Essayists tend to regard walking as an harmonious analogue to their writing practice. It’s often been said that essays meander, that the pace of an essay matches the unhurried, nosying stroll of the flâneur or flâneuse (or, indeed, these days, the flâneux). Critics have cast it as a human, humanist form, concerned with noticing and getting sidetracked, opposed to efficiency, speed, and productivity. They must not have been thinking of the Tan.
The Tan is a 3.8km track that loops the Royal Botanical Gardens, a 38-hectare public park that sits between the city, Richmond, South Yarra, and South Melbourne. The track does not, for the most part, enter the cultivated gardens of this earthly paradise. Rather, it hews to the edges, parallel with traffic-heavy roads. Despite this, the Tan is still very beautiful—the gardens are a dense, looming presence, whose trees form a canopy over the path—and is one of the most popular exercise trails in Melbourne. It is especially popular with southsiders, and is the closest Melbourne gets to elite Sydney fitness culture. Very few people meander on the Tan. Most run. Those who walk tend to do so in long strides, assisted by compression Lululemon leggings and litres of electrolytes.
People who grew up in Melbourne often have strong associations with the Tan. Someone told me it triggered memories of early childhood abandonment due to their mother leaving them with the nannies to go “do” the Tan. Another person said she used to work at a brothel with a South Yarra beauty who tracked her ex-boyfriend’s Tan run on Strava each day to witness his post-breakup decline. A third source told me that once during a Tan walk, her southside stockbroker hookup claimed that one of the Real Housewives of Melbourne used to drive her Porsche over to his mate’s house to “suck him off and give him a McFlurry.”
Clearly the Tan is a psychic hotspot. Somehow, though, I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago, when, driving down Birdwood Avenue opposite the gardens, I saw dozens of beautiful women running at full pelt past my window. I felt suddenly transported from my dusty Subaru Forester and vaulted into, I don’t know, a very nice Uber—an Uber Premier!—gliding through the streets of Manhattan. Specifically, I felt as though I’d entered the Manhattan depicted in And Just Like That…, the ever-worsening Sex and the City reboot that sees our hero, Carrie Bradshaw, move from her studio apartment into an impossibly charming, three-storey townhouse edging Gramercy Park—cue high heels on pristine pavements and a series of surgically-augmented gal pals wining and dining in ugly yet expensive interiors. These kinds of scenes are simply unattainable in the northern suburbs. Even the most scrubbed yet winsomely historic parts of Fitzroy are still too ramshackle, and people with money tend to conceal it. Not so, southside. In the blocks surrounding the Botanical Gardens, the houses and apartment blocks all have names: “Plymouth,” “Rycroft Hall,” “Park Mansions.” On Park Street, which runs between Domain Street and Birdwood Avenue and deposits you at the park, a gargantuan, double-fronted, three-storey Victorian terrace is selling for $33 million dollars. On Birdwood Avenue, an older woman in a Chanel jacket strides past me, speaking with a younger version of herself. “Diamonds,” she says, fingering her neckline. “I want something that hangs down a bit.”
The gates of Melbourne Girls Grammar, a very expensive private school, let out directly opposite the Tan, onto Anderson Street, so Grammar students “do” at least this portion of the track before or after school, alone, with their parents, or in bobbing twos and threes. School finishes at 3:15. By 3:20, the girls bubble up along the shoreline of the pavement. Small buses arrive, draw in a dozen or so kids, and then the next wave breaks. Some students awaiting lifts from tardy parents slump on the ground, their engorged backpacks filling the triangle of space between their lower backs, the pavement, and the wall. Propped up like young princesses in bed, they wait to be roused by the hiss of an Audi’s electric window.
