“I am unashamedly a Melburnian,” says Julian West in The New York Times. “I like the city's trees and gardens, its Victorian architecture and cast-iron lace, and the tranquillity that some mistakenly call English. I like the fact that it has four seasons that can be felt in the skin. Then, too, there is the quirkiness of the place; the fact that it not only has kept its streetcars as a major part of its public transport system, but has employed artists and cartoonists to paint them.”
The more interesting truth about Melbourne, writes Simon Busch in the New Statesman, is that Europe and Australia have interbred to produce “an alluring kind of unpretentious, untubercular sophistication."
The reason I’m positive about Melbourne, writes Nick Gadd in The Guardian, is its people -- “volunteers regenerating creeks, restoring buildings and trains, setting up community gardens and local festivals and literacy projects, doing street art, working with refugees and asylum seekers.”
Melbourne’s best places are where you least expect them -- “down cobbled alleyways, in dimly lit basements, and above tiny shops,” says Emma Sloley in Travel & Leisure. And a recent flurry of urban development has seen “the arrival of new places to eat, drink, and feed even the most severe retail addictions.”
“It doesn't pay to make predictions; sleeping on an unmade bed; finding out wherever there is comfort; there is pain; only one step away; like four seasons in one day.” -Neil and Tim Finn, Crowded House