By Lim Chee Wah

Founded on gold, Marvellous Melbourne, as this Australian city was once known, is still as rich; now more so in arts and culture, as Lim Chee Wah discovers.

Monday night, as I was having dinner at The Grand Hotel with Michelle Matthews, creator of the quirky Deck of Secrets, I finally resigned to the fact that even after three annual trips, I would still never see all of Melbourne. According to Michelle, neither haS a Melbournian.

Bar Secrets, one of the Deck of Secrets (www.deckofsecrets.com) series, has 52 cards; each highlighting a bar chosen by Michelle and her team to be one of Melbourne’s best. On one side of the card, you find the bar description and on the other a location map. But contrary to common perception, Bar Secrets is made for locals, not tourists.

Here’s why: Melbourne city centre has about 300 bars and they are like a secret society, tucked away in the city’s many obscure laneways, where most of the city’s art and culture thrives. Safe to say, aside from Michelle, there isn’t another Melbournian who can claim to know all the bars in the city. So if the locals are constantly discovering new things in and about the city, for travelers, this just means lots and lots of surprises.

That night, Michelle initiated me into the city’s bar scene. First stop, The Melbourne Supper Club – an affluent, sophisticated lounge where the cosy interior is fitted with plush leather couches. One floor up on the rooftop is the more casual Siglo, which opens out to a good view of the Parliament house and a cathedral tower in the distance.

We then walked over to Liverpool Street for a peek at the retro-communist inspired Double Happiness. The interior is a restrained exercise in Mao-era references with propaganda cocktails such as ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. On top of it is the two-leveled New Gold Mountain. The lower green level has a chill out vibe but the upper level is so garishly red that it could induce an epilepsy fit. Everything from the bead curtains to the lattice screens and lanterns scream Chinese. But to their credit, they pulled if off glamorously.

Lastly, at one in the morning, we settled at 1806 for our nightcap – an absinthe cocktail and a so-good-I-want-to-lick-it-clean margarita custard. 1806, which takes its name from the year the word ‘cocktail’ was officially used, has drama, thanks the to the grand red curtains and chandeliers left behind by site’s previous theatre restaurant. The menu here is literally a timeline of cocktail history.

By now, I was all giddy; not so much from drinking but from the sheer excitement of seeking out these bars that revel in being so covert that they don’t carry a signboard, or it’s so discreet that it’s no discernible for those who don’t know where and what to look for (hence the need for the Deck of Secrets). Who would have known that the bicycle mounted on the façade walls leads to New Gold Mountain? It was so much fun; behind each unassuming door, you feel as if you have stumbled into a private club. But trust me, the bars are friendly and not the least bit intimidating.

Melbourne’s highly celebrated Postcode 3000 city revitalisation project in the early 90s has much to do with this. In bringing back inner city living, it has also revived the laneways, which gradually manifest into a sort of antithesis to the mainstream culture that populates the main streets and the city’s public front. The laneways offer quirky, diverse and unseemly diversions from the ordinary.

Miso, a gallery artist who also creates intricate graffiti (papering, to be precise) of women figures in several laneways, mentioned in an interview with a local magazine called City that ‘for every work that I sell, I try to do one on the street, no matter how small. That way, for every work that someone owns and no one else sees, I put up a work that no one owns and everyone sees’.

And that’s what defines Melbourne – the duality and the juxtaposition of opposites that complement each other. The graffiti scene in the city’s laneways, even though a big part of Melbourne’s psyche, is still hotly debated. While the street art on Union Lane is legitimate in that it is part of the city’s Laneway Commissions project, many other graffiti in the city are mere guerilla art that are neither commissioned nor officially sanctioned.

But of course, the laneways are more than graffiti and quirky art and secrets bars; it is where the city’s café culture thrives. Degraves Street and Centre Place are famous for that. But nothing beats Brother Baba Budan (http://brotherbababudan.com.au). This small café on Little Bourke Street is known for its single origin coffee. So cool and popular that it couldn’t be bothered with a signboard. But you can’t miss the mess of chairs stuck on the ceiling like an installation piece.

To be fair, the city’s mainstream arts and cultural venues out in the open are equally as edgy as its laneway counterparts. During my visit, Melbourne Museum is recreating an archeological narrative on ancient Pompeii, which was buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and forgotten until unearthed by archeologists in the early 1700s.

‘A Day in Pompeii’ is an eye-opening exhibition that reveals the rich and cultured lifestyle in Pompeii through food, fashion, shopping, medicine and religion. More than 250 objects have been curated, including marble statues, gold jewellery and delicate frescoes. While there’s an immersive 3D theatre featuring the dramatic eruption of Vesuvius, the most poignant part of the exhibition was the body casts, made by pouring plaster into hollows left where victims of the eruption were buried. It was haunting, somber and while a large part of the exhibition celebrates the beautiful life in Pompeii, this final bit drives home the heartbreaking reality of its tragic fate.

