Amble around Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne’s historic food mecca, and it’s not the 17 acres of produce, meat and fish that overwhelm but the kaleidoscope of international foods.
If you need any clues that Melbourne is an ethnic stew, this Queen Mother of markets provides them: baby goat at the Greek butcher; weisswurst, kielbasa and hot chili kabana at the Polish Deli; kangaroo salami at the Aussie Deli; stemp, mealie meal and dried eels at Tribal Tastes; lotus root, gai larn and young ginger at the Asian vegetable stand; Vietnamese specialties at Dinh.
Not to mention Italian pasta makers, French cheese shops, fine food purveyors, and all manner of local seafood stalls with blue swimmer crabs, barramundi and the rest of Australia’s ocean bounty.
One way to get to know the city is to follow the food trail. Melburnians are food-crazy. They love shopping for food, preparing it, and eating it, at home and out among fellow foodies. Even though there are major markets in practically every neigh-
borhood (Queen Victoria Market is only one of many), there are also “food streets” whose storefronts display the neighborhood delicacies and reveal a bit of its culture too. Food streets, in fact, are a hallmark of Melbourne.
Not every street with a food store qualifies as a food street, as a guide for a food-focused group called Tour de Forks explained. Essential are cafes and restaurants for a range of budgets, a place for breakfast any time of the day, a wine bar with a good choice of wines by the glass, and, of course, specialty shops for the local ethnic delicacies. A large measure of community and conviviality are also part of the real estate.
Little Bourke Street, for instance, is the heart of Chinatown, a crowded area in the city center with a dizzying array of restaurants and grocery stores. The Chinese, drawn by Australia’s Gold Rush of 1851, first settled here after returning from the goldfields. Come around noon for yum cha, tea and dim sum, a specialty at Shark Fin Inn, 50 Little Bourke St., and many other restaurants.
Barely a block away, still in the city center, is the Greek area around Lonsdale Street. A little east in Richmond, Victoria Street is known for the best Vietnamese restaurants in Melbourne, along with fishmongers, butchers and grocers with exotic East Asian delicacies.
A taste of Italy
Lygon Street, Carlton, was originally the city’s Little Italy, where Italian immigrants settled after World War II, and it’s where Melburnians head on Saturday morning to stock up on ciabatta, salamis and cheeses at Lygon Street Food Store and stop for a cappuccino at the University Cafe, both longtime fixtures. Old-timers like Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, a city institution since 1935, keep Lygon lively, even though a bit of its shine has moved over to Brunswick Street.
Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, is bohemian central, with its crush of food shops, cafes and restaurants from kitsch to class, art galleries, bookstores and funky boutiques. People come for ice cream at Charlaine’s, specialty teas at Tea Too and the breads and cakes at Babka Bakery Cafe, a favorite Sunday brunch stop. Pireaus Blues, Mao’s, Bangla Sweets & Curry Cafe and Matteo’s Ristorante hint at the ethnic mix along this lively street.
Turks and Middle Easterners have the edge along multi-ethnic Sydney Road, Brunswick, where signs read “El Fayha Sweets, Best Lebanese Bakery in Melbourne” and “SpotOn, Authentic Lebanese Bread.” But like many of the food streets that have blurred their focus, it also has a Chinese takeaway, a Thai butcher, Asian greengrocers and Vietnamese hair salon.
By many measures Melbourne is a melting pot. After English, the most frequent languages you hear are Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Arabic. The city’s 3.3 million inhabitants come from at least 110 ethnic backgrounds. Today, Melbourne is the third-largest city of Greeks in the world, and the largest enclave of Italians outside Italy. John So, of Chinese descent, is the first popularly elected Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
Founded on a land grab
Melbourne wasn’t always so diverse. After early attempts to establish a British settlement failed, in 1835 John Batman, a Brit living in Tasmania, crossed the Bass Strait and picked a site on the Yarra River where central Melbourne now stands. He gave its aboriginal owners assorted knives, tomahawks, scissors, blankets and items of clothing in exchange for about 775 square miles of their land. It has been called the greatest land grab in British imperial history.
First the British came, then Germans, and within 10 years Europeans outnumbered aborigines. Melbourne became the capital of the newly established colony of Victoria in July 1951, and five months later gold was discovered north of the city and changed its history. Gold seekers arrived from all over the world, fueling an economy that soon made Melbourne Australia’s financial center and swelled its population by almost 500,000 immigrants in a decade.
Among the host of issues the booming young colony had to handle was immigration, and one of its early acts was to confine aborigines to missions and reserves. When the Commonwealth of Australia was established in 1901, with Melbourne its first capital, immigration remained a thorny issue, and the country enacted a law designed to exclude non-British immigrants.
It wasn’t until right after World War II, when the Commonwealth set up an Immigration Department, that thousands of displaced Europeans and Middle Easterners started arriving: Jews, Greeks, Italians, non-Muslim Egyptians, Hungarians, Turks, Lebanese, Maltese, Poles. In the next 10 years, 1 million immigrants came. By the 1960s more than half of all immigrants were non-British, and a formal ban on nonwhite immigration was lifted.
But it still took another 30 years for the High Court to recognize the aboriginal people as the first landowners.
The haunting stories of why so many people left their homelands, how they made the long sea journey, how and where they settled, and the often searing policies of who did, and did not, gain entry are recounted in the Immigration Museum.
In its outdoor Tribute Garden, more than 7,000 names are inscribed on stone slabs lightly washed by water to represent their sea journey to Australia. The Museum itself is in the Old Custom House, which stands essentially on the site where disembarking immigrants arrived on the north bank of the Yarra and were inspected by customs officers.
By definition the aborigines aren’t part of the Immigration Museum, but their complex culture is getting its recognition. At Bunjilaka, the aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum, aboriginal people not only present their own heritage but also maintain a special rock and water garden filled with their native medicinal and edible plants.
The annual Melbourne Food & Wine Festival (March 16-25, 2007), the southern hemisphere’s premier culinary exposition, includes cooking demonstrations by bush tucker chefs of such native delicacies as kangaroo prosciutto with lemon myrtle sauce. The aborigines, who barely 10 years ago were legally recognized as the first owners of Melbourne, are now officially part of its vibrant melting pot.
