The beating heart of Melbourne? Its marvellous culture

Opinion

Karl QuinnSenior Writer, Culture

October 31, 2026 — 5:00am

October 31, 2026 — 5:00am

Senior arts writer Karl Quinn and sports broadcaster and columnist Kelli Underwood presented the keynote speeches at The Age’s Melbourne Assembly forum, moderated by Waleed Aly, on the topic, “Sport v the Arts: What is the true heart of Melbourne?” Below is an edited excerpt of Quinn’s speech. Read Kelli Underwood’s speech here.

I grew up in a city where sport versus the arts wasn’t just an abstract topic for debate – it was a genuine life choice. You were either Team Sport or Team Arts, and there was no in-between, and barely any overlap.

That was Brisbane in the 1980s, and it was a place I couldn’t wait to get out of.

I was an artsy, book-reading, model-making, role-playing kind of kid; I loved nothing more than curling up in an armchair and reading for days on end during school holidays, or hunching over the dining room table as I drew or painted my Airfix models or built a diorama of a Roman fort under assault from the Celts, my tongue invariably poking out the side of my mouth as I became lost in concentration for hours at a time.

But I also loved sport. And I played plenty of it. I had a brief dabble with rugby league before realising I possessed a neck, which seemed to rule out that particular code. There was plenty of cricket, athletics, some motocross and BMX – I even have the chipped teeth and scarred legs to prove it – but above all, there was my great and enduring love of soccer.

I started playing when I was about 10, and was still playing until a few years ago when I was forced to concede that the mathematics of it all – 90 minutes of joy followed by three days of hobbling around with aching knees, groin and hammies – no longer stacked up. Unlike the medical bills.

There was a period, though, when I didn’t play at all. That was in the mid-1980s, the peak of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s corrupt regime, when the battle lines were well and truly drawn: sport and all it represented – extreme blokiness, anti-intellectualism, private-school bonds parlayed from the field to the boardroom via brown paper bags stuffed with cash, and the shady real estate deals they facilitated – was set in direct opposition to the world of culture, or counter-culture, towards which I had increasingly gravitated.

One had to pick sides, or leave. So I headed to London. It was there that I first realised sport and the arts actually could co-exist. I started playing soccer again with a bunch of people I met at an arthouse cinema. The music scene was full of football-inspired fashion. Artists and writers and filmmakers were unabashed in pronouncing which team they supported.

Looking for an Australian city that might similarly play both sides of the Arts/Sport divide, I chose Melbourne, landing here in the early 1990s, just in time for a recession that would drag on for years. I came on a punt (so to speak) and though work was thin on the ground for someone with aspirations to write for a living, I fell in love immediately with the music, the galleries, the theatre, the festivals: St Kilda, Brunswick Street, the Arts Festival, the Writers Festival, the Comedy Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, one of the biggest and longest-running in the world.

I loved the cinemas. There were so many back then, long since gone: the Longford, the State, the Lumiere, Village Bourke Street, Greater Union Russell Street, Hoyts Mid-City, the Carlton Moviehouse, the George. And I loved the book stores, too.

I still loved sport, though. I was at the MCG for the cricket World Cup Final in 1992 and again for Australia v Iran and the infamous pitch invasion that cost us qualification for the FIFA World Cup in 1997.

I’ve been there for my share of footy and Boxing Day Tests over the years, and to Marvel and AAMI stadiums and, in the distant past, Princes Park, as well as our ever-expanding tennis precinct for the Australian Open. Hell, I’ve even been to the Formula One grand prix a couple of times – an experience that only served to convince me that no sport has ever been more suited to television than to actually being there. “Wow, did you see that?” “No, sorry, I blinked.”

Sport demands we pick a side. The arts, however, strive to find the things that bind us, despite our differences. A city that embraces both, it seems to me, is one that is comfortable acknowledging what makes us unique, what makes us members of particular tribes, and what unites us in a common sense of identity – one that celebrates plurality rather than bows to a monoculture.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect embodiment of that unity than Kylie Minogue’s pre-game show at the AFL grand final last month.

It was uniquely Melbourne in its references, it embraced the game and diversity and fun, and it brought sport and music and dance together in a moment of pure, joyous celebration. And perhaps best of all, it made Peter V’Landys and our rugby league-playing cousins north of the border jealous as hell.

