Route 35: Nadia Bailey
Image by Connor O’Brien
Route 35: The City Circle by Nadia Bailey
You’re startled awake on board route 35, and are unsettled to find that you recognise four of your fellow passengers from your dream. Each passenger tells a supernatural story related to four landmarks: Flinders St, State Library, Fitzroy Gardens, Old Melbourne Goal. You are filled with a sense of foreboding that something terrible will happen. A passenger presses you for information, and you lose control and attack them only to wake up, back at the start of your journey.
The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 35 tram, starting at stop D2, Central Pier, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
Credits
Written by Nadia Bailey
Commissioned by David Ryding
Edited by Elizabeth Flux
Recorded at the State Library of Victoria
Produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton
With music by Steve Hearne
Tramlines is a podcast created by Broadwave in partnership with the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
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Route 35 by Nadia Bailey
[SFX A tram travels towards the listener. Rumbles along the tracks. People board.]
Intro (various voices): Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines (laughs), Tramlines, Tramlines, Tramlines, um T-R-A-M-L-I-N-E-S, Tramlines.
[SFX Tram doors open]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: This is Tramlines: part audiobook, part spoken word and part locative literature. These are stories written to be listened to on a tram.
[SFX Tram dings and journeys on. Theme music fades out. Episode theme opens]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Today’s journey is a new fiction work by Nadia Bailey. The optimum place to listen to it is on the route 35 tram, starting at stop D2, Central Pier, but it can be listened to on any tram at any time.
[Length: 48 minutes – one round trip of the City Circle – board in the Docklands and travel anticlockwise]
Nadia Bailey VO: Welcome, passengers, to route 35, the free City Circle route. You are currently travelling on an W Class tram, built between 1923 and 1956, and an iconic part of Melbourne’s history. As you’ll notice, the trams are beautifully decked in green and cream liveries, although personally, my preference is for the original maroon and gold colour scheme. So much grander, wouldn’t you say?
As we travel this route, I’d like to invite you to turn up the volume on your headset so you’re not distracted by what’s playing over the loudspeaker. Pay attention to it, and you’ll barely scratch the surface of what this city has to offer. Oh, you’ll hear about its shopping strips and dining precincts, its grand churches and narrow laneways…but you won’t discover the real Melbourne. The shiny façade they give you is true enough, I suppose, but the route we travel on has many stories to tell. And the story I will tell you, tragic though it is, is worth knowing. Because it’s my story. And perhaps, because it’s all I have left.
So settle in as we travel together through the Docklands, towards Central Pier. A reminder, passengers, to ensure you take all your belongings with you when you disembark the tram. Also, please show respect to your fellow passengers by taking any rubbish with you. There are many things I can put up with, but such discourtesy is not one of them.
The next stop is Docklands Park. From here, you can see where the Melbourne Star Observation Wheel once turned. Towering 120 metres high over the Docklands, the Melbourne Star was the only giant observation wheel in the Southern Hemisphere. It dominated this part of the skyline for 13 years, moving so slowly that it barely appeared in motion at all. Like so many things, the Star has become a victim of time, a ghost that haunts the city, still held, perhaps, in the minds of those who once rode its decks; or otherwise forgotten completely, its memory fading as quickly as the clouds that chase each other across the sky.
The next stop is South Wharf and Wurundjeri Way. Wurundjeri Way takes its name from the land of the First Nations land this tram travels on. Wurundjeri, one of the First Nation peoples whose land this tram travels on.
The next stop is Flinders Street West. From this stop, it’s just a short walk across the Yarra to reach the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre or the glitz and glamour of the Crown Entertainment Complex.
The next stop is Spencer St. Step off here to walk to Southern Cross Station, where you can connect with train and bus services travelling within Melbourne, across Victoria and interstate. This stop always reminds me of something a little out of the ordinary that happened to me many years ago, back when Southern Cross Station was still called Spencer Street Station, and the Main Line Starter Clock still looked out across Platform One. Have you ever seen the Main Line Starter Clock? It’s a handsome piece of engineering. Its case is carved from cedar and polished to a deep, warm brown. It has a white face marked with black Roman numerals, and two black hands which slowly chase each other around the dial in perfect time. That’s what the clockmaker, one Mr Thomas Gaunt, aimed for his whole, unfortunate life: to make a clock that would keep perfect time. Before this clock was installed in the station in 1871, standard time in Melbourne did not exist. Oh, people tried to keep things more or less the same, but there was nothing scientific about it. It was guesswork, human and fallible. But Mr Gaunt was a man of science, and not to mention the only watch manufacturer in the Australian colonies. So the whole business of keeping standard time fell to him.
