate.” Arriving from London, John Martineau reaches in November 1866 the city of Melbourne after a 3-month journey on board of a sailing ship. “After a long, wearisome voyage, the first impression is almost one of disappointment at having come so far only to see sights and hear sounds so familiar.”
His impressions and account of his travel through Australia appeared in the English newspaper The Spectator during the course of 1867 and 1868 and were later published in London in 1869 as “Letters from Australia”. Comparing Melbourne with any English providential town, he writes favorably of its “well-filled showy shop-windows” and “the ambitious and costly architecture of the public buildings, hotels, and especially banks”.
The space covered by the city and its suburbs is “out of all proportion large for the population”, with broad lanes “not paved” but macadamized “in good order in all weathers”, with broad, deep, paved gutters on both sides of the road. The most attractive feature in Melbourne is, anno 1867, “a vista of open sky or distant mountain ranges” giving a “sense of freedom and space”.
Disappointment is, of course, the least likely word to describe a first impression of Melbourne nowadays. Very few travelers today arrive in Victoria through Port Philip, as most probably he did, stepping on the train from the pier at Sandridge towards Flinders Street, observing the lowness of the houses even in the city center.
These days the majority of passengers arrive by airplane and, while Melburnians still wait for a (direct) rail connection to Melbourne city center, I am to admire the highways and, upon entering Melbourne, the broad lanes -now fortunately fully paved- and the impressive Melbourne skyline. Among the skyscrapers the skyline features since 2020 the 318-meter high Australia 108 building.
The building is not only the highest, but it is typified by a prominent 9-meter protruding yellow sky-lobby or “starbust”, high in the sky, inspired by the Commonwealth star on the Australian flag. Catering to an Asian audience, the building fully incorporated the Chinese system of Feng shui and obeys Chinese numerology. Australia 108 was developed by the Singapore-based company Aspial, perhaps reflecting the changing nature of foreign direct investment flowing into the country and confirming its influence on Australia.
The mid-19th century sense of open space is evidently lost, with historic buildings sometimes hidden behind or in between a new line of commercial and residential skyscrapers, providing Melbourne the feeling of a modern metropolis, at the cost of squeezing out some of its splendid past and history, not only during different demolition phases of the 19th and 20th century.
And so it is no longer the vista or mountains that serve as a reference point while entering and traversing the suburbs of Melbourne, it is its ever changing skyline that sets the tone. A skyline that is certain to change according to Melbourne’s and Australia’s economic highs and lows, fortunes and misfortunes, fashions and mindset.
After a long flight, 157 years after John Martineau, and with the cold south-western wind announcing the imminent arrival of autumn, we find comfort in a late-evening hamburger at Abbey Road Cafe at Acland Street. In the right corner of my eye trams arrive at the terminus station of line 96, right in the heart of St. Kilda, only to reverse and leave for New Brunswick.
– BVB –
Letter from Australia is to be published every Friday.
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