I was staring dead into the
eyes of Chopper Reid, Australia's most notorious convicted murderer. Admittedly, he was on the other
side of the glass, and the eye contact only lasted a fraction of a second, and
nobody could actually confirm it was in fact Chopper Reid and not some thug who
looked like him, but the Gonzo was hard to find in Melbourne, which is why I
could happily live here and let the Gonzo stupidity take place somewhere else. So Chopper Reid will have to do,
even if this monster gangster has become one of Australia's best-selling
authors, saying buckets about Australia, but I'll get to that shortly...shhhhhhh
Shortly after arriving in
Melbourne, I understood exactly why Australians often refer to their second
largest city as the continent's cultural heartbeat. Here were the freaks, tattooed, punked up and pumped
out, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow. Funky graffiti decorated walls, gothic alleyways
housed arty stores, old-school wooden trams rattled past my feet. A man wearing nothing but pink
underwear wandered into the middle of Flinders Street muttering something about
something. After Sydney's
beachiness and Perth's sleepiness, here was the oddness I'd been seeking! Three hours later, I was so
plastered you could have painted my skin in bright hues and used my brain as a
baby's playpen.
When my mate Rat told me
that his mate Duck had out-drunk, out-partied and out-lasted our outrageous
mutual mate Rico, I knew I was in trouble. Now Rat can put a pint away, but Rico's reputation
goes back to his birth, when he slapped the doctor back, demanded an apology
for his recent butt whip, a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black, and promptly
relieved himself all over the nurses.
With no respect whatsoever for my liver, Duck would be my guide in
Melbourne. We met on fashionable
Chapel Street, slamming back ales while an eclectic mix of foot traffic rambled
past. Slackers and Crackers, Goths
and Yuppie-Moms. It
was a gorgeous sunny day, and the city was in bloom. "There are no discernable trademarks in Melbourne,"
explains Duck, "but it's the most livable city in Australia by far." Indeed, locals refer to Sydney as
high gloss with little substance, all beach and no soul. Melbourne and Sydney have been
waged in a struggle to be Australia's premier city for over a century, one of
the leading reasons why the Sydney Opera House was built - to do one over
Melbourne. "The
convicts went to Sydney, the administrators went to Melbourne," I am told, as
if this explains the illustrious pedigree of Melbourne, which holds the
distinction of being Australia's oldest city. It's essentially the same argument you might hear
about Los Angeles and San Francisco, which shares Melbourne's quaint trams,
lifestyle and schizophrenic weather. "If you're looking for good weather in Melbourne,
wait", goes the saying. What
wasn't waiting were the beers, flowing like a chocolate waterfall at a candy
bar, We were celebrating the 30th birthday of one of Duck's mates, who
was so loaded up on alcohol, pills and English humour he partied for 52 hours
straight. Personally,
I was in no rush to get home, in this case, the Flinders Station Hotel, a
backpacker zoo with over 500 beds crammed into closet-like cages. My rule of never turning down a free
drink was beginning to hurt, as an assortment of motley characters continued to
bomb me with the booze until it all went fuzzy. My notebook descends into utter chaos - something
about serial killers, and secret Afrikaner societies, and a diagram that
resembles a menstruating amoeba. I remember pulling Tarot Cards and having my
fortune read, which, if I could remember it, probably said, "Tomorrow, you will
have a truly shitty hangover."
By the time I stumbled into my closet, I was ready to pass out
cold. Then I discovered a Chinese
guy sleeping in my bunk. The
cursed Goldilocks Syndrome! Now
when you pay $25 a night for a lower mattress in a room so narrow it creates
awkward sexual situations just trying to get past your roommate, you don't want
to find a Chinese guy snoring on your pillow. A Swedish girl perhaps, but not a Chinese guy. So I bobsleigh off downstairs to
reception, and we go-kart back upstairs, and wake the guy up. But by then, my
clean sheets are soiled with his loose, flaking acne, so he apologized, and
helped me make my new bed on the top bunk closest to the rattling window, and
finally I could enter blessed unconsciousness. Melbourne showed enormous promise.
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
19 January, 2006