Picture, if you will, Mr Gaunt standing on Platform One of Spencer Street Station, watching the trains heave into life, steam billowing from great metal bellies, lumbering towards destinations near and far, and longing to have all this marvellous modern industry synchronise to his will.
Now, Mr Thomas Gaunt was a man of exacting standards and curious tastes. He was horrified by mess and pleased by efficiency. He was also very ambitious. He longed for his name to be remembered by history. To leave behind him a shining legacy. A man obsessed with order and timeliness, he worried that time was something he did not have enough of. How could he achieve all of his ambitions when a human life on earth was so dispiritingly brief?
There is an interesting legend about Mr Gaunt. It’s said that one night, when he was in his workshop tinkering away with cogs and bezels, a strange man appeared. The man was tall and thin, dressed very correctly, and he held a leather briefcase which he set down on the floor. The thin man had an offer for Thomas Gaunt. An extraordinary opportunity. I understand you’re the only watchmaker in the colonies, said the thin man. Can you create a clock that keeps perfect time? Well, this is what Thomas Gaunt had been training for his whole life. When he said that he could, the thin man was delighted. If you can make a clock that keeps perfect time, I will grant you the gift of immortality – for as long as the clock keeps running. And with that, the thin man took some papers out of his briefcase and Gaunt – that poor, gullible fool – signed the contract there and then.
Gaunt’s career flourished. He received many commissions to install his timepieces around the city – perhaps you’ve walked through the Block Arcade and looked up from the black and white tiles to the cathedral-like ceiling, and spotted the enormous, black-faced clock flanked by two strange figures at the southern end. These figures are named Gog and Magog. Ever since they were installed, these mammoth statues have struck their chimes every hour on the hour without fail. If you visit the Block Arcade, you will still hear them marking the inexorable passage of time today. Some say Gog and Magog were guards of the underworld and gods of dark spirits; others call them the companions of Satan. There is an old prophecy that says when Gog and Magog finally pause their timekeeping and return to war, it means that the world will end.
In 1871, he achieved his goal. The Main Line Starter Clock was installed on Platform One of Spencer Street Station. Telegraph lines carried accurate time signals from the Melbourne Observatory to this marvellous clock, and so long as it was kept wound, it would never be wrong. Time in Melbourne was no longer malleable. Such was Thomas Gaunt’s legacy.
The thin man kept his word. At first, Thomas Gaunt was delighted by his immortality. His workshop bustled with customers. His clocks could be found all over Melbourne, from Customs House to Parliament. He remained ageless while the city changed around him. But eventually, he came to realise that what the thin man had given him wasn’t the blessing he’d thought it to be. His friends got old, and one by one, they died. His enemies died too, leaving no one to compete with. The city changed around him. Technology sped up, from analogue to digital, steam to electricity, telegrams to telephones and telephones to emails. Progress moved relentlessly forward, leaving Thomas Gaunt lost. He no longer knew how to exist in the world.
Eventually, he became desperate to escape his terrible fate. He resolved to destroy the Main Line Starter Clock to put an end to his own suffering. First he tried to make it run down. Then he tried to sabotage it. But it never worked. The clock kept ticking and Thomas Gaunt kept living, for years and years and years…
Time ticked on. No one knows for sure what happened to Gaunt – he slipped from history’s pages, though his marvellous clocks did not. Not so long ago, the Main Line Starter Clock was recognised by the Heritage Council for its superb craftsmanship and significance. And so they decided to preserve Thomas Gaunt’s clock by fitting it with electromechanical parts so that it would no longer have to be manually wound. You see, now the clock is completely automated. It will keep perfect time forever.
