This college, founded by the University of Melbourne in 1887, was too tree-lined for me to get a proper view on Street View (I had to pull up a winter photo). I imagine it’s so passers-by and people who drive past it don’t get into accidents while trying to make sense of its complex energy. There is no fucking way a building as old as this, looking the way it does, and FACING A CEMETERY (Melbourne General Cemetery) isn’t haunted in some way. For the low price of around $30,000 a year while studying at Unimelb, you can live (and probably die) in Queen’s College.
Watswool Woo(l) Brokers, West Footscray
The string of industrial buildings along Sunshine Road in West Footscray are all pretty derelict, which lends the street as a whole to feeling pretty cursed. But there’s a difference between cursed and haunted, the latter of which this building definitely is. As a kid, my mum would drive into the city to pick up my dad from work (he doesn’t drive), and this would be one of the buildings we’d pass. Passing this building, it isn’t that difficult to imagine hearing the wool auctions taking place, to see people loading massive crates of the stuff into pickup trucks or vans. It doesn’t seem at all maintained; the fencing placed around it has been broken into, the grass patchy and wild, the lettered signage falling off slowly, one by one, and the grotesques of a sheep’s head on each end of the street-facing side, their piercing gaze staring into your soul. Compelling you to take off that woollen jumper (or it could just be summer. You decide).
McDonald’s, Clifton Hill
You know how buildings owned by fast-food companies often have a certain ‘look’ to them? Most McDonald’s stores look fairly similar. Their buildings are normally more modern in architecture, incorporating the brand colours, and offering an inoffensive, soul-crushing aesthetic. The building itself is one of many things that tie down to the experience, everything about said experience screaming ‘McDonald’s’.
That isn’t the case at all for this store. Imagine being drunk or stoned with your friends, and suggesting a Macca’s run. While traipsing and winding through the streets of North Fitzroy and Clifton Hill, you come across this two-storey art deco building, one of the most intact examples of its kind in the city. Situated on Queens Parade, this heritage-listed store is often called ‘the most beautiful McDonald’s in the world’. If that sentence alone doesn’t haunt you, I don’t know what will.
Queen Victoria Market, CBD
I could make a cheap joke here about this place’s status as a tourist trap being the source of its haunted-ness. And that’s a good part of it (trying to walk through the market is a fucking nightmare). But there’s more to it than that. In a part of Melbourne where most things are open until fairly late, there’s something pretty cursed about an area as large as the Queen Vic being completely shut down by 3pm (5pm on a good day). I also recall an exchange student from California telling me, a couple of months ago, about how the car park was originally the site of Melbourne’s first cemetery. I was staying the night at his apartment, which looked over the market. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Was it because I found him cute? Actually, yeah, partly.
Amcor Paper Mill, Alphington
Funnily enough, this was the building that inspired me to write this piece. I can recall times I’ve driven past it with friends before, but not intentionally. Literally the only times we’ve driven past it are when accidentally finding our way onto the Eastern Freeway. After doing some research, there is literally nothing about this building that isn’t haunting. The company the building belonged to was fined in 2008 for dumping oil into the Yarra River, adding to an already pretty extensive history of pollution and corruption.
Now? They’ve sold the building off to developers, who are turning the land into soul-less ‘smart’ housing that boring people will move themselves and their matched Ikea furniture into, living their boring lives. Travelling to their boring, 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs in their boring smart cars to go home, watch boring prime time commercial TV and eat boring food for dinner before going to bed at half past boring in the evening. Doomed, from beginning to end, and even after the building is gone. It makes my blood boil.
The idea to make this came about when I was googling ‘poster glue’, and Google spat back at me ‘well, actually it’s called wheatpaste, you uncultured swine’. I made a batch last night, in preparation for a city-wide flyposting session tomorrow (shhh).
Here’s what you will need:
Water
Sugar
Flour
Step 1
Order food from an Indian restaurant which will arrive in approximately forty minutes. That gives enough time to make the wheatpaste and have the food arrive nice and hot.
