Melbourne in July: Cold, Blue and Worth the Walk

I went to Melbourne in July, which is winter there. I knew that before I booked it. What I did not know was what winter does to a city I had only ever seen in other people's photographs, where it is always golden. It is not golden. It is cold and blue and handsome, and I liked it more for that.

The first thing I noticed was the trees. Big street trees with nothing on them at all, black branches held up against a sky that could not decide whether it was grey or blue, and often did both inside the same hour. That reads like a complaint. It is not one. A bare tree in winter light is one of the few things in the world that looks exactly like itself.

And the light. Melbourne in July does a late afternoon blue that I have not seen in many places: that hard, deep color you only get on the coldest clear days. Then the cloud comes across and everything goes flat and silver, and the grey stone takes the color of the sky. I walked a great deal more than I meant to. I kept going one more block to see what the light was doing on the next street.

The buildings hold up in that weather. There is a gothic one in brick and stone, striped like somebody built it with a strong opinion, a tower on it and bare branches in front of it. I stood in the street and looked up at it for longer than a person normally does. And there is a pale exhibition hall out on its own in a wide street, dome and tower, a bare tree in front, so large that the sky behind it looked like part of the building.

Then the lanes. I turned down one for a shortcut and came out under red lanterns, strung across the street on wires above my head, hanging against grey. A gateway at the end of it with red pillars and a tiled roof, and past that the lane kept going: more lanterns, more city behind it. Ten of the best minutes of the trip, and I had not planned to be there.

I stopped at a counter with glass across the front, a sushi counter, with the kitchen working on the far side of it. Long trays of rolls laid out in rows, sauce over the top of them, everything arranged as if it had been told to stand still. People came in, looked, pointed, and left with something in a bag. Nobody sat down. Nobody was in a hurry.

I ate mine walking back. It had been a long day on my feet by then, and I was past wanting a table, so I stood and ate because I needed the food. Not every meal is a story. Some of them are just fuel, and I was glad of it.

I read a whole menu board standing out in the cold, twice, the way you do when you are deciding and also stalling. Grilled kangaroo fillet. A porterhouse steak. Slow roasted pork belly. A fried chicken burger. Moroccan lamb tagine with chickpeas, apricot and pistachio. I did not try the kangaroo. I was not brave enough for it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is the most honest menu I have ever stood in front of. A city that knows exactly where it is and is not going to pretend otherwise.

There was a winter festival on while I was there: a big screen, a marquee, everyone in coats, and a sign out front with white letters and snow sitting on top of them, which made me laugh, because there was no snow anywhere. And one afternoon at an event under a glass roof, a stage, a small band, and a room full of people sitting down to eat. Being south of the equator in July means the calendar and the weather do not match, and everybody there simply lives with it.

Painted the whole way down. Not one clean wall anywhere. Layers, a face over a name over something older, somebody's fresh work going up over last season's, color at the height of your shoulder and above your head, brick underneath it. It is the only part of that city that is being made and unmade at the same time. That is the whole reason I stop.

The small thing that stayed with me was in the same place as that menu board, inside, in a warm room, on a wall where they brew beer. A little cream plaque, and on it, in plain letters, that the first beer brewers were resourceful women in Babylon, four thousand years ago. I read it twice and then I took its photograph. Women have been making things and handing them to each other for longer than anyone bothered to write down. I do not know why it landed the way it did. It did.

One small thing from that trip that I keep, and it is not a place. Someone made me a figure out of balloons. It rode on my lap in the car that night, and here it is again indoors, sitting on a cushion like a guest.

What I brought home is not one moment. Cold on the backs of my hands. That blue at four in the afternoon. Red lanterns over a grey street. A tree with no leaves on it doing its job perfectly. Every photograph I took that month is blue, grey and brick, and when someone asked me afterwards whether it had been miserable, I said no. It was handsome. It was the first place that taught me a city does not have to be warm to be kind to you.