Travelogue Melbourne - Flinders Lane and alleyways
I was heading into the CBD to meet Scott, to go together to a Science Week gig. The Big Science Gig, in fact. I was meeting him just after work. So I caught the train in.
At Flinders St Station, I took the middle subway exit, to see where it led. Past little shops of strange curios and odd clothing, and up some stairs following a sign saying DeGraves Lane. I had no idea where that was, but I figured I'd find out. I emerged into that frozen shaded daylight the skyscrapers are so good at, beckoned by the wonderful smells of waffles, chocolate and coffee being made at full speed for commuters heading home. And paused to look around.
DeGraves Lane has no vehicle traffic. It's a tiny bluestone lane sandwiched between big old buildings, lined with restaurants and cafes. The central lane is sunken from the sidewalks, and filled with tables, umbrellas and people. The umbrellas make a second sky above, just a fraction of a storey high. I remembered being told of a little lane off Flinders Lane that was notable for its restaurants - and an art shop. I recognise the art shop. I found it one other time, by accident. Like I have today.
I found my way through onto Flinders Lane, more bluestone and that closed in feeling from being between buildings that face other streets. An alley opposite appealed, but I turned left, looking for Scott's workplace. Before I got there, I found another lane. One where the buildings on either side met overhead, forming a darkened square arch. Set into the paving of the lane was a circle of lights, changing colour slowly. Above in the roof of the arch, a ring of translucent tubes hung down, changing colour in the same pattern. A transporter. I wandered over, and stood in the middle of the circle. To my surprise, I heard voices. A highly-directed sound beam, audible only to those standing inside the tiny circle. I strained my ears to hear what was being said, to pick out the words against the background noise of a city heading home. And I heard: "It's never been so easy to change the voices in your head". That was a little freaky, and I stepped out and walked on.
Scott was waiting in the wind not far up, talking with a workmate. Nearby, his boss and some other team members had stopped for a smoke, ducking out of the wind in another tiny bluestone alley off the narrow lane. I told him of the transporter. He hadn't realised it had sound, so we went to try it. He stepped in, then stepped out looking slightly bemused and said "It told me to separate my colours from the whites".
He told me of other alleyway artworks and strange things. The wind organ, somewhere in Chinatown, with strings hanging down for you to pull on and make sounds, and many strings forming great aeolian harps. Not present currently - possibly down for repairs as the sign's still up last he saw. And the cartoon safe, a great (presumably styrofoam) safe stuck to a wall high up on a building, with a target painted on the ground below. You could stand on the target and look up, and see the safe apparently falling towards you.
As we walked, we drited back towards DeGraves Lane - but instead turned and walked up that opposite alley that had appealed. More cafes and restaurants, more close-in traffic and people. And City Lights - a side alley full of graffiti and lit artworks. The graffiti was intricate, detailed, reaching quite high. And on the walls, light boxes with a range of artwork that apparently changes regularly. Scott drew my attention to the little mini cherrypicker still sitting in the alley from the most recent changeover.
The alley turned into Central Arcade, which led onto Collins St. We walked a little way up Collins, then Scott mentioned a jazz club. We turned back down another alleyway - Manchester Lane. In this lane is a jazz club of the same name, apparently an old and relatively famous one. It was quiet at this hour, albeit open. As we walked past, a trio were arriving - unloading a great big double bass out of the back of a van, and carrying in other instruments.
We turned east again along Flinders Lane, and almost immediately turned down into Cathedral Arcade. The roof of this arcade is amazing - a curved corridor of stained glass in old patterns. And only marginally impacted by being able to occasionally see old boxes stacked against it in the storage areas above. The arcade has this odd feel of being like a row of windows into a set of other dimensions. The glass walls and roof highlight shop doors that lead into rooms that seem bigger than they should be, with walls and supports at odd angles. From each door you can just make out piles of wonderland treasures of unexpected shapes and designs. I was particularly taken by Alice Euphemia, with a mannequin in the window wearing tights in a pattern of brightly coloured hand-drawn eyes of many shapes and sizes. Wandering in, I couldn't perceive the space well enough to walk into it - dressing rooms that came towards you and twisted, steps up below spinning mirrors that show down and behind. And more amazing odds and ends, like a dress decorated with large, bright red plastic goggle-eyes that moved and followed you as you tried to enter the shop. We extracted ourselves safely from this bizarre dimension, and slipped out past a narrow set of back stairs that proclaimed they led to the Victorian Writers Centre. As if I needed proof that this was a place of strange worlds. Though if I *had* wanted proof, I might have looked more closely at the post-box opposite the stairs. Sealed up, with a long line of gold handwriting explaining in legalese that it was not a post box. It's the sort of thing you'd look at in a lucid dream, to see if you were actually dreaming.