There were many times, over the years, that I visited Thomas Gaunt’s clock on Platform One. I stood below its blank, fatuous face, as it stared out over the throngs of people going about their business, boarding and disembarking trains. I checked it against my wristwatch and listened to the tick, tick, tick as it kept its terrible, perfect time…
[brief pause]
The next stop is Swanston St. Alight here for Federation Square, or head down St Kilda Road to reach the Melbourne Recital Hall, the Arts Centre, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Now, I want to tell you a little bit more about Flinders Street Station. The station was originally built in 1854, and completed to its current design in 1909. It’s famous for the clocks above the entrance, which display departure times for various suburban trains and have provided a meeting spot for Melbourne residents for as long as anyone can remember. The station was recently repainted to the original colour scheme from 1909 — a pale sandy yellow for the exterior, with wooden accents in rich forest green, and metal shingles in red to match the brickwork.
Now, Flinders St is more than just a train station – it has a long and storied history. Being a faithful employee of Public Transport Victoria, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the station more fully than most. In fact, there are whole sections of the station that the majority of people will never get to see, areas that are entirely closed off to the public. Structural problems, you see. OH&S issues. There was one night, not long ago, after a particularly long meeting with the transportation board, when I found myself quite alone on the station’s upper levels. There are a few offices up there, reserved for the occasional staff meeting, but most of those upper floors are simply not used. There are some rooms which haven’t been opened in years.
That particular night, we’d drank endless cups of instant coffee with UHT milk, and eaten arrowroot biscuits which, dunked, left soggy crumbs at the bottom of the Styrofoam cups, until finally, the meeting had finished. M y colleagues called out cheery goodbyes as they made their way to the shiny elevator and back down into the main station, still bustling with late night commuters and the familiar chant of trains about to depart. I knew I should follow them, but I can’t abide mess of any kind and there were so many crumbs and used coffee cups left scattered across the table. I swept the crumbs from the table into the cups and put the whole mess in the bin. It was then that I noticed the door to the dome room. Have you ever gazed up at the dome from the corner of Flinders Street and Swanston Street and wondered what was inside? From the street, the dome is monolithic, its copper roof turned to verdigris, green as a cat’s eye. What you might not know is that there is a room inside it – a strange, circular room with round windows like a ship’s porthole, bathed in eerie, green light that recalls the spectral interior of a submarine. I fancied that I might go inside for a few moments so that I could look out, through that round window, and over the city below.
The whole floor was quiet. A sliver of light leaked out from underneath the door, like an ink stain in water. I reached out a hand to open it but as I did, I heard the sudden ding of an elevator – not the elevator that led back to the main station, the one around the corner, just beyond my line of sight. I hesitated for a moment. No one was meant to be using that particular elevator anymore; in fact, as far as I knew, it had been out of service for years. With my heart beating faster, I walked toward the sound, turning corner after corner of identical passageways with identical once-white walls, now stained with water-damage. I reached the disused elevator just as its heavy metal doors lumbered open. The elevator stood for a few seconds as if waiting for me. Then, the doors slid closed again and it rumbled downwards and disappeared.
Silence.
Feeling unsettled, I stepped away from the door to the dome room and walked down the corridor toward the gate that separated the living areas of the station from the disused parts. Under my feet, which seemed to carry me towards the gate automatically, almost against my will, the carpet was threadbare, worn through in places, its once vibrant hue leeched of colour. I reached the gate. It too displayed its age, its silver burnished to brass and strung with spiders’ webs as insubstantial as the air itself. I placed one hand against the cold metal and pushed. The gate swung inward, smooth on its hinges in spite of appearances. The dim hallway stretched out before me, lit here and there by flickering fluorescents that buzzed and hummed like something living.
As I walked down the hallway I felt the air change around me: colder, dustier, the air of a place undisturbed by breath or light. A door emerged from the gloom, with the ghost of gold letters marking the frosted glass: LIBRARY. I pushed through it. The room arranged itself around me: tall bookshelves stretching towards the ceiling, grimed in a layer of dust; a single light hung on a once-white cord, while the wooden floor creaked and groaned beneath my feet. I reached a hand towards a book and ran my finger down its leather-bound spine, leaving a trail clean of dust in its wake.
At the far end of the library was another door, paned with frosted glass though which I could see a faint green glow. It was the billiards room. I opened the door and stepped into a forgotten world, a place that had once seen so much life but now stood as still as a monument. At its centre stood a felted table, with brightly coloured balls poised on its surface as if its players had just stepped away and would be back at any moment. I gently pushed one, smooth and round in the palm of my hand, and it skimmed noiselessly across the table and clicked against another, the sound huge in the cavernous space. It seemed as though I was in another world, but when I looked out the window – it too grimed with a thick layer of dust – I could see the familiar movement of the city: streets bustling with people, advertisements winking in the darkness, the silver tops of trains gleaming as they pulled in and out of the station below.
