The once marvellous Melbourne is today a hellscape of construction, congestion, delay and rage:
The populations of Sydney and Melbourne swelled by a record 310,000 in a single year as migrants surged back into inner city areas and student accommodation while many financially pressed Australians moved to outer suburbs.
Don’t get me wrong, Hellbourne still has its charms. Especially the food, which is the best in the world bar none. It is also craps all over Sydney for inner city life and nightlife.
But it has also lost something important, perhaps critical. Yesterday, Melbourne was a cheap and charming artistic centre.
Today Hellbourne is struggletown, and the price of that is the ongoing collapse of its creative street culture, which was built upon low-cost economics.
Melbourne also used to be very different to Sydney in the manner of its integration of migrant cultures.
Whereas Sydney created isolated ghettoes of singular cultures, Melbourne’s ethnic communities penetrated deeper into the mainstream. Although migrant communities were still present, they were never as isolated as in Sydney.
This contributed enormously to the Australian lifestyle we know today.
But this has also started to break down. Recent waves of African and Asian migration have been forced more to the margins by the land cost. They penetrate less inwards, and alienation creates more significant social problems than in the past.
Hellbourne has also spread outwards in a bizarre patchwork of satellite towns that appear to have no logic beyond which megadeveloper cashed which land bank.
Central Melbourne is still a multicultural marvel at night. An Asian city that never sleeps.
But scratch the surface these days, and you will find Hellbourne lurking, with its falling living standards, perennial failed infrastructure, ponzinomic economy, and bankruptcy.
