TRAVELING IN STYLE : TOP DOG DOWN UNDER : Sydney Might Sneer and Canberra Will Definitely Protest, but Australia’s Real Capital, Argues One Not Impartial Observer, Is Handsome, Civil Melbourne

WHEN AUSTRALIA became an independent nation on Jan. 1, 1901, it didn’t have an official capital. Towns and cities all over the vast Australian land mass proposed themselves as candidates for the honor, but the principal rivalry was between Sydney and Melbourne, already Australia’s political and economic hubs. In 1908, a compromise was achieved: A new capital, to be called Canberra (a corruption of an Aboriginal word for “meeting place”), would be built in the Monaro Tablelands, about 400 miles northeast of Melbourne and 200 miles southwest of Sydney. Meanwhile, the government would sit in Melbourne.

Construction of Canberra took almost a generation, though, and Melbourne remained the capital until 1927, when the Australian Parliament first sat in its new Canberra home.To me--and I am admittedly prejudiced, being born and raised in that city--Melbourne is still the capital of Australia, for it encapsulates so many of Australia’s most appealing and revealing traits.

SYDNEY, WITH ITS INLETS AND HILLS, FOLLOWS nature’s contours. In Melbourne, nature has been tamed, arranged into parks and avenues lined with oaks and elms. A high, wide Southern Hemispheric sky stretches overhead, but the city seems to keep its distance from the horizon.

Sydney bustles and sprawls; Melbourne is organized, with certain places set off for the pursuit of commerce, dining, religion, family life. You notice the difference even getting around the cities. Sydney’s buses climb and twist in a feverish anarchy; Melbourne has trams that rumble along appointed tracks on broad boulevards. It is a city of purpose, of space elegantly apportioned, of geometric neatness, of a measured life.

Australian novelist Rodney Hall--himself from Brisbane, in Queensland--has observed that the people of Melbourne have “an air of preoccupation about them, each appearing to be a person of consequence, right in the middle of conducting some unhurried business. Something lurks beneath the surface, something Sydneysiders do not have. Crowds intermingle like members of a club.”

In a sense, Melbourne is a very Victorian city. To begin with, it’s the capital of the state of Victoria--which, of course, took its name from the queen of the same name, just as the city took its spirit from the era symbolized by that famous monarch. Melbourne was built as a railway town in the 19th Century, orderly and spacious in the expansive mood of the time. As it prospered after the Victoria gold rushes of the 1850s--in 1852, it is said that the city gained about 1,800 new citizens a week--Melbourne became a wild place, with scores of brothels and gambling dens setting up within a stone’s throw of Parliament House and the Catholic cathedral. It was all part of the typical Victorian mix of boundless optimism and gnawing guilt.

Melbourne remains Victorian in its sense of religiosity and high purpose. It is a city of public spirit, loyalty and reserve. It is fond of holding “Public Meetings” on any issue. And the city bristles with stern prohibitions, not always observed. “Keep wholly within the car,” say placards in trams and trains. “Boys over 6 years of age not admitted,” say signs at the doors of ladies’ washrooms in railway stations.

Melbourne is the capital of the Australian industrial and financial world. The country’s largest corporation, Broken Hill Proprietary--a steel, oil and mining giant, with $12 billion U.S. in annual revenues--is headquartered here. Seven of the 10 most profitable Australian corporations are based in Melbourne, in fact, and the city is home to the Western Mining Co. and many of the other mining firms, whose operations in search of gold, copper, iron ore, bauxite and nickel dot the Australian continent. It is also the place where much of the country’s scientific and medical research is conducted.

It is the capital, too, of Australia’s film and fashion industries, and the birthplace of its most famous humorist, Barry Humphries--better known to the American public as Dame Edna Everidge. It is also, I think, the Australian capital of ideas. Melbourne produces theorists and extremists of every stripe--fascist, communist, anarchist, New Age and more. It is a hotbed of both creativity and cranks, with a thousand earnest Adult Education classes in between. Germaine Greer, Rupert Murdoch and Olivia Newton-John are also Melbourne natives.