From the very beginning, Melbourne was a place of both sport and culture. Within a few years of European settlement in 1835 – following a shady transaction orchestrated by John Batman that nonetheless had the virtue of at least acknowledging First Nations custodianship of the land – we had cricket matches and horse racing. Obviously, there was a long and rich cultural tradition before that, full of song and dance and story – and sport, too, with the game of marngrook believed by many to be one of the major influences, alongside Gaelic football, on what would become our Indigenous code.

The Melbourne Cricket Club was founded in 1839, the city’s first debating society was founded in 1841, its first theatre opened in 1842, the first codified Australian rules for footy were agreed upon in 1859, and two years later the National Gallery of Victoria – the nation’s oldest such institution – was established.

As this nascent city was building its identity, sport and art were its foundation stones. But let’s not sugarcoat things: so was money.

Sport, and the gambling it spawns, has always been a favoured way for Melburnians to dispose of their income. And the arts have been a great way to make the getting of that income look respectable. A colonialist might make his fortune through the forced dispossession of the native inhabitants, the heedless razing of forests, the introduction of soil-compacting hooved animals to a landscape ill-suited to support them, or by gouging, collusion, market-rigging and anti-worker measures. But there’s not much in that heady mix that a decent spot of philanthropy and patronage couldn’t obscure. Business and the arts were and remain almost as intertwined in Melbourne as business and sport.

Almost, but not quite. I think it’s safe to say that a lot more deals have been done in the Long Room at the MCG than in the Great Hall at the NGV. And while patrons at the opera might have a sneaky peek at the footy scores at intermission on a Friday night, it’s unlikely many footy fans are catching up on the latest theatre reviews at three-quarter time.

In May, a report tabled to state parliament put the contribution of sport to Victoria’s economy at a whopping $9.2 billion, with 71,000 full-time-equivalent employees in the sector.

But in fact, the contribution of the creative industries to the state economy was far greater, at $41.1 billion – more than 8 per cent of the entire economy – with more than 340,000 creative workers in the state.

You’d think that clearly makes Melbourne a city of the arts more than of sport. Well, not so fast.

Drill down into those numbers, and you’ll see the definition of “creative” industries is not limited to what we might traditionally think of as the arts – and I would include there both the so-called high forms of opera, ballet, classical music and galleries, and the low, as in pop music, street art, comedy, film and television and so on because I think those distinctions are of little use other than in privileging one set of class-aligned tastes over another.

The government data recognises architecture and design, computer programming, publishing and print media – I’m glad somebody thinks we’re creative – and broadcasting as creative industries. In fact, it even counts a designer working in automotive manufacturing as a creative worker. Fair enough, too. Anyone with a job in the car industry in this country is clearly doing something out of the box. But it’s still a long way from what we ordinarily think of as an artist.

I point this out not to pooh-pooh the analysis, merely to remind us all that it ought to be treated with some caution. What was it Mark Twain said about lies, damned lies, and statistics? Maybe we should just call it creative accounting, and quickly move along.

At any rate, there were around 20,000 Victorians working in the arts as we more commonly understand them in February this year. Precisely what their economic contribution was is not delineated, but a May 2024 report from Creative Australia might offer some guidance. It found the average income of artists in Australia was just $54,500, with a little less than half of that coming from the actual work itself (the rest came from arts-related activities such as teaching, or entirely unrelated part-time work).

To put it simply, the vast majority of people working in the arts in this city, this state, this country, do it tough. Some do extremely well, to be sure, but for every Reko Rennie or Cate Blanchett, Nick Cave or Troye Sivan, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of others toiling away in search of the big break that may never come. Perhaps not all of them have the talent to warrant such a break, but they – and we – need the time and space and opportunity to discover those who do.

And that’s why support is so essential – for the arts workers themselves, and for the venues and organisations that foster them and give them the space, literal and metaphorical, in which to try to take flight. And the reality is that arts funding in Victoria is on the slide.

In December 2025, the government released its Creative State strategy for the next four years. It was big on ambition but contained not a single cent in new funding commitments.

The report of a parliamentary inquiry released last June found “it has never been harder for Victorians to make a living in the cultural and creative industries”. It also tracked a decline in funding for the creative sector each year since 2021.

As a result, a number of organisations, such as Writers Victoria, the Australian Print Workshop and the Abbotsford Convent Foundation have been defunded. And the amount going direct to creators through grants, as opposed to organisations, has also declined – by as much as 34 per cent in real terms since 2021. As arts academic Ben Eltham told me, for the first time in his experience, creators are beginning to leave Victoria for the warmer embrace of NSW and Queensland. Little wonder there’s a rally planned next month to draw attention to the situation.

