Spent yesterday in Shepparton, the country town 175 km from Melbourne where my sister lives with her family. Got to experience the excitement of arriving in a big city as I came into Melbourne this morning on a rickety one-car train. It took us through eucalyptus forests, fertile fields (some glowing yellow canola), a small mountain range, and miles of pleasant English-looking suburbs... to arrive at a stunning modern train station whose wavelike roof seems to float undulating above the platforms. From there wandered through the downtown, the streets full of people lunching in food courts and cafes spilling onto the streets, and eventually by streetcar up to Melbourne University, where in less than an hour I was fixed up with an ID card and an office to share! Melbourne likes to call itself "the world's most livable city," and so far I'm feeling it!
I leave you with a remarkably sophisticated description of Melbourne taken from a quarterly guide to events in the city:
Melbourne’s history is best understood in comparative perspective. The city’s origins lie in a surge in nineteenth century urbanisation which ringed the Pacific with a network of bustling commercial cities: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver. They grew as gateways to their expansive hinterlands, facilitating European settlement and the harnessing of their developing regional economies to world money and produce markets. They were cities of the nineteenth century, built from scratch, their spatial form shaped by the latest technological innovations and their social economic structures mirroring the logic of modern capitalist market place. … Melbourne was for most of the nineteenth century the most remarkable of these Pacific Rim cities, and the largest in both population and in physical extent….
Savvy cosmpolitanism!