The ones who do walk home, or to buses and trams further afield, walk very quickly. They walk quickly and they talk quickly, in a subliminal pitch designed to evade hovering authority figures. They walk up Anderson Street, cut across the edge of the park, and cross the road to the 7-Eleven on the corner of Domain Road and Park Street. On this walk, Grammar girls may sometimes encounter Grammar boys, whose own school skims the eastern side of the gardens, and use the opportunity to quietly size them up. Inside the 7-Eleven, by 3:40, there is milk all over the floor and melting Slurpee smeared on parts of the shop that are very far away from the Slurpee machine. Girls enter empty-handed and exit clutching Nestlé Chai Flavoured Lattes, Krispy Kreme donuts, Haribo jelly lollies, Maltesers, and Doritos.
But this is not really the Tan. The 7-Eleven doesn’t count, though I think The Botanical does. The Botanical is a cafe/bar/restaurant on Domain Road, lodged among a cluster of similar venues. The whole strip is complimentary knitted blankets and waiters in black waistcoats, darting out between services to Windex the glass. The Botanical counts because everyone (apparently) comes here before or after doing the Tan on weekends. The big day for the Tan is Saturday, specifically mornings, when the runners head out first thing, and the more leisurely strollers complete their loops by around midday. There aren’t many people here today, on this Tuesday afternoon. It’s just me and two business men. They each have two phones; one at their ears, and one on the table. They talk simultaneously, interjecting into each other’s conversations occasionally.
“I’m South Yarra but could do—”
“Awesome, I’ll give Sophia a call—”
Then, to each other:
“He’s too salesy.”
“Unbelievable.”
“He’s just a commission man.”
*
There is only one correct way to “do” the Tan. The starting point is marked by the Pillars of Wisdom on Alexandra Avenue, which is actually one pillar, singular—a large column with a digitised screen displaying the fastest men’s and women’s Tan run times (10:08 by Craig Mottram in 2006, and 11:31 by Jessica Hull in 2023). It's topped by a brief acknowledgment of Wurundjeri Country. From here, you go clockwise, keeping the park on your right for the entire loop. It’s a faux pas to go anti-clockwise, because doing so means you shirk the respected hardship of slogging up the Anderson Street hill. At the top of the hill, you turn right onto Birdwood. Across the road is The Botanical. But, for now, you continue on the park side of Birdwood until it veers into Linlithgow Avenue. This part of the track curves through the gardens and returns you to Alexandra Avenue and, finally, back to the Pillar(s). From there, you may do another half-loop or drive back up to the cafes for Nutella ganache pancakes and a macchiato.
There are people who have been running the Tan for decades who have never once deviated from this route. An official run club reinscribes Tan orthodoxy every Saturday morning, when they circle the park and gather, post-run, at The Botanical. So, the next sunny Saturday morning, I return to the track, determined to “do” it properly, though I opt to walk, not run, to enable maximum eavesdropping.
The first leg, along Alexandra Avenue, is uneventful. An icy wind is slicing through the sunshine. On the other side of the road is the Yarra, with its leisure boats and strong-armed rowers. I walk through snippets of conversation.
A man whose ankles roll alarmingly inward as he runs: “He said it’s going to cost 30 or 40 grand and I said, ‘well, if it’s going to make you feel better and you can afford it, just do it.’”
A young woman in scrunch-bum leggings: “We did a personality test at work yesterday. I’m sensitive, and he’s a leader, and that’s why we’re perfect together.”
Another young woman, also in leggings, asks her companion: “Are you nervous about the credit card?”
“No.”
When I reach the bottom of the Anderson Street hill, I take a seat on a metal park bench and watch the parade go by. A middle-aged woman with tight, honey-blonde curls wears a Comme des Garçons love-heart logo windbreaker, onto which has been stitched a Liberal Party patch. Her curls jump up and down as she strides past. Ahead of me, two identical border collies are sniffing two identical dalmations. The dalmations are being walked by two gay men, who each have two rings in one ear (but not in a northside way; these earrings are standard, small hoops, no dangle). As I resume my schlep up the hill, runners whizz past. Many of them are wearing miniature vests holstered with two soft-bodied water bottles at chest height, which deflate as they empty. The contraption unavoidably brings to mind teats; when the runners duck their heads to take a drink, for a second or two their mouths pop open and shut, like babies trying to latch.