It’s all well and good to insist that Melbourne is Australia’s cultural capital, indeed one of the great arts cities in the world. But it didn’t get that way without effort and strategy and planning and funding, and it won’t remain that way without more of the same.

The reality is many of the things that make this city so great as a place to create and consume art are under threat.

Take live music, for example. We love to boast about Melbourne’s music scene, and with good reason, but a healthy scene isn’t just one that has a city bursting at the seams with people and excitement when a Robbie Williams or Taylor Swift or AC/DC is in town. It’s one that can accommodate Oasis playing to 50,000 people at Marvel and a very gifted busker playing Oasis songs a few hundred metres away, on the steps of Southern Cross Station, on the same night.

It’s one that has rooms of various sizes that allow new acts to emerge, hone their skills, gain confidence and competence in front of 30, 300 or 3000 people at a time. That’s how Dom Dolla went from sneaking into nightclubs as an underage high school DJ to playing in front of 60,000 people at Marvel Stadium a few weeks ago.

It’s one that allows Julia Jacklin to write, rehearse and record her new album, called The Gem, in a room above a pub in Collingwood, called The Gem, over the space of a year, and then to launch it in the downstairs bar at a gig for 100-or-so people before going on an international tour. I was lucky enough to be there for that show last month, and let me tell you, it was pretty special.

But those intimate spaces are becoming harder to find, especially for live music. A survey by Music Victoria last year found the number of venues presenting at least one gig per week had declined from 813 in 2019 to just 655 in 2024 – a drop of almost 20 per cent. There are a bunch of reasons for that, including the changing behaviours of young people, but one clear factor is the tendency of property developers to identify areas with vibrant nightlife as desirable, only to then object to the noise generated by said nightlife, effectively forcing it to cease operation.

Calls to strengthen prior-use protections for live-music venues, to introduce a levy on tickets for major international touring acts at state-owned stadiums, and to ensure support slots for local artists when international acts play here, would all go some way towards protecting the vibrant live-music scene on which we so pride ourselves.

There is an obsession with big numbers when we talk about the arts and culture in this city, and with good reason. They are impressive.

The NGV boasts more than 3 million visitors a year, drawn largely by those rolling blockbuster exhibitions. The Comedy Festival drew a record 796,000 attendances in this, its 40th year, and has its sights set on 1 million in the not-too-distant future. The $1.7 billion Melbourne Arts Precinct development will knit together for the first time a zone extending from the Ian Potter Centre and ACMI at Federation Square to the Malthouse, wrapping in its vast embrace Hamer Hall, the Arts Centre, NGV International and the soon-to-rise NGV Contemporary, Melbourne Recital Centre, the MTC’s Southbank complex, Buxton Contemporary, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the campus of the Victorian College of the Arts. Throw in a purpose-built Indigenous garden and open-air performance space, and this will be a zone every bit as impressive as our world-leading sports precinct to the east of the CBD.

This is truly exciting stuff, and it’s well worth celebrating. It’s a big part of why we can even ask: is Melbourne a city of the arts? But if we don’t also pay attention to the entire ecosystem from which our creators emerge, we risk becoming nothing more than a city of major events, many of them imported. And that would be to our enormous detriment.

When I think back to what drew me to Melbourne more than 35 years ago, it wasn’t just the sport or the arts. It was the architecture, the parks, the food, the diversity, the way different pockets of interest and activity coexisted, interacted, and cross-fertilised to make this city one of the most vibrant and exciting I had ever encountered.

It was, in short, the culture of the place.

In most respects, Melbourne has only become better since then. Think of the impact the licensing law reforms of the early 1990s, and the opening up of the laneways and the development of a residential population in the CBD have had. But none of these things happened by accident. They took planning, thought and investment, and a clear sense of what we wanted our city to be.

Melburnians embraced the idea of their city as a hub of creativity, and it has paid off in spades.

So, to return to where this debate started, I would say that Melbourne is absolutely a city of the arts. But I would urge us not to be complacent about that.

As we look forward in this Melbourne Assembly and beyond to what we want the Melbourne of the future to be, it behoves us to remember that true creativity springs from the grassroots. And those grassroots are fragile. They need constant care and attention – and, yes, funding. They need space to grow.

Let’s insist that our policymakers, politicians and powerbrokers ensure the arts have that, so that Melbourne remains truly marvellous.

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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