Melbourne undercover

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Melbourne after so long away. Afterall, not many cities can compare to Tokyo. Everybody asks me: are you bored yet? Do you find it dull ? But, against all expectations, I have been really enjoying it. I guess so many years away gives you a new perspective and lets you appreciate things you took for granted.

Plus, everywhere I go there are places that bring back memories and associations I haven’t thought about for years.

This thought hit me the other day as I passed by the “Golden Tower” coffee house  in the city’s centre, and remember my mother’s warnings about it (more below) . It got me to thinking of all the strange, quirky and macabre little bits and pieces I could remember about Melbourne – the kind of stuff only locals know, the little secrets and urban legends that give cities their texture and depth.

So here is my little mini-special on Melbourne uncovered!

This super-dodgy-looking, greasy spoon diner has been around, on Melbourne’s main street, ever since I can remember. With the boom in pretentious cafe culture in the city, I’m amazed its still there. But the truly remarkable thing about it is that I can remember my mother warning me as a child that people who went in there were sometimes abducted and sold as white slaves, and never seen again. (My mother always had a slightly sadistic sense of humor, like creeping into my room with a carving knife after watching “Nightmare on Elm Street, aged 11 )

The weird thing is that I remember talking to other people whose mothers had told them the same thing  – for some reason this particular cafe was considered to be a sinister haunt by all of Melbourne (and look how shady that woman looks, as she creeps out…)

The final irony is that many years later in the mid-90s, police busted a pedophile ring operating out of the Har Krishna vegetarian foodhall just down the block. Apparently that is where they met to exchange victims.  (Although I hasten to add that the Hare Krishnas themselves- for whom I have always had a soft spot  – had absolutely no involvement).

But maybe the old rumors had some kind of truth in them afterall?

This is one of Melbourne’s most popular tourist attractions, the Old Melbourne Gaol. Its the place where criminals were once imprisoned and hanged, famous for its nighttime ghost tours, and (again) as a place for parents to frighten their impressionable children. Below is the deathmask of Australia’s most famous criminal, the bushranger Ned Kelly, who was hanged at the prison (and alter played by Heath Ledger in a flop movie, also starring Orlando Bloom).

The funniest thing about it is that while the prison still operates as a museum, its forecourt, surrounded by a wall with iron bars, now belongs to the university next door, which is also my old university, RMIT. And they have labelled the gloomy, accursed, blood-stained  place the  “Alumni Courtyard!”

This is THE best place in Melbourne to buy heroin – the games centre in Chinatown near Bourke Street. There are always people buying and selling here, and they’ve been there since I was in high school. Everybody knows.

The city of Melbourne’s official tribute to its hardest-rocking sons: a stinking, grafitti-covered alleyway in the city is named ACDC Lane. This is what it looks like, below. I liked the posters for the club “Third Class” with their “Prison rave!”

All over Melbourne, you can occassionally spot these stickers on traffic lights and street signs; advertising something called the Cave Clan.

The Cave Clan is a shadowy group dedicated to exploring the sewers and tunnels beneath the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes in canoes. There is nothing on the same scale or of the magnificence of Tokyo’s undercity tunnel network, but enthusiasts will tell you Melbourne’s hundred-year old underworld is still worth a look.

In fact, in one of my first stirrings as a budding adventurer, I joined the Cave Clan underground one when I was about 16. Bored and curious, I had peeled a sticker off a traffic light, called the number and arranged to meet a group of Cave Clan in a nearby park. Not knowing what to expect – (Satanists? Antisocial deviants? ) I told my Dad to call the police if I wasn’t back in four hours, and he grunted yes and returned to reading his paper.  At the park, we all slid down a manhole and spent a few hours tramping through dripping, grafittied, slightly creepy tunnels but the Clan themselves weren’t quite as scary or hardcore as I had expected…

(In recent news, a stray Cave Clan member was rescued this year after spending three days trapped in a sewer. Passers-by heard him calling for help though a stormwater drain).

Melbourne’s parks are its pride and joy. The centre of the city is ringed with vast, lovingly maintained gardens and the Fitzroy Gardens, beside the state’s Treasury Building, are among the most lovely. The very prim-and-proper, historic park has huge stretches of velvety emerald lawns, little ponds, and avenues lined with hundred year old stately trees laid out to form a huge Union Jack pattern (the gardens dating from colonial times). They stretch out, Central Park-like, from the shadow of the city’s skyscrapers, with one side lined with beautiful old government ministry buildings.

During the day the gardens see a constant trickle of straight couples having picnics, bureaucrats on lunchbreak, and staged wedding photo sessions. So far, so wholesome.

But at night, they reveal a whole new character. First of all, the gardens are alive with possums that scurry down from the trees to range over the lawns (that is why the tree in the first picture has the big metal and around it -to prevent possums climbing up).

Looking a little bit like small tree kangaroos, many foreign visitors find the animals cute and come to handfeed them little bits of fruit. But for most Australians, they are little more than overgrown rats, given to screaming and hissing in a bloodcurdling fashion in the middle of the night, as they run and fight over the rooftops.

But thats not the only wildlife. The park is also a major cruising ground for horny, repressed gay men who flock to the park after dark to hook up. And – most spectacularly of all – it was the site of pitched battles between Timorese and Vietnamese gangs, who would arrange fights over the internet and then turn up under cover of darkness to fight full-on pitched battles, armed with samurai swords. One kid got his hand chopped off.

Scurrying creatures, dudes making out in the dark, samurai warfare; it all happens here.

I passed this store the other day and smiled to myself, remembering one of Melbourne’s most colorful characters. Franco Cozzo was an Italian furniture retailer, made famous by his iconic TV commercial (see below!) which played on Melbourne TV virtually unchanged for a decade. Franco, in heavily accented English, would exhort customers to buy his garish furniture, switching between English, Italian and Greek to appeal to all bases. The commercial was so well-known that even non-Italian speakers such as myself can repeat his sales pitch verbatim “Il mobile de camprari!” (His Greek catchphrase, “megalo, megalo, megalo” just translates as “Big, big, big”)

But eventually it was revealed that the high profile business had been nothing but a money-laundering operation for his mafia-backed drugs operation. His son went down for it, and Franco allegedly faked a heart attack in court to escape conviction. I’m sure that he was abducted at some point as well, but oddly, there is no mention on his wikipedia page….

I love the comments on the clip (below) on his youtube page though: “Somewhere in Brunswick, there is a house with lots of ugly white furniture”. Hahahahaha!