My favourite spot in Melbourne is the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road. Already this contemporary-looking building is like a candy store of art and design, its most recent exhibition, ‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’, just cements its role as a formidable art institution in the region. This retrospective exhibition on Dali, and a comprehensive one at that, carries more than 200 stunning works by this surrealist genius, drawn from two largest collections of Dali in the world, the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali in Figueres, Spain and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.

Be prepared to spend at least a day here and I must say, seeing Dali’s work up close reveals many intricate details that are otherwise easily missed; for instance the figures of a father and child that kept reoccurring over a period of his paintings, which experts say is a reflection of his estrangement from his family. It is an overwhelming sensation to browse through the exhibition as it brings you through every stage of Dali’s remarkable career from a talented 14-year-old to the artist that he was in his seventies.

Even though Dali is widely known for surrealism, ‘Liquid Desire’ also explores his experimentation with Cubism, Abstraction, Neoclassicism and New Objectivity. It also highlights Dali’s artistic output that extended beyond surrealism, including his venture into sculpture (don’t miss his Lobster Telephone, an iconic sculpture of the twentieth century), film (watch the screening of Destino, a collaboration with Walt Disney that was reconstructed in 2003), advertising (did you know that Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo?), fashion (he designed an eerie brooch with an mechanical beating heart), Freudian psychology, theatre and yes, atomic theory.

The works are absurd, gorgeous, ridiculous, engaging, funny, enlightening and at times even perverse. But as a description for a piece of Dali’s painting so aptly describe, the ‘strange array of pictorial components is decipherable not through any established aesthetic code but rather through the principles of Freudian psychology’. It is immensely fascinating.

On my last night in Melbourne, I watched a foot-tapping fun musical called ‘Jersey Boys’ at Princess Theater. Having many successful runs in New York, Chicago and London, ‘Jersey Boys’ follows the rise to fame story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. After the two hour show, with songs like ‘Oh What a Night’ and ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ still ringing in my ear, I walked over to The Melbourne Supper Club to meet up with some friends. Having been here just recently, I instinctively walked through a nondescript door that lead to the lounge when other theatre goers just walked on by, oblivious to this hidden gem.

There and then, I felt like a savvy Melbournian. And that’s why I keep coming back here year after year. You don’t come to Melbourne to look at some monuments but to experience the city’s culture-rich urban life and live like a Melbournian, even for a few days.

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Essential Information

Stay Since Melbourne is known for its stately Victorian era buildings, The Grand Hotel (www.grandhotelmelbourne.com.au), housed in the former Railways Administrative Building that dates back to 1886, would be an iconic place to stay. As part of the MGallery boutique hotel collection, the interior recreates the ambience of old world elegance and it is comfortably spacious. The corridors are wide enough for coaches to move through and the ceilings are six metres high. As such you get beautiful loft-style apartments with a living area and kitchenette, and a spilt level where the bedroom occupies. Large windows let in lots of natural light, giving the rooms an airy and cheerful ambience. See listings for promotion.

Eat Housed on the upper level of a racy building at Federation Square, the award-winning Taxi (Level 1, Transport Hotel, Federation Square, 2 Swanston Steet. +613 9654 8808) serves inventive modern Australian cuisine with surprising Japanese influences. The service is impeccable and the wine list extensive.

Drink The Melbourne Supper Club (Level 1, 161 Spring St. +613 9654 6300). Siglo (Level 2, 161 Spring St. +613 9654 6300). Double Happiness (21 Liverpool Street. +613 9650 4488). New Gold Mountain (Level 1, 21 Liverpool St. +613 9650 8859). 1806 (169 Exhibition St. +613 9663 7722)

Do this The best way to understand how the city was founded and built is to take on the Melbourne’s Golden Mile (www.visitvictoria.com.au) walking tour. You’d explore the heritage precincts, city streets, arcade, laneways and the city’s most amazing buildings that date back to the 19th century – these are historical landmarks that you wouldn’t know existed because some of them are rather hidden and nondescript. The highlight is when you come to a dome that was built in 1891 but encased within a modern high rise.

Don’t Miss A Day in Pompeii at Melbourne Museum (http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum) Now until Oct 25. Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire at National Gallery of Victoria (www.ngv.vic.gov.au) Now until Oct 4.

Getting there AirAsia X (www.airasia.com) flies daily to Melbourne. Keep checking the website as AirAsia is known to offer zero-fare promos where you pay only the airport tax. For more leg room and bigger space, you can upgrade to the premium seats. And if you do get bored, in-flight entertainment is available at only RM30.

Photography by Lim Chee Wah