I walked on. At the far end of the games room was another door which opened to an even larger room, one with well-worn wood en floors and hospital white walls, now crazed and peeling. An archway stretched from one side to the other. There was something written on it, marked out in angry scrawl: DO NOT DAMAGE THE BAG – USE ONLY FISTS. It was the old gymnasium, the one I have such fond memories of. Rusted iron rings hung from the walls. A leather pommel horse, dusty with years of disuse, stood as lonely as an animal lost from its herd. A pair of Roman rings hung from the ceiling, swaying gently in an imperceptible breeze. Every few seconds, the light in the room changed – from soft pink, to blue, to yellow, to bright white – courtesy of the electric billboard across the street which shone in through the half-moon windows. It seemed as though time had stopped; that the gymnasium was waiting, anticipating a future where its patrons – my friends from long ago, whose names now escaped me – might yet return.
As I stood gazing up at the rings, I became aware of a sound – so distant, so quiet, that at first I thought I was imagining it. But no – there was something, I could hear it. Completely impossible, but definitely there: an old dancehall tune, muffled, barely audible, like a radio playing from another room. I left the gymnasium and went back to the corridor. I was right. There was music playing. As I walked further into the bowels of the station, it became louder, more distinct – as if a band were standing just beyond the grand set of doors at the end of the corridor. The closer I moved towards the doors, the louder the music became, clearer and clearer, until I could almost picture the players themselves standing on the mezzanine above the dancehall, could see the shine of their instruments under the golden light of a chandelier, the sheen of sweat on their brows as they moved in time to the music. I could see the dancers whirling across the room, wearing suits and bright dresses, clasping each other at the waist or spinning away to change partners, feet nimble on the polished floor, as they bobbed and twirled in time. It was all there in my mind’s eye as I finally came to the grand wooden doors, and the music swelled to powerful crescendo, and I pushed through, hoping to join them, hoping that they would welcome me to the dance –
…nothing. The ballroom stood before me, still and empty. The walls were blistered and water-stained, the windows streaked with dirt and pigeon mess, and the lavishly decorated columns flanking the windows were crumbling into ruins. The chandelier hung as still as the dead, its once bright crystals tarnished and dark, while beneath it, the parquetry floor ruptured and curled as it decayed. There were no dancers, no musicians. The mezzanine stood empty. The only sounds I could hear were my own nervous breaths, the creak of my shoes as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I stepped over the threshold. Hello? I said. The grand, curved ceiling bounced my voice back to me as a mocking echo: Hello? Hello? Hello?
The ballroom was so lonely that I couldn’t bear to go any further. I backed out the way I came, my footsteps tracking a clean, dark trail in the dust. I pulled the doors closed, heard them click into place. Something final about that sound. Slowly I walked back the way I came, heading away from the ballroom, away from the gymnasium and the billiards room, away from the library and its countless unread books. As I reached the gate, I paused and listened: somewhere, from deep within the hollow spaces of the station’s long-abandoned rooms, I could hear it. The sound of the dancehall band, playing on and on and on…
[brief pause]
Forgive me, passengers, sometimes I get lost in my memories. When you’re as old as I am, it feels as though those memories are all you have; like an album playing on repeat, or a tram following its well-worn tracks. Sometimes I think I must call out this stops even as I sleep: Bourke Street. Albert Street. La Trobe Street. Exhibition Street. On and on it goes…
Just a reminder, passengers, we are travelling widdershins today, which means we’re going contrary to the course of the sun or a clock. If you have an aversion to travelling widdershins, please alight here and catch the number 35 in the other direction. But as your humble guide, I would advise that you not. The city is so much more interesting if toured the wrong way around. This city is so much more interesting if you know how to look at it.
