Skateboarders are avid travellers, but all those guide books you buy won’t tell you where the sick spots are. I doubt any of those travel logs have chapters dedicated to a set of stairs or rail, so obviously we – the skaters – need a special tourism ittinery, and Satva Leung knew how to do it: Streets.
This is the fourth instalment of a guide through one of the world’s many skateable cities, and Melbourne is the place to be. I must admit that I rarely differentiate between Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra or Perth so to know that the down hill 3-sets leading to a big 4 is NOT in Melbourne, but the Riverside park IS, can be very helpful when you realise how vast Australia is.
I’ve never been to Melbourne, but I guess this issue of Streets is pretty complete seeing as it covers the Museum (sand gaps), Riverside skatepark, the Drains (generation gap), Flinders Street rail (golden rail), Lincoln Square (ledges and stairs) and loads more with various snippets of footage. I must say that I didn’t quite get the part about the Flinders Street rail because apparently the place has been rinsed dry and isn’t worth visiting. Ah, the laws of Already Been Dones…!
Thank god Satva made sure he interviewed a good handful of locals: Lewis Marnell, Ben Gauci, Chris Woods (originally from New Zealand), Jake Brown, Morgan Campbell, Renton Millar to name a few. You’ll also spot footage and vox pops with a few foreign heads because you can’t deny Melbourne is a hot holiday resort with it’s cool party scene, beautiful women, and numerous spots of course!
I only have one problem with Streets, and that’s the fact that it guides you straight to a spot so that you can rinse it and then bugger off leaving the locals with a knackered spot to contemplate. I might be from the old school, but I’m not really down with open invitations to skate and destroy. Then again, these audio visual guides only tell you about the spots that you’ve ogled at before in many videos (N.B. Flinders Street rail). I’m sure there is plenty more to skate in Melbourne that this short video has us expecting. Streets Melbourne is definitely worth checking out if you’re heading down under. Otherwise you can probably live without watching it.
Music by:
• DJ Mutt
• Mophono
• Dr. Claw
• Lethal D
• Matt Webb
Ralph Lloyd-Davis
07/06/06