About Melbourne Australia
Our web design studio is located in Trentham and the nearest city is Melbourne Australia . For those of you unfamiliar with Melbourne , it is the second largest Australian city with a population of around 4 million people and growing. Famous for the Melbourne Cup, Australian Open, and being the home of Aussie Rules Football.
I was often asked by penpals, whether I had a kangaroo or koala. In the city you don't see kangaroos or koalas unless you visit the zoo or wildlife sanctuary. In fact the beloved icon of the Australian kangaroo, is so prolific, farmer consider them pests and the koala is endangered in some areas of Australia.
Melbourne has been described as having 4 seasons in one day and the weather changes in Melbourne unpredictably. Generally, the winters aren’t so cold but can be overcast and bleak and the summers are tolerable, with the exception of a few stints of unbearable heat. Bushfires in Summer are an inescapable reality of the region and some Summers, smoke covers the city.
Melbourne has a huge sprawl of suburbs, but increasingly people have sought the city life of cafes, theatre and restaurants and the price of land goes up the closer you are to the city and certain suburbs are more sought after for their social status and because traffic on the cities roads is so congested that travelling from one suburb to another is very time consuming. Over fifty percent of Melbourne households comprise of 1 or 2 people and many families are relegated to the outer surburban fringes because the price of housing is so exuberant in Melbourne . The median price for a house in Melbourne is AU $500,000.
I grew up in Melbourne and have watched it change over the years. From a sleepy town, that was deserted in the early hours of the morning to a bustling city that never sleeps.
When I grew up in the mid nineteen eighties, you could ride the trains in the middle of the day and find them empty but now, you would struggle to find a seat. Houses were bought as homes and not as investments, and we all grew up playing with the same friends and going to the local schools. The familiarity of seeing the same faces, was something you took for granted. The same libarian at the local library, the same teachers teaching the same grades, the same neighbourhood children, and the same family working and living at the local milkbar. No-one moved house or changed jobs. Divorce was uncommon. There was a certain continuity to life.
When we grew up, one by one our parents sold our homes and bought themselves houses that were two and three times the size of the ones we grew up in. Houses separated by huge fences and neighbours that they rarely saw. But the memories of friendships of those days at school and in the suburbs; of bean bag fights, rounders and bat for ball cricket, all summer long water fights, playing tag during lessons, blackjack and street tennis. Children from many nationalities came to call Australia home. In Melbourne, mixed marriages are now common.
Melbourne has a diverse background of people, who live together in relative peace and it something very unique. It has evolved to become very much a global village. People are very transient and do not stay long in the same house or job. Moving overseas or interstate for work, is common. Change has become part of life. Melbourne has the same problems of many cities - poverty, gambling, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage suicide, theft, corruption, bribery, vandalism, violence. Being aware and avoiding dangerous situations and intoxicated or suspicious people, is a wise thing to do. Like all large cities, Melbourne now has a greater share of violence, drugs and crime than it did when it was a smaller town but unlike other larger cities like New York, police presence on the streets is scant and should you find yourself in a dangerous situation, you will need to rely on passerbys for assistance. Crime is also not deterred by the fact that penalties for violent crime are minimimal. Unlike in America, where violent crimes are treated with the severity of the law, Australia's convict past, means that the justice system is skewed towards rehabilitation as opposed to punishment. Unfortunately, of late, violence in Melbourne and other Victorian towns and regional centres is increasing.
The dominant culture in Australia is Anglo-saxon. In recent times, because of immigration, there is a growing angst about immigration and racism is flaring. Australia is very much at the cross roads and unless governments can acknowledge the growing problem, and deal with racism in the police force, schools, Universities, and other institutions, violence and lawlessness will erupt. In May 2010, five police officers dumped a visibly ill Chinese man in a puddle, after he had spent several hours in police custody visibly bleeding. The officers are found laughing and gloating over his state and refused to provide him with medical attention. This man died 15 hours after being released. Although, the matter is being investigated, it is probably unlikely, that criminal charges will be laid. This is just one case of racism in the police force. Additional cases of police bashing African youths, Aboriginal deaths in custody, and evidence of Australian police circulating racist and pornographic emails shows that the culture of racism is growing in Australia and cannot continue to be ignored, even if the general public feel that these events are isolated. Racism, especially in the police force, judicial system, government departments, schools, and other institutions, should not be tolerated and a policy of proactively recruiting police, teachers, public servants, etc from other cultures needs to be adopted. The institutions like the Australian police force are almost entirely represented by the dominant culture and in order to evolve, Australia needs to acknowledge that the prisons are overrepresented by Aborigines and the Australian institutions are over represented by people of the dominant culture and act to correct this imbalance and restore integrity and respect for the valuable institutions that are so important to Australia.
