101 Waterfront Way (Melbourne Eye / Southern Star Observation Wheel), Docklands, VIC, Australia

LaTrobe St end of Docklands in March 2008; Melbourne Eye at hard right.

It's fair to say that a number of New Zealand cities have Australian equivalents.  Christchurch is a miniature Adelaide.  Auckland is a miniature Sydney.  And perhaps the reason why I took to Melbourne so merrily is because it's just Wellington writ large, but lacking any serious hills to climb.  They are both the cultural capitals of their respective countries.  They both have by far the most competent public transport of their respective countries (though that isn't saying much in either case).  Their dining precincts are unparalleled in any other city in their respective countries.  And after Wellington did an impeccable job converting its old wharves into a welcoming, vibrant waterfront precinct, Melbourne decided it had to replicate this idea.

Unfortunately, Melbourne didn't quite grasp the idea properly.  Anybody who has been to Docklands can attest to the fact that it can be a pretty sterile, lifeless area trying way too hard to attract ... well, it seems to want hordes of tourists and shoppers, but somewhat in contradiction it wants them to be a higher class of clientele, cashed up sorts who will blow heaps of money on impractical clothes and a meal that costs four times what you'd pay at a normal Melbourne restaurant but is only a quarter the size.  Of course, cashed up bogans dismiss Docklands as a hub of leftie yuppies, while actual lefties such as myself couldn't afford to live there even if we wanted to.  You see the dilemma.  So to help lure some more people in, the Southern Star observation wheel was built ... and that's when things got hilarious.

In our entry about Moonee Ponds Creek, you would have already seen this picture of the Southern Star from Railway Canal, taken during construction in April 2008:

Now if you thought "how'd the London Eye get into that picture?", I don't blame you.  No doubt most people have heard of the London Eye; a gigantic ferris wheel beside the Thames that affords spectacular views of the city.  Somebody decided there were enough people in Melbourne who'd also want to pay money to be taken from one place ... to exactly the same place.  Well, pretty much as soon as this thing was proposed for Melbourne a few years after the London Eye opened, the comparisons flowed in.  Can't we have original ideas?  Don't we look like such colonials for copying London?  So on and so forth; the unofficial name "Melbourne Eye" stuck much better than "Southern Star Observation Wheel", a downright stupid name.  Construction began in 2006, and after a couple of delays and inevitable snide comments by everybody, it opened in December 2008.

February 2009 from West Melbourne.

Hooray?  Not so fast.  In January 2009, just a month later, the Melbourne Eye closed.  That's right, after just a month in operation, it shut down.  The damn thing suffered buckling and cracks!  The operators tried to blame all of this on a rather severe heatwave (yes, as in that heatwave that gave us Black Saturday) ... it was later discovered to be a design fault, though I'm pretty sure any big-mouth pundit on the street was proclaiming that the moment the wheel closed.  This led to the most hilarious part of the saga: the wheel was taken down for repairs (or, so it seemed, for good) while the legs remain up to the present, clearly visible from the main highway and intercity railway lines into the city from the north.

Lonely legs in February 2010.

Cranes join the legs in January 2011.

Two years later, this erectile dysfunction has become something of the Melbourne answer to North Haverbrook's monorail, if you catch my drift.  "There ain't no observation wheel and there never was!"  Yet amazingly, reconstruction began last month!  Can't wait for the Melbourne Eye's next month of operation.  How about June-July 2012, then it closes because of a "harsh winter", aka more structural defects and revenue being markedly underwhelming?  After all, that's the crucial difference between London and Melbourne's Eyes: London put theirs beside major attractions in the middle of the city, while Melbourne parked theirs on the city fringe.  Beside the wheel, you have an area of urban renewal that most people don't really care about enough to visit, and a giant fucking railway yard (great for me but not so much for sane people).  Before you get through the reconstruction, folks, you might want to have a quick re-think about the wheel's location.

Rating: Unpleasant, in a hilarious way.  I'm sure it'll be fine once it's ready, but those lonesome legs haven't been a good look.

