Skyline

 

When I was a child there was a campaign to ‘Keep St. Paul’s In The City Skyline’. Badges, pins, spoons, pamphlets and other paraphernalia were earnestly distributed to the good people of Melbourne, the purpose being a restoration appeal. Some of the stone was starting to chip off the old blocks. I thought like a child. My child’s mind thought it a plea to galvanize opposition to encroaching skyscrapers. In particular the two square blocks of nothing-in-particular the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria promised to build across the street. I was too young to synthesise the finer points of their arguments. Postcards of the period still portrayed polychrome Melbourne on the Yarra, leafy avenues and princely bridges, with the spires of the cathedral dead centre. Obviously, this was the skyline as intended, the place for a village, St. Paul’s the furthest place upstream vessels could venture in 1835. The still point of the turning world, almost. Campaigners remembered their own ‘30s, the spires completed before a clear blue sky, an edifice to make lovers of neo-gothic proud, and Melburnians impressed. These childhood visions were not about to be spoilt by mere blots on the landscape, whatever their claim to modernity. It sounds a forlorn hope, nostalgic wishfulness, to keep a building prominent in the skyline. My dentist, a man of conservative habit, railed at all the cranes and sky-high girders of the ‘80s skyline, having only bad words for the blatant culprit, Premier John Cain. Why that civil mild-mannered premier, rather than any other premier, was to blame for the daily alteration of the skyline it was difficult to ascertain, but everything about Southbank everything everything was laid firmly at the feet of one person, and the expansion of skylines in all directions ever since was the fault of Cain Junior, he of cabbage hat and blessed memory. Everything. Others blame New York. Perhaps my dentist had nightmares about endless rows of teeth erupting from everywhere at once; he retired soon after. Centuries come and go. Progress persists in its regressive way. More and more mere blots arise, made to look something-in-particular, encased in filigree steel patterns or shaped like a lemonade bottle squashed by a tram. Such skylines have gone viral far and wide, mushrooming squares in suburban settings that give fresh meaning to the placename Box Hill. Soon Moonee Ponds will be the Box Hill of the West, and where will it all end? Paraphernalia to address these encroachments are in short supply as the greater metropolis turns into a giant’s causeway, everyone afforded their own local skyline, unstoppable chips off the old block, every suburb with its own Box Hill.