Go south for the winter
Cold, wet? Who cares. With so much to do, visitors won‘t care about Melbourne’s chilly weather
It’s a wintry night in Melbourne – one of those drizzly evenings when you might just want to snuggle up with a good book by a fireplace. But Melburnians have never let something trivial like the weather get in the way of a good time.
After so many prolonged Covid lockdowns and restrictions that put the city’s vibrant art, festival and food scene on hold, Melbourne is back in the dizzying swing of it all.
Kicking off winter, the diverse art, music and performance festival, Rising, is a new event on the Victorian cultural calendar. Planned annually, Rising (June 1-12 this year) features 225 events across 37 venues.
Most spectacularly, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl and surrounds is transformed into a “night garden of stimulation’’ called The Wilds, featuring giant, glowing inflatable sculptures, projections, roaming artists, pop-up kitchens and a 70-seat, glasshouse-inspired bistro called The Lighthouse that serves up a four-course, set fine-dining menu led by chef David Moyle (of Franklin and Longsong).
The usually inaccessible stage of the Bowl is transformed into an ice-skating rink with skaters serenaded by the fabulous Night Chorus community choir belting out ’80s and ’90s hits.
The Yarra River (Birrarung) features Monochord, a powerful laser beam that flickers and sweeps across the water to music, created by artist Robin Fox.
Even a plain old carpark in the middle of the city’s Chinatown is transformed into Golden Square – three levels of performance, art and rooftop bars.
Flinders St Ballroom, a disused and dilapidated space on the third floor above Flinders St train station, is utilised for Patricia Piccinini’s new art exhibition, A Miracle Constantly Repeating. Piccinini’s weird and wonderful, sometimes unsettling, hyper-real silicone sculptures mix up the boundaries of human-animal-plant-machine and are spread across several rooms. It’s her first solo show staged in her home town for almost 20 years.
Art lovers can rejoice for other reasons too. Melbourne has also welcomed The Picasso Century, at the National Gallery of Victoria (until October 9) as part of Melbourne Winter Masterpieces. Featuring more than 80 Picasso works and 100 works by 60 of his contemporaries, it is curated by 20th century painting scholar Didier Ottinger from the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
ACMI – Australian Centre for the Moving Image – on Federation Square has undergone a $40m redevelopment, reopening last year. It is currently hosting another Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition, Light: Works from Tate’s Collection (until November 13) featuring more than 70 works by historical and contemporary artists who “harnessed this elemental force’’ through painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, installation and the moving image.
Save time to explore ACMI’S free centrepiece exhibition The Story of the Moving Image with its numerous interactive exhibits, iconic costumes and movie memorabilia including the piano from Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano and a half-and-half vehicle constructed from cars featured in screen cult classics Mad Max and Bush Mechanics.
ACMI is also the home of Karen Martini’s restaurant HERO that offers contemporary all-day dining. Try the potato bread with fermented blueberry and goat’s curd. It is spectacular.
Any arts lover’s visit to Melbourne would be incomplete without seeing the showstopping, new, “reimagined’’ Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Princess Theatre in the East End theatre district. Fresh from Broadway, it is now a one-part (3½ hour) production instead of a much longer two parts. The show is worth seeing if only for its flawless, jaw-dropping magic illusions and special effects.
The perfect base for all these city adventures is the brand new (opened in April) voco hotel on Lonsdale St. Once the site of the Cobb & Co stables, the hotel is 252 rooms of plush comfort with a rooftop pool and bar, city views and restaurant.
Development is everywhere in Melbourne, with 11 new hotels opened in 2021 and another 10 so far in 2022.
There are also productions of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre until July 23.
For football lovers, the MCG hosts Manchester United v Melbourne Victory on July 15 and Manchester v Crystal Palace on July 19.
Covid was long and hard but the shackles, finally, have been cast off. Bad weather? I don’t think anyone has noticed. The writer was a guest of Visit Victoria