Mitchell Toy: The Melbourne traditions that should be brought back from the dead

Once upon a time in Melbourne you could buy a tram ticket from a conductor or ride a horse-drawn carriage through the city. Here are five lost traditions we should bring back.

The dead Melbourne traditions that should be revived.

On a recent trip to the city I felt something wasn’t quite right, then it hit me: the horses and carriages are gone.

They were taken away sometime during Covid and now the city doesn’t quite seem the same.

Animal rights activists, as usual, didn’t even talk to the horses before pushing for a CBD-wide ban on animal-drawn vehicles, although concerns about animal and human safety certainly came into it.

Still I can’t help but feel it’s another little tradition gone from Melbourne, and they’re piling up.

There was once a time when you could buy a ticket from a tram conductor and have a kick on the turf after an AFL match.

Now we don’t even make our own cars.

Here are five Melbourne traditions that have gone to the grave, and must be recalled lest more should follow.

Horses and carriages were once a big part of Melbourne life.

Kick-to-kick after footy games

While this long-running tradition is still alive in the AFL, you could say it’s on life support.

There was a time decades ago when spectators taking to the field after the final siren of every match was a right not a privilege.

Now security concerns and general boo-hooing have seen the tradition drastically curtailed.

At the start of last season the AFL announced kick-to-kick was coming back after Covid, for a miserable total of 37 games throughout the season with just 11 of those in Melbourne and Geelong.

It’s a cop-out and a shame.

The chance to tread the same turf as our favourite footy players connects Melburnians to our sacred game.

The chance to tread the same turf as our favourite footy players connects Melburnians to our sacred game.

Real service at service stations

It’s a real wonder they’re called service stations, because that’s exactly what you don’t get these days.

In some long forgotten dream, a man in a blue jumpsuit and a cap would appear at the driver’s side window as soon as you pulled up at the pump.

“Regular or unleaded?”

Then he’d fill ‘er up, take the cash payment, bring the change and even squeegee the windscreen if need be.

You wouldn’t even need to get out of the car.

Like self-serve checkouts at supermarkets, it’s now totally acceptable to make customers do all the work.

A Melbourne service station in 1961, when you could get actual service. Picture: State Library of Victoria

A Melway in every car

Show a street directory to a teenager and they’ll think somebody’s printed out Google Maps.

Gone are the days when you had your mates’ page grid reference marked in a tattered old Melway that eventually got replaced when the new freeway came in.

Sure, smartphones are convenient and quick, but the old hard copy maps meant you had to find the fastest route to the destination using dead reckoning and, gasp, get to know your local roads.

The reliance on technology is a mindless replacement for real local knowledge and you know what’s next.

The cars will bloody well drive themselves so we don’t even have to look up from TikTok while we’re travelling.

Gone are the days when you had your mates’ page grid reference marked in a tattered old Melway. Picture: Lawrence Pinder

The milkman

Hear me out.

I realise it’s not necessary for every household in Melbourne to get a delivery of fresh bread and milk each morning, nor to hear the clop-clop of a horse-drawn milk float with every sunrise.

But the demise of the milkman in Melbourne reveals something very troubling about our cultural development.

Long before the final Melbourne milk runs in the late 1980s, it was common for the milkman to collect empty bottles on the doorstep, replace them with fresh ones and collect the cash payment left by the resident.

That meant countless homes in Victoria would leave money on their doorstep overnight, confident that nobody would steal it.

Imagine trying that sort of thing these days.

Even if we wanted the milkman back, we might never recover the society in which he was able to thrive.

The demise of the milkman in Melbourne reveals something very troubling about our cultural development.

Tram conductors could remember local elderly passengers by name and wake them up when they reached their stop.

Tram conductors

I vaguely remember a radio news bulletin sometime around 1997 during the phasing out of tram conductors, in which it was announced the connies intended to do the Full Monty on the steps of parliament to prove they were sexier than ticket machines.

I’m not sure they were sexier, but they were certainly a lot nicer.

For the sake of convenience and some slick technology (not that myki has ever been accused of slickness) we ditched a squad of dedicated staff who, in many cases, became pillars of their local routes.

Not even Chat GPT can remember local elderly passengers by name and wake them up when they reach their stop.

When the connies got binned, we binned more than we bargained for.

Besides, the inability to now purchase a ticket onboard any Melbourne tram is a silly error that was never corrected.

Originally published as Mitchell Toy: The Melbourne traditions that should be brought back from the dead