Melbourne: Goldilocks, Killers, and Tennis

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My next adventure was another major sporting event, this time the Australian Open, my first Grand-Slam Tennis tournament. I confess that if there’s one sport I admit I can play, it’s tennis, but if there’s one sport I don’t watch, it’s amateur male wrestling. With tennis, I grew up with Becker and Edberg and Lendl, and kind of left it at that. As a spectator sport, I find it tennis a little frigid, although my friend Andrea insists that World Number One Roger Federer is God Almighty Himself and another friend has an obsession with the colour of female tennis players’ underwear. But here I am, surrounded by screaming fanatics, their heads swiveling like pendulums as a little green ball gets slammed across the court. About fifty-three Cypriot supporters are screaming and chanting and hurling abuse at their player’s American opponent, ironically dressed in blue and white. The Australians, ever fanatical about their sport, are dressed in national colours and singing in a chorus of deafening support for their local players, most of whom, thankfully, get knocked out by some US-coached European player with a name that sounds like an exotic strudel dish. I found it impossible to watch one game for more than five minutes without falling asleep with my eyes open and dreaming of being attacked by a gang of crazy-killer ball kids. So I bounced between the outer courts, enjoying the scenery, drinking beer, appreciating the odd shot, and shouting abuse at several players because their clothing offended me in some way. Bright green bandanas? No wonder world number 32 Carlos Moya lost to a complete unknown from Monrovsomethingstan. Moreover, it’s shocking to realize how young these players are. Tennis is a game for boys and girls, not men and women. Game. Set. Snooze.

Duck was right. If I had to live in Australia, I would live in Melbourne. Shooting around town with the top off his week-old metallic blue Mini Cooper convertible, we checked out Fitzroy St and St Kildare, packed with folks enjoying their sundowners. Melbournites don’t talk much about their beaches, but the ocean fronts were just fine to me, vast and clean and suitably sandy. “Look, when you’re competing with Sydney or Adelaide, we’re not going to go on about how great are beaches are,” says Duck, steering me into the mouth of a massive clown, framing the gates outside a creepy old amusement park. Besides the bar and restaurant strips, I spent a day exploring the charming alley boulevards in the city, with pop art galleries, hyper-styled graffiti and hip designer threads. I made my way along the Princess Walk past the various sport stadiums, the enormous tennis complex, the famous Melbourne Cricket Ground. No other city in the country has its sport arenas so nearby and accessible. The first Olympic Games held in the southern hemisphere were held in Melbourne, in 1956. Huge development was taking place to the west called Docklands, an enormous building downtown is being constructed which will rank as amongst the tallest in the world, and the Crown casino, located slam-dunk in the city, is regarded as the biggest in the southern hemisphere. I walked along the Yarra River, snaking through the city as peacefully as the Thames snakes through Oxford. Into the Botanical Gardens, past Fern Gulley and here is the Shrine to fallen soldiers, an imposing, solemn structure built to commemorate the thousands who lost their lives in both Great Wars. Do you know the one country that has backed every war the US has ever supported or led itself into? If you said Equatorial Guinea, you’re wrong. Australia’s unconditional support of the USA has cost the country hundreds of thousands of its best and brightest - at least one in five Australian men were killed in World War I, and the infamous Anzac attack during WWII was nothing short of a meat grinder for healthy Aussie blokes. Australia is said to support the U.S in its need for a strong protector and desire to play some role on the international stage, which could finish the show quite nicely should Australia gets lost on its way to the theatre.

Moving on, past Foundation Square, where thousands of students are lined up to hear if they got into university. The Arts Centre has a weird rooftop structure designed to resemble a ballerina’s dress, but instead looks like an egg-whisker that fell into blender. The blessedly free-of-charge Circle Tram took me on a route around the C.B.D, and even without a trademark site or golden beach, it was clear that Melbourne is still a beautiful city with a wonderful buzz to it.

Back at the hostel, the drunks had moved downstairs to the 24-hour bar, so I took the opportunity to flop back in an enormous green bean bag and watch Chopper, the biopic movie that features Eric Bana in his breakout role. Chopper, this sick bastard, carved off his ears so he could get transferred to another prison because everyone in his prison wanted to kill him for knifing another inmate to death. Then he blew some guys head off with a shotgun outside a Melbourne pub. Somehow he got released and started writing about his life, and his numerous books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and inspired all sorts of lunatics like the tattooed moron I met in Puerto Iguazu, who finished the sentence: I am inspired by: Chopper Reid. Today, when Chopper isn’t growling at drunken travel writers in Melbourne bars, he lives on a farm in Tasmania, breeding chickens trained to kill. As I hopped on my flight to Hobart, Tasmania’s capital city, I really hoped I wouldn’t cross his, or his chickens, road by accident.

The Pickled Frog
Hobart, Tasmania

Gonzo Gallery for Melbourne: Goldilocks, Killers, and Tennis

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