Melbourne: Most Insecure City in the World

Eureka Skydeck, 2013

The Economist Intelligence Unit has named Melbourne the "Most Liveable City in the World" for the sixth straight year. Huzzah! Break out the champagne, but just make sure it's a 1996 Bollinger La Grande Annee Brut. What? You can't afford a $600 bottle of champers? Then too bad, because these rankings aren't for you.

Despite social media crowing from every civic leader from the Premier down, the "Global Liveability Ranking" means very little by itself and means even less to those who already live in those benighted cities fortunate enough to make the cut. Melbourne, like the rest of Australia, is desperate for external—preferably foreign—validation, has taken these rankings and run with them for decades, without actually thinking about what they mean. 

The beneficiaries of this aura of "liveability" are the executives earning a whole heap more than you. These global rankings are generated by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the sister company to the more well-known magazine. The goal of the EIU is to help "businesses, financial firms and governments to understand how the world is changing and how that creates opportunities to be seized and risks to be managed". Translation: they don’t care whether your local public school is falling down, only whether there are quality private schools nearby for executives with expense accounts to send their little darlings to.

The rankings are devised for senior executives schlepping into town (in business class, of course) for a two-year stay to restructure the local business (synergise efficiencies and such, the action formerly known as sacking people) before leaving with a well-earned pay raise and a promotion.

The people for whom these rankings are divined will not be searching for an affordable home within a 60 minute drive of the CBD, nor will they be worried about the quality of public education from their nearest state school. They won't be struggling to find amenable employment or efficient public transport because the issues that matter to you and me will be looked after by their cashed-up, tax-dodging multinational employers. 

Don’t just take my word for how meaningless these rankings are, take a look at this quote from EIU themselves on the top 65 “Most Liveable” cities: “Although 17.2 percentage points separate Melbourne in first place from Warsaw in 65th place, all cities in this tier can lay claim to being on an equal footing in terms of presenting few, if any, challenges to residents’ lifestyles."

Soooo basically, tax-dodging multinationals, you can send your overpaid staff anywhere in that top 65 and they will likely not be stabbed or robbed or fleeced and <zinger>will be free to do same to the local government </zinger>.

This is not to say Melbourne isn't a great city—it is. We have great healthcare by international standards, pretty good schools and an abundance of decent coffee [note to self: pitch EIU Global Coffee Index]. But it's strange to think of Melbourne being up there with Vienna. Both are nice cities, but Vienna has a proximity to Europe that Melbourne simply can't match. It is also the home of many international institutions and global initiatives that are simply more important to the world than, say, the Australian Open. It also has dumptruck loads more culture than Melbourne, a functioning public transport system (one that has been updated since the 1930s) and, most importantly, the Leica Shop.

But remember, regardless of how relevant this ranking is, we still beat Sydney. And that’s the important take home lesson from all this: Sydney sucks.

IMAX: The Last Picture Palace

IMAX Melbourne, Nikon F100, Nikkor AF-S 50mm f/1.4, Fujifilm Natura 1600

When Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar returns to IMAX Melbourne for one last night this Sunday, it’ll be the end of an era. At the end of the screening, the massive IMAX GT 1570 film projector will be switched off for the last time; the 272kg platter of 1570 film Interstellar occupies packed up never to be seen on these shores again. As part of the third stage of the cinema’s “upgrade”, IMAX Melbourne is removing the film projector, along with the inferior twin-digital projection system, and replacing them both with the new 4K IMAX Laser projection system.

IMAX claims the new Laser (must...resist...urge...to “finger air quote”) system is a “quantum leap in cinema technology” that provides audiences with “the sharpest, brightest, clearest and most vivid digital images ever”. This is all, of course, marketing guff. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. As a film and film aficionado, my customary position is to be skeptical of IMAX’s lofty claims for the new system. After all, technology companies have been promising to make film obsolete since 1981’s Sony Mavica and its video floppy disk system (as if you'll ever need more than 490 lines of horizontal resolution!). It has taken three long decades for digital projection and capture to live up to its own rhetoric and even then, the resolution of 70mm IMAX film exceeds virtually all commercially-available digital capture devices. But I will resist the urge to critique the new system until I see it in action.

