Melbourne, Apr/May 09 – Home at Fitzroy

The journey out to Australia was much more tiring than coming home. As Alex Garland once observed in The Beach, the jetlag is far worse if you fly from west to east than the other way round. Piling up the hours, in effect you’re saving them up in the piggy bank for the future return home. A long gruelling flight to Kuala Lumpur was followed by a similarly gruelling eight-hour stopover.

I dozed on my brand new suitcase, wary of dropping my guard in the crowded terminal, and wary of falling over as the suitcase had wheels. The flight to Melbourne lasted another eight hours and I slept like a baby. It was midnight on Wednesday by the time we landed in the city. I had all sorts of paranoid fantasies about my electronic visa being declined as I stood bleary-eyed at the passport desk, but the security guard waved me on through without a second glance. Good to have ya back mate, what’s crankin’?

I caught the shuttle bus into the city and stayed for a few days in Elizabeth Street Backpackers, a huge and chaotic hostel just down the road from Flinders Street Station. I wasn’t in the mood to party – I was very low on cash so my priorities were to find a permanent place to stay and, more importantly, a job! I was excited about living in Melbourne for the next few months though, as it is regarded as the cultural epicentre of Australia. First I needed to find a comfortable, cheap and conveniently-placed base to explore the city.

Unfortunately, Melbourne being full of travellers, all the hostels were full and vacant rooms in house-shares were scarce. I was naïve to think rent would be cheap. The metropolitan area is huge, stretching away for miles in all directions, into dozens of suburbs I didn’t even know the names of. I think one of the hardest parts of moving to a new city is getting to know all the place names, so you don’t look like a gormless twunt when you have to ask somebody for directions. I had little time to work with, and I would soon have to surrender my precious $65/night double room at the hostel.

I did find somewhere, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘Home at Fitzroy’ was its name. A small suburban house twenty minutes’ walk from the city centre, it wasn’t in any of the backpacker guides or Lonely Planet. It billed itself as Melbourne’s greenest hostel and a relaxing place for long-term backpacker stay. Essentially it was a very large house-share, featuring an ever-changing cast of twenty or so inhabitants, some uninhibited partying, and as one internet review memorably stated, “bong-stained retro furniture”. It seemed to survive solely on word-of-mouth recommendations, and was one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever stayed in.

The suburb of Fitzroy is one of the highlights of the city – a melting pot of bohemian culture teeming with life at all hours. The main strip of Brunswick Street is packed with restaurants, cafes, bars and live music venues. There are big events and gigs every night of the week. Down the other end of the street sits the CBD, an easy walk away. A few streets across is Lygon Street and Carlton, another bustling area. There was always something happening. When I had no money (which happened to be always) I used to just wander through the noisy streets, floating between the crowds and soaking up the night-time atmosphere.

The hostel itself was established at the end of the 90s by a good-natured Aussie couple, who seemed just to want to rent out their property and meet some travellers. They extended the house out into the back yard, built an extra storey of bedrooms and created a courtyard for people to mingle and play table-tennis. Solar panels on the roof powered the hot water. On the house fridge was pinned a grand ‘manifesto’ in grubby laminated plastic, spelling out its aims as an exercise in sustainable communal living. As time wore on it appears they tired of the labour and delegated a series of travellers to manage the hostel and collect rent etc. When I arrived there it was descending into chaos.

It was the sort of thing I would have loved to be part of back in my uni days. There were so many people coming and going. Ex-housemates who knew the door code came back to visit all the time. The whole house was painted in psychedelic colours and furnished with a cluttered retro-futuristic theme. There was a sunken circular pit in the lounge where people would lie on bean-bags and read by the fire. People would plug their music players into the battered house stereo and blast out dance music, ambient stuff, rock or hip-hop depending on the mood, time of day, and their level of inebriation. The tea and coffee were free, and there was an internet room where you could surf for free, and some giant bookcases stuffed with thousands of volumes of eclectic reading in numerous languages, left by an endless succession of travellers from around the globe.

