Melbourne a shell of its former self in the grip of coronavirus second wave

Melbourne’s famed vitality has gone, and to a degree that is astounding. The pandemic’s future is fearfully unknown.

Currently, it is fearfully unknown whether the pandemic can actually be got back under control in Melboune. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

It seems only yesterday that Melbourne won The Economist’s prestigious award for the world’s most liveable city seven years in a row. Now it has returned to punitive lockdown.

The great pandemic unknown rolls on, like a Hindu Juggernaut hurtling along out of control, bulldozing through the streets of the present, unstoppable, and on into an indeterminate future. Or is it rather like an irrepressible live volcano spewing out tides of fiery contagion, which slowly roll on down the mountain, then out, ­menacingly blanketing the plains.

As with volcanic lava, the city structures remain untouched — Pompeii — while the human populations are helplessly vulnerable, cursed to inhabit ghost towns and to withstand the vague threat that approaches.

One key to Melbourne’s live­ability was its vitality, a buzzing urban cosmopolitanism in symbiosis with suburban virtue. Today, the buzz has gone, and to an absolute degree that is astounding. Confidence is suddenly precarious. The throbbing heart of the metropolis is ice-cold. Sydney can look south with a mixture of self-satisfaction and trepidation at this new twist to the Australian tale of two cities.

Elegant Collins Street, normally packed during the day with teeming crowds of office workers and shoppers, is empty, like on the dead Sundays of the pre-1990 city.

Even the bleak imagery of John Brack’s starkly caricatured 1955 painting Collins St, 5pm — with its robotic troop of grim-faced, expressionless men in suits and hats marching antlike to the station and then off home to the suburbs — showed crowds of purposeful people.

A 10-minute walk away is the MCG, for many the sacred heart of the city — resonant in the memory with extraordinary, brightly lit spectacle, pageant and brilliant sport performance, from the regular Australian football attended by 70,000 fans, to the Boxing Day cricket Tests, and back in time to the 1956 Olympic Games. Today, it is as if this were the shell of an ­ancient mausoleum, rebuilt by ­archaeologists, its surrounds long gone, its treasures pillaged; or a stadium that hadn’t hosted a sporting contest for 1000 years, and will not again into the distant future.

And the Australian Football League, the most successful sporting organisation in the country, is itself reeling. Each week it frantically reschedules to stay a jump ahead of the pandemic. All of its 10 Victorian clubs have been exiled to hubs in Queensland and NSW, to play their matches in a kind of abstract simulation of the real thing.

In local suburbs right across the city, the retail shopping strips are sad dimunitions of their former selves. Proliferating FOR LEASE signs stand out, as deserted shops spread like an aggressive cancer. Empty shells don’t even bother to advertise that they are available.

So many hopes lie crushed here, given the imagination, energy and confidence to start a small retail business, manage to raise the capital, fit out the shop, invest in stock and, full of hope, open its doors to the public.

The second lockdown has been especially cruel for those businesses that were struggling but managed to reopen, with skeleton staff and reduced stock, only to be forced again into closure.

There is only a certain amount of resilience.

In the late afternoon along these retail strips, there may be a lone lighted shop, and with people inside, offering a glimmer of hope in the winter gloom. But out beyond the dispiriting main streets there are the houses and apartments containing their own clusters of anxiety and deteriorating mental health — at businesses failing, jobs being lost, diminished investments in property and shares, mortgages that can’t be paid, and a blankness about what the future holds. On top of it all, there is fear of catching the virus, with the pandemic now seeping into hospitals and nursing homes. The bright hopes that marked the emergence from the first lockdown have been comprehensively snuffed out.

In this, the second pandemic wave, nine housing commission towers were sent into total lockdown with police guarding the doors. Not quite the February scenes from Wuhan, where Chinese authorities welded exit doors shut. Yet there are dystopic allusions here in Melbourne. Shots of these grim towers bore out the cries from within of being imprisoned, children’s faces pressed to windows, looking out. Anecdotal evidence does suggest, however, that those inside have been supplied with plentiful food and other necessities, and a high degree of communal spirit endures.