We escaped the arcade down Swanston St, but almost immediately fell into another strange place - the underground clearance store. At first glance, a shop with constant spruiking of unneeded but too-cheap goods. I'd not been down there, so Scott took me. It's just as well - I think I needed a local guide. The place is Tardis-like, rooms upon rooms opening into more rooms, and turning back on itself without looping. It's the kind of shop in which you could make four right turns and have no idea where the place you'd started was. While on Swanston St, we also went up: and visited the upstairs hobby store. Also reasonably extensive, though a little smaller than the Two Dollar Tardis.
On the corner of Swanston and Flinders is Young and Jackson's, a hotel that's famous for a particular painting. Chloe. We wandered in to have a look. The hotel is done in a very classic old-style lavishness, a kind of style that owes nothing to modern and minimal, but also owes nothing to overdecorators who went silly with the gold leaf. It's elegant, and it works. The decoration is remarkable, tasteful and sophisticated and stylish. And then there's Chloe. A full-room-height oil painting of a young naked woman standing coyly in a nature setting. Old rooms, don't forget, so high roofs too. Chloe is pretty, and pretty bare. I'm not sure she's actually legal age, though she must be pretty close. She's in Chloe's Bar (what else), where the drink of choice is Naked Ale and the crowd is getting rowdy after work, egged on by a sense of debauched hedonism. Probably the same mood that's been in the room with this painting since it was put up here almost a hundred years ago. The painting is older, but that's how long it's been in this bar.
We turned right up Flinders, thinking to go back to DeGraves Lane for dinner - but didn't get that far. Flora's Indian restaurant looked pretty good, and their meals were pretty tasty and cheap. I preferred the rose lassi, Scott the mango lassi. We ate under fluorescent lights and a TV playing Bollywood dance sequences, by a large lit photo of Flinders St Station by day. Then we headed across to Fed Square, past the building with all the crawling text messages ("I love you Craig! You are a great guy!"..."Jason Rocks!!!"..."Please put your litter in the bin"...) to see when the gig actually started. It wasn't til 7:30, so we wandered some more.
Scott knows a lot of stories of the city. He's explored it the way I explored Perth, at strange times and in strange places, looking for the things that tickle your curiosity or sense of adventure. Things that make life rich. And so he led me to even more strange places up Flinders Lane, where neither of us knew what we might find.
The first alley we took had a solid wall of graffiti - but mostly stencil graffiti rather than freeform. Scott spotted "Filth", a character who turns up in graffiti around Brunswick regularly. There were many messages, hand written and stencilled, such as "Please fuck the system. Thank you very much." The wall of graffiti was interspersed by more formal art - another City Lights project, with artworks in light boxes at various heights along the wall. And many non-lit artworks, that looked like they'd been stuck on by their creators anywhere that seemed to fit, and then had had pieces broken off by passers-by. The alley was only painted on one side - the buildings on the other face were all bare and clean. Except one, which had been overpainted freeform in great and intricate detail as if it were a mosque. Minarets over the windows and non-representative patterns filling in every square cubit. Except the patterns weren't Islamic, but urban tribal, with the feel of flowing mathematics and language from a culture very much here and now.
At the next corner of Flinders Lane, the modern office building we stood by had a great large lightwell and wall of window, with one of those huge space-filling modern artworks suspended inside. Green and yellow wood pieces, hinged together with steel. Staring at them, they resolved - into a tiered structure of flying snapdragons, caught mid-flap as if waiting for someone to pull the string and release them into the sky again. I looked at them for a while, curious as to their construction - and then noticed the wall behind them. The lights on them cast shadows - not of snapdragons, but the shadow of orchids.