Step 2
Bring your one container’s worth of water to a boil.
Step 3
Get your rice ready for dinner, because you’d rather cook the rice yourself than spend an extra $4.
Step 4
Cut the bag open with a bread knife because you couldn’t find where the scissors had been moved to since you last used them. If you know where your scissors are in the house, those will work fine too.
Step 5
Wash your rice, rinsing it repeatedly until the water runs clean. The ratio when you put it in the rice cooker should be 1 parts rice to 2 parts water.
Step 6
Refer to the recipe you’re using, which calls for 3 tablespoons of flour to a cup of water- shit, how much water did I put in?
Step 7
Once you’ve figured out that it was 10 cups, convert 1 tablespoon into grams and multiply that amount by 30- SHIT, THAT MUCH FLOUR?
Step 8
*sigh*… Measure out your flour.
Step 9
Actually, fuck it — eyeball it and mix in some water. Use a potato masher to get rid of any lumps until the mixture becomes a thin paste. If your kitchen, unlike mine, has a whisk, that’ll work too.
Step 10
Have your delivery order come twenty minutes earlier than initially planned. Comment on how early it was to the driver. Feel like a bit of a dick because, normally, having your dinner delivered to you that early is a good thing.
Step 11
Mix the flour paste in with the water and mix constantly until it starts to bubble.
Step 12
Transfer it to the container.
Step 13
Refer to your recipe again, because this is when you put in the sugar — ‘(added strength)’? WHAT THE FUCK IS ADDED STRENGTH SUGAR?
…if you, like me and probably everybody else on the planet, don’t have added strength sugar, sub in the type of sugar you do have. I used raw sugar.
Weird flex, but I will take literally all of the credit for this immense faux pas. I went to Preston Market to go grocery shopping for a paella, which I made for a Halloween party. I had never actually seen a paella pan while shopping there, but because that market has fucking everything I’m going to just assume that I missed the place that sold them. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I ended up getting one the month after at this catering supplies shop in Fitzroy. Didn’t stop this disaster of a dish from happening though.
The paella pan, in about as good a spot as it’ll be in the kitchen I have, after actually making the paella. Since buying it, I have only used the pan for toasting spices and sandwiches.
Back to the Halloween party though. My housemates and I ended up pulling a (honestly not that) surprisingly bougie spread together. Devils on horseback (with prosciutto!). Caviar and crackers. Quails stuffed with brandy-soaked grapes, wrapped in vine leaves (that I only found out at around that time were growing in our courtyard!). Sangria. One of my housemates joked for weeks afterward about how we became the side of Brunswick we (by ‘we’ I mean the entire household) so hated. They’re wanting to be running buddies with a friend/pretty much (like 100m away from us) neighbour of ours though, so I guess the gentro badge joke is on them.
Besides, I’m the one that thought it would be a good fucking idea to cook a paella in a wok. I feel like that… actually makes me some weird kind of gentro? I mean, I’m currently in Byron Bay, and have written this on a stomach full of the most caucasian-ised Mexican food I’ve ever had (and I live in Australia, so that’s a bold claim to begin with). I’m some sort of gentro, whether I like it or not. I mean, you kind of absorb it when you live somewhere like Brunswick. I now run a (two!) blog(s!), I’m planning a radio show on a community station that’ll have local musicians on it talking about place and how it affects the unconscious in their practice — you get the picture.
We all agreed to do the cooking for the party in the days leading up to and on the day of the party. Because I was only responsible for the one dish (and mulled wine, which can be made beforehand AND ACTUALLY BE GOOD.) I decided to do it on the day, only to discover that I STILL left it too early. I was just so pumped to make this paella that I couldn’t wait. That, ironically (apart from the fact IT WAS MADE IN A WOK), was the reason for it being nowhere near as good as it could’ve been. My plan was to initially cook the paella, which was actually great freshly made, then put it in the fridge before warming it up again in the wok. It had all the right ingredients in it, Arborio (I couldn’t find Calasparra until afterward, when I found out the house had it all along) rice, a $3 bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, green beans, calamari rings, mussels, chicken, fish stock, and saffron, not in that order (not that I would know the order of how these things get put in, anyway. I only ever blindly follow recipes unless I’ve made the dish a million times.) It developed a nice crust on the bottom, which I guess is the point of a paella to begin with.