Interstellar, one of the boldest and most impressive science-fiction films this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is also likely to be the final feature film (partially) shot and projected in 70mm IMAX. The past few years have seen a number of films, particularly those of Christopher Nolan, utilise the format for key sequences. J.J. Abrams is continuing this trend, shooting at least one segment of Star Wars Episode VII on 70mm IMAX. Whether or not the film is released in 70mm IMAX for suitable screens is moot, Melbourne audiences will be seeing it projected via the new Laser system come December.

If there is to be a future for film, digital projection seems to be an inevitable part of it. Perhaps, for the multiplex, this is the best of both worlds: the organic nature of film capture paired with the adequate consistency of most digital projection. But for the world of IMAX and epic event cinema, the removal of capacity to project 1570 film will leave audiences all the poorer. I understand the practicalities of the situation – a projection system is only as good as the films available to present and there is a dwindling number of drawcard movies being shot and projected on 70mm IMAX film – but I still can't help feeling like something truly great is being lost.

So here's to IMAX and the crazy people who made it possible including inventors Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw; IMAX cinematographers James Neihouse, David Breashears; IMAX director and developer Greg MacGillivray and more recent notables such as Christopher Nolan. The cinema is far richer and more powerful for your efforts and I can't wait to sit down, strap myself in and watch the fruits of your labours one last time.

ELCAN (Ernst Leitz Canada) IMAX projection lens. German-born know-how made in Canada – optics without compromise. Source: For the Love of Film – Interstellar IMAX® Featurette 

[Surrey Hills Telecommunications Relay] Tower Heist

The distant Surrey Hills Telecommunications Relay Tower (r) and the four transmission towers atop Mount Dandenong (l). Potent symbols of Marvellous Melbourne's technological strides in the mid-twentieth century. 

These are strange days.

Usually NIMBYs would tie themselves in knots to saddle useless structures with a "heritage overlay". They would burden an empty, decaying turn-of-the-century koi pond with one if it meant preserving the "amenity" of the surrounding suburbia.

Thinking of building apartments close to transport infrastructure? THINK AGAIN! How dare you destroy our suburbs by placing higher density dwellings in sensible locations that can handle the increase in residents. I have lived here all my life in 23 Oak Tree Grove Crescent for the past 407 years and I raised my fifteen children, twenty-seven grandchildren and 2,031 great-grandchildren right here and in the park and we had fun and ice creams and a night at the pictures cost only 1p and there weren't Asians, now you want to bring more of them here??! Outrage!! 

Thus it is with some amusement on my part that the good burghers of Surrey Hills have fallen prey to their favourite planning ploy. They "can't believe" it's not butter the "ugly", "unsightly" "obscene" "eyesore" that is the Surrey Hills Telecommunications Relay Tower could soon be subject to a heritage overlay.

The tower is part of a group of "controversial" heritage overlays - including the Burvale Hotel and former ATV-0 Studios - proposed by the City of Whitehorse.

Why the angst? Well, the tower is "ugly", of course. It's "obscene", an "eyesore", a "horror" and it "stinks". Words one might expect to hear from a 7-year-old describing a smaller sibling who just defecated in their pants, but not from the doctors and doctor's spouses of Surrey Hills who have presumably undergone some sort of education, most likely at the taxpayer's expense. What is about modernity these people hate so much? Well, in fairness, at least they're consistent - they hated the tower from the beginning.

Surrey Hills Telecommunications Relay Tower (detail)

When the Postmaster-General's Department first proposed the tower in 1961, it was badly needed. The rapid growth of high-rise buildings in the CBD (after the abolition of height limits) meant the existing transmission mast at the City West Telephone Exchange was no longer effective. Sensibly slated for one of metropolitan Melbourne's highest points, the tower would relay signals for broadcast and telecommunications to and from the CBD and all around the state.

Predictably, residents were against it. Like all good NIMBYs, they weren't against development per se, just the one that was (completely coincidentally) planned adjacent to them. The Residents' Protest Committee, formed to fume at the PMG's Department, was even kind enough to suggest an alternative site in Blackburn. All love and care, these guys. The NIMBY journal of record, The Age fumed about the tower as well, reporting it to be an "eyesore". This is a role they continue to perform with aplomb to this day.

