I know why people are flocking to Melbourne – it has nothing to do with coffee or laneways

In Australia, spring starts in September. But not if you live in Melbourne. The sub-20 degree days and grey skies here roll out closer to Halloween than just about anywhere else north of Hobart. The locals are safely equipped with an umbrella at all times, as well as noise-cancelling headphones to tune out the seemingly endless construction works. The city’s once edgy laneway bars are increasingly feeling like overcrowded tourist traps. It’s enough to make you wonder what Melbourne has going for it any more.

Apparently, quite a lot.

Whether you’re having a drink with friends at a Collingwood bar, or making new ones on a tram, Melbourne’s real appeal is its people. Credit: Chris Hopkins

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, more people are coming to Melbourne than leaving, according to interstate migration data from removalist booking platform Muval. As a recent defector myself, it’s easy to see why.

I landed in Australia’s coffee capital last October, making the move from Perth armed with only a suitcase and a raincoat. While this marked my first time living in Melbourne full-time, I had, in fact, been won over by the city several summers earlier.

Aged 19, I spent 10 weeks here in early 2016, in that time undergoing the most significant period of personal development in my young adult life.

As a teenager, I had always been interested in talking to strangers as a way of orienting myself in new environments, but this was on a different level. For the first time in my life, the social energy mustered in approaching strangers was equally returned by the spaces made for me at Collingwood dinner tables and the cigarettes shared in the Sircuit smoking area. I had never been so spiritually inflated by the inhabitants of a city and vested with so much personal confidence, as I befriended fellow passengers who caught my eye on the tram.

The energetic friendliness of these Melburnians invigorated my faith in the willingness of strangers to share directions or the centre seat of a picnic rug in Carlton Gardens. I had never felt more like an insider.

That summer in Melbourne came just before I started university in England, and it was the best possible guidepost for such a turbulent period of my life. I had seen the very best in people and took with me the understanding that it was always worth asking for a seat at the table.

Every day spent here inspired within me the same kind of delirious happiness that probably drove Julie Andrews to belt out I Have Confidence in Me in The Sound of Music. Melbourne helped me discover my personal superpower of being able to talk to strangers, and as a young gay kid, only recently out of the closet and far removed from the small town in England where I was raised, it was a revelation.

Enjoying the sun in Edinburgh Gardens is a rite of passage for Melburnians. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

For the first time, I was allowed to develop my personal identity within an actively queer environment, and one that so welcomed my desire for connection.

The Melbourne that treated me so well as a 19-year-old traveller continues to accommodate me just as kindly today, as a Victoria-registered voter living in Footscray with a skinfade and a try-hard moustache.

And that is fundamentally the beauty of this city. It is a place that welcomes newcomers and makes the time to listen. There is an interest here in the eclectic personalities who file through the barriers of Flinders Street Station, who decorate the windows of bars along Smith Street.

Melbourne is engaged by sharing stories in a way unlike any other city in which I have lived previously, be it London, Norwich, Cologne, Bonn, or Perth, another place where I grew up. It’s an experience, I feel, that has been shared by the thousands of others that have opted to make Melbourne their new home.

If, as the saying goes, Sydney is the movie and Melbourne is the book, then I am glad to report that those of us further south are happy readers. Distinct from the short-form glitz offered by other cities, Melburnians make the time to savour a good story. The op shop shoes and paint-stained shirt will pique our interest more than the chunky Rolex and TikTok teeth.

People are making the move to Melbourne because, when they arrive, the locals will loop an arm over their shoulder and ask them what they want to drink.

Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier is a freelance writer and editor based in Melbourne.

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