Souvenirs: this tea towel is about Melbourne
"These people were anxious to be possessed of every thing which they took a fancy to – tomahawks, knives, blankets and more especially bread were what they never ceased to importune us for.’ – John Helder Wedge
It’s as if we suddenly woke up and noticed where we were.
Late-twentieth-century international cool eschewed anything that carried a name, unless that name was global to the point of being rootless, or was the name of somewhere faraway and exotic.
It was a reaction, perhaps, against our grandmothers’ fondness for coming home from holidays with teaspoons with enamelled handles depicting ‘Brisbane’, ‘The Gold Coast’ or ‘Hobart’ – tinny little souvenirs that lined up on the wall in home-made timber racks like lost years, rarely stirring sugar into tea.
Fifteen years ago, the best things were anonymous and international – the owner of an Alessi kettle or an Eames chair was not pledging allegiance to a place but to an idea of design, to Planet Style. It didn’t matter if it came from New York, Italy or Paris (or a Kowloon factory with a label that read ‘Florence’), as long as it was sleek, witty and hellishly expensive.
But the wind has changed. Just as we all, almost as one, felt the urge to go out and buy ‘green’, reusable supermarket shopping bags, so other old-fashioned objects and attitudes have become meaningful again.
The liberal scattering of home-grown designer clothing and old-fashioned craft shops across the inner-Melbourne suburbs are at the consumerist end of the spectrum. They may be all about recycling, organics, sustainability and re-use, but they’re still shops. You spend money there.
Other once-daggy practices undergoing a 180-degree turn include digging up the nature strip to plant vegetables, riding bicycles while wearing skirts (a piece of code declaring, I think, that the wearer is riding to save the planet, not to get great calf muscles), baking cupcakes and hand-crafting gifts from random bits of felt and old buttons.
Mixed in with all this between-the-wars style thrift and creativity is the unashamedly kitsch practice of displaying the names and symbols of one’s own place. Once, you could only do this if you were in New York, wearing an ‘I © New York’ T-shirt – and only because John Lennon had done it.
Secondhand tram destination rolls – long strips of waxy black material with suburb names printed in blocky sans serif capitals – sell for upwards of a thousand dollars. A shop in Lygon Street North prints up T-shirts that read: ‘I © Brunswick’. One Melbourne bagmaker will sell you a carrybag, also in black-and-white, decorated with an oversized typewriter font, listing street names from your home suburb; another just uses an image of the city grid itself.
It’s a self-conscious pose; a funky bar in Hawthorn uses a tram roll as art on the wall; another new eatery in Carlton has a stylised map of the streets around it for its logo, and calls itself ‘Residential’, in an appeal to local patrons.
Maybe this craze for Melbourne-themed stuff will pass, either through the normal cycle of fashion that makes anything your mother liked uncool, or through a normalising of the new localism. One day, 100-mile diets, shopping locally, buying secondhand, growing vegetables and cycling might be unremarkable. And shortly after the craze passes, this stuff will become rare, so collectible and anthropologically interesting.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, once said that when it all started, he set aside a room in his house for Simpsons-themed products. (By now, he’d need a couple of houses to fit it all in.) I’d like a house – or maybe a very Melbourne apartment, say part of an old Victorian house facing out over the bay – decorated with tram-roll wallpaper, furnished with a Melways coffee table stacked with Melbourne history books, old tram seats for couches, a table made from window frames picked up in the hard rubbish collection, the bathroom soap wrapped in map pages. I’d watch my DVD of the local theatre production Melburnalia (all about laneways and tram trips) while sipping tea from crockery printed with the silhouettes of city buildings, and wearing clothes from a wardrobe filled with Brunswick T-shirts and a woollen scarves bearing the boomerang logo of the local grocery store (accessorised with brooches made from a Victorian licence plate) – and then I’d sit back and wait twenty years for the trend to pass and then re-emerge, delightfully retro.
Meanwhile, the tacky tourist shops will keep right on with their trade, quite oblivious to their fleeting moment of cool.
For a tourist, there are, apparently, three things you need to have in any image of Melbourne: Flinders Street Station, a tram, and the Arts Centre spire. Snow is optional, but highly desirable. Penguins are also good, as are gold miners. I know these things because I have done my research. Not in the quiet stacks and at the dignified timber desks of the State Library, but further down Swanston Street, where the tourists buy their souvenirs in strip-lit shops that vibrate faintly with the bustle of the street and a radio squawking in one of several languages in the background.
Here, nothing is exempt from having a surreally bright or cartoonishly drawn image of Flinders Street Station slapped on it. There are tea towels, of course, and calendars, snow domes in four colours and ‘enamelled’ plastic spoons, but also mouse pads, plastic rulers and – my favourite – a pad of sticky notepaper shaped like a thong (the footwear, not the undergarment) as well as being printed with the station’s photo: two kinds of kitsch in one useful object! Stubby holders, pens with little trams that roll up and down the barrel, bottle openers with a handle in the shape of a bottle top – the permutations are endless.
On the website of one of the companies that make this stuff, I find identical objects imprinted with the clichés of our other major cities and attractions – the bridge for Sydney, a surfboard for the Gold Coast, and – do I need to say it? – a crocodile for the Northern Territory.
The new crafty stuff gets its cachet from being ‘real’ – either a real tram destination roll or street directory, recycled, or at least made in Melbourne by a Melbourne person with, presumably, a Melburnian’s insider knowledge and knowingness, the kind of person who would never contemplate getting on a bus to see the penguins. Either way, they’re attempts to own a piece of the city – or an admission, perhaps, that it owns us.