When residents couldn't persuade the PMG to redesign or relocate the tower, the next decades were spent finding new ways to demonise it. When it was under construction, residents claimed tools had fallen from the tower into their backyard. This was found to be baseless.

Residents also claimed the tower interfered with TV reception. Yes, that's right, a tower built to improve television and radio was alleged to have made television reception worse. This, again, was found to be baseless.

Radiation later became the catch-all boogey man, with the children apparently at greater risk of cancer, superhuman abilities and other live-threatening placebos illnesses. Again, a wonderful story lacking any evidence.

By now, I'm surprised "concerned" residents haven't developed symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome, gigantism and hysterical pregnancy...but I digress.

The tower's design suited its purpose and the telecommunications need for it was great, so the PMG pushed ahead. There it has stood for more than five decades; an eastern suburban icon symbolising Melbourne's new technological age.

All too often, people have a reflex response to things they don't like: "it's ugly", "it's an eyesore", but this does not make the tower any less worth of protection. Heritage isn't just about aesthetics or even age. Heritage takes into account many different values: cultural, historical, social etc.,  and applies protection accordingly.

The tower is part of a group of post-war buildings and structures under heritage consideration, not because of aesthetics, but because of the role they have played in the community. The tower symbolises Melbourne's leap into the twentieth century where modern technology began to make the world a much smaller place.

Without this tower, Melbourne's telecommunications services would have suffered greatly (a symptom of the removal of CBD height limits) and the entire state's communication infrastructure severely constrained. This tower is Marvellous Melbourne, an era when the city broke out of its naval-gazing parochialism and started getting. shit. done. This is why this "eyesore" finds itself on the list of potential heritage overlays.

Today we (and everyone at Lost Melbourne) bemoan the loss of many of the world's finest examples of Victorian architecture in Melbourne throughout the 1950s and 60s. Lovers of architecture can all list favourite buildings which were lost during an era of modernisation (Federal Coffee Palace anyone?).

But now we are at risk of committing the same crime if we consider post-war architecture and structures expendable. Unfortunately, it's started already, with approval given for the demolition of the former National Mutual Plaza and in the past couple of days, the Dallas Brooks Hall. Don't be hating on these buildings just because they're "ugly".

Dear residents in the vicinity of the Communications Relay Tower: Don't be like the residents of Heathrow complaining about aircraft noise. If you dislike it, you probably shouldn't have moved into an area where the tower announced its presence long, long, long before you arrived.

If you have lived in the area for less than 50 years, then its your own fault. Bugger off somewhere else. I'll gladly buy your house at what I assume is a reduced value due to tower amenity and gaze lovingly at it every day knowing it helped transform Melbourne into the great city it is today.



Further Reading

Heritage Study of Surrey Hills Telecommunications Relay Tower, Built Heritage, 2014

"Face-Lift for P.M.G. Tower Site" 1962, January 22, p.9

"P.M.G. at Site" 1961, The Age, August 23, p.7

"P.M.G. Tower 'Most Prominent Eyesore'" 1961, The Age, August 11, p.6

Happyvale Springs

Today, after visiting the Monash Gallery of Art with the illuminating Chris Zissiadis of Urbanlight and Lea Williams of instant fame, I took the long way home. Owing to the fact I was in a borrowed car sans electronic toll tag, I wended my way down Stud Rd for the first time since the Eastlink toll road had opened. Seeing the changes along that former main north-south thoroughfare was quite striking.

Places that used to be mental distance markers for me as a child passenger on a family trip were gone. Where the Austral Bricks quarry used to mark "almost home", now sits an ill-suited mess of mud and homogenous concrete dwellings. "HARCREST" by Metricon was spelled out in large letters; stage 2 now selling. Yet another cookie-cutter development for outer-suburban Melbourne.

I quickly pulled into the estate, hoping there were some photographs to be had in the afternoon sun (results now pending processing of film). Admist the half-completed homes sat homes ringed by mud, occupied by new tenants. Even late on a Sunday afternoon, the sales office was still buzzing, couples and families walking from the main entrance clutching reams of glossy brochures and plans. Design. Inspire. Create. said the signage for the online interior design tool.

