A Head to Head special: Melbourne vs Sydney

This week’s topic: That Melbourne is better than Sydney

Andrew Woodhouse

Bling, Bling, Bling.

These are the sounds of Sydney.  If you dote after diamonds, glitz, glamour, views, fake fur and facadism, you like Sydney. If you enjoy V12 harbour powerboat racing, callow car contests or doof-doof music with dinner, you’re in Sydney. If you suffer from appalling public transport, a financially sick health system, narrow streets, parks the size of stamps and view-flu, you’re a Sydney-sider.

What is a view without a thought?

Sydney has only three thoughts: me, me and what you think about me. Only in Sydney can this Head to Head topic exist. In Melbourne the subject is otiose (they know what this means).

If you prefer intelligence and clotted cream with your concert-interval scones, an almond Magnum at a Shakespearian drama, the current Pompeii Archaeological Treasures exhibition, free CBD trams, rugging up for real winters and fog, playing football while splashing in Autumnal showers of golden leaves and parks the size of Sydney Harbour, then you’ll enjoy Lord Melbourne’s demesne.

Ding, Ding, Ding. These are the sounds of Melbourne.  And it’s the music of the world’s only beautiful, burgundy, heritage-listed, fine dining trams as they reverently glide through suburbs.

Melbourne is magnanimity. It conjures up only three thoughts: class, class, class.
Where else are there more musty, fusty, cobwebbed antique bookshops? Nowhere else in the southern hemisphere is there town planning that understands the art of the axis, and has a Royal Parade in Parkville (where else?) that really is regal with its tiara of noble, English elm trees.  Where else is their real skill in football, rather than that other game that’s just boys and their balls playing chasey before post-game gang-bangs?  Where else is there a world heritage-listed, gilded, 1880 Royal Exhibition Centre, double the volume of our botched, so-called opera house, really an operetta foyer that’s too small for its own orchestra? And show me please, where is there, anywhere on earth, another Windsor Hotel with its truly magnificent phalanxes of jewel-encrusted chandeliers?

True, Sydney has its advantages. It has two seasons, hot and wet, or dry and wet. It has water, water everywhere but only for the privileged to enjoy. It has the QVB,  now claustrophobic with escalators. Thanks Clover. And Sydney is this continent’s cradle of European civilisation, but will it ever grow up?  Sydney has grunge, beer barns with plasma TVs, gambling ghettoes and vomit-metres. Melbourne has roasted walnuts on five-metre-wide footpaths. It has friendly, professional, waiters with gold-buttoned waistcoats and ankle-length, snow-white aprons who’ve mastered their craft employed in hushed cafés with real open fires, real mahogany wainscotting and real names like Café Latino, not rude Biology 1 students on loud polished concrete floors in stainless steel and mirror boxes with café names like Zinc.

Melbourne has more than streets. It has boulevardes. And on a Grand European Scale. It’s where they know the art of wearing a scarf, pay tribute to tweed, where heritage is honoured, where mosaics matter and where stunning public sculpture is simply assumed. Its snug, twilight, laneway bars, buffered from residential zones, are not just cute, they’re intimate. Textured gold-leaf wallpapers and groovy, glow-bar, retro 70s decors are enticing, captivating – titillating even.

In Melbourne a book is not a four-letter word, it’s where reading is relished, where Australia’s most intellectual daily newspaper, The Age, still wears its traditional Royal Coat of Arms as a front-page honorific. In Sydney trashy, splashy photos flatter articles as if to say: ‘We got limited words.’ Obviously.

Sydney is over-accessorised, its style just an add-on. Melbourne is more than style. It has panache, élan and its own méthode Melbournoise. Sydney, always playing catch-up, has aspiration but no inspiration.

Melbourne is where civilisation disembarks at is destination.

Peter Whitehead
I was born in Melbourne, at sunset on Grand Final Day. The Demons [my dad’s footy team] were celebrating their third successive Premiership glory. A finer entry to the sports-mad city is unimaginable. I choose to live in Sydney.

The provincial presumption of this week’s provocation presents the problem: the word ‘better’.

Assume a big tick for good and carry on preening. Give us a break…. Since our so successful Olympics Sydney does have serious pretensions to global city status. Now, it is embarrassing enough to have an incontinent sibling tagging along with your sophisticated new best friends, but when they start an unseemly spat about who is better – aaarrrgh! Comparisons are odious. Particularly with that foetid hell-hole on the underside of our continent.

Why not accept our differences and leave it at that?

Sydney is a rambunctious pirate city sprawled around a glorious harbour. Melboring, as we know it, squats upon the banks of an open sewer called the Yarra under the constant threat of rain that never comes but in miserable drizzles.

The denizens of that dark place pass their lives queuing for Aussie Rules games until what they miscall summer comes and they line up for the Boxing Day Test or, poor loves, The Tennis.

As a dedicated investigative journalist I have trekked down the Hume to report from a city that reeks of mud despite the drought. We are staying in Camberwell, an oversized suburb in Melbourne’s east where pubs are prohibited. True, totally dry – in an unimaginably large suburb bordered by beer barns – Pymble on steroids without the fun.

They do love their clothes down here. It’s that or perish from exposure adjacent to Antarctica.  In the city Shane Warne calls home velour track suit pants with ugg boots is haute couture.

There are positives: 60 million more public transport journeys last year [mostly to sporting events]. It is delightful to board a tram, shelter from the prevailing gale and the threat of rain, and clickety-clack along, corking the sclerotic traffic. But when you alight you are still in Melbourne.

Marvellous Melbourne was real enough in the century before last. Even after the Boom went bust in the 1890s Victoria had claims to be the premier state when the nation moved to federation. The Australian Houses of Parliament met in that glorious colonial folly on Latrobe Street until 1927. The Olympics came to town in 1956. Since then there have been world-record attendances at local sporting events, occasional mass murders, frequent honourable mentions in obscure Swedish surveys about liveable cities, the Grand Prix was wrested from Adelaide, Moomba resuscitated and Underbelly shot. A downward spiral demanding a death roll.

There is much for the heritage enthusiast. Apart from some prominent concrete erections developers have shown little interest since the nineteenth century.  For those without ambition Melbourne is a welcoming wen full of kindred souls. But enough of this cruelty. Why kick a cripple? [Barry Humphries could tell you. He launched his career making mock of Melbourne, suburb by lamentable suburb.]

They speak differently here. The short a has been swapped with the short e. I becomes a throaty aah. Newsreaders reported Melcolm Fraser, the ax P-am end Malbourne Gremmar greduate, faahting for his political laahf after losing his pents in Mamphis.

In the Athens of the south they are not worried by the Global Financial Crisis because 80% know the GFC is the Geelong Football Club. Another 19% seem as sure as they can lumpenly be that it stands for Get F-worded C-word. The remaining 1% makes a fat living out of knowing very little.

The southern city does try harder, like an ugly sister lopping toes to fit that ‘must-have’ glass slipper. Such desperation to satisfy makes it a pleasant place to visit. And, to allay anxiety, the Sydney Road is clearly signposted, just north of the CBD, with its honoured reputation as the best thing out of Melbourne.

And the Queen’s Birthday weekend goes forever.