Perhaps I should preface this self-congratulatory post by acknowledging that it may contain grains of hubris and slices of hyperbole and possible inflation of reality, but this is Melbourne and this is what we do.

No other Australian city has the MCG!

This following list was compiled a few years ago, but in honour of some friends of mine who are currently touring around Australia and are seemingly confused about Australia’s great city and the provincial cousins, here is the true picture; unembellished and free from facts.

This is how Melbournians relate to the rest of Australia:

• We like Tasmanians because they’re like a younger sibling to us and they are so lucky to have as an older brother.
• We laugh at Queenslanders because they are slow and talk funny.
• We don’t like Adelaide because they want to prove themselves to be our equal and we know they’re not.
• We have an eternal grudge match against Sydney. We dislike Sydney so much that our newspapers have a mandatory editorial published every month about why Melbourne is better than Sydney (this sentence is one of the few in this post that’s actually true!). We know we’re superior to Sydney, if only the world we recognize that fact. What makes this rivalry almost unbearable is that when a Melbournian meets a Sydney-sider, this northern neighbor is usually oblivious to the fact that the two cities are meant to be at war. Most foreigners think that Sydney is the capital of Australia. When we’ve stopped laughing at this ludicrous conceit, we take it as a personal insult.
• We would also take issue with Perth but Perth is so remote we can’t be bothered to yawn at their cultural insignificance…although we happily shared from their billions coming the mining industry boom.

I hear what some critics suggest and that Melbourne’s weather is somewhat unpredictable,  and not always as sunny and as warm as Brisbane and Perth. Melbourne retorts, who wants sunny every day? The fact that snow and sun and heat and cold will share the 24-hour weather cycle gives birth to the artistry and complex cultural diversity that continues to define Melbourne as the world’s greatest metropolis. We have grabbed hold of these slings and arrows of climate to create cafes and sporting events and parklands to envy galleries all over the globe. Why else do we care that our airport is so ugly and inconvenient? Because once you’re here, you’ll never need to go back to the airport. 

Put it this way. In 2018, 119,000 people left their homes from all over Australia and from across the world, and made Melbourne their new home. On average 100,000 people move here each year to drink our coffee and to play our footy (and possibly for one or two other reasons also). Indeed, Melbourne will soon outshine Sydney altogether as she loses her final vestige of dominance over us, the awe-inspiring and pointless statistic: Australia’s largest city.

 And what about the rest of the world? Every year we pump ourselves up with self-adoration and we award ourselves with medals for competitions that don’t exist…because we are best! Melbourne’s “National” Art Gallery recently showed off an exhibit about, you guessed it, Melbourne and why Melbourne beats the rest.

If anyone is still left with a smidgeon of doubt, remember this, the rest of the world continues to vote Melbourne as the most liveable city in the world. No-one quite knows what “liveable” means, but that’s beside the point.*

*yes, Melbourne has recently lost the title to Vienna but one can’t allow such details to interrupt my narrative