The owners had just appointed Linda, a new full-time manager, to steady the ship and get the place running smoothly again. There were lots of complaints about the noise from the neighbours and the place constantly teetered on a knife-edge of being shut down. In a way it was one of the city’s best-kept secrets, a whole world away from the cattle-market chaos of the big backpacker hostels. But in fairness it was the kind of place that needed constant vigilant attention and should not be left to run itself.

As with most hostels there were cliques and counter-cliques, and a few nutters that made it difficult for the rest. There was a group of Kiwis and Brits who took it on themselves to get pilled up and stay up partying for three days most weekends. There was not much point sticking around in the house when their sleep-defying chemical frenzy was at its peak. It took me a while to make friends purely because there were so many names to learn. Each day would bring a tide of new faces barging through the front door. I was just one man and it felt like a lunatic asylum.

Some of the long-termers were pissed off with Linda for spoiling their fun and trying to change things too quickly. She got her friend in to help decorate and the friend promptly painted over the messy Uluru mural in the computer room, which actually brought one of the long-termer girls to tears. I was glad of somebody trying to bring order to the place and I helped where I could with the tidying up. We went through all the books in the book-cases and threw a lot out; there were some really old ones there. I shared a quiet dorm room right at the back of the yard with a Swedish guy, Olof, and we cleaned that room out. Olof even jerry-rigged a clever pulley system with string and a water bottle to stop the door from swinging open and bringing in the cold. If Linda ultimately succeeded in her purge I do not know.



One of my favourite places was the posh cinema down the road that showed independent films. I often went to the discounted screenings on Mondays, a cheap hit of culture for the hard-up amidst a bountiful well of sophistication. I’m not proud about it but one week we paid for one movie then sneaked into another film for free at the end. I got caught out by a keen-eyed usher when I tried it again the next week and was effectively barred from coming back; all to save paying $6 for another ticket! I felt like such a cheap wanker and I couldn’t even look him in the eye as I left. But all I can say is the longer the economic crisis goes on, the more will try to follow in my footsteps.

The parties came thick and fast. A girl who was leaving held a fancy dress party, where people came dressed as superheroes and movie characters and danced away in the lounge in the middle of the afternoon. You can’t really potter about making yourself a cup of tea when that’s going on. Another time the house-share across the road invited the entire hostel to their ‘tight and bright’ party. The idea of ‘tight and bright’ is pretty simple, guys wear something tight, and girls wear something bright. The small house was bursting to the seams with revellers by the time we all got in, but it was a very well-organised party, where you could help yourself to unlimited booze by paying a $10 cover charge. It was the sort of thing that would have been really good if there’d been half as many people there and we could properly mingle. I sort of hung around at both events, neither present nor absent, not really getting in the mood.

Meanwhile there was always a lot going on in the city. A guy I knew, James, kindly gave me a spare ticket to see the show Suitcase Royale at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. It was alright, a bit zany and surreal like the Mighty Boosh, but lacking that show’s fantastic absurdity and clever musical routines. I was very glad to sample one of the events though. I couldn’t help thinking how great it would be to live in Melbourne if I had money.

Due to the recession, backpacker jobs were suddenly very scarce indeed. I searched endlessly for work without success and had to borrow money from my parents. I’d envisioned myself bagging a high-flying IT job in some fantastic city skyscraper and living the life of a prince on my super-high wages. But I was in dreamland, living in denial of the stark economic wasteland, where all that might be available was a bit of miserly-paid bar or restaurant work. If I was lucky the hours I worked in such a job might cover my rent at the hostel, then in a few months I might work my way up to a call centre position and find a room in a house-share. Sod that. After a long time of scratching and saving I was done working in crap jobs.

After a few weeks in Melbourne I got tired of the rut I was in and realised I was probably barking up the wrong tree. Either I was looking in the wrong places or looking for the wrong thing entirely, and this vast city of money and culture would yield no treasure for me.

Once again I was out of options and out of cash, so I returned to the comforting bosom of the strange, prosperous land that is Western Australia. Surely I could find a job there!