The next stop is Swanston St. Step off here for the State Library of Victoria, which first opened in 1856. The library has a collection of more than two billion books, as well as pictures, maps, manuscripts, objects and ephemera. At the library, you can take a tour, listen to music, play games and access free wi-fi. As you can see, it’s a beautiful building. The facade is in the Corinthian style, very grand. Perhaps the best part of the library is the Reading Room, an airy, light-filled, octagonal space, with bookshelves lining every wall, that stretch up as far as the eye can see, and topped with a dome as lovely as the sky itself. A long time ago, there were two lion statues that guarded its entrance – but at some point they were misplaced. How does one misplace a pair of statues, especially ones as grand and memorable as lions? Well, these things happen, one way or another. Perhaps they are in an archive somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. Perhaps an opportunistic public servant spirited them away to furnish their own residence. Perhaps they simply got up and left. In any case, they are gone and so nearly is their memory. But now, perhaps they still live a little because now every time you pass, you’ll notice their absence. Perhaps you’ll even imagine them – ghostly, stalking through the early morning light, their carved jaws opening up to expose stone teeth. Perhaps that’s enough to bring them back – well, if not to life, then at least to some kind of existence.
Well, where was I? Ah yes, the library. A little known part of the library is its catacombs. Why would a library have catacombs? you might ask. I asked myself the same thing, when I learned about them. I was looking for a particular book, you see, and when I asked the librarian to locate it for me, she plugged the title into the computer and then frowned. That’s a rare one, she said. No one’s asked for it in years. It may take a little while to locate. So I told her I was in no rush, that I was happy to wait. I’ve always liked poking around in the library. Well, why don’t you come with me? she said. I wouldn’t mind the company. So off we went, she and I, through the Reading Room and down the cosy corridors, deeper into the library’s interior, chatting as we went. I listened to the click of her heels on the polished tiles, and caught a hint of her perfume: warm and a little dusty, like inhaling the pages of a very old book.
Soon the librarian and I reached the doors to a lift I’d never seen before. The librarian glanced at me and smiled. We don’t use this one very often anymore, she said. Soon there was the sound of something heavy lumbering up the shaft, screeching on old pulleys, and then: ding! It came to a halt and sat for a few seconds, and I can’t tell you why, but I got the distinct impression that it was thinking. Then, slowly, the doors shuddered open. After you, said the librarian. So in I went. The librarian followed – I heard the click, click, click of her heels behind me – and the doors clanged shut, the lift jolted, and then roared into life. We were going down. As I stood there, I realised that the lift was much larger than any other I’d been in. You’d be able to fit a car in there and still have room to open the doors on both sides. The librarian caught me frowning and smiled. Do you know what we call this lift? I shook my head. The elephant lift. Even the largest items in our collection can fit in here. I can’t remember what I said, but I do recall that I was beginning to feel nervous. There was something about the librarian that unsettled me. I realised that the whole time I’d been talking to her, I’d never looked at her face – not really. Not in detail. And now, trapped in the lift, it occurred to me that there was something quite strange about her. A shimmer around the edges, like a lens shifting in and out of focus. And there was a smell…at first I thought it was her perfume, turned sweet and rancid in the enclosed space, which suddenly did not seem so big after all. But it was something…different. Something familiar.
I breathed in that strange, sweet smell and was transported back to a science class I’d taken at university, where we’d been shown a series of squat glass jars with things floating inside them – a snake curled like a question mark, a pair of pale, pink lungs splayed like butterfly wings, and a terrible fleshy mass that the professor explained was a spleen. The jars were sealed of course, but that didn’t stop the smell from leaking out. That smell! I could never forget it. Formaldehyde. The librarian smiled at me. Not far now, she said. The lift descended lower, heading down…down…down, for what seemed like an extraordinarily long time.
The next stop is William St. Step off here to visit the Old Melbourne Cemetery… Oh, I’m sorry. What I meant to say is step off here to visit the Queen Victoria Market.
The stench in the elevator became more and more pronounced. Although the elephant lift was large, I began to feel as if the walls were encroaching…getting closer and closer the further down we went. I dislike enclosed places, ever since…well, never mind that. I looked at the librarian again. I forced myself to focus on her face, which had seemed so normal in the warm light of the Reading Room but now seemed to be the face of something – I don’t quite know how to say this – but something not quite human. Her eyes, which I had first taken to be brown now appeared to be near black, iris and pupil the same ghastly shade. When she smiled, her lips spread open to reveal teeth that were elongated like that of an animal. I pressed my back against the wall but still I could smell that awful smell: her sweet, rancid perfume, mingling with formaldehyde.