Across the road were more amazing buildings. Scott drew my attention to one old three-storey and we went inside. Gorgeous art-deco type staircase going up and up. The sort of building that fits having a gentlemans club on the third floor, the kind it takes you half a lifetime or great deeds to become a member of. Scott tells me that the building used to have a Gothic nightclub in the basement. It's not that any more though - the main floor is a super-modern-style furniture store, with chairs of multicoloured acrylic in 60's inspired designs. The staircase seems very out of place.
At the same corner, Scott also pointed out a metal tower, on top of a building, stretching into the sky - and said "I climbed to the top of that". Because he could, of course. The next few buildings from the old club had stoops. Stoops are those little staircases that go up to a front entrance. Below them were walkways beside lower floor windows, the buildings based around a ground level that didn't have any relevance to this street.
Then we came to something unexpected. ACDC Lane. Scott told me it was a place of posters. I asked him if he knew that, or if he was just inferring it from the evidence. Because the walls of this alley were covered in posters. Gazillions of them Many for a club down and around the U-shaped lane, a place called Honkytonks. But many for other gigs and places as well, slowly building sediments of paper. It doesn't seem like it's very thick, and you don't think there's many posters there - until you see a spot where someone's ripped a surface layer off, and you can see the rings going down, down and down like tree rings or sedimentary layers. The walls must have had a good inch of extra insulation on them. Even the graffiti in this lane had been painted onto paper, cut out and stuck on.
In the same block as ACDC Lane I refound Craft Victoria. Another of those magical windows into curious artworks. We'd passed a lot of art in windows, both corporate foyer displays and actual art galleries showing exhibitions of modern, abstract art of colours and textures and words turning into stray meanings. I like Craft Victoria because it's that little bit more real and tangible. Lace and driftwood, bizarre scarves and dolls. Things that you can imagine being made by people and used or worn by them, but which are incredible artworks in their own right. Texture, form and function, mixed with colour and meaning.
We cut through one last alley from Flinders Lane to Flinders St. It was curious - concrete and stairs almost Escher like, stairs going above you as you went down, starting at the sides of buildings with not total relevance to any partticular ground level. But then, I'm not sure where ground was. At one point we looked over the side of the alley and found that our bit of ground level was actually three stories above the ground level next to us.
We wandered back down Flinders, heading for Fed Square again. Passing the Herald Sun building, there were more flat windowboxes set into the wall, though these ones weren't lit. They contained newspaper pages showing great headlines of the past, with overprinted images of people of those eras stopping to read them. Scott told me that when the building was left empty for a long time, those headline boxes were unused - and someone came along and put up their own fake set of headlines. They stayed there for quite a while, almost unnoticed except as one of those curious things that the denizens of a city take for their own.
Inside Fed Square, we met a friend of Scott's. She was involved with the origami cranes in the Fracture Galleries. The Fracture Galleries are the space inside those big bubble-froth-like walls of the Federation Square Atrium, and right now hanging inside them is a huge artwork made of hundreds and thousands of folded paper cranes suspended on wires. She was there for lighting tests - the cranes don't show up properly at night, especially given they stretch so high above you. So you can't see the picture they make. She was trying to work out how to improve their visibility - and said that yes, origami does NOT light well.
The Big Science Gig was good. A mishmash of current cool Australian science research, presented in a fun style with plenty of singing.
And then afterwards we wandered out again, and found ACMI. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which I'd nbever been inside. So we went in. Old cameras, TV sets, a bar from Blue Heelers. A puppet of Ozzie Ostrich. Harvey Krumpet in a display case, with a space next to him for his Oscar. The Games Lab, a place where they're (dis)playing the newest computer games and the newest techniques. Currently it's in the middle of a festival of games that will last a couple of months. I wished I'd known about this to tell my brother when he visited.
Back outside, I sent a message to Fed Square. You can do this. SMS to 19 SMS FED, and have your message appear on one of the crawling text boxes that go up and down and across the building in various colours. I sent the following message: "The world is a surprising and uncertain place. But that's all right, that's why it's fun". Then we searched the boxes to find it.