Surrounding Melbourne is the countryside. Much of the country side was founded during the gold rush, indeed Melbourne owes much of its development to the discovery of gold in the mid 1800s. The money and population that came to Victoria because of the gold found in Victoria, changed Australia from a place where convicts were sent to a nation founded by immigrants. City people often believe that the country air is cleaner than the city. Unfortunately this is an urban myth. Aerial spraying of pesticides is common over crops, tree plantations and forests. Chemicals are widely used in agriculture and industry and even the humble bee has a far higher death rate in the country than its city cousin. Artificial chemicals which include pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers and other toxic chemicals pollute the waterways and environment. These chemicals accumulate up the food chain and the more potent chemicals are in country areas. The myth of natural farming is just marketing. Farming relies on the bottom line, and the problem of environmental pollution is a community problem - the farmer is concerned with the economic reality that by using chemicals money can be saved on hiring labout to mechanically remove weeds. Sheep are dipped in poison, cows are feed on grass that has been doused in artificial fertilizer, pigs fed antibiotics to make them grow faster, tractors leak petrol fumes all over crops (even ones considered certified organic), forests are sprayed and poison leaches into the drinking of local towns or directly into tank water, smoke from wood fires hangs over towns because some people believe that burning a fire cold rather than hot makes the wood last longer; (too bad about the carbon monoxide pollution) and some have not learned that burning PVC and plastic is wrong. In the city, you only have to contend with pollution from cars, noisy neighbours, toxic flouride in drinking water (and any other chemical that leached in there but is under the so called safe limit), pollution from industry and pesticides that are used in parks, public places and next door neighbours. If you are sensitive to chemicals, you are best moving to the desert (where you might only have to contend with the possibility that someone might put a nuclear waste dump in your backyard)
Country Victoria is a vastly different place to Melbourne. Melbourne is a multicultural city that has evolved from a melting pot of nationalities, but the country has largely been settled by Irish, English and Cornish settlers with small settlements of other nationalities. In the words, of one University lecturerer, the 'country is very vanilla' and many Melbournians will find that country life is similar to what Melbourne was, some 30 - 50 years ago. Country towns also tend to have a large proportion of locals who are related by marriage and because family histories can go back generations, there are both strong extended family ties and family feuds that underlie the fabric of towns in country Victoria.
Due to the history of settlement and colonisation, there are multiple levels of government that administer the law in Australia. Victorians are governed by federal law, victorian law and local councils. Australia remains part of the British commonwealth, and is ruled as a democracy. Elections are held every 3-4 years and the two major political parties are the Labor party and the Liberal party. Understanding Australian politics and law enforcement is only possible, if you understand its history. Corruption, profiteering, bribery, wheeling and dealing were part and parcel of a country that grew up isolated from the rest of the world and who owed tribute to England. In 200 or so years, very little has changed and is unlikely to change because such things are deeply rooted in the past. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/01/1083224647516.html http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21041205-601,00.html
The driving force to the development of Melbourne and Victoria was the Gold Rush in 1850s. The money from gold mining was instrumental in the development of Melbourne and the regional towns, in particular towns in Central Victoria. Though some people become very rich from the gold rush, many lived in great poverty and the government officials imposed such a high price on gold mining licenses that gold mining became unprofitable and many sought secure jobs in the railways and other professions.
Due to the rising property values worldwide, Melbourne has become more attractive to immigrants and in 2008, roughly 1500 people move into Melbourne each week. The type of city Melbourne is evolving to, is perhaps not what many Melbournians would find desirable, because as Melbourne grows, it becomes just a little less personal and a little more cold. Crowded trains, conjestion on roads, water restrictions, expensive housing - all contribute to the pressure cooker effect of living in a city not built to house so many people and unfortunately, it spills over to people's attitudes to one another. It is harder to accept the way Melbourne is changing when you can still remember the way it was. Violence and drugs are more commonplace now than twenty years ago. Growth comes at a price.