Memory lane

My little ode to Melbourne's bluestone backstreets. First published in the (melbourne) magazine.

Melbourne will always be one big beautiful bluestone lane to me.

As an eight-year-old I moved from Canberra to South Melbourne and on my first day of exploration, I lost myself in basalt. How could I not? Our back gate opened onto a row of strange blue-grey stones that stretched into the distance in both directions. I was mesmerised.

Where I’d come from, yards backed onto other yards. There was nothing in between. Now I had my very own little thoroughfare over the back fence. 

My Mum’s only instruction as my bike and I clattered out into the cobblestoned unknown was to avoid main roads. Fine by me. I’d seen roads before. But these lanes were like nothing else on earth.

For hours, I vibrated down those lanes, staring in awe at each individual bluestone, every one pocked and sloped a different way but making up a perfect whole. I didn’t know it then, but I was staring at Melbourne’s grand design; a little Hoddle Grid, right down to the slightly irregular oblongs and the criss-cross of streets, like furrows of grout.

I loved the sound of my bike on all those little ridges. That thwackety jounce of mudguards on a bluestone lane is the true sound of this city. I was soon to learn that no other city loosens mudguards quite like Melbourne. 

When the rain came I didn’t mind at all. The clouds themselves turned the colour of bluestone; the colour of Melbourne. The deluge polished up the stones until they shone, as if they were melting and running down the lane, around my tyres.

I travelled upstream. I crossed roads and barely noticed. To this day I have no idea I how I found my way back. But when I did, it felt like home.