This was Melbourne at midnight on Saturday, shot through my crappy digital camera. I was looking down from Federation Square across a pullulating mass of humanity, up to Princes Bridge in the distance. It was like a human version of the Christmas Island crab migration.

Time to defend the Commonwealth Games.

There’s a tram rumbling past outside for the first time in two weeks, which means normality is returning to our dazed suburb (though we are braced for the Grand Prix). They’ve been using buses, I guess because they can navigate the maze.

Last night I went down to the river for the “Last Ever Fish and Water Creatures Display”. From my bad vantage point it looked like a triumph of fluoros, cellophane, tin goldfish and one hundred and fifty taps, though there were bigger watery plumes more tastefully lit up down near the MCG. I have never seen anything like the crowd, shoulder to shoulder down the river bank, streaming as far as the eye can see like some good humoured Russian province deployed as Eisenstein extras.

Given there was literally not a single street car park available for six kilometres from the city on our side, most people were trudging a long way to the car, or cramming onto trams that were shuttling to and fro as if Melbourne was being evacuated from some titanic sewerage disaster.

I don’t know what happened to the cars for the last fortnight. With blood curdling warnings to bring a week’s packed lunches or eat the passengers if you venture onto the highways, the reality has been that the bitumen has been empty. Maybe people cleverly caught public transport, which tends to suggest that our system could make a huge difference if we all used it. Maybe everyone with any money fled the city for the fortnight. Maybe people spent so much money on tickets they couldn’t afford petrol.

This morning John Faine on local ABC radio had a go at hectoring Justin Madden, our Minister of Sport, about ticket prices. He was so pushy I was surprised that Justin didn’t tell him to take a tablet and have a nice lie down. Yes, they were frighteningly expensive – sixteen hundred dollars to get a family into the opening, according to a friend of mine who went. And $280 got someone else a seat high up the back at the swimming finals, where he couldn’t hear anything intelligible. Actually that was because he had entered Planet Patriotism, where no-one makes any sense and the brain just rejects the sounds because they are so ludicrous.

But they sold a lot of tickets, and the state has to pick up a very big bill. Though I must say an alleged fifty mill for the opening is a bit on the “white knuckled out of control” side of an orderly budget, even if they did turn the city into an action replica of Baghdad at the end. And there must have been a LOT of rehearsing to make sure that plasticy li’l Delta Goodrem didn’t either melt or catch fire as they turned the Melbourne Cricket Ground into one titanic Catherine Wheel.

The organisers finally proved there is no such thing as resurrection. If there was, the grounds would have been full of zombie Roman Emperors back from the dead and looking for lions to set on the Christians.

I am bemused by the way the blogosphere turned into a bunch of costive gradgrinds over the opening. We had a duck. The duck didn’t make sense. Do opening ceremonies ever make sense? Think Athens. Think Barcelona. Think Kylie on a giant thong. Actually, laydees and gennelmens, they are not full of instantly graspable meaning if you spend your life tending herds of spiders in South America, or even running a great metropolis on the plains of the United States.

I was a bit stunned by the way that we have objected to the duck and totally ignored Ron Barassi walking on water. You want esoteric? That is esoteric. This contrast makes me think that the culture warriors of the right have won, since we flog someone for attempting literature and art and stuff, and keep completely mum when a bunch of sportsters do something completely idiotic.

I suppose the message of all those really old athletes staggering around with the vaguely hi-tech wand thing is that if you succeed at some athletic endeavour in our wide brown land, we have you for the whole of your life. Get a parking ticket in Alice Springs and you become the “1542 Commonwealth Games silver medallist for the jouste with ye double-sided axe” who has just done an oo-wah thing and spat on the flag with his nasty ticket.

God help you if you are caught with a joint up your sock. Or if you stood in a bus shelter while someone smoked a joint so you got some of that (gasp) recreational drug up your lung linings.

