(from sunday)

Today I wandered the city, trying to learn it. Moving from Perth, our family only ever lived in the suburbs, and so it wasn't until year 9 that I began to know the city, during my school's City Campus program. The City Campus - it still exists, on Flinders Lane - is a curious inversion of the common tradition among upper crust private schools to ship the leaders and football stars of tomorrow off to the countryside to install self reliance and group cohesion, with the intended result a solid old boy's/girl's club. We outer-suburbans caught the train into the city every day, like commuters, like workers - an alternate form of preparation for real life, I suppose. I can't remember what we were meant to learn in the classroom (there were beanbags - a venture into alternate educational realms?), but I remember coming to terms with something alive and thrumming, something big, vast and - peculiarly - both human and inhuman. We negotiated the city like tourists, each lunchtime a stop-start venture into the streets and lanes. Until someone told me how to remember the order of the CBD streets, I'd lose myself regularly and be forced to stand midstream, people cascading around me, gazing around with a look of barely shielded terror. Now I know: Spencer, King-William, Queen-Elizabeth (the nod to royalty), Swanston, Russell, Exhibition (presumably named after the famed Melbourne exhibition of the 1850's?) and Spring. On Elizabeth St, we waited for traffic lights and watched men sidle into Club X with a crab's sideways dart, weighed down by a thick urgency. Once, we even saw one exit - someone's grandfather, sheepish after a solo orgasm, the private turned public, and we followed him to see how long it would take for him to disappear into the crowd, before we couldn't distinguish him from the suit next to him. A little while - broken stride, residue of guilt, the stink of his sex - but a shift of pace, a resetting of shoulders and the man was gone. At the Vic Market, I was overcome by the antithesis of supermarket - smell, squalor, noise, old Italian men, Chinese women with singsong voices, custard apples, baby chickens huddled in cages, touristware and bad Australiana, fruit prices fluctuating wildly from stall to stall - and hurried through, casting glances of disbelief. Surely a relic from a previous age? The City Baths on Swanston St and warnings from teachers to be careful in the changeroom, supposedly a beat. The man with the odd smile behind the counter of Bernard's Magic Shop, who watched us closely.

That was a while ago. Becoming comfortable with a metropolis after the trees and air of the green wedge took time, and I was never fully comfortable or happy with the idea of a city, the artifact furthest from nature and origins we've yet created until I left its safety for a month after school, scooting through Brunei (forest researcher cousin gone native) -Singapore (a waystation - does anyone go there for its own sake?) - Malaysia (Dad grew up there back when it was British Malaya, producer of fine rubber) - Thailand (everyone else was). Back, bearded and amazed by other places, I still felt a deep peace the first few days I was back, new at uni but an old hand at the city, a known place, a home. I remember feeling a sense of pride at my city (quickly followed up by wondering why I felt proud of little ol' Melbourne). But no aberration - every time I've been away since (sullen London, beautiful Ireland, pastiche Rome), I've felt the same way about Melbourne. I love the place. A new city, brash but also a little uncertain, defined not by its boulevards and streets but by its laneways and alleys, the small nooks and streetart, life at street level, the floors above restricted to workers and the apartment dwelling nouveau riche, beginning to expand past Batman's grid southwards, surging past the evil of Crown down St Kilda Rd, a second CBD sprouting. Sydney has two, bisected by the harbour; Melbourne as well, perhaps soon. One night, lost on purpose with two friends, we found the Docklands development, with sleek apartment towers ringing the new harbour. I know it's only for the rich (rents start round 500/wk for a single bedroom), but still, it's beautiful. Even if we are trying to imitate Sydney.

You probably already know this, but if you walk to the Hotel Sofitel (Spring St end of Collins St), take the lift to the 35th floor (don't let the staff see your fear) and visit the toilets, you'll encounter the best free view in Melbourne. A floor-to-ceiling window allows you to see the entire of the eastern suburbs, inner stretching to hazy outer, the MCG laid bare, the Yarra, Fitzroy Gardens, Studley Park. Below, to the left, a new apartment tower culminates in a swimming pool. A month ago, I waved to two guys sitting by the pool - a tentative wave back, followed by suspicious glances followed by a short conversation followed by lap swimming followed by more suspicious glances followed by a short, sharp jab of two fingers in my direction. Today, a girl circumnavigated the pool, bathers a colour not so far from flesh; two businessman, drying their hands for longer than necessary at the window. "Reckon she's topless?" - from the most fatherlike, surprisingly. A meditative silence. "Nah. Pity". They leave; another two from the same conference enter. Cue sound of pissing. "Hey Geoff. Do you think she's swimming topless?" Urinal flushing. "Nup, more's the pity. Come summertime though, there'd be something to see." Exit.

Later, in Chinatown, I find a store specialising in abalone. Cans from floor to ceiling, the label design colourful and stylised for the Asian market - a photo of the muscular underside of an ab (a remarkably ugly creature), silhouettes of divers, the cheap paper bordering on crepe. The prices are astronomical - minimum of 35 bucks for a single 500 gram can, and I wonder how on earth the owner gets away with charging premium export prices in Australia. I've gone ab-diving before, great fun, and we cooked them up with garlic and soy and a touch of lemon in hot oil and they were delicious, but other times, prepared more simply, they were underwhelming. The owner won't let me take a photo and clicks his tongue at me for asking.

I spent an hour or so exploring the alleys near Chinatown, and further afield, near the massive building on Lonsdale St that looks a little like a hammerhead shark crossbred with a Dalek (not an insult - it looks amazing, though perhaps the analogy isn't the best). The alleys wind back and forth, break into a dogleg, lead past tiny dumpling houses, obscure Chinese societies, shuttered doors deep in Melbourne's bowels promising a live band on Friday/Saturday nights, but only as part of a mysterious acronym society, original cobblestones, miniscule carparks tucked away behind churches, sheltered doorways and evidence of temporary homes, and one special alleyway I'd found a year ago with street signs altered into philosophical one-liners (when one is the river, one is the sea) that a nearby bouncer told me was the work of a Melbourne City councilor.

The Vic Market was winding down as I came near, but crates of noisome pig ears and withering lettuce lay in wait for the final shoppers. Notes: a pleased couple carrying a birdcage containing a budgie, a tiny dog careening through shops, an old homeless guy with hopeless eyes and a nervous circling pattern developed over years, three buskers reluctantly leaving the best corner in the market, one of their group counting their takings on a table - a city of coins, silver and gold columns rising up.

Before long, the sun dipped below the horizon and the chill of early night fell across the city and I hurried home, happy, well-fed on the buzz and thrum.

I've always wanted to spend 24 hours in the city, to see what I would see; maybe sometime soon I'll have the guts.