Three days off in Melbourne last week.

And didn’t the old gold money town welcome my wife and I!

That’s me, in the photo, in front of some dry public art, Tricia had her camera out.

We had been there only hours, wondering what to do, where to eat on a Monday night, we were loving especially the laneways, and the artistic graffiti therein, and we were both taking lots of pictures.  We knew we wouldn’t bother visiting galleries.  We were getting our fill from the walls downtown.

Through one wall downtown, we heard some band playing.  Being such a smartarse, I said to Tricia that this sounded so Melbourne, so like a Nick Cave wannabe band.  We walked up that lane and I was telling Tricia how, whenever I came to Melbourne with bands in the 80s, I felt obliged to walk around late at night singing Birthday Party songs (as sung by Nick Cave).

Then, sitting on a concrete ledge at hip height on the back wall of the Westin, I saw a Ticketek ticket for a Nick Cave show.  I called to Tricia - “Hey, take a photo of this!  This is just too bloody Melbourne!”  So she took the photo, and then we looked at the date on the ticket, and then I picked it up to find that it was two tickets folded over, and the show was that very night, at a venue called The Forum.

This photo was taken before we even touched them.

We found that the venue was down that lane, where we had heard that music, so we went in and the show was great and we loved it and Nick Cave sang lots of the best Bad Seeds songs - “Tupelo”, “Red Right Hand”, “Mercy Seat”, “Stagger Lee”, “Weeping Song” and lots more.  And Warren Ellis on violin with a wild beard looked most like an Irish Rogue bushranger from up country in about 1850, and Mick Harvey played some guitar, and Conway SAvage’s bass made it like a Birthday Party show, all raw and primal, like I remembered it being way back in 1983, when I was green and naive &I was going to be an engineer.

And this is how Nick Cave looked -

I commented to my wife that he wears a suit well, so for the next three days in Melbourne,

I couldn’t help notice that most Melbourne blokes wear suits better than men do in Sydney.

On the second day, we saw lots more in laneways, shopped a little, and I dropped in to see Ned Kelly’s armour.  On the third, we walked around the Botanic Gardens, I wearing a suit now like a Melbourner born, and shopped in Prahran and saw a Fellini inspired circus show, with much of the Nino Rota Italian carnivalesque music I love so, at the Swinburne College of Circus Arts. called “Divino”, and that looked a bit like this -

Each night, we drank happily at laneway bars, and ate well at restaurants in Laneways.  Our favourite bar was presided over by Rama, who is only twenty, and seems to treat working a bar like I drive a cab - he is really into it.  He makes up his own cocktails, and I gave him a name for one - Laneway Nectar.