Here’s the paella, cooking a good several hours before the actual party.
2pm. Our kitchen fridge was so full of food that there was no room for the paella. This meant going across the local park to a friend’s house, and putting the food in her fridge. She didn’t have enough room for the pan though, so I said goodbye to the socarrat (the Spanish name for the paella crust but honestly if it’s in a wok can I even call it that?), transferred it into a metal bowl of hers, rearranged her entire fridge without her permission, and let it chill until the actual party. I brought the empty pan home to wash, though.
As unbelievable as it is, here’s proof that I went to put the paella into a different bowl to chill in my friend’s fridge — a wok in the park, if you will (sorry. Double sorry. All the sorries. ‘Sorries’ isn’t a word, just like how my paella wasn’t a paella).
This… let’s call it a pilaf from now on, was collected at around 9pm. I spent ages reheating it in the wok, stirring it around (THE COMPLETE FUCKING OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU SHOULD DO WITH A PAELLA), until it was warm and kinda crispy (and not just because the stirring action was so vigorous it actually snapped off parts of the mussel shells).
Look, it at least tasted fine. My housemates, being the kind souls they are, decided to focus entirely on that in the pilaf. “This has to be one of the best paellas I’ve ever tasted.” My drunk, high, tired from cooking, everything heart accepted the compliment toward the pilaf. I’m honestly not too sure if anybody else actually ate it though. It was a stupid party dish to begin with. Parties go on for hours and the food normally stays around for that long. Literally the only party a paella is good for is a dinner party, and that’s why I’m looking forward to actually making a proper fucking paella pretty soon (a few of my friends and I want to get a weekly dinner party rotation type thing started — fuck, I am way more gentro than I would like to admit.)
I’m living the Melbourne dream. I live in a house in East Brunswick with housemates I get along really well with, sandwiched between three tram lines and pretty much right by the Merri Creek. I own a bike that, at the time of writing, is currently (hopefully) chained to a random bike hoop on Blyth Street (I chained it there about three weeks ago). I checked on it a week after putting it there to find it all in one piece, so I’m hopeful it’ll still be there.
I’ve also freegan-ed the shit out of my room and, bar a vintage suitcase that is used as more of a display piece/actual suitcase (which I only picked up for $20, anyway), haven’t paid for a single piece of furniture in it. It was only as I was planning this piece that I realised how Melbourne that is.
Sydney queer scene: fetishisation of wealth Melbourne queer scene: fetishisation of poverty
Having my room entirely be a mix of hard rubbish, stuff people would’ve otherwise thrown out and stuff that came with the house wasn’t something I actively seeked out as a goal, though admirable, I guess. So, where did my furniture come from?
Dresser, Fan and Mirror
These things all came with the house, which is why I grouped them together.
I can still remember the day I first moved in to see the drawers placed awkwardly in the middle of the room. It’s fairly light, and even with its drawers full I’m able to push it around (though it does ride up against the clearly DIY-ed carpet).
I have no idea how the mirror hangs, but I’m glad it does. The mirror had the cutest writing on it, which I’ve since accidentally rubbed away by cleaning it. ‘It’s a good day to have a good day.’ Cute until my fucking stupid meme ass brain googled the phrase and suddenly remembered that ditty.it meme.
I originally thought the fan belonged to a housemate of mine. I didn’t even notice it in the house until maybe a couple of months in, and used it for the first time when I was toasting spices in my kitchen-without-a-working-exhaust-fan. I’m not going to entirely blame the kitchen — I was toasting powdered paprika which wouldn’t have made the air of the entire house noxious weren’t it in the pan to begin with. I decided to use the fan against an open window, an idea that probably would’ve worked about as well as just opening the window without the fan.
