On a recent Friday afternoon, having read that a survey of overseas tourists departing from Melbourne had nominated its newest public construction, Federation
Square, as the most magnetic of its attractions, I caught a tram – the second best way to approach the centre of Australia’s second largest city - to evaluate this intelligence.

Was it possible that Melbourne had finally embraced the fond hopes of its administrators and tourist authorities, and adopted an iconic landmark? It seemed to defy everything I’d come to know of Melbourne in more than 30 years of on-and-off residency in this good-natured but maverick-minded city.

Sure enough, the square - a loose, modernist interpretation of an Italian piazza honouring the centenary of the nation’s establishment as a federation of States in this very city - was virtually empty. The architects had cloaked the buildings with mottled panels suggestive of a camouflage suit in what was, perhaps an unconscious acknowledgment, perhaps, of the attitudes of the people who were meant to use it. But clearly it was still far too intrusive for a city that seems to abhor the bleeding obvious.

Melbourne survives without a monumental harbour bridge – lacking even a monumental harbour – or stunning opera house. It doesn’t promenade in city squares (although it will get together for a nice public protest). It’s a city of events and traditions, the keeper of the nation’s sporting calendar and much of its artistic and cultural heritage.

The incendiary London chef, Gordon Ramsay, whose opinion is to be ignored at your peril, describes its restaurants as “the culinary engine room” of Australia. Its public gardens - marvellous places for a walk and a read, and a sandwich on the grass - invite comparison with those of London; its grander buildings with the best of Manchester’s, others with those of Spanish-revivalist California. But many of them, and much of what makes the city what it is, are in hiding.

You have to literally burrow into Melbourne, to appreciate it as its people do. You have to depart the impeccably arranged formal city grid and enter the capillary network of “little” streets, cobbled laneways and alleys that weren’t a part of the original symmetrical design plan. A handful of “little” streets – Little Bourke St, Little Collins St, Little Lonsdale St - running parallel to the main events, were introduced by a practically-minded colonial governor who foresaw the need for utility access to the rear of the buildings fronting the bigger arteries. But during the 1850s gold rush that turned the infant city into a boom town, more affluent by far, then, than Sydney, they seemed to develop a will of their own to branch off and intersect.

They take you to places, away from the rattle of trams and vehicle traffic, where you suddenly discover Melbourne’s rich array of intimate coffee shops, bars and bistros, designer boutiques and art galleries (more than 130 of them) and arcades … discover, moreover, the beating heart of its culture.

To view the essence of Melbourne, you must ignore the commercial shopfronts at street level – much like those of Everywhere Else - and cast your eyes upwards, to the first (for Americans the second) floor level, where a good deal of its highly eclectic built history surprisingly survives, where people live and go about their business, and a thriving community of artists and jewellers and fashion designers are producing unique, much-sought-after work.

Walk through the leadlight barrel-vaulted arcade of the 1920s Beaux-Arts style Nicholas Building in Swanston Street, not far from the squat functionality of Flinders St Station, and you can take the city’s only remaining operator-controlled lift to the airy, naturally-lit, if slightly run-down studios of close to100 designers and artisans. This is, by the way, the building that the headache gave us, what with the fact that the Nicholas family’s fortune was based on its manufacturing of aspirin.

Downstairs, Alice Euphemia is typical of a sizeable collection of shops in the immediate area, which have championed Melbourne, Australian, and sometimes New Zealand fashion labels – among them Obus, Ammo and Mien - and jewellery.

A few blocks away, in Little Collins St, a business called e.g. etal – as much an exhibition gallery as a retail store – stocks the work of around 50 of Australia’s best contemporary jewellers.

You’ll need a navigational aid to track these enterprises down. Marais, for instance, whose racks include the improbable creations – in jersey – of Josh Goot, who won this year’s Young Designer of the Year award at Melbourne’s l’Oreal Fashion Festival – seems to have been parachuted into its upstairs quarters in the Royal Arcade, under cover of darkness. Aside from a small sign over a stairway, there’s no evidence of its existence.

Fortunately, former bridal gown designer Fiona Sweetman conducts “Shopping Secrets” tours (Phone 03 9329 9665) that will put you on the scent.

Even in Federation Square, you can ferret out a jewel like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, devoted to the cinematic arts, and the permanent exhibition of Australian art at the Ian Potter Centre, a satellite of the nearby National Gallery of Victoria.

