Category: Melbourne

  • What the Discerning Visitor Actually Finds at Phillip Island

    What the Discerning Visitor Actually Finds at Phillip Island

    Phillip Island exists in the Melbourne imagination primarily as two things: the penguin parade and the Motorcycle Grand Prix circuit. The penguin parade draws a million visitors a year to watch Little Penguins waddle up Summerlands Beach at dusk — a genuine…

  • Mornington Peninsula: The Full Picture

    Mornington Peninsula: The Full Picture

    The Mornington Peninsula is a peninsula in the most complete sense: water on three sides, a ridge running down its spine at 230 metres, and a climate that sits reliably cooler than Melbourne by two or three degrees for most of the year. This topographic fac…

  • The Gardens at Melbourne’s Edge: Cloudehill and the Ranges

    The Gardens at Melbourne’s Edge: Cloudehill and the Ranges

    An hour east of Melbourne along the Burwood Highway, the Dandenong Ranges begin as a change in air pressure before they register as topography — the road begins to climb, the temperature drops, the eucalypts give way to mountain ash and then to tree ferns,…

  • First Nations Art in Melbourne and the Galleries That Take It Seriously

    First Nations Art in Melbourne and the Galleries That Take It Seriously

    The story of First Nations art in Melbourne’s gallery ecosystem is not a story about representation as accommodation — about a mainstream system making room for a marginalised culture as a corrective gesture. It is a more interesting and more demanding stor…

  • The Great Ocean Road, Read as Landscape Argument

    The Great Ocean Road, Read as Landscape Argument

    The Twelve Apostles sit on every travel poster, every screensaver, every brochure produced by Tourism Victoria. They are also, when you arrive in high summer with three coach parties and no shade, the least interesting thing on this road. The argument for t…

  • Chunky Move and the Australian Movement Vocabulary

    Chunky Move and the Australian Movement Vocabulary

    The founding argument of Chunky Move — articulated by Gideon Obarzanek when he established the company in 1995 and debuted it at the Melbourne International Arts Festival — was deceptively simple: that contemporary dance in Australia did not need to be impo…

  • The Cinema Rooms That Make Melbourne a Film City

    The Cinema Rooms That Make Melbourne a Film City

    What makes a city a film city is not a film festival. It is not, primarily, a production industry, though Melbourne has had that at various points in its history. What makes a city a film city — what produces a population that thinks about cinema as a form…

  • The La Trobe Reading Room and What It Contains

    The La Trobe Reading Room and What It Contains

    There is a moment, ascending the staircase from the State Library Victoria’s main entrance on Swanston Street, when the dome becomes visible above: an octagonal lantern of reinforced concrete, its twelve skylights admitting the particular grey-gold Melbourn…

  • The Commercial Galleries Building Melbourne’s Collection Culture

    The Commercial Galleries Building Melbourne’s Collection Culture

    The relationship between a city and its commercial gallery ecosystem is one of the better diagnostic tools for understanding what kind of art culture that city actually has — not what it aspires to, or what its public institutions claim, but what its privat…

  • The Collingwood Walls That Are Not Hosier Lane

    The Collingwood Walls That Are Not Hosier Lane

    Hosier Lane exists. It is real, it has been there long enough to accumulate genuine texture, and some of what appears on its walls is, by any standard, skilled work. But Hosier Lane has also become a destination — a place where tour groups arrive with camer…