Melbourne Trip Quotes

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade travelling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service. The Super Constellations took three days to reach London and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat-belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.

The Guardian’s Paul Vallely has given a decent account of how Cardinal George Pell, appointed by Francis, began a review of the bank’s operations. Pell had successfully overhauled the Church’s finances in Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian son of a former heavyweight boxer, Pell is a political and doctrinal conservative who speaks aggressively and does not believe in man-made climate change. He is a cult hero among conservative Catholics. You can imagine what the Lavender Mafia think of him. Vallely notes grudgingly that, “For all his conservatism, Pell had for years been a vocal critic of the Roman Catholic bureaucracy and its corruption.” Pell moved quickly, and made enemies. A straight dealer to the point of unbearable bluntness, especially in the delicately perfumed and gold-embroidered world of the Holy See, Pell probably didn’t anticipate getting tripped up by dirty tactics: in this case, stories leaked to the media about—you guessed it—clerical abuse. The press reports were coincidentally timed, arriving just as Pell’s reforms of the bank began to take hold. It was alleged that Pell was soft on child abuse, thanks to offhand comments he had made years before, in typically ribald and direct Australian fashion. It was suggested that he may himself have some questions to answer about covering up abuse. Then the allegations widened, to direct accusations of historic sex abuse, at which point Pell had to put his work at the bank on hold. Now Pell is back in Australia, trying to clear his name, and his reforms are stalling, just as the intriguers intended. This is how efforts to clean up the Roman Catholic Church usually end.