Painted City

If you're a follower on instagram you may be aware that I like to snap pictures of street art in Melbourne. I've never lived anywhere before where street art is such a valued and celebrated part of the artistic culture of the place. Melbourne loves street art. In this area particularly (around Fitzroy) businesses actually go out of their way to have their buildings decorated as a kind of advertising: a woman with long flowing locks (naked) on the side of a hairdresser's building; a humanoid cat (again, naked) where once there was a cattery. Those are however two unusual examples because the art doesn't generally feature naked women/felines, but even in those cases, there's nothing graphic.

I've begun to collect images of some of my favourite pieces of art. Though I don't know who created most of them, there are two artists I'm familiar with - Kaffeine and Lucy Lucy - and I'll start with a gorgeous collaboration they did near here a few months ago.

This was all one continuous piece but it was hard to fit into one photo, so here's a collection of mine and Lachy's instagram photos of it. I'm not usually stuck in between the cow and the girl. In fact, this mural didn't last long before it was painted over by a piece I don't like at all and which hasn't been painted over since. I don't know what the ethics of painting over someone else's work is, but I'm sure it's the nature of the job and street artists know their work is temporary.

This is another piece by Kaffeine discovered in the CBD. You can see how much she loves animals, and I personally love her style. We had the opportunity to meet her at her Berry Street charity book launch and we offered her the big white wall in our apartment! (If we are lucky enough to have her paint it, I will certainly share pictures.)

These two are from the CBD and Fitzroy respectively, and quite different in scale. The ballerina is just on a wall beside a cafe, not much bigger than your hand. My picture of the skeleton is quite old and I'm not sure if he's still there, but he was about knee-high and seems to be made of paper pasted onto the wall. It's so great to be doing something boring, like walking through the CBD, and just find yourself surprised by a bit of guerilla metropolitan decorating.

This is a selection of wall-size murals around Fitzroy and Collingwood. I couldn't do justice to the top image at the time of day I was photographing it, but there is an outline of a bird's skull and beak over the woman's face, and it is painted up the side of a multi-level building; quite a sight to behold. The next two were both found while wandering around industrial Collingwood. It's a quiet area with a lot of warehouses that doubles as a giant art gallery.

These images just give you an idea of how some areas of Melbourne are saturated with art; there's nothing like walking down a laneway lit up at night in an immersive haze of colour. The last image is of a building in Fitzroy which I believe to be the studio of a few artists.

I'm a country girl at heart, but as cities go, this one is pretty beautiful.

Things I didn't know were Things in Australia (Part Two)

A few weeks ago I shared a small list I'd been compiling of Things I had noticed that were Things here in Australia which aren't necessarily Things in the UK, last time I checked. Well, I guessed there would be a few more to add and I've finally finished putting together another small list of Things. So, without further ado...

Moth Explosions
Unfortunately this is exactly what it sounds like. A couple of months ago, I noticed there was a moth in the kitchen. Well, moths do exist, I thought to myself, and promptly forgot about it. The next day there were several more moths. That's odd, I thought, and I pointed it out to Lachy. 'Ah,' he said. 'Sometimes you get little explosions of moths in the pantry or wherever' (not verbatim). I noticed that a bag of almonds appeared to be moving. Moths were crawling around inside it. I threw it out. Fast forward two months or so and I'm eating my breakfast. Innocently I scoop up a spoonful of Weet-Bix (UK readers, you may recognise this bastardisation of Weetabix, but they are the same thing) and notice a little wriggly maggot-like thing on the table. By the end of the day the kitchen is flooded with moths. We find them in the rice. In the tea bags. Even in the cocoa powder. We throw everything out and buy plastic containers for all our new food. The last of the moth carcasses has only recently been swept away. THIS IS A THING.

Personalised Licence Plates
Look, my parents have personalised licence plates, so I'm not speaking as an impartial observer. But Australians really love their personalised licence plates. It's not just a fun thing you spot once in a while driving down the motorway. It's like a TECHNO or a DEALR or a 4D M4N is speeding past you every minute. Of course there are also innocent ones that are just people's names, but those are the ones you remember.

Jodhpur Boots
So this could just as easily be an Alex-being-behind-on-fashion thing than an Alex-in-a-foreign-land thing. Disclaimer.
You know these shoes?

I grew up wearing these because I got a pair that cost about £20 when I was nine years old and called them 'riding boots'. Alternatively, 'jodhpur boots'. Right? Because you wear them with jodhpurs while you're out tearing up the turf on your elderly pony? Here, everybody's wearing them. And they aren't getting on a horse any time soon (as far as I know). I'm sitting in Avalon Airport right now and a lady at the table next to me is wearing them. I was so confused the first time I saw a person wearing these in the city. I look at them and I see work boots. I can't get over it. Seriously. They're like super trendy.