MELBOURNE IS A MULTICULTURAL METROPOLIS. Fully half of the city’s residents are said to be either foreign-born or have at least one parent who is foreign-born. Southern European, Asian and Middle Eastern influences are particularly strong. The suburb of Clayton has the largest Greek population of any town outside of Athens. About 20% of the primary school pupils in the suburb of Footscray are Vietnamese. On a bus headed for Footscray recently, my fellow passengers were not just Vietnamese but also Maltese, Polish, Lebanese and Croatian. Hardly one of them was speaking English. In a single food shop in the suburb, I found souvlakia, lasagna, dim sum, American-style roast beef sandwiches, Wiener Schnitzel, pizza and the inevitable Australian pastie--a crescent-shaped pastry stuffed with vegetables.

It is largely because of its ever-larger immigrant population that Melbourne--as even the people of Sydney will often concede--has become the capital of Australian gastronomy. This is a recent distinction. Melburnians used to be casual and apologetic about food. When I was a youth, pie and tea (the former being a meat pie that was largely gravy enclosed in heavy pastry) or fish and chips (fried and greasy in the English way) were viewed as staples--adequate “tucker” for any “real Australian.” Today, diners in Melbourne’s restaurants are likely to peer at lengthy wine lists, puzzle over the right sauce for their duckling and debate the merits of Sichuan versus Hunan cuisine as if they were arguing about Melbourne football. At the same time, a certain red-blooded attitude toward food and drink persists. People still eat butter with gusto here. The salt shaker is not seen as a dagger pointed at the heart. No one has yet explained the dangers of red meat to the truckers who eat huge steaks for breakfast along the highways into Melbourne. Even at lunchtime, it is quite common to see businessmen (and sometimes businesswomen) putting away half a bottle of wine, or even a full bottle, apiece.

I have favorite eating and drinking spots of my own in Melbourne--places I try to visit every time I return to the city: the espresso cafes in Toorak Road, South Yarra, where I sit with a newspaper and watch the street life; the spacious bar on top of the Regent Hotel at the “Paris end” of Collins Street, where I nurse a champagne cocktail and think over the day’s events; Il Bacio in Lygon Street in Carlton, a university quarter, where the high quality of Australian meat and vegetables and fruit joins happy forces with Italian culinary skill--and where the conversations I overhear always give me clues to what Melbourne intellectuals are agonizing about this month.

THE PEOPLE OF MELBOURNEprobably don’t play sports more than anyone else in sports-mad Australia, but they do turn out in prodigious numbers to watch big sporting events. Attendance figures of 80,000 to 100,000 are frequent for important matches in cricket or “Australian Rules football”--a fast, rough game different from soccer or American football. The Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia’s premier sports stadium, is located right in the heart of the city--about where the cathedral would have been in a medieval European town.

I go there often to watch matches between Australia and the West Indies, England, India or some other part of the former British Empire--and the stadium is so big that from a bench high in the public stand I always feel as if I am on a mountain, peering at a scene in a valley below. Out come the umpires, looking like penguins in their white hats, long black pants and white jackets. Polite applause signals a big hit or the dismissal of a batsman. A roar of formidable Melbourne moral disapproval rises against an unpopular umpire’s decision. Beer cans hit the stadium’s concrete floors more often than the bat hits the ball. This is Melbourne with its mind on the job; this is Melbourne at worship.

The city also mounts the greatest annual public blowout in Australia--the Spring Racing Carnival--with a horse race known as the Melbourne Cup, held on the first Tuesday of November (remember that the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere) as the excuse. On this day, people don crazy clothes, drink like fish and risk their earnings on horses they have never seen. A century ago, Mark Twain, after witnessing the Melbourne Cup, remarked, “It brings Australia to a halt.” Indeed, the day of the event is an official holiday in the city.

On one Cup Day several years ago, I went to Flemington Race Course, about four miles from the city center, where the race is held--traveling, as do many racing fans, by tram. A girl climbed on board in a bathing suit and a fur coat; her boyfriend was on roller skates, a red cap on his head and long red socks on his legs. On the same tram, there were men in top hats and men in bush hats, and a man wearing a pig’s face mask. Beer, fried chicken and champagne were being energetically consumed. An orderly Melbourne tram seemed to have become a surrealistic picnic ground.

