Melbourne: A Tale of Two Cities

In comparing Sydney and Melbourne, the two best-known cities in Australia, the analogy that makes most sense is New York and Boston.

There’s nothing like a Red Sox-Yankees (or Mets) rivalry in this baseball-less land, but consider the existing similarities: Sydney’s a massive urban sprawl, with choking traffic, terrific night life, an extensive ethnic mix, restaurants by the boatload and a big bridge: the Big Apple of Oz.

Melbourne is more finicky, more parochial, more snobby. First-class gardens break the flow of concrete and asphalt. Trams clang down the main streets. The tempo is calm, the city contained, with a marvelous, accessible London-esque feeling.

As one observant guidebook writer put it, Melbourne’s “a big Australian city. Sydney’s a big world one.” In another context, Sydney is beer and espresso, Melbourne is afternoon tea and petit fours.

Which makes Melbourne more appealing in some respects. The focused city center, laid out in a rectangular grid, is securely compact and surprisingly beautiful, with its mix of soaring new buildings and stately old Victoriana. The outlying gardens--Carlton, Fitzroy, the Royal Botanic--add an air of graciousness and Britannia-style civility. And those tree-lined boulevards are grand, the work of a city planner who, 150 years ago, determined that they should be wide enough for herding sheep.

Although locals are proud of their parks, their orchestra, their fashion, their impressive National Gallery of Australia and Mietta’s (a world-class French restaurant), it’s sports that makes them batty (yet another Bostonian characteristic).

Melbourne hosted the 1956 Summer Olympic Games, and the city fathers had been desperately angling to win the 1996 games before Atlanta won its bid. But Melbournians don’t have cause to be greedy. On the first Tuesday in November, most of the country, let alone the city, closes up for the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s version of the Kentucky Derby. The new National Tennis Centre, with its retractable roof, hosts the prestigious Australian Open. Cricket attracts partisans to the beautiful Melbourne Cricket Ground, but it’s the Australian Rules football matches--better known as “footy” or “Aussie rules”--that draws enormous crowds and extraordinary enthusiasm.

I watched some footy on TV, and can’t pretend to understand the patterns of the game. But you don’t have to know a first down from a touchdown to realize that the tackling, pummeling and grabbing makes the National Football League variety tame in comparison. Footy fever peaks in September with the Grand Final, their version of the Super Bowl.

Other diversions in this classy town are less taxing on the nervous system.

High tea at the Windsor Hotel from 2:30 to 6 p.m. is strictly an Old World, drawing-room experience, an occasion that attracts the city’s political and literary figures. But anyone can dawdle here over the finger sandwiches and the rich pastries. The Windsor is just across the street from the Parliament House, an elaborately detailed building that is still very much in use by the state of Victoria’s Legislature. The gardens in the rear, complete with lawn tennis and bowling green, are worth a look.

Lunch on the run in Melbourne doesn’t have to mean fast food. At Schwob’s Swiss Gourmet Sandwich Bars located around the city, sandwiches are packed with sliced meat and veggies. Melbourne also has gobs of mall-like food courts, plus a Little Italy and a Chinatown, both loaded with small bistros and restaurants.

There are a couple of must-sees and must-dos in Melbourne: Take a ride on the famous green trams, or “rattlers” that plow through central city, and at least stroll through the Victorian Arts Center across the Yarra River from downtown, to view the gardens and walkways. The center is home of the National Gallery, with a collection of works from Australia, Europe, Asia and America.

And rest your feet with a half-pint of something cold at Young & Jackson’s “Hotel,” a corner pub across from the Flinders Street railway station. If Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson were alive and well and living in Melbourne, you’d find them here.