I parked the car and wandered around. All the hallmarks of a new development were present and accounted for:

• Geographically incongruous estate development name suffixed by geographical feature
• (Harcrest. See also Sumerfield, Casiana Grove at Cranbourne(!), Highlands or Mayfield)
• Generic house designs with personalised "packages" (get your choice of chrome door knobs or granite bench tops!)
• Main drive with grandiose stone gateway and tacked-on supermarket and café(s)
• Mud
• Man Made Lake(s)
• More Mud
• Playground and park (with mud) 
• Streets that are:
• stupidly narrow,
• go nowhere; and
• bare nauseating names (The Boulevard, Bloom Ave, Verdant St, Grove Way, Appledale Way, Honey Ave)

How will the passage of time treat these overly designed and homogeneously engineered spaces? Will they develop their own personalities and be truly "homely"? Or will they end up markers of a generation of urban planning failures - mass produced suburbs jutted one up against another, lacking the necessary infrastructure and services for the development of a real community?

Here, let me save the time of developers by drawing a housing estate design that is free to use and can be adapted to almost any size parcel of land:

Richard McKenzie's Grand Adventures in Outer Suburbia (formerly "the country")

It's probably a mark of how rare it is for a piece of land this size to become available for housing in a relatively developed area that Metricon categorise this estate as "inner urban", even though it is some 25km from the CBD.

More news as it develops.
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Ha.

Slow Burn on Fast Fashion (Part I)

It was an unexpected conversation. There I was standing before the soon-to-opened Australian high-temple to fast fashion, giant electronic imitation antique clocks counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until H&M opened their first local store. I had my camera in hand and snapped off a few shots when the customer service gentleman from the Bourke Street tram stop approached me.

"It's pretty crazy," he said. I let out a non-committal "hmmm" and formed the awkward smile when I haven't prepared my face to smile. I looked at the crowds passing by, the VIP railings being set up for opening night, demarcating the special from the plebs.

"It's just a shop," he continued, "in a month's time it will be forgotten about and the next thing will come along."

"It'll be sooner that that," I said, "the Emporium opens up in less than two weeks." Sometimes I wonder whether I actually say the things I say. This guy had the benefit of hours standing in front of fast fashion ground zero and he was going to say his piece, regardless of my additions or intentions.

"Sure, it's made a few more jobs, but it's all so cheap. What about the people who make these clothes? How to they make a shirt for $6?"

I followed up with a slightly more committal "Yeah, well..."

"And soon they'll want to stay open for longer. Myer wants to do 24 hour trading. I mean, what will that do to families? The workers? All the other shops will have to stay open longer just to compete, but they won't want to pay the proper rates."

Ah, retail! I know about retail, I'm in retail! "Yep, that's retail," I said, "Adapt and survive. I've been in retail for seven years and..."

"My wife's been in retail for 35 years," tram man said, "Thirty-five years. And for all the governement's opening up trade and Workchoices and all this other hot air, has it made out lives any easier? No."

Ooh...politics! I majored in politics. Maybe I can contribute to this debate, "Yeah, retail workers always get shafted..."

"And they STILL want to cut their wages. What, so they can work at 1am for the same wage as 9-5? I don't think so."

We were certainly in agreement at this point. "I completely agree," I began, "Look, I gotta head back to work, but it's been nice chatting with you."

"Oh, sure. You too. See ya."

Emporium Melbourne: Unboxing Video First Look Exclusive

Emporium Melbourne: it's a shopping centre. Like many other similar such outposts, it is a place where people with or without money congregate to pass the time by looking at shit they don't need while scrolling through an endless stream of inconsequential minutiae on their smartphones. What's that? A break in the visual stimuli of life? Swipe to unlock.

These centres'  corporate owners loftily claim them as the modern inheritor of the Habermasean public sphere where people can come, meet socialise and engage with the world. But they are almost all privately owned and impose severe restrictions on individual activities while reserving the right to data mine patrons because marketing. Time will tell how restrictive Emporium will be.

Local media has largely swallowed the Emporium Kool-Aid. Broadsheet, a local publication that has misplaced the Auto Levels command on Photoshop, has effused breathless enthusiasm for Emporium's "graceful walkways" and its "plush, experience-focussed shopping". Whatever that means.

Of opening day, they reported that "anxious queues" were lined up outside well beforehand. Funny, at 8am, all I saw was this:

While Broadsheet reported "anxious queues" at 9am, this is all there was at 8am. 

