Melbourne is stuck in a reverse Groundhog Day: every day is worse than the one before | Tim Richards
The week with the earthquake was my worst in the pandemic, and it wasn’t the quake that made it so. It was the protesters.
I’m a freelance travel writer living in the very centre of the Melbourne CBD – so central that I can see the GPO clock out of my window. My wife Narrelle and I joke about using it to check the time, but I do find myself glancing out of our apartment’s windows at that reassuring clock face with circles in place of numerals. And I love the deep chime that heralds each new hour.
We moved into the city centre in 2003, which I now realise was the beginning of Melbourne’s second golden age, after the prosperity-fuelled Marvellous Melbourne era of the 1880s. At that point the famed laneway culture was still a work in progress – the half-dozen lanes around us were yet to be populated with cafes, bars and shops, and we had to go to nearby suburbs to browse library books or visit a supermarket.
Before long our chosen ’hood was a thriving drawcard for everyone – tourists, shoppers, workers, diners, residents and idlers – just as it had been in the 19th century. Except this was 21st century Melbourne with proper sewers and no typhoid, Marvellous with none of the awkward drawbacks. By 2019 almost a million people visited the CBD every day, and the city council was talking about widening the footpaths to cope with them.
It was great. Until it wasn’t. This week was the worst I’ve had since Covid entered our lives. Worst even than in 2020, when Melbourne’s long second lockdown dragged on for four months. Because a reverse-Groundhog Day scenario has been in effect.
In the movie, Bill Murray’s endlessly repeated day in the small town of Punxsutawney gets worse then gradually better, as he learns to be less selfish and get the most out of the eternity granted him. In Melbourne we started reasonably well, dipped, then rallied, then from mid-2021 everything became progressively worse as lockdowns returned with shorter gaps between them: a seemingly never-ending sequence of empty, restricted days that contained less and less solace or amusement.
An oddity of lockdown life in the CBD is that despite the melancholy surroundings, with their empty shops and deserted laneways, there have been a number of good places to eat that have stayed open for takeaway: the souvlaki stalwart Stalactites for example, or the upmarket Italian corner shop that is Spring Street Grocer. No Hollywood post-apocalypse movie ever showed its subjects schlepping through deserted streets in order to eat the city’s best gelato, but that’s what we’ve been able to do.
Slowly, however, the reverse-Groundhog Day effect has removed even that balm for wounded urban souls. With each successive lockdown, fewer CBD businesses have stayed open to minister to the needs of the city’s residents and passers-through. The fancy food hall at David Jones where we splurged jobkeeper money on expensive cheese closed a few months ago when DJs sold the building. The cafe on the GPO steps has stayed shut for the first time in the sixth lockdown, and most cafes still open are closing at 2pm.
Then, on Tuesday afternoon, we had to endure antivax protestors parading below our window while police helicopters droned above, and that day of discontent summed up how grim life in the CBD has become in this latest long lockdown. Then the last straw. In the mid-afternoon I stepped out to buy lunch from one of the businesses that’s stayed open faithfully through every lockdown, a vegan jaffle hole-in-the-wall place called Union Kiosk – to find it closed because of the protest.
The crowd-loving virus has systematically turned all the joys of the Melbourne CBD life – intimate venues, happy crowds, easy socialising, the use of public transport rather than cars, shared public spaces – into bad things, making them liabilities rather than assets. And I hate it. I hate seeing this vibrant, special place become the exact opposite of what it was for decades, what it was less than two years ago.
As we recede ever farther away from that Golden Age, as I metaphorically wake every morning with Sonny and Cher on the radio but with things getting worse, I despair for the Melbourne CBD – for all city centres, really – now that this disaster has turned their charms into curses.
What I need is for Bill Murray or his Aussie equivalent to talk to Melbourne’s version of Punxsutawney Phil, the rodent with all the answers (perhaps the peregrine falcons nesting atop a Collins Street office block?) and find out whether we’re going to have just six weeks or six months more of this slow, depressing deterioration; and whether I might eventually wake to a hopeful new tune.
The post Melbourne is stuck in a reverse Groundhog Day: every day is worse than the one before | Tim Richards appeared first on Chop News.
from Chop News https://ift.tt/3i63hNc
Post a Comment