Recovery on hold
Mallacoota, in the Australian state of Victoria, has the jump on most of us when it comes to confronting the apocalypse. This is a town whose people, last New Year’s Eve, had to retreat to the beach to escape the fires that threatened it. Some of its houses are wrecked, their timber frames burned away, their metal cladding scrunched like tissue paper. Which makes it all the more striking that one of the first acts of restoration has been to install a brand-new public barbecue facility, with pristine picnic tables and emerald grass, a few feet from a backdrop of charcoal trees next to a river mouth polluted by ash. I am not sure if this work is mad or touching – possibly both.
To drive from Sydney to Melbourne, via the scenic coastal routes, is to alternate between shock and hope. You can travel all day through damaged forests, but the underlying beauty of the landscape endures. Native trees have a remarkable ability to sprout green shoots from their charred trunks, so that seemingly dead wood is swathed in new life. Locals tell you they’re grateful you’ve come, which makes it all the more heartbreaking that this latest catastrophe will stop tourism once again.
Faulty towers
As for almost everyone, the past few weeks have been about adjusting to realities that change every day. I went to Australia to join my daughter, who has been living there for six months, and we were to travel the country before she and her boyfriend set off on an ambitious Asian tour. I have never planned a trip in more detail, half of which is now unpicked.
A fortnight ago we decided – wrongly as it turned out – that it was still reasonable to see a show at Sydney’s opera house (it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, we told ourselves). A week ago I was having a drink in a Melbourne bar with a friend of a friend, while my daughter explored the idea of sitting out the pandemic in Bali. At the time of writing we were due to be camping in Australia’s red centre. Then the realisation dawned that we might not get home at all if we didn’t leave soon. So, here I am, contemplating a pale sun fighting to penetrate a London sky, the desert horizons having contracted to the saw-tooth backs of London terraces.
It’s not supposed to be possible to like both Sydney and Melbourne, one allegedly more superficial, the other more sophisticated. I claim a tourist’s prerogative to enjoy both, but Melbourne – which lacks the icons and setting to impress itself on the world’s consciousness – is the more intriguing. It has aspects of both American and British towns, a Houston-Eastbourne fusion which, I hasten to say, is also definitively Australian. Like London, it reveals itself through a series of contrasting districts. Like London, its recent skyline is atrocious, made of gimmicky glass towers delivered in both cities by much the same cohort of investors, developers and consultants. Which only goes to show that this junk is global.
Aboriginal sin
Wherever you go, you encounter awkward proclamations of respect for the indigenous people who formerly lived in a given location. You hear them before the show starts at the Sydney Opera House, along with announcements about turning off mobile phones, and at the entry to some caves in the hill town of Buchan. You read them in signs in Melbourne’s neo-Gothic cathedral or in the preserved bit of wilderness that is the Yarra Bend park. Such statements don’t include the possibility that the land might ever be handed back, of course, which is what makes them awkward, but I guess it’s better to have this acknowledgment than not.
A day out on the coast, south of Melbourne near the towns of Hastings and Rye. Also Safety Beach, renamed in the 1960s from Shark Bay, on account of the (admittedly harmless) creatures who swam around nearby. Apparently the old name deterred visitors. Rebranding, you might say – one way to deal with unwelcome information.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
