There is a world where art and sport are discrete – but that’s not Melbourne

October 8, 2026 — 6:00am

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The longer I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that Melbourne’s secret is that it’s integrated. Ours is not a city of discrete neighbourhoods like New York. Not really, anyway. It’s not a city of enclaves and subcultures – “villages”, says Eddie McGuire – like Sydney. It’s not that Melbourne is undifferentiated. It’s highly varied. But it’s that the borders between these variations are subtle and fuzzy. More matters of degree than essence.

Probably nowhere is that truer than in sport and the arts, which we will talk about at The Age’s Melbourne Assembly civic forum later this month. There’s a world, perhaps most of the world, where these things are discrete: different concepts appealing to different cohorts, some dwelling in the overlap, many not. In Melbourne, much more dwells there. The Melbourne Football Club has a fan who plays trumpet in the stands, who sometimes can’t make it to games because he has to play with the MSO. If you run an art gallery, no one will blink if you are a passionate Essendon supporter. Bulldogs, maybe.

That’s a rarer gift than we know. In Sydney, for instance, even sport alone is stratified. You follow union or league, or neither. But none can be a lingua franca. Tell me what you love and I’ll have a fair chance of guessing which school you went to. That’s not........

© The Age