Building

 

Image: ‘Southbank’ drawn from the train, outside

 lockdown, in my panorama book in the Autumn of 2021.

Melbourne is to have Australia’s tallest building, again. It will be a twisted spiral, courtesy of the computer. Actually, it will be two towers, two for the price of one being (at present) $2bn. The Mayor of Melbourne says “it will have a ripple effect in spreading confidence throughout the city and abroad.” The Mayor is not saying it’s just one more tall building to go with all the other tall buildings over there in Southbank. Nor is there any explanation about why confidence requires a tall building, though obviously someone thinks it necessary for Melbourne to keep up with the worldwide phallocracy. Nor is there a definition of ‘abroad’ where the ripples will have their effect; Broadford, perhaps. The Mayor calls the building “awe-inspiring” and “jaw-dropping”. It’s a case of awe-jaw. The name of this “ambitious” structure dispenses with the basic building blocks of spelling, the vowels. It will be called STH BNK, doubtless inspiring local wags with bonk jokes for some time to come. Someone, it’s not clear who, will be excited to learn that our tower will surpass Q1, the erection on the Gold Coast that is currently numero uno in our part of the world, heightwise. Perhaps pride was dinted when Q1 replaced 101 Collins for pre-eminence.  Aesthetes sigh at the ripple effect, thinking it has something to do with visuals, and surely ripples will be an effect of the twisted spiral. The Mayor of Melbourne, however, is focussed on things that are above: “It will challenge all future developments to not only consider, but to conquer the incredible.” Unquote. Bombast has no limits and goes back to the Tower of Babel, and earlier, even. How exactly anyone can conquer the incredible is a matter for John Ruskin and other theorists. Reassuringly, the Mayor of Melbourne shows how it’s done, though it is assumed the Mayor talks investment and jobs, rather than architecture, deftly ignoring a reason given for financing the project, “hoping it would revitalize Southbank.” Melburnians with long memories sometimes wonder how many tall buildings can be built on a floodplain, the ‘bank’ part of Southbank being more than geographic description. After all, the settlers banked the Birrarung below the falls with bluestone to make a port, but also to stop Emerald Hill from flooding. This vowelless skyscraper is not being built on solid bluestone foundations. Like its neighbour towers, it could well end up swaying in the southerly gales, creating a myriad ripple effect. That is neither here nor there to the Mayor, who is speechless even while giving speeches. In the same report it is said the state’s building sector “reels” amid rising building costs, with one major company collapsing recently, leaving hundreds of homes unbuilt. Renaming Docklands Ghosttown would show a lack of confidence. It takes all the vowels at our disposal to make a case.

Water

 

All the water melting off the ice sheets (‘ghiacciaio’) floods into the sea below. Tipping the mind into a direction of loss. Boats speed alarmingly over the great rising arc of waves. Everywhere where water can rise, where water spreads. The planet (‘pianeta’) itself. Gradually small news recedes behind the news of water. It has taken time for glaciers to reach the ‘frontpage’ (‘copertina’). Now that they have, we read the news with some reluctance, like most news on the ‘frontpage’. More recently it has been reported the seas’ surfaces warm at higher warmth than heretofore. Heretofore is a Shakespearean (‘eloquente’, ‘rinascimento’) way of saying previously. An alarming number of statistics are supplied to support this fluid situation. Ships sail calmly on. Internal human responses are more difficult to monitor, complicated by the desire to know more and, at the same time, a desire to want to know less. Each day includes a random half-hour of money, fame, disaster, ambition, and exotic locations, called the news (‘notizia’). News is always followed by a couple of minutes’ abstract disquisition on water, called the weather forecast (‘tempo atmosferico’). These disquisitions attempt realism (‘realismo’). Forecasts ignore melting glaciers, as a rule. All of this is by way of paraphrasing and modernising Giovanni Battista Fontana, not Giovanni Battista Fontana the Baroque composer, or Giovanni Battista Fontana the painter and engraver, the other one. ‘La nave preziosa calma continua a veleggiare’, to quote his Preface. In his rediscovered seventeenth-century manuscript ‘Acqua Alta’ (‘High Tide’ or, if you live nearby the lagoon, ‘High Water’), Fontana conjectures on the unlikely prospect he calls Noétà, which we might translate as the Noah Event, the remote possibility of his beloved city of Venice going completely underwater. The thought occurs from time to time, especially in the mind of his time traveller (‘viaggiatore del tempo’). Yet what do Venetians do? Fontana cannot decide if Venetians are stoics, pessimists, hedonists, procrastinators, canutes, clowns, or are simply too proud to do other than go down with the gondola. Instead of shifting to terra firma, instead of constructing an ark, they relocate upstairs, converting gothic windows into jetties for ready mobility. Are they realists, or romantics, or have they finally lost their marbles? He needn’t have been concerned, it is all for him just a fanciful idea. Fontana’s manuscript, printed in a limited edition on best cloth paper using an untraceable serif typeface, is popped back into the cabinet. Science fiction has its limits. Reclining on the sea-blue couch sends the mind into a sense of false security. Imagining the height of the sea, the breadth of horizons, the volume of the melt, it is time to switch off the lamp and sleep until daylight again.    

Weather

 

Weather, it was once explained to me after I asked a bureau employee what is weather, can be defined as rain. Either it is raining, or not raining. This would seem to make weather reports redundant, fairly much, yet weather insists on cropping up in most news conversations. I remember Rosemary Margan. She stood behind a Perspex screen with a map of Victoria decorated in wavy high and low fronts, herself drawing extra arrows meaningfully with a squeaky texta in the direction of Melbourne. She lived in a time when females were weathergirls and males were weathermen. One of the men was Rob Gell, a man who took weather with the full gravity it deserves, whether raining or not raining. Rob fearlessly talked isobars and continental troughs, his evening reports being in the nature of mathematical theorems, which they are once you think about it. Another man seemed not to take high pressure areas with the same earnestness. Edwin Maher cultivated the art of the pointer, an essential prop for homing in on a weather map. At first instead of a stick he introduced a carrot, then an ice-cream cone, till the novelty turned into a cult, with viewers sending in pointy objects of varying suggestiveness to promote their charity or special day. Nevertheless, today as well as taking us direct to the weather bureau, the internet provides much more in-depth, accurate weather than TV weatherpersons can squeeze into a minute. They are a thing of the past for someone who hasn’t watched television news for twenty years, but this week work colleagues disclosed that they are followers of Jane Bunn. Jane Bunn, apparently, has vocabulary. Her viewers can expect more than thunderstorms, they can expect “a rumble of thunder”. A cloudy day will include promisingly “fluffy clouds”. Alternately, there could be “drizzly showers.” This adjectival injection to Jane’s reports keeps her fans on edge, but divides those who like their weather more Gell-like. Forecasters walk the line of making the unpredictable sound predictable, and still getting it wrong; the line between doing something new and original with a script of mundane routine. Even Jane Bunn knows there is a limit to the ways she can say it’s going to rain tomorrow, but for now my work colleagues and I enjoy collecting her bon mots. “A little spit of rain.” “A few spots of drizzle.” “Small hail.” “Storms will be barrelling through.” I have also learnt that she collects rainbows, photographs of rainbows at least, from her many followers. These and other facsimiles of weather are posted on her Facebook page; all she has to do is include the latest choice during the evening broadcast. This kind of information revolution would have been impossible back in the days of transparent maps and sceptred pointers.