Moonee Ponds Creek, northern Melbourne suburbs, VIC, Australia

Dwarfed by Citylink in North Melbourne.

When I first looked at a map of Brunswick West/Moonee Ponds before moving to the area, I noticed Moonee Ponds Creek flowing between the two. “How nice,” I thought, “I could go for pleasant evening strolls along there.” Then I actually saw the creek. To call it a “creek” is to grossly overstate reality. At its southern reaches, it was widened into a small canal for the conveyance of coal to railway yards in the days of steam locomotives and isn't too grotesque:

Railway Canal in West Melbourne.

In the mid-20^th century, the then Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works had the brilliant idea of concreting the whole bloody thing from Flemington Road north to Strathmore as some sort of flood mitigation strategy. The buffoons turned it into a hideous stormwater drain, a watercourse with almost no natural or redeeming qualities.

Here it is north of Flemington Road in Parkville, complete with bizarre erections that look like they come from U2's insipid Vertigo Tour imagery:

And here it is, marking the border between Moonee Ponds and Brunswick West. During times of heavy rain, it occasionally fills close to the top of the concrete and bears a faint resemblance to an actual river, but it is usually an awful, stagnant skidmark across a slab of concrete:

Nothing lives in here. Even the pigeons usually give it a miss. It is discoloured and it has an unpleasant whiff about it. Apparently some skateboarders have put the sloped concrete walls to use, but if this is your idea of a mad place to skateboard, I don't really know what to say to you except that you must be pretty desperate. Even more laughable, I once saw a father in Brunswick West taking his two children and their dog to frolic in the creek on a hot summer's day. Had the father promised the kids a cool dip in the water without telling them it would be the most pissweak dip ever? I don't know about you, but I prefer not to waste my leisure time beside a skidmark.

Rating: Our very first "cellar floor", for crimes against nature.

300 Dudley Street (Festival Hall), West Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Festival Hall from Dudley St.

There is simply no competition for the worst concert venue I have ever been to: Festival Hall wins by a mile. I've been to venues with worse organisation (looking at you, Auckland Town Hall and Stade de France), but for sheer dinginess, Festival Hall coasts to victory. Rightly dubbed "Festy Hall" or "Festering Hall" by Melburnians, this decrepit and dank hall is a stain on Melbourne's otherwise fantastic live music scene.

Stage door, Railway Place.

Now, many venues have access doors down alleyways that aren't exactly the most aesthetically pleasing places in the world. However, Festy Hall looks like it is surrounded on all sides by such alleyways, even on the wide open Dudley Street side. There is hardly an indication that this is a live music venue, or even that the place is still operational. Charlotte has never been to Festy, so when I first showed her my photographs of the place, she asked if it was some old and possibly disused factory. Nope, this is a live music venue that can hold up to 5,445 people - and if your band is too big to play theatres but not quite big enough to play Rod Laver or Hisense Arenas, this is about your only option in Melbourne.

Inside, it's not much better.  If you have the misfortune to be in the seats at the side, as I once did, you can enjoy all the thrills of watching a band through a tall plastic screen.  It's meant to separate the seated area from the standing floor, but in the end just makes you feel like you're watching a video on a grubby television.

Rosslyn St side, western end.

Festy's biggest claim to fame is hosting the Beatles in 1964, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't seen a lick of paint since. It doesn't have the character or mystique of most old venues; its walls don't ooze with stories of frenzied and chaotic live events; it doesn't even have the faded charm of a legend well past its prime. It's just a rambling, uninviting cavern with covered windows and peeling paint. It looks more like a prison or - as Charlotte noted - a disused factory than a vibrant centre of music. Normally music venues employ architects in the design phase, but Festy Hall's original developers clearly just skipped that.  If I weren't from Melbourne and my tour was booked here, I'd leave with a false impression that Melbourne's a pretty smelly city without much going for musicians.  Then again, hopefully this will work in our favour next month when Ke$ha plays here and she'll resolve to never again sully Victoria with her presence.

Rating: Damnable