A Tourist in your Own Town
When the Sydney Christmas COVID outbreak struck the NSW-VIC border was closed for the second time in both a hundred years and a few months. My plans to spend summer down NSW’s south coast beachside with friends was shot. Again I was confined to Victoria without the winter, the work and sense of delayed gratification to justify it. If any gratification was going to happen, it was now. Usually on a nice day in Melbourne I will go for a long walk, listen to an audiobook but I had become bored with every house in the neighbourhood in a five kilometre radius I needed to break out of this ring. It was with this impulse I began to go for long bicycle rides.
Melbourne is unique amongst Australian cities in that it’s possible to both use a bike as a form of transport and have somewhere large enough to be worth exploring. There are bicycle paths in Sydney but nobody except the steel nerved and those in the delivery services use them. They are fraught and an adversarial culture between cars and bikes has developed - bikes can never win. From the moment you sit on a bicycle a clock somewhere is counting down. Also Sydney’s terrain is picturesque but will leave quads exploded and calves on fire.
Melbourne in contrast is quite flat and has a grid system with a hierarchy of laterally and longitudinally arranged roads - meaning if you’re on a busy highway, simply move one street over and you will have a quiet path for riding, heading in the same direction.
Melbourne also has nature strips. These I discovered during lockdown. Beside creeks and rivers that feed into the bay is a network of interconnected cycle paths. The transition from suburbia to bushland is sudden. If you head out of the city it is not long before you are passing fields, horse ranches and vineyards, that all hug the nature strip.
Using a bicycle as a form of transport through the suburbs is unique way of seeing a city. Walking is too slow to cover enough ground to see changes in distinct character while driving a car gives you a vague impression in a context where distraction can be deadly. But on a bicycle - the suburbs sail past at a rate where you can appreciate the architecture, their heritage and their era. This is especially so of Melbourne, a city that very much captures the Australian dream now inaccessible to so much of Australia. The single story family house on the quarter acre block. Idiosyncrasies of each house - the paint job, the garden - present a bicycle ride as a gallery of personalities. The houses with first generation Mediterranean immigrant with their fig trees and grapevines. It is easy to become sentimental and nostalgic on a sunny day. Especially if you have a few beers under your belt and especially if you have been priced out the housing market.
Melbourne is also lucky enough to have a good cafe and bar culture citywide - this means that you duck out of a nature strip and have a drink in your hand within minutes. Like exploring any city there will be a moment when you experience the bliss connection - when two mental maps join together. In the case of riding a bicycle it will be when two extensive cycle paths are revealed to be linked thereby creating a union of opportunities available across both paths. This happened to me when I realised I could travel nonstop for 30 kilometres down the Diamond creek trail and the Yarra Main Trail and realised that it joined with the Darebin Creek Trail. This meant the horse ranches of Heidelberg could be seen in the same trip that ended at the Fairfield Boat House - an antique structure of well painted Victorian architecture that hugs the Yarra river. The hint was in the name all the time. Whoever made the decision to install nature strips and cycle paths along a river allowed this substrata of thoroughfares to be possible - naturally creeks join rivers and so will their cycle paths.
I am sure the Germans have a word for the feeling of going under a bridge for the first time that you have crossed above many times. It is experiencing the underside, the voyeuristic thrill of seeing but not being seen, outside the traffic and the noise and looking in.
Perhaps most enjoyable for me is looking at old industrial areas. This is a side in a major Australian city that barely exists anymore. The return on property development is simply too high for manufacturing or industrial processing to compete. It’s simply easier and cheaper to see off the inner city land.
Yet the implication of an industrial area close by to suburbia is of a local life - something that is also vanishing in our post-industrial economy. Strolling through is a far different experience to riding - on foot is a post-apocalyptic trudge, echoing foot-steps, the startling reverb of a magpie’s squark, to walk is to be exposed. Riding through on the other hand is as a leisure activity, the vista trails by slow enough to be appreciated but fast enough so any would-be pursuers, with their nail covered baseball bats could be outrun.
The most startling example of this was a tour I had many years ago of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward - an area that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. In colourful California Cruisers we visited abandoned street after abandoned street - the entire vista bleached and drained of colour from flood and bleached by sun. This was a clash - leisure in the wasteland.
In a Melbourne industrial area the experience is similar - touring a depopulated landscape with structures vacant, their use now obsolete. Perhaps the most chilling example is an abandoned Buddhist Temple in North-West Heidelberg. At the edge of a few industrial blocks is the temple gate - paint flecking off, the once bright colours faded. A stack of CDs rest by the entrance. The inner grounds also hint at abandonment - the structure has its windows smashed and graffiti covers the interior walls before they disappear into the shadowy inside. The garden has the pots and swans made of disused tires painted white of something that was once very kept. Now the pots and tires are encrusted with mildew. There is a giant statue of Buddha who has witnessed the whole decay.
It’s treasures like these that one only finds when riding a bicycle - the best way to be a tourist in your own town.