There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered.
I went to the National Gallery of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon in June expecting a museum of empire — another British Museum, another V&A, the spoils of the world hauled home and hung where the light is good. I expected the Grand Tour paintings on the third floor. What I didn’t expect was to meet their counterargument first, on the ground floor, dressed up as a yellow pumpkin. It took me three hours and three floors to understand that’s what it was.
Reading a city by what it sells and what it buries
I got there the way I always start in a new city: a tram to the market. Melbourne’s trams are the green of a billiard table and the cream of old piano keys, and within the downtown grid they cost nothing — you step on, you step off, no tap, no fare, no questions. A man raised on American cities, where the middle class treats the bus as a sentence the poor are made to serve, stands on Swanston Street watching the free tram stack up and pull away and thinks: so it can be done. They simply chose to do it.
The Queen Victoria Market is one of the oldest arguments Melbourne has with itself, and it doesn’t advertise the fact. I didn’t know, walking the sheds, that I was walking on the dead. Seven hectares of fruit stalls and fish halls sit on top of the city’s first cemetery, closed in 1854 and paved over when Melbourne decided it wanted the land more than the memory. They moved 914 bodies out in the 1920s — give or take what the record admits to — and they did not move all of them. Sir John Monash himself called it a disgrace, and the work went ahead anyway, because the work always goes ahead. What gets paved over gets called progress, then heritage, then it gets a plaque. I’ve written that exact sentence about a dozen towns. It was restful, in a grim way, to find it waiting for me at the bottom of the world.
So I did what the living do: I poked around on top of all of it. Secondhand booksellers, a Turkish woman who sold me a coffee and a borek without looking up, butchers calling out to women they’ve sold to for thirty years. The market does both things at once, openly — the dead under the floorboards, the living haggling over flathead above them.
Then I walked several kilometers down Swanston Street, which runs through Melbourne’s memory in strata: the boom-time bluestone built to look like temples because money prefers to be worshipped indoors; Chinatown, the oldest continuous one in the country, planted square across the city’s central spine rather than tucked off to a margin; St Paul’s and the buttery clocks of Flinders Street Station; and finally the river, brown and patient and in no hurry to explain itself. A street keeps its own minutes. I read buildings the way I read court files. Rivers are the only honest archive — they take everything and keep none of it where you can reach it.
The pumpkin and the thumb
The gallery announces itself low and long, no dome, no columns — Roy Grounds built it in 1968 to look like a fortress that had made peace. Out front, amid the fountains, stands David Shrigley’s Really Good: a bronze thumbs-up the height of a house, the thumb stretched like taffy past any bone that could hold it, approval cranked so far past sincerity it curdles. It greets you the way a city greets a man who’s been gone a long time — too friendly, slightly wrong, the gesture held a beat too long. It’s the most honest thing on the lot, because it admits the performance.
Inside, dead center under the glass roof of Federation Court, stood the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin — yellow as a caution sign, eleven splayed legs, pocked all over in her graduated black dots. Kusama has painted this same gourd for more than eighty years, since she was a girl on a seed farm in Matsumoto, and the dots are the obliteration she’s spent a lifetime fighting, the pattern that wants to scatter the self into infinity. The pumpkin is the homely anchor she sets against it, painted and repainted so it cannot float away. A woman who stayed mostly in one room her whole life, painting one thing until it filled the universe. I filed it away without yet knowing what it was the answer to.
The painting was never a souvenir. It was a credential.
Upstairs, the Grand Tour. The wall text described it as a charming custom — young aristocrats off and away across Europe and other continents to learn their art and culture. The honest version: a young man of the right family sent abroad to acquire the finish a country house couldn’t supply, returning with a canvas to hang in the hall so visitors would understand, without anyone saying the words, that the boy had seen the world. And not only boys. Women made the same crossing — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, and at least 955 more that a Stanford project has only lately dug out of the registers. The men got the portraits. The women got the footnote, and then not even that.
The paintings are beautiful — Canaletto’s Venice laundered into light, Bellotto the nephew working the same flattering haze, Tiepolo’s silk-wrapped Finding of Moses in the color of money. I want to be honest about the beauty, because my argument doesn’t need them to be ugly. They are very beautiful, and they were painted to be carried home as proof. Both true at once, which is the only register I know how to think in anymore. A gallery, even a royal one, is just a courthouse with better lighting: the pictures on the wall are the minutes, and the meetings are held elsewhere.
I recognized the machinery immediately, because it’s the same machinery — only the freight has changed. They paid to see these places; I get paid to live in them. They had a slow ship and six months to plan a crossing I’d do between a Tuesday and a Wednesday with a carry-on and a Wi-Fi password. And we counted countries the same way. That’s the uncomfortable part. They were the empire. I was the help the empire moved around, billing my crossings to a client the way their footmen once billed their passage to a household. No one was ever going to paint me. I counted anyway.
The inventory the canvases don’t hang
Here’s what doesn’t make it onto a gallery wall. The 152 bus down Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, learned before the language. The Tangier medina folding in on itself. Cairo’s car horns like a second weather, and a driver named Hani who wouldn’t cheat me and after a while wouldn’t let anyone else. Venice — the real one, not Canaletto’s — drowning quietly under everyone arriving to photograph it before it goes. And four years, no joke, in a construction camp in the Saudi desert, which is the room where the finish gets made and never the room that gets painted. There’s no gilded canvas of a labor camp at the edge of the Empty Quarter, no flattering haze, no Canaletto to place each man exactly where a man should be. I can give you that picture, because few others have: the heat with actual weight, the fine red grit in the keyboard and the bedroll and the back of the throat. The Hejaz was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived, and the most honest — the only stop on the whole itinerary that wasn’t selling me anything.
The Grand Tour shows you the cathedrals and the canals. The worker camps show you the quarry the cathedral came out of. One is the truth and the other is the painting, and you should know at all times which one you’re looking at.
What the pumpkin was arguing against
The grand tourists count the world to prove they mattered. The old woman in the one room repeated a single gourd until it filled the universe — not to prove she’d gone anywhere, but to keep from disappearing where she stood. One art counts; the other holds on. I’d climbed the stairs with the lord’s instinct in my chest and come back down owing her an apology.
So why do we count at all — the tourists with their commissions, me with my stamps and datelines and whatever this is? I think the count is a hedge against the suspicion that none of it stuck, that a man can cross every water there is and come home exactly as heavy as he left, with nothing in the hold but stamps. The paintings were insurance against that fear. So is the passport. So, honestly, is this.
But there’s one credential that can’t be commissioned or hung or paved over — the saudade, the longing, the evidence carried in the body and not the hold, that the going meant something, that I did not merely move. Tourists collect views; I accrued routines and then abandoned every one of them. They have Venice in a frame on a wall, behaving itself forever. I have a tideline on a stone wall and the muscle memory of a bus route in a city I’ll probably never see again.
The aristocrats, then and now, come home with a painting. I came home full of people I will miss until I die.
I will take the ache.
— Douglas Stuart McDaniel, Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future
