Coronavirus Australia: Watching slow-cooked death of the Melbourne culture I love from afar
From a vantage point 4000km west, I’m watching my hometown wither. Suddenly, the gravity of what’s happening to Melbourne’s restaurant scene has hit home.
When you leave something behind, it’s usually with the knowledge it will be there to revisit. That is the consolation. And nobody could leave behind the life I had in Melbourne without a few regrets.
The funky cafes surrounding my little flat; the ethnic specialty eateries you’d drive kilometres for; the cool CBD bars you’d fall out of; the internationally renowned restaurants where you’d meet for dinner with friends, hug and kiss, laugh, eat and drink — the proper metropolitan life.
The specialist food shops; the comforting familiarity of Prahran and Queen Victoria markets, which defined the phrase “foodie throng”. Not to mention the people, the entrepreneurs, who rolled the dice to build businesses. I’m wondering just how much of the Melbourne that made me what I am will be there when I get back.
From the west, it seems like we are operating in a parallel universe, a perception amplified by a base three hours south of the capital. How hard did it get for me, personally? My favourite cafe was closed for a month; internal borders meant I couldn’t drive to Perth for about two months; dunny paper got a bit tricky.
But honestly, COVID-19 has made very little difference to my life outside work, the handcuffs on interstate travel and return being the obvious implication.
Back in Melbourne, my friends are stuck in their homes. They might walk for an hour. They are subject to curfew. They work at home if they still have a job, or clients, or freelance commissions.
They have no cafes to visit; no bars, Vietnamese pho joints or proper linen napkin dining.
It is a life, I gather, of unrelenting monotony and, in some cases, isolation and loneliness.
Compare that with the west.
Earlier this month, I woke up in a resort hotel in Broome. A hotel! I swam in the pool. I went to a pub for lunch and watched people queue the pre-coronavirus way for a table. I flew to Perth on a jam-packed Virgin flight and nobody offered a face mask.
Back in Melbourne? A mate’s multifaceted business is down by 50 per cent on last year. Another missed saying goodbye to his dad as he quietly passed away in hospital, no outsiders allowed.
Some have virtually no work; others, particularly those working for large corporates, are doing it, day in, day out, from home offices, alone. They’re hurting.
And the many I know, and in some cases respect a great deal, in hospitality? It is difficult to see how many will survive into next winter when the subsidies are, presumably, gone and the reality of recession is biting harder.
And then there are a few farmers: people we got to know while living in the country who built their businesses and indeed their lives around growing for chefs. If you have a thousand chickens laying perfect eggs, you don’t just ask them to take a break.
Pity the cafe operator who lost his or her business? Of course, but also would you want to be a commercial property agent next year when the For Lease signs scar the streets more than they do already?
Every day someone remarks that I must be glad to have moved from Melbourne in 2019. Of course I am. Dodged a bullet, at so many levels. But the happening-right-now erosion of Melbourne’s hospitality infrastructure and talent pool, undoing 50 years of creativity, ambition and vision is a kick in my still-Melburnian balls.
Thankfully, among my friends in the west, I detect no schadenfreude about the east-west divide, despite the parochialism of the local news media.
Indeed, certainly among my Perth friends, considerable affection for Melbourne and distress at the demoralising situation the city finds itself in. Most of my Perth friends love Melbourne for the reasons I do: it offers, in terms of both the style and substance of its food and wine scene, something Perth never will.
Well it did.
What will be left when next I fly into Tullamarine? Unless something changes very quickly, I fear the fabric of the famous food and wine scene will have unravelled in dramatic fashion.
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