An ode to the joy of Melbourne. Could Pauline possibly understand?

We fortify ourselves with gozleme grilled by a busy Turkish cook in a headscarf, the flatbread so hot from the plate we juggle it from hand to hand.

We drift by outlets offering Italian, Greek, Spanish, German and Asian specialties, and manage to resist the cricket ball-sized dim sims invented right here by a Chinese-Australian stallholder, William Chen Wing Young, in 1949.

We plunge in among great stands of fruit and vegetables and squeeze past rows of gourmands scoffing oysters from the shell.

Butchers and seafood vendors rush cheerfully back and forth serving queues of customers from behind their refrigerated, glass-fronted stalls.

The scent of quiches and fresh bread and coffee fills the air, mingling with the aroma of all manner of delicatessen goods that were mostly unimaginable when I was a child.

Sunday mornings, if we are in Melbourne, are devoted to a ramble around the market.

Our local is the South Melbourne Market, which has sprawled across its four-hectare site for the past 158 years.

“It’s like going on a holiday,” a daughter says.

It is, too.

I am put in mind of another glorious Sunday morning, travelling with another daughter in another great city. We awoke to find the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in Paris, right by the Place de la Bastille, closed to traffic and transformed into a vast open-air market.

The Bastille Market was occupied by the stalls of producers who arrived before dawn in vans loaded with fresh seafood, meat, poultry, charcuterie, breads, cheeses, fruit, vegetables and flowers.

Hard-to-please Parisians emerged to prod the produce and discuss the provenance of it, a pleasure shared at other markets across the city and in French villages everywhere.

Melbourne is not Paris and Australia is not France, but multiculturalism has created something exotically delightful and purely Australian in its local markets.

South Melbourne Market is, like the others operating across the city, a broad melting pot of cultures. Further out, the Dandenong Market is the diversity daddy of them all. It offers all manner of fruits, vegetables, meats, herbs and spices to satisfy the demands of 150 ethnic groups from the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Africa.

“Travel the world in your backyard,” shouts the Dandenong Market’s publicity machine, and it is not much of an exaggeration.

I’m not the shopper in my family on our market excursions, it happens.

I break away to browse the shelves at the bookseller (The Merchant of Fairness, what a name!), and to wander the aisles.

I’m there to observe without purpose.

The French might call me a flaneur, a person who strolls, observing life in a detached, yet engaged way.

It has been my pleasure since childhood when I went to market days with my father.

They were old-time country affairs. Cattle were herded into the sale ring, the rapid-fire chant of an auctioneer meeting the nod of buyers and the cry of spotters.

There was a mesmeric quality to such markets.

My father, mingling with the other cattlemen and stock agents, left me alone, and I grew to cherish the solitary absorption of sights and sounds and the smell of cattle and dust for no purpose beyond being there.

Country women served tea in china cups and sandwiches on crockery. The men of the land (they were almost always men) laid knowing eyes on the beasts in the sale ring and gave nothing away until the auctioneer changed his rhythm and knocked down a yard to a buyer.

And so it is for me at today’s livestock-free markets in the city, this sense of contentment in being there.

Shoppers flow along the aisles and stop to test the ripeness of an avocado, fill a bag with cherries, sample spices, pick up a baguette or natter to a cheese seller. There is simple fulfillment in observing the theatre of it.

Little old women tow baskets on wheels, couples discuss the ingredients of an antipasto or a Sunday dinner, comparison shoppers despair at prices and young parents surrender to their children with a trip to the doughnut van. Here is a passing parade of a city’s spirit.

Once, I would amble to the footpath to listen to the Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford busking, before he and his music went off to the forever in 2016.

Melbourne everywhere is a gift to the would-be flaneur. We wandered through the city to the State Library, where the visitor is required to absorb in silence its glories, to view its great soaring dome and to contemplate its studying nooks, all occupied.

There is nothing to equal it in the nation.

Its administrators surely have misjudged the multitudes who love it if they believe they can get away with their plan of slashing by half its number of librarians, replacing them with “self-service” options. It would leave just 10 reference librarians to serve what is said to be the third-busiest library in the world. A petition of protest is building with the speed of light.

It was a weekend for celebrating and defending Melbourne, whatever flaws it may have.

We took ourselves, with tens of thousands of others, to the city’s new fabulously expensive underground railway stations, there to witness a city rejoicing in its revealed modernity.

There wasn’t a sour face to be seen. Smiles shone for miles.

You had to find the raggedy little anti-immigration Put Australia First rally at the Flagstaff Gardens to discover a swirl of bitterness.

Pauline Hanson spoke. It was as if she had sucked a lemon. Someone should have fetched her a gozleme from the market.

But Hanson, if you listened closely enough, brought welcome news.

“I’m not from Victoria and, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t move to Victoria,” she quavered. “I’ll stay in Queensland, thank you very much.”

A familiar Pauline-ism came to mind: “If you don’t love it, leave it.”

But our mood was too elevated to employ any such crass sentiments at the end of this lovely Melbourne weekend.

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