New in Australia is the stark manifestation of social division. Marxists have been blustering unconvincingly for decades about class conflict in this country. Now we have a real case, not of conflict but of divide. When Melbourne went into partial lockdown, the map of affected suburbs showed their spread across the northwest, comprising less well-off areas such as Broadmeadows — working-class and lower-middle-class suburbs, to use slightly archaic language. The more prosperous, upper-middle-class eastern suburbs were so far unaffected.

Melbourne’s Chinatown is deserted. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

Further, the housing commission tower blocks are home to some of the most disadvantaged. In Flemington and Kensington, mainly African immigrants with large families are concentrated in subsidised public accommodation.

The rich brought the plague into the country; the poor suffer from it. This is a strangely old phenomenon, with almost identical patterns to be noted in pre-modern Europe, the Middle Ages, and even back in Roman Empire times. When plague struck, the rich left the contagion of the towns and cities and retreated to their spacious palaces and country estates. When plague struck London, as it did every decade before the mid-17th century, Shakespeare retreated to rural Stratford. When plague struck Cambridge, Isaac Newton moved back to his country home, where an apple fell on his head, he thought of gravity, and the rest we know. Back in the squalor and congestion of cities such as London, the plague spread virulently, wreaking its terrible death toll among the poor, who lived cheek-by-jowl in hovels. Fortunately, today’s cities are clean and spacious by comparison, and the inequality divides are much narrower.

On the day before the current Melbourne lockdown, the roads to the Mornington and Bellarine peninsulas, and the Bass Coast, were jammed with the upper-middle class escaping the city to their beach houses. A day later, Daniel Andrews prudently banned travel to holiday homes, even within the lockdown perimeter of Victoria. The Premier did allow golf, unlike during the first lockdown, but then again golf is a sport that crosses all social divisions in Australia.

Another contribution of the ­social elites to this confronting reality is the modernist architecture introduced in the 1960s, in a monumental surge of utopian stupidity that cursed the less well off, by bulldozing their Victorian terrace cottages in the inner city and crowding their dwellers into the impersonal concrete towers that remain today, separating them from the earth.

Le Corbusier, the celebrity French architect, has a lot to answer for; as do those overconfident town planners who fell for his ­vision. The Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, killing 72 people, was a kind of anticipation of 2020 Melbourne plague silo incubators. One might have hoped that demolition of the towers would follow soon, but this is remote, given the state’s finances are going to be under crippling pressure.

A quite different malign consequence of the second lockdown is loss of community confidence in the polity. Australia has done so well during the COVID-19 pandemic largely because of shrewd and effective leadership, with the Prime Minister and premiers working closely together, directly advised by the chief medical officers, making decisions quickly and enforcing them. Symbolic was Scott Morrison’s: “We are all Melburnians now.” In Victoria, understandably, ambivalence towards the Premier has emerged.

On the one hand, Andrews continues to speak with authority — clearly, firmly, and reasonably, yet with enough of a compassionate tone to soften the harshness of the rules he is imposing. On the other, the second wave in Melbourne seems almost entirely due to the incompetence of his government in what is shaping up as the most consequential political bungle in post-war Australia. Quarantining returning travellers in hotels was a good idea. Staffing those hotels with untrained and flagrantly casual security guards defies comment. This was not rocket science: the necessity of ­imposing strict hygiene protocols is obvious to any half-awake adult.

On top of that, the Premier’s turning a blind eye to 10,000 gathering for a political demonstration, coinciding with rising optimism that the virus was under control, sent a catastrophic signal to the community that it could relax. Other states did get away with similar public gatherings.

There looks to be a critical dearth of talent in ministers under the Victorian Premier. Responsibility also lies with the Health Department, giving credence to an old Canberra snootiness about the poor quality of state bureaucracies. An obvious failing was to weaken the authority of the Chief Medical Officer by placing him three rungs down in the hierarchy — in February, he should have been promoted. Overall, the anticipation of risk at critical junctures, and the response, has been lethargic and inept.

But this is no time for recrimination. All energy needs to be ­focused on dealing with the emergency. Currently, it is fearfully unknown whether the pandemic can actually be got back under control. The Juggernaut has crushed the Premier’s plans of grand infrastructure projects, with the state budget flashing red. The big worry is the severity of the blow to the confidence, short and long term, that made Melbourne such a ­vibrant and liveable city.

The local mood is grim and pessimistic. For many, life has come to a standstill.

John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.