But you have to go slightly beyond the square to the other side of the Yarra River, and walk a little distance along its beautifully maintained pedestrian paths, or take to the bike path with a hired machine, or better still, take a river cruise (Phone 03 9614 1215), to get an accurate perspective of its skyline and a hint of its tribal cultures.

For all of its modest, muddy dimensions, the river exerts a profound force on the city, much as Kryptonite does on Superman. Those abiding in the more affluent suburbs of the south find it draining to venture even to the university and Italian quarter of Carlton, on the edge of the CBD. They barely make it to the riverside restaurant precinct of Southbank, which also houses the Crown Casino and entertainment complex, and the new harbourside residential and restaurant developments of Docklands.

And those on the north possibly can’t conceive of a reason to mix with all those snobs in moneyed Toorak, South Yarra and Brighton.

They tend to make an exception for St Kilda, the inner beachside suburb where some of the city’s most expensive residential real estate intersects with backpackers’ hostels, and more feral entrepreneurial types transact the business of drugs and sex.

Along St Kilda’s Acland Street, the descendants of Jewish emigrants take coffee and something sweet in European-style delis and cafes and cake shops, or enjoy the beach or the indoor saltwater baths, while the kids ride the roller coaster at Luna Park. At night, the Esplanade Hotel (The Espy), pumps beer and pulses with live music from local and national touring bands.

St Kilda hosts so many festivals and events like triathlon competitions, that on weekends, parking is all but impossible. Fortunately, it’s served by several tram routes (timetables, route maps etc here). A couple of kilometres away, on the same side of the river, Chapel St also seems to repel the effects of the river, due to the gravitational pull of its shopping strip and club scene.

Melbourne is a city of the near at hand. The sheer proximity of its facilities gives it a curiously village-like ambience, despite the fact that this is also the centre of a vast suburban sprawl that houses 3.6 million people, and for the past three years has been growing at a faster rate than Sydney.

You find the National Gallery of Victoria and the concert hall (Hamer Hall) and Victorian Arts Centre (theatre, opera, chamber music and light opera) flanking Southbank, a few minutes walk across Princes Bridge from Flinders St Station.

Cross St Kilda Road at that point, and you can walk through a series of parks to the world-class Royal Botanic Gardens. If you get the taste for walking, you could join the throng of Melburnians who circumnavigate those gardens at a variety of paces, with or without strollers. The gravel track they use is called – with the city’s characteristic love of odd diminutives – “the Tan”.

The “G” is the Melbourne Cricket Ground - as much a sacred site as a sporting arena. It’s a 20-minute walk from Princes Bridge along the river that takes you past Rod Laver Arena, home of the Australian Tennis Open. To confuse the issue a little further, mostly what they play at the Melbourne Cricket Ground is not cricket but football – and moreover a locally-invented brand of football called Australian Rules. At the other end of the city grid there’s a new smaller football arena, called Telstra Dome. Like Rod Laver Arena, it’s also a popular venue for other events, including rock concerts.

It’s only a brief train ride to Flemington, the major venue (with two other Melbourne racecourses, Caulfield and Moonee Ponds) for the Spring Racing Carnival, a communal excuse for dressing up, having possibly more than a few drinks, and losing money. The principal event, occurring on the first Tuesday of November, is the Melbourne Cup, which literally stops the nation.

Should you tire of the near at hand, Melbourne is also the capital of the quick getaway. An hour and a half by car gets you into the vineyards of the Yarra Valley, where you’ll find some of Australia’s finest table wines. While you’re there, Healesville Sanctuary will introduce you to the world’s most curious mammal, the platypus. A slight diversion takes you to the mountain forests of the Dandenongs. About the same distance away are the beaches (and more vineyards) of the Mornington Peninsula. Another hour or so puts you on the Great Ocean Road, winding precariously through the wilderness of the Otway Ranges, past some of Australia’s best known surfing beaches.

Or you could take the highway to Ballarat, its route plotted deliberately to fold as harmoniously as possible into the landscape, dor a visit to Sovereign Hill, a working reconstruction of the goldfields era settlement.

The best way to approach the city? An hour before sunrise, gather in the Royal Botanic Gardens, close to the Shrine of Remembrance, and board a hot-air balloon . As dawn breaks, you drift serenely over domes and spires, the spearing Rialto Tower that river and those laneways, stalking the secret city.