Why has Melbourne been hit so hard by coronavirus?

One of Melbourne’s biggest strengths as a capital city has also made it uniquely susceptible to a surge in coronavirus. Its natural geology may also be playing a role.

One of Melbourne’s biggest strengths as a capital city has also made it susceptible to a surge in coronavirus cases.

What is happening in Melbourne? For the first three months of lockdown the city seemed to have the coronavirus on the run. In early June, there were some days when zero cases were reported.

But now, during the past month, the coronavirus has revived and is resurgent largely through community transmission. And Sydney, scene of the early Ruby Princess debacle, seems to have a better handle on managing the virus’s spread than does Melbourne, for the time being at least.

It’s almost as if Australia’s two biggest cities are tag-teaming in their response to the coronavirus: Sydney fumbled early but now it’s Melbourne’s turn to drop the ball.

The Ruby Princess was a specific and tragic incident whereas Melbourne’s outbreak is clearly stemming from multiple suburban clusters. But why? Is there something in Melbourne’s demography or culture that has led to the southern capital being more susceptible to a suburban-based surge in coronavirus cases?

In many ways Australia’s capital cities are remarkably similar. Melbourne’s key demographic indicators tend to sit between those for Sydney and those for Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. Indeed, it is Sydney that is the extreme city, not Melbourne.

All Australian capital cities have surged in population thus far in the 21st century (largely due to immigration) but especially Melbourne. Indeed, the Victorian capital has recorded a higher rate of population growth than the Australian average thus far this century in every age group up to the age of 65.

Modern Melbourne is youthful, energetic and very much work and/or training-focused.

But all Australian capital cities are places of education, training and work. Indeed, it’s a familiar rite of passage: young Australians leave country towns, travel to the city, acquire skills and training, form households, raise families, work and then leave for retirement, generally on the coast or in a cute tree-change town.

It’s just that Melbourne is extraordinarily efficient at this process: it draws in younger people (especially those aged 20 to 44) and it holds on to residents for longer. Sydney does this too, but residents there are more likely to leave the city earlier in the life cycle, indeed from the age of 45.

Maybe there’s a greater temptation in Sydney to cash in on high property values and move to a lifestyle town up or down the coast. Maybe Sydney is just so big, so congested, so Manhattanesque, that by the mid-40s many locals are apt to head off in search of a quieter, gentler way of life.

The bottom line is that these demographic narratives make Melbourne different to Sydney, and to other capital cities, in numerous subtle but nevertheless suburban ways.

If this basic age-profile explanation is correct then Melbourne would have a particularly strong extended-family culture: kids, parents and grandparents would more likely live in the same city. A trip to visit grandparents for Sydney kids is more likely to involve a car trip to another city or town, whereas the same visit for Melbourne kids is more likely to involve a car trip to another suburb.

Grandparents based in Perth and Adelaide are more likely to have grandkids in Sydney or Melbourne or indeed in London or New York. Interestingly, every year Brisbane attracts more people in every age group. This is not so much a reflection of the containment of multi-generational families in Brisbane as it is an indication of the sheer scale of interstate migration (often lifestylers from Sydney).

My point is that if there is one major city where interfamily connectivity is likely to be strongest, for a range of reasons, it is Melbourne. And in normal circumstances this is the city’s strength: connected families are strong and supportive; they cultivate kinship and love; in many cases these “familial tribes” pool resources and share the burden (and joy) of childcare.

Strong and connected families help make communities more resilient. But in a time of contagion, these deep-seated strengths of Melbourne can turn into something of a liability via clusters of infection.

However, there is one other factor that I think distinguishes Melbourne from Sydney and from other capital cities and that may help explain the virulence of the recent outbreak.

And in some ways it is kind of linked to Melbourne’s strong suburban family argument. Melbourne’s other distinguishing feature is its geology. Or more particularly, its landform. Hear me out.

Sydney’s five million residents are scattered across a vast flooded river system. As a consequence the urban landscape is dissected by rivers, bridges, the harbour and the coast. It leads to a pattern of settlement that is disjointed. There’s the Shire, the northern beaches, the eastern suburbs: each region is quite separate. Some Sydneysiders proudly say they never go west of the bridge or north of the harbour or, indeed, “into town”.

Even Sydney’s rich revert to tiny tribes including, for example, the insular Point Piper peninsula with less than 2000 residents. Toorak has 13,000 residents. It seems that Melbourne’s rich like to huddle up.

In contrast, Melbourne is laid out across a vast and uninterrupted plain that wraps around Port Phillip Bay from 9 o’clock to 6 o’clock. The northern and western suburbs are especially flat, being underpinned by a levelled volcanic plain spilling in from Victoria’s Western District. Melbourne’s suburban development radiates outwards, like the white of a fried egg, and is never really interrupted in most directions. Indeed, Melbourne’s urban form is positively Los Angelean in concept (except LA is three to four times bigger).

Melbourne’s eastern suburbs are the protein-rich primordial soup from which the Australian suburban life form first emerged. These eastern suburbs extend for 40 uninterrupted kilometres between the CBD and the Dandenong Ranges, and only then are they deflected southeast towards Pakenham farther afield.

There is no equivalent uninterrupted urban mass on the Australian continent to the eastern half of Melbourne. It commands an urb­an territory that is unmatched by anything in “bitsy”, fragmented, harbour-dissected, territorial Sydney.

Lay out a suburban carpet like this, wall to wall, Werribee to Dandenong and beyond, where every suburb bleeds into every other suburb, and soon enough that city will begin to celebrate its suburbia. Sydney is so bedazzled by the sheer beauty of its harbour that it has turned its back on its “dreary” suburbs.

Melbourne on the other hand owns, loves, engages with, barracks for and effortlessly connects with friends, family, sporting groups and all manner of cultural accoutrement that litter suburbia. Melburnians are in and out of each other’s suburbs partly because the city is so easy to navigate but also because the suburbs contain strong extended family connection points.

This engagement with and celebration of suburbia is evident in Melbourne’s popular culture.

The three-bedroom brick veneer was invented in Melbourne by AV Jennings. Barry Humphries could have anchored his pretentious suburban caricature, Edna Everage, only in suburban Melbourne (Moonee Ponds). Kath & Kim proudly project their suburban culture and heritage from Fountain Lakes, nestled in the bosom of Melbourne suburbia.

Loveable lisping Kenny (2006) came from Werribee. And daggy Darryl Kerrigan, the much-loved family man from The Castle (1997), hailed not from Sydney’s hoity-toity eastern suburbs but Melbourne’s Coolaroo. Coolaroo!

Given this demography, this landform, this heritage of suburban development and of extended family connectedness, perhaps it isn’t surprising that a contagion should use these hitherto considered strengths as a way of getting a foothold into a community.

The Prime Minister has said we are all Melburnians. The lesson, if I am right, is that the evilness of the coronavirus is that it takes a city’s culture, attributes and strengths — including Melbourne’s loving and connected suburban families — and commandeers these as vehicles for the nefarious purpose of further infecting the Australian people.

Let Melbourne’s experience be a lesson to other communities: think how your perceived strengths might be commandeered and repurposed by the coronavirus.

Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group; research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.