Poached Eggs
I think this is a symptom of Melbourne's cafe culture, which I guess makes it a Melbourne Thing rather than an Australian Thing. Breakfast is a big deal in this city. Brunch, even bigger. Every menu has poached eggs on toast. You can get your eggs poached in twenty different places on Smith St (where we live). I never had a poached egg before I moved here. I didn't know what it entailed and I thought it sounded really fancy. Like they've been poached from the estate of a gentry family. Whatever. Now I eat poached eggs on toast like once a week. Poaching! It's going to catch on.

(Disclaimer: it's probably already caught on.)

Milk Crates
Again I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a Melbourne Thing. I just read a very funny article which describes Melbourne as 'the milk crate capital of the world'.

These crates are all over the city. Orange, yellow, green, blue, grey, black, etc. People use them for everything. Seats, bed frames, tables. Cafes use them. They love them. Guess what I've never seen in one of these crates? Milk. And stealing one is like a rite of passage. I found one on a street corner. No business in sight. So I took it. We found two more at a tram stop. We use them as a table for a potted plant, and as DVD storage.

That's it for the latest instalment of Things that are Things. More will appear in due course but probably slower than this as I smoothly assimilate into Australian culture...

White Night

I thought I'd write a little post on my latest living-abroad experience - Melbourne's White Night on the 21st of February. A few people told me it was no big deal/horrendous/not to bother but I liked the sound of it. Art and entertainment all over the city, 7am-7pm. What's not to like about that? I read an article somewhere in preparation that said to embrace being a tourist, so that's what I've done. I also suspect that having such low expectations helped me have a damn good night.

So, we drank wine while we played board games in preparation, and then had some Red Bull for energy of course, and unfortunately as the evening went on I did drink them both at the same time (but not from the same cup; I'm not a heathen). However, by midnight, when we went out (having been advised by the aforementioned article not to venture out between the peak times of 9pm and 11.30pm) I was only feeling the effects of the Red Bull. I know this is probably not the general consensus, but I think you can enjoy the event an awful lot more sober.

The first stop between our flat and the city centre where stuff was going on was the Royal Exhibition Building, where we watched a light show symbolising the four elements projected onto the building's façade with some cool sounds too. I only had my phone camera so these images are from Instagram.

We wandered down Swanston St, starting from the State Library which had a loooong queue outside so we went on to the Wheeler Centre, where the Emerging Writers' Festival was running an event called Magazine in a Night. Lachy and I both wrote something and put it in the submissions box, so we'll see if we make it into the final magazine! We moved on and discovered a travelling organ in the street; not something you get to see too often.

We discovered the dance stage where a dance troupe were leading the audience through some steps and had fun taking part in that for a while; then we visited the City Library where there was some interactive art that you walked around on with black lights to reveal a pattern criss-crossing over it (it was about integration I think). Around 2am the queue for the State Library was shorter so we joined it, but it was moving so slowly once we got inside that we jumped ship and went to the library's Bohemian Melbourne exhibition, which was really interesting.

After that we headed to Hamer Hall, where a show called Ghostly Machines was running. For a long time nothing happened and then there was all this sound and light and all these machines moving in sync over the stage and I couldn't tell you what it was about but it looked spectacular. Also it seemed that they were just using the actual machinery they use for light/sound/acoustics in all their shows, but in a creative way, which was cool.

At the NGV we walked into a room with a projection of some cool alien landscape which turned out to be a microscopic camera focused on a jar full of chemicals which the artist was adding to, so we could see all these cool tiny reactions projected on the wall, but I couldn't get a decent photo of it.

On the way home we dropped by Sticky Institute, Melbourne's only dedicated zine shop, where there was a 12-hour zine reading taking place. The guy we stayed to listen to was wearing a bird mask and reading from his zine by candlelight; he also played a song from the zine called 'Island of the Dead' - they were the only lyrics and he sang them progressively louder over one chord on his guitar. I didn't get his name but I will be going back there to find his zine - I'm sure they'll know who I'm talking about! 

We hit the hay around 5am and the following day White Night felt like a very trippy dream. Will definitely be going back next year.

Melbourne: The First Month

So, I've been here in the great nation of Australia for coming up on four weeks now. This morning, my good friend Katharine asked how it was treating me. I was preparing to say 'amazing, but...' except that once I said 'amazing' I started listing the reasons for the amazing-ness and sort of got sidetracked and forgot the 'but'. I remember it now, so I'll go into that very quickly before moving onto the lighter topics...

I graduated from St Andrews a few months ago which not only means I finished my degree (yay) but rather more importantly, and often forgotten in the excitement of the lead-up, I moved away. Not just from the UK - I can deal with that (I'm not really sorry to be missing post-referendum tension) - but from the friends I'd been living with, day in, day out, for four years. It didn't really dawn on me that I was moving away from them until we were in the taxi on our way out of St Andrews, and it sucks not seeing their faces every day. I was also putting a lot of pressure on myself to find a job immediately, no matter what, but today I had an epiphany when Lachy told a friend that we were here at least three years - three years is a long time. How could I be feeling pressured about three and a half weeks of joblessness?

