Melbourne

We love Melbourne so much, we once made a show about it.

Hot damn if I don't love Melbourne. It's the city I was raised in and around and I've got a terrible bias because I've never left the country, but I don't rip on junkies who love junk because hot junk is the only drug they shot into their arm. I'm a Melbourne junkie. I even appreciate the place junkies have in my fair city, because I take a tram, and anyone who takes a tram in Melbourne has dealt with a junkie or a drunkie.

Rolling in through North Melbourne has that rather unique combination of horrendously broken men and women screaming at each other and lightly slapping each other's crusty face with limp, track marked arms, sitting right next to upstanding women with sticks up their butt, ignoring the screeching as desperately as their head phones will allow. The hipsters come on and off, scurrying away to either a derelict commercial space that's been illegally transferred into a rental property or, in stark juxtaposition (a word any good hipster loves), their three-quarter of a million dollar townhouse owned by mummy and daddy. If you hear a note of scorn in my voice, I guarantee you've mistaken the true ring of pride. My unshaven, capped, cargo-panted, flannel visage, clinging with all its might to the nineties, blends in with this freaky-deaky mélange like a needle in a public toilet.

Victorian State Gallery : Cameron Zayec 2007

Melbourne is blue. That's its colour. Look at it from a distance, the medium height skyline, and tell me its overall mood isn't blue. The mix of modern look at me please oh god look at me architecture with the old gothic and deco office buildings, holding firm from the fifties when John Brack painted brown and tan bankers moving from work at five o'clock, their lined mouths barely registering emotion beyond a faint urge to climb back into the nest with a scotch and dinner on the table. The Nicholas Building on Elizabeth Street that I would so dearly love to film inside - this is a building with elevators with grated, manually operated doors, with elevators run by attendees who decorate their cell with flowers, pictures of puppies and an electric space heater. Melbourne University's weird, wavy cow building, the home of the Criminology and Psychology department, whose glass is printed with black and white rounded splotches, long vertical wavy steel dividing the bovine skin. Nearby is the Roundabout of Death, where Peel, Elizabeth, Flemington and Royal Parade meet with three different tram lines and a terrifying rite of passage for any young driver who emerges from the right lane into the left, then suddenly has to fly over to the right again, screaming in fear as your dad yells in frustration until, sweating and broken, you find yourself in the path of an oncoming tram and veer back onto your side, stopping at a red light and the Royal Women's, where you wouldn't mind a little lie down.

Smack bang in the middle of the Roundabout of Death is the giant pole and enormous Australian flag, surrounded by lesser minions usually displaying either a museum exhibit or the Grand Prix. I remember coming out from the Royal Children's Hospital, so pleased just to have escaped, and being struck every familiar time with how immense the flag is. I still imagine myself being wrapped up in it, and knowing there'd be so much room left over that I'd drown in navy blue and six white stars. Sometimes old blue would be replaced with a giant Aboriginal flag that dad or an uncle would grimly curse but that I secretly thought was way more interesting and used way cooler colours than ours.

City from Alexandra Ave : Cameron Zayec 2007

When I walk home from work, out of Shed 4 at the end of Victoria Harbour, to my back is a glorious view of the Bolte Bridge, awesome in its simplicity - two giant silver stiffies, constantly surrounded by swirling seagulls chasing moth jizz. The sun sets behind it and the silver reflects the purples and frosting pinks of the burning sky. The air smells of salt and a cool breeze always refreshes me at the height of excruciating summers. At night, the buildings are always lit with vibrant colours, as broadly skewed towards pretty as the dusk sky. Big, huge buildings, interesting from all angles, the ANZ with its bizarre twisty wind turbines. The Shredder over by the Citylink onramp is black, sharp and severe, like an evil turtle-hunting ninja. I like to listen to Bowie and look up as I walk to the tram terminal. That's what started this post. As I round a corner and pass the deceptively broad expanse of Flemington Raceway where creatures with much bigger penises than me are flogged by frustrated little men with much tinier penises than me, I can't help but spurt rhapsodic about Melbourne, all because I walked home listening to As The World Falls Down and thought that's the gayest damn thing. Awesome. And blue.

West Gate Bridge from the harbour : Cameron Zayec 2007