The skies are overcast in palest purple with a lemon horizon as I drive down Studley Park Rd towards Abbotsford.
It’s after lunch and the light is in the western half of the sky, but low on the horizon shooting a warm yellow haze over the suburbs. There’s a long low shape of a warehouse painted in orange which sets off perfectly the blue distance of the city beyond. It’s May and the air is brisk, crisp, making you move more quickly but not yet to the sudden-intake-of-breath cold we will get to in July.
The Fitzroy housing commission flats make an upright box shape in the middle distance and the nearer warehouses and nearly new office blocks match their rhythm with large horizontal forms sometimes laced with external piping or girders. The grey green expanse of the eucalypts that make up Studley Park are playing a harmony with the distant blue-purples of the city.
And now the road is in amongst the inner suburban streets of Collingwood, displaying its graffiti and grunge, its uptown cafes and weird array of small businesses along Johnson St. And the colours are all variations of purple and lemon and terracotta, with the occasional blue green of a gum, or lighter warm green of an exhausted plane tree pressing up from the concrete world of cheek by jowl houses and old warehouses.
This is Melbourne and I love it.