Flemington itself was choked with people when I arrived--about 80,000 of them, it was said. When the people of Melbourne assemble for a festival or a sporting event, they arrive in extravagant numbers and laden with food. The Flemington racegoers had also brought chairs, tables and stereos. They were dressed in a swirl of innocent gaiety and crudeness, their behavior a duet of the formal and the bizarre. On the smooth lawns within the Members’ Stand, ladies from posh Toorak, wearing the year’s finest gowns, were sipping tulip glasses of champagne and politely nibbling large oysters on the half shell, served by the uniformed waiters they had brought with them for the day. Elsewhere, I saw two transvestites dressed in empresses’ robes of China’s Tang dynasty, with pointed shoulders and bodices encrusted with cheap stones. A heavily painted woman labored under a hat from which 40 roses arose. A man wore a lampshade on his head.

Perhaps only a city as serious as Melbourne could besport itself so madly on Cup Day.

A FEW YEARS AGO IN SYDNEY,I went to see Lady Mary Fairfax, a leading newspaper magnate and socialite, in her mansion overlooking Sydney Harbor. During our conversation, I asked her what she thought of the then-new Victorian Arts Center in Melbourne, a complex of performing arts halls that has become that city’s brilliant answer to Sydney’s famous Opera House.

“It will do a lot for Melbourne,” she replied in a tone suggesting that she thought Melbourne needed it. “But to tell you the truth,” she continued, “I am devoted to Melbourne. Here in Sydney, we slough off a skin every few years. Melbourne is attached to enduring values, and I like that.”

She paused, and then continued, “Whenever I know I’m going to Melbourne, I start smiling.”

GUIDEBOOK

Mastering Melbourne

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Australia is 61, and the city code for Melbourne is 3. All prices are given in U.S. dollars and are approximate, based on an exchange rate of 1.5 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar. Hotel prices are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

How to get there: There are no nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Melbourne, but there are daily connecting flights on Qantas, Air New Zealand and United Airlines.

Where to stay: Le Meridien Melbourne (formerly Menzies at Rialto), 495 Collins St., telephone 620-9111, fax 614-1219, reservations (800) 543-4300, a stylish hotel in a handsomely renovated Gothic Revival building in the financial district. Rate: $185. Regent Hotel, 25 Collins St., tel. 653-0000, fax 650-7780, reservations (800) 545-4000, a modern five-star hostelry occupying the 30th through 49th floors of a centrally located tower. Rate: $220. Windsor Hotel, 103 Spring St., tel. 653-0653, fax 654-5193, reservations (800) 448-8355, just around the corner from the Regent, old but refurbished, with a 19th-Century atmosphere and a stunning dining room. Rate: $175. Georgian Court Guesthouse, 21-21 George St., tel. 419-6353, a pleasant bed-and-breakfast in a verdant residential neighborhood next to Fitzroy Gardens. Rates: $65-$85.

Where to eat: Il Bacio, 131 Lygon St., Carlton, tel. 347-2044, one of the city’s most pleasant and dependable informal Italian places, $30. Chalkey’s, 242 Lygon St., Carlton, 663-6100, another local Italian favorite, $35. Vlado’s, 61 Bridge Road, Richmond, tel. 428-5833, famous for its steaks, $70. The Treble Clef, Victorian Arts Centre, 100 St. Kilda Road, tel. 684-8211, light meals and more substantial repasts, with a view of the Melbourne skyline and the Yarra River, $20-$30.

The Melbourne Cup: For information, contact Spring Racing Carnival, 640 Collins St., Melbourne VIC 3000, tel. 600-1322, fax 670-3469. Tickets for the race may be booked by credit card through BASS Victoria, tel. 11-500, fax 686-6243.

For more information: Australian Tourist Commission, 2121 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1200, Los Angeles 90067; (310) 552-1988.