And on to the amazing parts. You (dear reader) may know that I am something of a country mouse. I studied the Latin text of the country mouse and the city mouse in year nine, and basically the country mouse got really freaked out by the city mouse's dogs and ran away home. Not a great dinner guest.

Yeah, there are a few dogs in Melbourne that freak me out. There are Bulldogs which are basically places I wouldn't want to walk after a certain time at night, which is new. But there are also some really cool dogs like Huskies or Great Danes, and by Huskies and Great Danes I mean the art scene and the apartment... (this is getting complicated). There are a few events every single night I wouldn't mind attending. The Melbourne Fringe is currently taking place. We went to an erotic art exhibition on Friday where people were rolling around naked on the floor throwing glitter over themselves. On Saturday we went to a workshop day at the Victorian College of the Arts about the business end of being a professional arts practitioner, which we left an hour early to attend a performance of a play by Lucy Prebble (The Effect: amazing). In the coming week we're going to the book launch of a street artist we love. It's like all the things I loved about university, but they're going on constantly, and people just organise these events independently and yeah. It's amazing.

I also love our apartment which is bare brick and exposed beams and polished concrete floors and very much like Monmouth Manufacturing is in my brain, if you've read The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (if you haven't, you should. MM is where an eccentric young explorer lives and plots to find a sleeping Welsh king). We have an OFFICE with a WHITEBOARD and a framed print from the comic Saga. How could anyone fail to be creative in an office like this? Also office chairs from Ikea with dodgy wheels that won't move unless you're sitting in them. And I have my framed autograph from Neil Gaimain instructing me 'Dream!' in typical Gaiman style. Plus we were looking after Lachy's brother's dog, who is a Kelpie, an Australian dog that looks like a dark Border Collie, and she made us feel very at home in our apartment.

I'm not sure when the next update will be since this is now my life and not so much my travels. But there's plenty of Australia I still have yet to see. I'll no longer be spamming Facebook with these posts, so if you haven't already, click follow by email over there (->) and be my friend. I'll leave you with these two photos. I haven't got my camera out yet! Okay? Okay.

Monmouth Manufacturing (pre-furniture)

Lachy with a work by Kaffeine (the street artist)

Melbourne Life, Week One (and a bit)

My new life in the Southern Hemisphere had a bit of a rocky start when I touched down in Melbourne. After eating the much-anticipated avocado on toast and sleeping until a more reasonable hour (10am) I spent the whole of my first day vomiting into a sink, and then retching into a sink, and then trying desperately not to fall asleep while watching Friends and Seinfeld.

On day two I was keeping my food down (well, my popcorn and toast) but still not much was accomplished. I bought a crummy Nokia phone which I put my UK sim card in for emergencies, and stuck an Aussie sim in my older (but comparably better) phone. Lachy and I went to take a look at the flat we were going to be living in and gaped at the space we had no furniture to fill.

On Saturday we went to Ikea and bought a chair. That chair is currently sitting in the centre of a very empty-looking living area. We bought two desk chairs which we don't yet have a drill to assemble and a bedframe which it turns out doesn't fit Australian-sized mattresses, one of which we had already bought. We bought the basics, too, like plates and cutlery and salt and pepper.

Then it becomes sort of a blur of waiting for electricians and phone technicians who never arrived, waiting for post to prove my address and open a bank account, waiting for the mattress to be delivered... Celia came to visit (we went to school together, now she is also engaged to an Australasian and moving to Melbourne, yay team). Our mattress arrived and we started sleeping in the flat and it began to feel like we were actually living there. But only yesterday did it actually feel like we were properly living there, because we got internet, and were connected to the rest of the world again.

Job hunting is a pain, because it's sort of an urgent issue and so far unfruitful. Let's leave it at that. Over the weekend we bought some fresh veg and cheese at the Victoria Market and then spent an hour volunteering with Second Bite, collecting up perishable food from the stallholders who can no longer sell it to pass it on to people who need it. Fun was had all round. I also discovered the local library is around the corner. Books and internet and work spaces. I like it. The State Library is a more impressive version and fun if we're in the city, which is fortuitously only a tram ride away. As a matter of fact we're a short distance from lots of cool things, like my favourite restaurant, Vegie Bar, and a supermarket whose motto is 'eat your ethics'.

The other day on the tram Lachy and I sort of got trapped in this group of British travellers with dreadlocks and posh accents and it was a bit of an Inbetweeners 2 situation. They were talking about getting married to Aussies in order to get a visa and I wanted to laugh and shout at them because doing three months of farm work to get a second working holiday visa would be infinitely easier than trying to provide evidence of a phoney relationship and also marriage visas are expensive and they were just so dumb and I felt unusually hostile towards my countrymen. But we weren't actually in their conversation, just surrounded by it, so I kept zipped.

On a brighter note, this morning I set out at 6am to a nearby dance studio, which is in an attic, and did some barre fitness looking out over the rooftops of Fitzroy while the sun rose. It was a pretty damn cool way to start the day and I'm feeling hopeful. Melbourne is a very cool city and I think we are going to love living here.

Coming soon: pictures.