The residents of Melbourne like to unironically put their city in the same conversation as Tokyo, New York and London. No-one else in Australia buys that rubbish, and their scepticism has been confirmed this week as thousands of American NFL fans descended on Melbourne for the 49ers vs Rams game this Friday at the MCG.
Confirming both the stupidity of Americans and the ignorance of Melburnians, the first thing most of these dumbstruck tourists had to say was, “I didn’t even know this place existed.”
Local tour operators, sensing a rare commercial opportunity to explain their own city to the world, have reportedly struggled with the basics. Walking tour guide Trent Whereisthat, who has spent eleven years telling tourists that Flinders Street Station is “basically our Grand Central,” said this week’s crowd broke him in new ways.
“When I was explaining the virtues of Melbourne’s infrastructure to them as we glided over the Westgate Bridge, this guy from San Francisco burst out laughing, sputtering something about a Golden Gate. Very rude. Then when I tried to tell him about the Paris end of Collins Street and he asked if that was near the stadium.”
The game — a 10:35am Friday kickoff for which gates open at 7am, because nothing says global sporting spectacle like asking 100,000 people to be fully seated and emotionally invested before their second coffee — has been billed by the league as historic. Some commentators even went as far as to compare it to the atmosphere of a Superbowl. Those commentators were, unsurprisingly, Victorian.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was similarly unequivocal, declaring the game “a win for jobs, a win for businesses and a win for fans,” a statement issued without apparent irony from a state whose native football code has spent 130 years failing to convince other cities in Australia that they, too, are winning something.
It’s this comparison Melburnians have spent all week trying to avoid making. A city that considers a Tuesday-morning cafe queue a cultural export has been forced to watch 40,000 visiting Americans walk past the MCG’s Australian Rules Football hall of fame, glance in for four seconds, and ask a security guard where “the actual football” was.
Melbourne’s civic self-image, built over decades on “world’s most liveable city” rankings compiled by British consultancies nobody has heard of, has taken further damage from the discovery that most Americans in town this week could not locate Victoria on a map, let alone spell Vegemite. When asked to name something Melbourne was famous for, several fans interviewed near Federation Square guessed “Captain Kangaroo,” and “Crocodile Dundee.”
Confronted with this, Melbourne City Council issued a statement insisting the city’s “global reputation for culture, sport and liveability remains undiminished” — a line delivered roughly six hours after a visiting fan was filmed trying to order a Budweiser at a pub called the Elephant and Wheelbarrow.
The game itself, coincidentally, is being played by two teams from the NFC West — San Francisco and Los Angeles – both from California. California in fact has three NFL teams. They share it’s population of nearly forty million people. When it was explained to a tourist this week that in the Australian Football League there are ten teams from an area with just over four million, she laughed so hard she had to be given oxygen by St Johns.