Channel Nine has been a disgrace, and their presenters’ did a churlish, narrow minded, cack-tongued slow motion swim back and forth through a very small bucket of cliches. As I have said on various other blogs, the obsession with medals is just pure laziness, because they don’t have to track the performance of other teams, or put crews out with the tiny, cheap, accessible cameras now available to talk to furriners about the stories in their teams. All those stories about adversity, personal bests, unexpected friends and random copulation (quick, switch that recorder off!) that tug at the heart and leave a tear on the cheek of a hardened reporter. Mind you, the Nine mob aren’t hardened, they have gone soft in the studio, heeding no voice except the accountant, listening to Eddie McGuire to get a sense of reality… whose last take on the real world was a flung rock at his head because he was a Mick school kid in Coburg. To get his upbringing now, you have to be a Muslim.

Why didn’t they recruit local crews to get stories? Go down to all those tertiary joints full of budding journos? Could have been great. Mind you, Channel Ten have just gone that route, publically asking for the Rest of Us to send them stories for no money. In return, they will reward us with contracts that give them exclusive use of the footage on all media to be invented between the Emperor Nero and the heat death of the sun. I kid you not.

There is a substantive point to this rant, besides the fact that I am off the leash of disciplined writing for a few minutes. For most people, the games has been a construct of Channel Nine, which paid an estimated eighty million, and badly wants some money back.

They really have turned it into a tawdry and embarrassing version of us, which I guess has been beamed out to the world, or at least those bits who don’t have their own coverage.

The ABC has done pretty well, at least to Melbourne ears (though Ken at Troppo had a different experience). We could always fall back on Radio National when we got sick of our local radio announcers hopping around like a bunch of young fleas on a very juicy dog, and they always sounded humane and vaguely sensible. A much better representation of us as a nation than the drongos that Channel Nine was painting us to be.

For the people in the stadiums, I am sure it was very different, a magic experience with interested spectators catching all sorts of also-ran moments of desperation, fumbling and sheer courage.

For the rest of us in Melbourne, there was the growing realisation that the city was alive with public entertainment. Hundreds of thousands of people took themselves off into the balmy nights in a great snake of fun that stretched for several kilometres up the river, past the cauldron of the MCG, as far as the post-modern geometrical disjunctions of ACMI, Flinders St station and Swanston Street.

In some ways, my biggest memory is a collective haze of cops, tramways people and volunteers, each with a small piece of territory to keep organised and damn well determined that this particular bit would work and they would keep their tempers at the same time. I am sure there are people who will go home to Jeparit and Shepparton and Camberwell with a souvenir smurf jacket and warm memories of a shiny orange wand they waved and waved and waved at a river of chiakey humanity.

Here’s a story. Someone told me about the cleaning at the Games Village. Contracted out, of course. The company couldn’t get enough cleaners, so they called for volunteers. The cry went out to churches, and this person’s granny responded. How could you leave those athletes living in muck?

So she has spent the last few weeks turning up to be smocked up, given a mop and shouted at – we do petty power so well, don’t you think? – and sent off to scrub athlete’s bathrooms. It turns out they are very shoddily made, are coming apart, and don’t have proper drainage. She found a canister of soapy stuff that had torn off the wall, landed in the flat, undrained base of a shower, and set hard as concrete. She and her mates tried to wash it off, but the lump foamed up, until they were chased out by a wall of bubbles.

She thinks the whole thing is hilarious. She is 82.

I emerged last Saturday to buy milk and bread, to find our street transformed like this –

I went towards the beach to find a crossing point, only to discover a man on a tennis umpire’s tower –

Through his megaphone, he shouted “Welcome to St Kilda”. Thanks bro.

Shortly afterwards, this sort of thing occurred, whistling past with great determination:

Watched by a shoulder to shoulder crowd, including this family from a Fitzroy Street hotel:

Over the next few days, I found goodies on the beach.

Everyone has a bouncy castle, but not everyone has an entertainment unit which looks like a bunch of alien teeth inspecting a mosque.

It was called “The Luminarium”. As usual, we memorialised bits of the town we had already managed to tear down, not one but two generations of icon ago.

I was delighted to find this:

It’s a sculpture based on the imaginary wreck of the schooner called “St Kilda”, said to be the reason why this sunny beach suburb is named after a windswept, sea- pounded pile of kelp and puffin birds far out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Later in the week, I was cycling along the front when I found this road, completely empty, hours after the race had finished.

Which reminds me so much of the last time Melbourne was famous.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Austrapolitics, entertainments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.