Sydney 1 Melbourne 0

I can’t do it.  I’ve tried and I’ve tried but I’m sorry, I just can’t.  I know I must be in the wrong because everybody – everybody! – keeps telling me so.  But despite everything I just can’t bring myself to like Melbourne.

I can hear those of you in the know gasping.  Has Ged become so shallow that he’s fallen for the fake and easy charms of Sydney?  Is he such a fan of boardshorts, beer and barby (not Barbie) that he prefers the bottle-blond of the nation’s largest city to the sophisticated allure of it’s cultural capital?  Well, yes.

You see, I think Melbourne looks like Birmingham.  And not even Birmingham now, but Birmingham in the 80’s.  It’s dirty and grey and every so often smells of urine.  I know it’s got the laneways and the funky shops and an apparently endless list of seriously cool bars.  But I have a theory about that.  As Big Andrea once pointed out, only countries with really bad climates are good at interior design.  “If you have to create your own environment you tend to do a good job of it”.  Big Andrea’s like that.  She’s always right.

It’s certainly true Melbourne has a bad climate.  It swelters in the summer for weeks on end of 40 degrees plus (those awful bushfires earlier this year were only an hour or so away), and in the winter it freezes (ski fields only three hours away).  Taxi drivers keep telling me Melbourne is in a drought but every time I’ve ever been there it’s been raining under a concrete sky.  Which reminds me of my favourite Birmingham quote.  “Even if you cleared up the dog shit, it’d still be Birmingham”.  That’s how I feel about Melbourne.

Admittedly, the last few times I’ve been there it has been for work and a long-distance commute does few cities any favours.  The only thing worse than airport-taxi-office-airport is airport-taxi-novotel-office-airport.  But this time I spent an extra day there, hung out with my cousin Millie who took me to best tapas bar I’ve seen outside of Spain and to an exhibition by an amazing artist I’d never heard of.

So I’ll give you the bars and the galleries.  And the cafes.  And the funky little boutiques, the seriously cool graffiti and the different little restaurant every time you go.  It costs $10,000 to open a bar in Victoria, $250,000 in New South Wales and that, until recently, explained the different experience of visiting the two cities.  They get off-the-wall holes-in-the-wall, we get mega-sportsbars.  But didn’t legislation change that last year?  Everyone seems to think so but no one’s quite sure.  Certainly there’s nowhere yet serving alcohol in Sydney that could be described as funky or cool.

But so what?  Even if we’d got Wicked! instead of Priscilla, art instead of Andre Rieu, skiing less than six hours away, the Australian Open, the Grand Prix, Kath & Kim, a half-decent casino, I’d still prefer Sydney.  Walk with me for ten minutes by great rolling ocean, swim out with me in crystalline water, sail on our harbour and tell me there’s any city, anywhere in the world* that has anything to compare.   See.  You can’t.

*South Africa doesn’t count, Brazil’s too violent and Marseille lost its allure years ago.  Always read washing instructions.  Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up payments on a loan taken out against it.

Just another league sex scandal

In a group-sex session between nine huge men and one “immature 19-year-old woman” is each of the men individually responsible for checking he’s not taking part in gang rape?  This is the question which currently divides Australia

Or to be precise: when a woman agrees to have a threesome with two rugby players and six other players turn up and decide they want to take part, at what point does it become rape?  If the woman at first “brags” about the act the next morning, but then later comes to regret it, does that mean it couldn’t have been rape? 

Australia is currently having a mass debate about this issue because the men were all rugby players.  Or rather, because one in particular – one of the original two – is a huge rugby star.  His name is Matthew Johns and he and his brother Joey are NRL royalty.  

The L stands for League, and to get your head around this whole issue you have to understand how big Rugby League is out here.  It’s bigger than football in England, bigger than “football” in the States.  It’s huge.

As are the men who play it.  League is a big violent game where necks and brains are unwelcome diversions from the ferocity of running into and through the only men around as big as you.  The physicality of the game has been used by some academics here to explain the peculiar nature of League sex scandals.  You see, no one is surprised when these unintelligent young men spend the money that is thrown at them on fast cars and alcohol, nor that they attract a certain type of attention.  

But what is surprising is that when these men copulate drunkenly in hotel bedrooms, they tend to do it in each other’s company.  “Personally,” my mate Kurt tells me, “the sight of my best mate’s bum banging up and down would be the biggest turn off in the world”.  Not so for League players.