Bed
The bed itself got moved in two different stages — The mattress came in the first day I did, and the bed base followed about four months after.
The first I knew about the mattress was actually at a gig of a friend of mine, Al, who also ended up being the reason I moved. My now housemate, Earnest, was also at the very same gig, and is good friends with him. We left Boney and wandered through the streets of the CBD on a Thursday night. While trying to find somewhere for dinner, crossing an intersection, Al mentioned he had a spare mattress he was wanting to get rid of. I, not wanting to see it go to waste (my inner Filo really shining through), but also not having a car and Al living a two minute walk from me at the time, agreed to take it the day I moved in.
Then came the fun part of actually moving the mattress. After moving all of my other things into the new house from my parents’ place (thanks, sister), I made my way to my friend’s house. We’re separated for most of that distance by Allard Park, a flat park with a football ground in the middle. Earnest, Al and I all moved this queen-sized mattress out of the doorway, across the park, and through the walkway that leads to my house, which is at the back of the lot. I left myself to actually pop the mattress into my room once it was actually in the house.
The bed base was actually from the other house’s — for lack of a better term — ‘lead tenant’, Sandra. I got a message from her while pet-sitting for a friend in North Melbourne. ‘I have a bed base I want to get rid of, would you like it?’ Of course! I talk to her, try to arrange a time to pick it up, you know the drill.
So, I get home, fairly tired after caretaking a six month old Kelpie and a two year old cat who don’t get along well at all, to a queen-sized bed base, turned onto its side, right in the middle of my room. My other housemate, Emlyn, sees my fairly stunned reaction. ‘Yeah, we moved it over here to see how you would react’. It was a mix of perplexed and happy. My want for a bed base, to make my bed really ‘feel’ like a bed, overrode the tiredness, which quickly hit again like a bag of bricks as soon as I put the bed together.
Chair and Desk
I’m about as surprised as you are that a chair and desk in as good a condition as these ones were free.
I picked them up through a friend of someone in a Facebook group I am in, who was moving to Germany. My sister’s partner agreed to help me move the stuff to my place, but as he lives in Sunshine West, I figured it would be better for me to go to my parents’ in Sunshine so he could pick me up from there, drive to Footscray to pick up the items, then weave our way to Brunswick East without having to go back and forth. On top of the chair and desk, I also ended up nabbing a speaker set and amplifier for $25. I don’t care how shitty the sound coming out of them is, a price that low for a speaker system is pretty much free, and I had been letting my record player collect dust for about a year. Not anymore.
We make our way to the place in Footscray. Growing up where I did, I only really knew of Footscray as what lay west of the train tracks. Crossing over the tracks meant being somewhere that felt fairly foreign — the streets are wider. Remnants of old but still active industria (as is evident by the trucks, the noise, and the smell) sit side by side with construction sites for massive tower luxury apartments.The flat we drove to was pretty much on the edge of the Maribyrnong, one side of our view dominated by the port’s cranes and an endless sea of shipping containers. Melbourne’s disastrous attempt at a ‘we’re a big city’ wheel is just after the docks. You have to pass through these before you can enter the CBD, your vision tells you.
We loaded all of the things into his SUV, then drove off to my house. Over the Maribyrnong. Zipping through the inner north-west. Kensington. Flemington. North Melbourne and Parkville. Small, old-timey workers’ cottages interrupted by factories, interrupted by public housing flats, interrupted by Royal Park and the cemetery. Everything cascading into one another. Though we didn’t drive past it, I pointed out how close my mother’s first place when she moved to Australia was, at a block of flats in Brunswick West. Her first home of independence became mine, which was taking shape just that bit more that day.
We finally reached my house, and I told my sister’s partner to go through the back alley, allowing us to avoid the walkway. I had discovered a couple of weeks before, thanks to a housemate’s brother, that the back gate was actually just one massive sliding door we could use to get the furniture inside with ease.
Wardrobe
I actually found these in the same Facebook group as the desk and chair, but this time around was picking it up from a friend.