It didn't appear. -grin- I think the box that would have displayed it had hit software problems earlier in the night, some time after we'd seen it, as there wasn't anything at all showing there. A fitting end to an evening wandering to see what we happened to find.
At Flinders St Station, I took the middle subway exit, to see where it led. Past little shops of strange curios and odd clothing, and up some stairs following a sign saying DeGraves Lane. I had no idea where that was, but I figured I'd find out. I emerged into that frozen shaded daylight the skyscrapers are so good at, beckoned by the wonderful smells of waffles, chocolate and coffee being made at full speed for commuters heading home. And paused to look around.
DeGraves Lane has no vehicle traffic. It's a tiny bluestone lane sandwiched between big old buildings, lined with restaurants and cafes. The central lane is sunken from the sidewalks, and filled with tables, umbrellas and people. The umbrellas make a second sky above, just a fraction of a storey high. I remembered being told of a little lane off Flinders Lane that was notable for its restaurants - and an art shop. I recognise the art shop. I found it one other time, by accident. Like I have today.
I found my way through onto Flinders Lane, more bluestone and that closed in feeling from being between buildings that face other streets. An alley opposite appealed, but I turned left, looking for Scott's workplace. Before I got there, I found another lane. One where the buildings on either side met overhead, forming a darkened square arch. Set into the paving of the lane was a circle of lights, changing colour slowly. Above in the roof of the arch, a ring of translucent tubes hung down, changing colour in the same pattern. A transporter. I wandered over, and stood in the middle of the circle. To my surprise, I heard voices. A highly-directed sound beam, audible only to those standing inside the tiny circle. I strained my ears to hear what was being said, to pick out the words against the background noise of a city heading home. And I heard: "It's never been so easy to change the voices in your head". That was a little freaky, and I stepped out and walked on.
Scott was waiting in the wind not far up, talking with a workmate. Nearby, his boss and some other team members had stopped for a smoke, ducking out of the wind in another tiny bluestone alley off the narrow lane. I told him of the transporter. He hadn't realised it had sound, so we went to try it. He stepped in, then stepped out looking slightly bemused and said "It told me to separate my colours from the whites".
He told me of other alleyway artworks and strange things. The wind organ, somewhere in Chinatown, with strings hanging down for you to pull on and make sounds, and many strings forming great aeolian harps. Not present currently - possibly down for repairs as the sign's still up last he saw. And the cartoon safe, a great (presumably styrofoam) safe stuck to a wall high up on a building, with a target painted on the ground below. You could stand on the target and look up, and see the safe apparently falling towards you.
As we walked, we drited back towards DeGraves Lane - but instead turned and walked up that opposite alley that had appealed. More cafes and restaurants, more close-in traffic and people. And City Lights - a side alley full of graffiti and lit artworks. The graffiti was intricate, detailed, reaching quite high. And on the walls, light boxes with a range of artwork that apparently changes regularly. Scott drew my attention to the little mini cherrypicker still sitting in the alley from the most recent changeover.
The alley turned into Central Arcade, which led onto Collins St. We walked a little way up Collins, then Scott mentioned a jazz club. We turned back down another alleyway - Manchester Lane. In this lane is a jazz club of the same name, apparently an old and relatively famous one. It was quiet at this hour, albeit open. As we walked past, a trio were arriving - unloading a great big double bass out of the back of a van, and carrying in other instruments.
We turned east again along Flinders Lane, and almost immediately turned down into Cathedral Arcade. The roof of this arcade is amazing - a curved corridor of stained glass in old patterns. And only marginally impacted by being able to occasionally see old boxes stacked against it in the storage areas above. The arcade has this odd feel of being like a row of windows into a set of other dimensions. The glass walls and roof highlight shop doors that lead into rooms that seem bigger than they should be, with walls and supports at odd angles. From each door you can just make out piles of wonderland treasures of unexpected shapes and designs. I was particularly taken by Alice Euphemia, with a mannequin in the window wearing tights in a pattern of brightly coloured hand-drawn eyes of many shapes and sizes. Wandering in, I couldn't perceive the space well enough to walk into it - dressing rooms that came towards you and twisted, steps up below spinning mirrors that show down and behind. And more amazing odds and ends, like a dress decorated with large, bright red plastic goggle-eyes that moved and followed you as you tried to enter the shop. We extracted ourselves safely from this bizarre dimension, and slipped out past a narrow set of back stairs that proclaimed they led to the Victorian Writers Centre. As if I needed proof that this was a place of strange worlds. Though if I *had* wanted proof, I might have looked more closely at the post-box opposite the stairs. Sealed up, with a long line of gold handwriting explaining in legalese that it was not a post box. It's the sort of thing you'd look at in a lucid dream, to see if you were actually dreaming.