After what seemed like an eternity, the lift finally jolted to a stop. The librarian smiled – leered – as the doors groaned open. Here we are, she said, and gestured beyond the lift out into the gloom. To describe the space as a room fails to capture how large it was – it was more like a cavern, extending as far as the eye could see, and filled from floor to distant ceiling with dark shapes I could barely make out. As my eyes adjusted to the light, it dawned on me what I was seeing: a menagerie of animals, standing stiff and frozen in some kind of macabre diorama. There were a pair of lions, teeth glinting in the low light; a mob of kangaroos, seemingly poised to take flight; a giraffe stretching its neck towards the high ceiling, and even an elephant with dark, unreadable eyes. As I stared, the scene resolved into more details: the silhouettes gradually revealing themselves as animals large and small, and even, I thought, perhaps I saw some human forms crouched way back in the darkness.
Come along, said the librarian briskly, as she stepped from the elevator and gestured for me to follow. Let’s go and find your book. I stood on the threshold, staring into the darkness, where beyond the silhouetted figures, I now could see row after row of bookshelves. The smell of formaldehyde was so strong that it obliterated everything else, made me lightheaded and dizzy as if I’d just knocked back a glass of champagne. The animals were horrifying to me, neither completely dead nor technically alive. Trapped, for all eternity. In some ways, those poor creatures reminded me of my own situation, and with that thought, I knew I had to get out. I hit my palm against the button so that the doors clanged shut and the lift lurched into life, pulling me back up to the safety of the upper levels. And as the doors of the elevator closed, the last thing I saw was the librarian’s strange, enraged face and the shapes in the darkness that I swear were beginning to move…
[brief pause]
Now, you might have noticed that we’ve just passed the Queen Victoria Market, a place very much steeped in history and well worth a visit. This iconic market sells a huge range of clothes, fresh produce and gourmet food, and has been in continual operation since 1878. But most people who go to the Queen Victoria Market don’t truly realise the depths of history lying beneath their feet. You see, in the early 1800s, the site bounded by Queen Street to the east, Peel Street to the west, Franklin Street to the south, and Fulton Street to the north was set aside not for a market, but for a cemetery that would service the city’s entire population.
The first person buried in the cemetery was a shepherd; the second, a child: one Frederick William Craig, aged 18 months. They were the first of as many as 10,000 souls who were laid to rest in the ground where the Queen Victoria Market now stands. If you can imagine, for a moment, what Melbourne looked like back then: not a city full of broad streets and magnificent buildings, but only a village, surrounded by bushland. Back then, the cemetery was a lonely place, without fences at its boundaries, and only the rough, sandstone markers and red gum slabs to show that it was hallowed ground.
Unlike other cemeteries at the time, the Melbourne Cemetery welcomed the departed from all walks of life with open arms, forgetting religious differences at the verge of the grave. That being said, the faithful dead all kept separate quarters. If you were to look at a map of the Old Melbourne Cemetery, you would see that it was divided among the denominations: two acres to the Episcopalians, two acres to the Presbyterians, two acres to the Roman Catholics, one acre to the Independents, one acre to the Wesleyans, one acre to the Jews, half an acre to the Quakers, and half an acre to the First Peoples. The convicts – those wretched souls – were buried away from everyone else, outside the northern end of the Cemetery in a lonely stretch of No Man’s Land.
As Melbourne developed, the cemetery grew along with it – and so did the quality of the headstones. Those simple red gum slabs and sandstone blocks gave way to monuments more refined, and soon the cemetery’s headstones boasted ornate decorations of classical beauty: the broken column, the cross, the urn, the scroll, and the vine. Others featured trumpets calling the dead to paradise, che rubs with softly folded wings, and of course the hourglass, which much like the ticking of a clock, is the implacable symbol of Time itself. Here and there throughout the grounds stood the graceful figures of angels, their heads bowed, their eyes remote, keeping a long, silent watch over the city’s dead.
But the life of the city was growing too. The living need to eat, and so a market was established not far from the cemetery grounds. It became so popular that by and by it had to expand: sheds were built to accommodate meat sellers, raw dirt cobbled over with neat pavestones, and aisles made wider so that ever more buyers and sellers could engage in their daily trade. Eventually, the market became so popular that it began to encroach on the cemetery itself. By this point, Melbourne was no longer a village but a thriving metropolis, and so eventually it was decided that the vegetable market – which we now know as the Queen Victoria Market – was more important to the life of the city than keeping the dead undisturbed.