Originally located in Preston, this wardrobe was the shortest car trip I made for any piece of furniture. Still didn’t make it easy, though. In fact, it was probably the most difficult out of anything in my room.
After bouncing between asking Facebook and my parents for help picking up the wardrobe, one of my housemates offered to borrow their brother’s ute to help transport it.
Then came the day. I messaged the person I was picking it up from before work, letting them know I’d be there at around 5pm to get the wardrobe. They said they would be out by then, but would leave their house key in the post box for me. And so my housemates and I set off.
Drive up along Bell Street. Turn right and cross the creek. Keep going until you hit the road with the tram line and turn left. Getting there was simple enough. Retrieve the keys from the postbox. Walk to the unit at the very end of the block of flats. Go up a narrow flight of stair — oh shit. This might not be as easy as I thought it would be. And I didn’t think it was going to be that easy to begin with. I open the door and, thankfully, the wardrobe is already in the doorway, which leaves us only the stairway to carry it down.
It was a massive challenge trying to get it out of the doorway and down the stairs though. We had it on its side — easier to carry, but literally impossible to get down (it kept on riding against the brick wall). We decided, after a good half an hour of trying to do the physically impossible, to bite the bullet, carry it upright, and just hope that nobody got crushed between ~100kg of wood and jagged concrete, which thankfully didn’t happen.
We tried everything to actually get the wardrobe loaded into the ute. Carrying it to prevent it scratching. Dragging it on the ground with a giant rubber mat we found in the driveway. Getting rid of some of the pieces of wood to make the wardrobe lighter (not intentional. One of the wooden bars on the top actually fell off). Driving the ute closer and, eventually, getting the damn thing into the tray. There were tie-down straps in the trailer, but because we forgot to actually take them out before loading the wardrobe we didn’t have access to the tightening strap. Thankfully, Emlyn was able to tie a fairly secure, fairly tight knot in the strap. I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad to know a former Scout more than that day. We try to close the gate, to no avail, hoping that the singular strap keeping the wardrobe from sliding off of the ute will do the job, hop back in, and zip off.
Driving in Melbourne, speaking as someone who, while not a driver myself, has been in a whole lot of cars, is a very involved and intense experience. This is more so during peak hour. This is ESPECIALLY the case when you have a wardrobe questionably secured to the back of a ute with a gate that won’t close because the wardrobe is in the way. Anyway, so we’re zipping down Bell Street at 6 in the evening at a cruisy 30 kilometres an hour, extremely conscious of our status as the unintentional bad guys on a major road during peak hour. It’s only a five minute or so drive, but it felt much longer than that. It probably actually was much longer than five minutes because of how cautious we were and how slow we were going. Turn left. Go a bit further down than the road we’d normally turn on so we can access the back lane. Open up the back fence. Struggle to get the wardrobe out and leave it on the cobblestone while we have a breather. Discover that it’s going to rain soon. Have a friend from across the road come over to help. This happened over the space of a couple hours but involved so many things that time seemed to just zip by.
We finally managed to get it into the house, the wardrobe being just big enough to fit through the doorway. In good time, as well, as it had started to rain shortly after. I took care of the rest of the wardrobe’s journey, it being easily slid across the carpet floor.
So, what can we learn from all this? Getting shit at absolutely no cost is great, of course! But it also doesn’t mean you have to pretend like it’s some random assortment of items that don’t make a room feel lived in. I’ve been really self-conscious about this article sounding like one massive flex, because it can lean far too easily into that territory. But the items in my room make sense together. Sure, maybe it’s not in a ‘matched IKEA set’ way, but I don’t feel like that’s my energy anyway. I’m not asking you to force a story for everything, but being able to see story in things sure does help you value them more.
It’s probably a good time for something like this to come out onto the internet, anyway. Find stuff that sparks joy for you, especially if it doesn’t spark joy in others who are trying to get rid of said stuff.
Given how many of you are talking about that Marie Kondo programme, next week will probably be the best time in fifty years to hit up the thrift store. pic.twitter.com/dTta568u7I
Cursed Melbourne 