We escaped the arcade down Swanston St, but almost immediately fell into another strange place - the underground clearance store. At first glance, a shop with constant spruiking of unneeded but too-cheap goods. I'd not been down there, so Scott took me. It's just as well - I think I needed a local guide. The place is Tardis-like, rooms upon rooms opening into more rooms, and turning back on itself without looping. It's the kind of shop in which you could make four right turns and have no idea where the place you'd started was. While on Swanston St, we also went up: and visited the upstairs hobby store. Also reasonably extensive, though a little smaller than the Two Dollar Tardis.
On the corner of Swanston and Flinders is Young and Jackson's, a hotel that's famous for a particular painting. Chloe. We wandered in to have a look. The hotel is done in a very classic old-style lavishness, a kind of style that owes nothing to modern and minimal, but also owes nothing to overdecorators who went silly with the gold leaf. It's elegant, and it works. The decoration is remarkable, tasteful and sophisticated and stylish. And then there's Chloe. A full-room-height oil painting of a young naked woman standing coyly in a nature setting. Old rooms, don't forget, so high roofs too. Chloe is pretty, and pretty bare. I'm not sure she's actually legal age, though she must be pretty close. She's in Chloe's Bar (what else), where the drink of choice is Naked Ale and the crowd is getting rowdy after work, egged on by a sense of debauched hedonism. Probably the same mood that's been in the room with this painting since it was put up here almost a hundred years ago. The painting is older, but that's how long it's been in this bar.
We turned right up Flinders, thinking to go back to DeGraves Lane for dinner - but didn't get that far. Flora's Indian restaurant looked pretty good, and their meals were pretty tasty and cheap. I preferred the rose lassi, Scott the mango lassi. We ate under fluorescent lights and a TV playing Bollywood dance sequences, by a large lit photo of Flinders St Station by day. Then we headed across to Fed Square, past the building with all the crawling text messages ("I love you Craig! You are a great guy!"..."Jason Rocks!!!"..."Please put your litter in the bin"...) to see when the gig actually started. It wasn't til 7:30, so we wandered some more.
Scott knows a lot of stories of the city. He's explored it the way I explored Perth, at strange times and in strange places, looking for the things that tickle your curiosity or sense of adventure. Things that make life rich. And so he led me to even more strange places up Flinders Lane, where neither of us knew what we might find.
The first alley we took had a solid wall of graffiti - but mostly stencil graffiti rather than freeform. Scott spotted "Filth", a character who turns up in graffiti around Brunswick regularly. There were many messages, hand written and stencilled, such as "Please fuck the system. Thank you very much." The wall of graffiti was interspersed by more formal art - another City Lights project, with artworks in light boxes at various heights along the wall. And many non-lit artworks, that looked like they'd been stuck on by their creators anywhere that seemed to fit, and then had had pieces broken off by passers-by. The alley was only painted on one side - the buildings on the other face were all bare and clean. Except one, which had been overpainted freeform in great and intricate detail as if it were a mosque. Minarets over the windows and non-representative patterns filling in every square cubit. Except the patterns weren't Islamic, but urban tribal, with the feel of flowing mathematics and language from a culture very much here and now.
At the next corner of Flinders Lane, the modern office building we stood by had a great large lightwell and wall of window, with one of those huge space-filling modern artworks suspended inside. Green and yellow wood pieces, hinged together with steel. Staring at them, they resolved - into a tiered structure of flying snapdragons, caught mid-flap as if waiting for someone to pull the string and release them into the sky again. I looked at them for a while, curious as to their construction - and then noticed the wall behind them. The lights on them cast shadows - not of snapdragons, but the shadow of orchids.