First, it was decided that part of the Jewish ground, the whole of the Quaker ground, and that of the First Peoples ground would be given over to commerce. The bodies there were disinterred and then re-interred in other cemeteries, and the earth was paved over to make way for the vegetable market. But the job was not done completely. And so some bodies remained.
In 1854 – 16 years after Frederick William Craig had been laid to rest in the ground – the cemetery was closed to new burials, except to those who had already purchased grave sites in anticipation of their eventual deaths. And while 16 years is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, it was long enough that the cemetery had welcomed so many of the dead through its gates and into its grounds that it was already crowded with graves. But by then there were other cemeteries in Melbourne. Other places to bury the dead. And so, before long, the neglect began to set in. Paths became overgrown. The trees dipped their gnarled and grasping branches over the graves. The headstones began to fall into ruin. By 1890, my own grave was amongst them, and me awake and unquiet in it, trying fruitlessly to force death to come to me. The last funeral in the Old Melbourne Cemetery took place in 1917, in a world in which mourning had become the norm.
By 1922, it was decided that the market required more land and so more bodies were exhumed and relocated, coffins ferried across the city to resting places newer, and more final. Again, the job was not done completely, and so the market was simply built over the bones. By 1922, there was probably no one left to mourn the dead who still lay under that earth. Life had moved on, as it does, and the living with it. Memory fades quickly. The crisp letters on a headstone soon turn to indistinct blurs, obscured by the creep of moss and denuded by the elements. When I emerged from the ground, disinterred like so many others, no one remembered who I was either. And so I had no choice but to continue living this long, cursed life, tied to this city with its clocks, and trams, and never-ceasing circles...
How many bodies remain under our feet as we walk through the Queen Victoria Market? Some say perhaps 7,000 souls. Others that it’s more like 9,000. The records have been lost, so no one really knows who still lies buried in the earth while we wander through the market’s wide aisles, selecting produce or shopping for souvenirs.
Something you might not know about the Old Melbourne Cemetery: it was the burial place of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, two Aboriginal men who were the first people to be publicly hanged by the Government in the colony we now call Melbourne. Those names are all but forgotten now, like so many others. Lost to time. Lost to memory.
Well, the past is all around us, if only we care to know it.
And perhaps the ground remembers, even if we don’t. There are some mornings when I visit the market early, so early that the sun has not yet risen and the sky is the deep, hollow blue of almost-dawn. On those mornings, I watch as the growers and sellers roll up in their trucks and begin their day, stamping their feet in the cold and leaning into cupped hands as they light cigarettes or drink black coffee from white paper cups.
On those early mornings at the Queen Victoria Market, everyone is busy preparing for the day ahead, and the air buzzes with movement and the sound of trucks reversing and boxes slapping onto pavement and the gruff calls of workers going about their business. The sky begins its change in the east, a thin line of gold on the horizon that seeps upwards, turning the deep blue of night lighter and lighter until the air is clear and pale and new.
It’s at this hour, that strange, unfocused time between the last gasp of night and the new breath of morning t hat you might see them. The wanderers. They drift through the market, their faces thin, their eyes distant, almost unseeing. That look you sometimes find on the face of a particularly lifelike painting – but when seen on the face of a person seems inhuman. Unnatural.
You will not notice them because of the clothes they wear (although if you stopped to look, you’d realise that those clothes are not like any clothes you’ve ever seen before) but for the inexplicable sadness that will grip you as they pass by as sudden as rising mist. There have been one or two mornings when I’ve seen a wanderer and have been compelled to go closer, to try to speak to them, insubstantial as they are. As the clocks chime the hour, I’ve seen them gaze skyward, faces stricken, and then melt away into the darkness.
Oh yes – the dead are all around us, if only we care to look.
And now we find ourselves back by the water’s edge. Back to where we began our journey. You may alight here, of course, or you may wait a while – the Route 35 will soon turn back and continue the way it came, on and on, circling one way and then the other, as reliable and as terrible as a clock that never winds down…
This is route 35, the free City Circle route. Welcome aboard.
Beth Atkinson-Quinton VO: Tramlines is an initiative of the Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature Office with the podcast created by Broadwave.
Route 35 was written and read by Nadia Bailey, commissioned by David Ryding, edited by Elizabeth Flux, recorded at the State Library of Victoria, produced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton, with music by Steve Hearne.