When Matthew Johns and a “fellow, unnamed player” accompanied a 19-year-old New Zealand woman to her hotel room during a 2002 tour, neither of them thought it strange when their team mates came barging in for a piece of the action.  Or so they say.  The girl (operating under a pseudonym which confounds those claiming she just wants attention) says John’s took her to a taxi later and said “he hoped things hadn’t got too out of hand in there”.  Now why would he think that?

What I find most shocking about this debate is the views of those around me.  Women above all keep telling me “she obviously wanted it”.  Even Kurt, who’s played a bit of rugby in his time, confirms that it’s a difficult issue because there are so many predatory women who’ll follow a tour.  But my favourite quote of the debate is from a player from another team who said “The best way to avoid these scandals is to treat the girl right afterwards, make sure she gets a taxi for example”.

It’s not clear why this story has emerged only now, seven years after the event.  What is clear is that the girl involved blames the events of that night for the collapse of her life.  “If I had a gun I’d kill them all” she says. “I hate them.”

It is doubtful whether she will get an opportunity with a shotgun but she may well have done for the club.  LG have withdrawn their sponsorship of the Cronulla Sharks and the club is suddenly facing bankruptcy.  In the current climate no other sponsor is likely to step in and few expect the club to survive.

With Telstra (our telecom) threatening to withdraw its league-wide sponsorship, the entire sport is looking shakey right now.  Peter Fitzsimmons, everybody’s favourite sports writer, wrote before this scandal broke that “unless NRL can drag itself into the 21^st century its fan-base will desert it and it will die”.  Few expected his words to come true so soon.

David Iredale

In December last year 17-year old David Iredale decided to hike across Mount Solitary in the Blue Mountains, two hours west of Sydney.  These mountains, which get scatters of snow through the winter but never enough for skiing, are deceptively pretty, their rocky faces smoothed by the eucalypts which give them their name.  

David and two school friends had thought the treck across Mount Solitary might contribute to their Duke of Edinburgh award.  When they told this to the teacher at their school who administered the award program, he was about as interested as any teacher is when a pupil tells him what they’re doing over the weekend.  This didn’t surprise them.  This was the teacher, after all, who had been promising for weeks to bring them a GPS but kept forgetting to put it in his bag.

Mount Solitary is a three-day hike along a well-marked track.  It’s heavy going, especially the second day when a walker needs to climb 810 metres to the top of the mountain.  It might not sound much, but remember December is mid-summer in Australia and it gets bloody hot that far from the coast.  Walking anywhere can be tough.

My mate Kurt, who’s quite the outdoor-expert, told me recently than when you are walking in the mountains you should carry three litres of water a day per person.  Plus a litre or two for cooking at night, plus extra if you want to wash.  David Iredale was carrying two litres for the entire trip and, unsuprisingly, ran out on the first afternoon of his hike.  Undeterred, he and his friends pushed on to the next day’s climb.  The maps they’d brought with them showed fine blue lines trailing down each side of Mount Solitary and they assumed these were creeks where they could fill up their bottles.  Big mistake.  

Blue on an Australian map is mostly a suggestion of what might occur.  Open an atlas and you’d be forgiven for thinking lakes dot the centre and south of this country.  But one of those lakes, Lake Eyre, has water in it now and tour companies are selling “once in a lifetime flights” to view it.  

Creeks in the Blue Mountains are not quite so rare and most winters can guarantee a trickle somewhere close to the fine blue line on the map.  But you should never rely on them, especially not in mid-Summer.

At the top of the mountain David left a hand-written note which read “Got to the top!  Haven’t had H2O for a whole day but river coming up! Enjoy the view”.  Needless to say, no river came up.

At some point in the following hours David “cracked the shits” with his two mates and walked ahead down the path.  What happened next is on the one hand unclear, but on the other recorded in painful detail.  

The unclear part is why or how David left the path and ended up 200 metres to the north on a rocky incline.  If he was looking for water why did he leave the path which appeared to be heading towards it?  Dehydration probably, delirium perhaps.

The all-too-clear part of those dry and desparate hours was played to a packed court-house at an inquiry last week.  Five calls to the Emergency Services in 16 minutes.  Five different operators refusing to help David because, although he said he was on the Mount Solitary walking track, he was unable to name a cross-street.  His calls were audio-recorded but not entered onto the computer system as the operators didn’t think they were worth it.  The last person he spoke to said “OK, so you’ve just wandered into the middle of nowhere.  Is that what you’re saying?”.

David’s body was found nine days later.  That delay shows more than anything how easily you can get lost in the thick undergrowth of the mountains.  But no one in Australia is blaming the mountains just now.  They are just wondering why until this week, five months after David died, the emergency services had still not reveiwed their operating procedures.