I seem to have been in something of a Melbourne frame of mind lately - enjoying a few weeks down there, catching up with best friends and family, going to Meredith - complaining about the country-ness of the music scene there and then promptly stocking up on "good" alterna-country as soon as I got back to Canberra, and reading (and loving) Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap.
So I guess I got a few extra lols when my housemate pointed me towards this blog post - Stuff White people like - the Melbourne Version.
A couple of the highlights:
Not Liking FootballThis one resonated particularly with me as a North Melbourne supporter, remembering only too well an increasingly drunken pub crawl around Richmond on Grand Final Day in 1998 with some close friends and realising in almost slow motion that North was done for.
Sport is popular with the wrong type of white Melburnian, and the most popular sport amongst these people is Australian football. It is no accident that Melbourne is considered Australia’s sporting capital AND its art capital because art is the best way to hide your love of football. In the white Melburnian brain, art and football are mutually exclusive. If you profess an interest in one, everybody will assume you hate the other. Melburnian white people do this to hide their shame, because all of them carry around little shards of pain in their hearts caused by North Melbourne’s shock loss to Adelaide in the 1998 Grand Final, or the 1996 merger of the Fitzroy Lions with the Brisbane Bears, or Essendon’s agonising one point loss to Carlton at the ‘G in 1999.
I got nailed by a few other items but mostly recognised people or at least types that I've known over the year: most of it fortunately relates to the hippy trendies I've known but never entirely bought into the bullshit of.
This comment in particular though got me:
Talking about how Meredith isn't as good as it used to be (despite the fact that most people who go these days only started going a few years ago)(At least I was there in 99 - and still have the tshirt to prove it)
I've never been to Confest but love this description:
Confest
Filled with oppressively friendly men who ‘just want to give you a massage,’ Confest is sort of what you imagined the seventies to be like, except with a lot more AIDS and variants of hepatitis. White Melburnians like Confest because they get to experiment with creating a perfect society, which for them means being able to fuck anyone they want. Don’t sit down in the sauna because it’s the equivalent of touching a thousand naked and sweaty assholes.
