Melbourne is Australia’s most liveable city and I finally understand why

Iwas recently walking my dog in my local council area, which is so deep in suburbia that the SUVs have smaller SUVs as pets and activewear is a kind of class system. In this park, there is a conservation area full of beautiful native trees, it had been raining and my dog was wearing a sweet little jacket. I was walking there, between the ferns and eucalypts, wet with winter, and I thought: “Well, this is quite nice.”

Melbourne was recently again crowned the most liveable city in Australia and 10th in the world, beating Sydney (13th in the world) and well ahead of everywhere else. Ironically, after the couple of years we’ve had, I think I finally understand why.

A bit more than 20 years ago, I was a reluctant transplant to Melbourne. Adelaide has, of course, also been named Australia’s most liveable city (and the world’s). It also has a brown river and an overblown sense of its own loveliness; what could Melbourne offer me that was any different?

For some time, I remained sceptical. But the pandemic changed me. During lockdowns one through six, a strange thing began to happen.

In the winter of 2020, when we had all been inside our houses for longer than was strictly humane or hygienic, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about how isolated the city felt. To us, nowhere else had any concept of what we were going through. There were a few tense days when we had the tightest restrictions in the world.

With our borders closed we waited, poised by our laptops at 11am every day, to hear whether we might be allowed out for a quick trip to Readings (the answer was always “no”).

Something about that experience was quintessentially Melbourne. We were exactly as affected as the town that spawned Ben Mendelsohn should be. Only Melbourne could have the