TL;DR – We dip our toes into what Melbourne has to offer a little more with round 2.

Disclosure – I paid for all products featured or mentioned here.

PAX Australia & Melbourne 2023 Day 1 –

When you work in the games and pop culture space, you hear of the joy of PAX, but I have never experienced it myself, until I got there in 2022. Well, it is time for Round 2, where I know Melbourne/Narrm a touch better than before, and I see a couple of things I missed that I needed to make up for. So, in today’s and the next few Explore-It’s, we will look at our time down past the daylight savings divide to a city with an entirely different seagull-to-pigeon ratio than I have ever seen.

Well, of course, the first thing one must do when going on holiday is hop on a plane and fly across the cloud-filled seas down south. Flying so high, you start to see the curve of the Earth in the distance.

Coming from a hot, not-yet-summer up in Queensland, it was quite a shock to the system to get hit with the slightly gloomy Antarctic blast that was hitting the city. But to be fair, the clouds were dramatic, and you can’t blame someone for being dramatic when they look this good.

Now, one thing I wanted to do last time was visit some of the local cultural sites, but I was not prepared for NGV International to be housed in a bunker of stone. Its imposing edifice rimmed by a moat gives big medieval vibes, which is even more stark when you come inside to a world full of light and glass.

When you enter, you are led through this winding selection of exhibits, starting with Asia, where the old and the new sit side by side to show the legacy of time and place. There are these moments that transport you back in time, of which give you a sense of evolution but also timelessness. Then, there were moments like the Gibbons and Sages (Tengazau to Sennin Zu) from Japan where you slip into a different world.

One thing I find most fascinating about galleries is the juxtaposition between quiet and loud. People speak in hushed tones like a librarian will run up at any moment and hush them. But without the voices, every other sound becomes heightened. The tap of shoes on the wooden floors and the scratch of a paintbrush on canvas. Sitting down and taking it all in creates an almost surreal experience.

When you walk through the gallery, you get used to certain things: the white of the walls, the distance between the art, a pattern that gets familiarised in such a short time. It is almost a shock when you turn a corner and get assaulted with a room covered in art from floor to ceiling, bronze statues everywhere, and at every exposed aspect, red, red everywhere.

I think my favourite from the wall of choices was Horses Bathing in the Sea by Lucy E. Kemp-Welch because, more than the others, it took me to a place where you could almost hear the waves roll in as you prance through the water. And because the next nearest one involved a lamb about to get slaughtered by crows, but I am not sure that was the vibe I was going for on the day.

After leaving the bunker, it was time to wander around Melbourne, as I had an hour before I met up with friends. It was time to cross the river and dip down some alleyways to explore the art.

And then it was time to be social and catch up with friends, for drinks, for chats, and to discover what a chicken bowl looked like at Taxi Kitchen.

It had been a long day, but there was one more event to tick off, and it was time to get some music on. The Cat Empire was performing their new album at The Forum, which happened to overlap with my time down there, so that was an opportunity not to miss. I went with a friend, and the timing meant we missed most of the supporting acts, but then a sound of horns and drums appeared from behind as the band appeared as a procession through the audience and danced in the mosh pit for an age. The energy in the room was electric, even before they came back and did a 45-minute encore. Truly an experience I won’t forget.

And with that, day one comes to an end as I make my way back to my hotel, and 100% did not make a quick Maccas stop on the way.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images are by the author