Across the road were more amazing buildings. Scott drew my attention to one old three-storey and we went inside. Gorgeous art-deco type staircase going up and up. The sort of building that fits having a gentlemans club on the third floor, the kind it takes you half a lifetime or great deeds to become a member of. Scott tells me that the building used to have a Gothic nightclub in the basement. It's not that any more though - the main floor is a super-modern-style furniture store, with chairs of multicoloured acrylic in 60's inspired designs. The staircase seems very out of place.
At the same corner, Scott also pointed out a metal tower, on top of a building, stretching into the sky - and said "I climbed to the top of that". Because he could, of course. The next few buildings from the old club had stoops. Stoops are those little staircases that go up to a front entrance. Below them were walkways beside lower floor windows, the buildings based around a ground level that didn't have any relevance to this street.
Then we came to something unexpected. ACDC Lane. Scott told me it was a place of posters. I asked him if he knew that, or if he was just inferring it from the evidence. Because the walls of this alley were covered in posters. Gazillions of them Many for a club down and around the U-shaped lane, a place called Honkytonks. But many for other gigs and places as well, slowly building sediments of paper. It doesn't seem like it's very thick, and you don't think there's many posters there - until you see a spot where someone's ripped a surface layer off, and you can see the rings going down, down and down like tree rings or sedimentary layers. The walls must have had a good inch of extra insulation on them. Even the graffiti in this lane had been painted onto paper, cut out and stuck on.
In the same block as ACDC Lane I refound Craft Victoria. Another of those magical windows into curious artworks. We'd passed a lot of art in windows, both corporate foyer displays and actual art galleries showing exhibitions of modern, abstract art of colours and textures and words turning into stray meanings. I like Craft Victoria because it's that little bit more real and tangible. Lace and driftwood, bizarre scarves and dolls. Things that you can imagine being made by people and used or worn by them, but which are incredible artworks in their own right. Texture, form and function, mixed with colour and meaning.
We cut through one last alley from Flinders Lane to Flinders St. It was curious - concrete and stairs almost Escher like, stairs going above you as you went down, starting at the sides of buildings with not total relevance to any partticular ground level. But then, I'm not sure where ground was. At one point we looked over the side of the alley and found that our bit of ground level was actually three stories above the ground level next to us.
We wandered back down Flinders, heading for Fed Square again. Passing the Herald Sun building, there were more flat windowboxes set into the wall, though these ones weren't lit. They contained newspaper pages showing great headlines of the past, with overprinted images of people of those eras stopping to read them. Scott told me that when the building was left empty for a long time, those headline boxes were unused - and someone came along and put up their own fake set of headlines. They stayed there for quite a while, almost unnoticed except as one of those curious things that the denizens of a city take for their own.
Inside Fed Square, we met a friend of Scott's. She was involved with the origami cranes in the Fracture Galleries. The Fracture Galleries are the space inside those big bubble-froth-like walls of the Federation Square Atrium, and right now hanging inside them is a huge artwork made of hundreds and thousands of folded paper cranes suspended on wires. She was there for lighting tests - the cranes don't show up properly at night, especially given they stretch so high above you. So you can't see the picture they make. She was trying to work out how to improve their visibility - and said that yes, origami does NOT light well.
The Big Science Gig was good. A mishmash of current cool Australian science research, presented in a fun style with plenty of singing.
And then afterwards we wandered out again, and found ACMI. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which I'd nbever been inside. So we went in. Old cameras, TV sets, a bar from Blue Heelers. A puppet of Ozzie Ostrich. Harvey Krumpet in a display case, with a space next to him for his Oscar. The Games Lab, a place where they're (dis)playing the newest computer games and the newest techniques. Currently it's in the middle of a festival of games that will last a couple of months. I wished I'd known about this to tell my brother when he visited.
Back outside, I sent a message to Fed Square. You can do this. SMS to 19 SMS FED, and have your message appear on one of the crawling text boxes that go up and down and across the building in various colours. I sent the following message: "The world is a surprising and uncertain place. But that's all right, that's why it's fun". Then we searched the boxes to find it.
It didn't appear. -grin- I think the box that would have displayed it had hit software problems earlier in the night, some time after we'd seen it, as there wasn't anything at all showing there. A fitting end to an evening wandering to see what we happened to find.