my favourite australian rivalry is western australia (or perth, really) vs everyone else. there's nothing they don't have a chip on their shoulder about!
Yeah, I do like that. All of their 'Eastern States' conspiracies. Everything is about the Eastern States. I was once in a pub in Perth a few weeks before the referendum on the republic, in 1999, and some old man realised I was from Sydney and started going off at me specifically about that, it was all a set up, an 'Eastern State' plan to somehow... do something... with the only goal being to fuck Western Australia over? I didn't get it. And you’d hear that sort of thing all the time, and not just from senile old men. Every decision made in Sydney/Melbourne/Canberra was one specifically dreamt up to fuck over WA. It would be hilarious if it were true. Secretly, all of Perth is one huge Big Brother set. They don’t realise they’re on tv over here, and we all vote each week for different tricks to play on them. Last week, we gave them heaps of mining cash. This week, we’re taking it all away! Now we all laugh as we watch you all sell your HSV utes!
But yes, all the cities are great in their own way. And Sydney and Melbourne really are not at all comparable. Vastly different places. Its like comparing San Francisco to New York. Not that either city has anything in common with those two, just that they are equally different, to the point of making a comparison pointless. I don’t even know where to begin making a direct comparison between the two. If someone said to me “One or the other, which should I visit?” I would actually say that Melbourne is a far, far better compact destination, so if it’s 2-3 days only, go Melbourne. But there’s a wider variety in Sydney if you have the time, so if you have 5-7 days, go with Sydney. However, if you have any more than that, you are absolutely mad to not do both, BECAUSE THEY ARE VERY DIFFERENT and not in a way that is directly, superficially comparable.
And I didn't mean to make it sound like Melbourne was once like Detroit is today. Nothing *that* bad. Just that it absolutely,
definitely was the second city to Sydney, without it's own distinct qualities or unique personality. Through very deliberate (and great) planning, and clever marketing, they've completely changed that in a relatively short period of time, and that's fantastic. Nothing of the image of Melbourne today, existed pre-mid 90s, really. I would actually almost draw a line at the construction of Flinders Park, and say that was symbolically where the history of ‘modern’ Melbourne began. That kind of investment was what it began with. And it’s working specifically because it is deliberately planned, and so it is both measured and in a way, thorough. Sydney’s equivalent boom from, I guess, regional capital to international city was in the 70s, and it was a wild/organic thing that occurred despite the government, as opposed to a measured, centrally planned, government thing as per Melbourne.
It’s why the infrastructure in Sydney is completely fucked. The city underwent a similar rapid boom in the 70s, one that has continued since, and via a truly amazing history of unbelievably awful governing, continually devoid of any future planning, the infrastructure of Sydney never kept pace, to the point where now, even if all-time-brilliant governing miraculously appeared out of nowhere, it would still take… I don’t know what, something in the decades/gazillions of dollars… to even begin to address it, let alone fix it. You’d be looking so far into the future, that it would probably only start to look like a reasonable system around the time we all start teleporting around the place anyway.
But, I do have a soft spot for a bit of dysfunction. I’ve lived in London now for 18 months, and have spent an on and off total of about 6 months in New York, and I love cities that in part are absolutely incredible, but in part also make you feel like punching everyone in the face. That sense of dysfunction, and frustration, really is a common feature of so many big cities, and can very much be part of what makes them exciting/interesting. But yes, the benefit newer major cities, like Melbourne, have is that they’ve developed in an age where the importance of that sort of infrastructure planning is far better understood. Sydney has an unsustainable urban sprawl, to the point where it’s footprint actually makes it one of the largest cities in the world. Sydney has ghettos. It has a public transport system that would service a city the size of Brisbane well, but is pretty much meaningless to most of us. It has no future planning in place for any of these things, or other coming issues, e.g. water supply. But it’s always exciting, always evolving, always ‘on’, beautiful, and within Sydney lurk about five or six quite different feeling mini-cities, really. And it doesn’t have Dave Hughes!
Definite score one for Sydney!
) ~ and am already dreading the wall to wall coverage of the teeniest Oprah details that will dominate on every network here, but ah, what the hell hey?
nice posts as usual, earnie. 