All this reporting felt rather odd for a publication whose notional raison d'être is local independent fashion and design that is probably most likely to suffer with the onslaught of Uniqlo and H&M. But as Broadsheet says, it isn't excited about "breathless and imprecise hyperbole", just what makes Melbourne great.

Naturally, News Limited gave the same glowing endorsement to the centre, as did the commercial news networks and poor old modern-day Fairfax. A rough count of opening patrons would've probably seen media outnumber consumers 2-to-1.

Despite its light architecture and drummed-up publicity, Emporium Melbourne is just the same as every other shopping centre ever. Except the ones in the United States which have roller coasters and waterslides. I want one of those.

Being the opening day, the wired goons (rent-a-cops with earpieces and ill-fitting suits that seem to be all the rage) would have been loathe to heavy people with cameras, so for the first time in shopping centre, I felt liberated to take a few snaps.

I was not approached by wired goons or thrown out, but I assume once all the enforced happiness dies down, they will be less amenable to camera-toting terrorists like myself taking photos of things that do not have any reason to be photographed because privacy, 9/11 and not allowed.

If the attitudes towards photography at other shopping centres in Colonial First State's portfolio are replicated at Emporium, I'd recommend my fellow photographers to get out and take some pics now while the goodwill is still there.

This shopping centre is very vertical. Unlike the concrete paddocks of Doncaster and Chadstone, there is a lot of height to Emporium. Some of the space is light and airy. Others, like the food court - sorry, bespoke laneway-inspired food truck café gourmet lounge - are strangely dark.

There were "concierge" staff everywhere, under 25s dressed like bellhops from a Wes Anderson film that had desaturated in Da Vinci Resolve.

A great number of stores stand empty with only chipboard partitions and oversized models looking off into middle-distance indicating any future presence. Opening day (I visited around 2:30pm) was rather quiet. Sure, heaps of people were lining up for gratis bespoke burritos, but many shop employees stood gazing through their glass retail prisons wondering if some consumer love might come their way.

People waltzed around, confused by the little things, like turning the wrong way from escalators and lifts. Familiarity was yet to breed contempt in them. Others, like me, went entirely the wrong way, got boxed in by construction areas, looked at their watches, turned around and continued walking like we were meant to do that. Suave.

Being a new space, it's quite easy to get lost in. It also feels quite claustrophobic in the sense that there is no easy exit to Elizabeth Street owing to that godawful Somerset Apartments building on the corner of Lonsdale and Elizabeth. But hopefully the new Strand Arcade redevelopment (don't forget Nant Whisky in there too!) will improve accessibility.

For all these shopping centres' claims to being the next "experience", there is very little to differentiate them from any number of other shopping centres around the city, the country or the world. Why do people visit shopping centres? Is it for the "experience"? Is it because it's an "essential shopping landmark"? Or perhaps it's because some shopping centres "quickly establish a leadership position thanks to [their] unique architecture, premium ambiance, retail mix and innovative shopper services"? No. It's because people sometimes want to buy shit. And they keep on coming back to do so.

If you don't get it yet, I'm not a great fan of shopping centres. Criticisms of consumerism aside, I dislike their ownership of the modern "public" space and their usually bland "me-too" designs. At least this one looks a little bit different, but let's not kid ourselves. It still just a shopping centre.

Emporium Melbourne is not an "experience", it is an overinflated piece of façadist architecture that brings little, except moar shops, escalators and over-zealous, CCTV-driven security guards to the CBD.

This is not an entirely bad thing if it means suburbanites are drawn into the city, where there's good food, good cafés and good culture, and away from their lifeless asphalt arenas they call "shopping centres", but I won't hold my breath.

Ultimately, the muted buzz will die down, perhaps even before the Baz Luhrman choreographed paycheck opening night affair in August. Then it will be like none of this ever happened until news of the next "redevelopment" appears, tearing down more buildings for more shops, apartments and synergies of complete premium experience.

Until then, if you're bored, remember you don't have to go shopping.

I give this shopping centre 170 out of 250 open shops.

Coming Soon

Layers of confusion

More life inside or outside the window?

I, Robot was not a good film, but its CG stars appear to make wonderful Uniqlo models

EmBOREium