At the top, lightly out of breath from the incline, I follow the track to Birdwood Avenue, where I decide to stop for a coffee. I know it’s not Tan best practice to pause halfway through, but I don’t want to do another loop to reach the cafes again, and there’s no question of skipping this spot—this is the Tan epicenter. Almost every table is occupied. Generic house music plays. A man in a Greek-flag-spangled CFMEU hoodie sits among a table of blokes—it’s not all quarter-zip LinkedIn lads or quiet-luxury baddies. As I’m waiting for my skinny latte (when in Rome…), a woman in her seventies appears. She is wearing a pink ostrich-feather jacket, whose tendrils drift around her as she moves, amplifying her profile by half. The jacket is the show-stopper, and it’s supported by bug-eye pink sunglasses, a pink silk scrunchie in her blonde hair (all in matching shades), an ankle-length burgundy silk skirt with lace-up panels, black fishnet stockings, a Chanel purse, and a large Gucci shopping bag. She stands in the middle of the pavement and shrieks. A middle-aged blonde, possibly her daughter, runs into her arms. She is wearing a Gucci bomber jacket and tugging along a buggy with a toddler inside, clad in what looks to be a tiny Chanel twin-set. Another kid brings up the rear, this one wearing a helmet and a beige Gucci tracksuit. It seems that the Tan lifestyle starts young. One does not simply “do” the Tan with no practice. Years of social conditioning go into “doing” it properly. Later, I try to find the twin-set online and can’t—it seems Chanel hasn’t released a children’s clothing line for at least a decade, and not in that style. Was it fake? How much of this scene is aspiration, and how much is reality?
*
The next kilometre or so disappears easily. The last leg of the track will finally take me inside the gardens. But a little way past the Shrine of Remembrance, the imitation-Parthenon war memorial, I find myself veering off the path again. I take a detour down Government House Drive, a winding road that terminates, as you might expect, at the gates of Government House. When the yellow flag is flying high on the flagpole, it means the Governor of Victoria is in. And when the Governor is in, a handful of individuals gather each Saturday to stake out the imposing entrance. Today, there are five of them. On one side of the road, they sit on camp chairs, around a small folding table, decorated on top with images of Mickey Mouse. They have a tear-and-share loaf from Bakers Delight still in its plastic bag, a thermos of potato and leek soup, and small, laminated slips of paper. On the other side of the road, there is a guard's house, with a lone police officer strolling in and out.
“We’re here to advise the Governor,” a woman named Kathy tells me.
“Does she…Are you…?” I can’t formulate a question.
“Well, we try,” says another woman. “She never gets out of her car, of course.”
I ask them more questions. What are they trying to advise her on? She has the power to overrule any law, they say. What kinds of laws are they against? The whole thing. Also: ABNs. ABNs? Yes—Australian Business Numbers. The police are ABN holders. The government is under an ABN. They say these institutions should not be businesses. So are they against the Australian government? They are. They want Australia to rejoin the Commonwealth. But isn’t Australia already part of the Commonwealth? It is not, not since Gough Whitlam removed the phrase “we the people” from the Constitution in the 1970s. So are they monarchists then? Not really.
They show me their megaphone, which is emblazoned on the side with the words: “THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU.”
As we talk, Kathy sets up a telescopic selfie stick. She attaches her phone to the claws, and the group marches over to the gates. The policeman appears again to watch.
“You want to go first?” she asks me. “It will be intense at first, because the vibrations will be coming up into your body, but you’ll learn to stand in your power.”
I don’t want to go first. The others back me up. I go second. I take the megaphone, walk up to the gilded gates, and read off the laminated slip of paper:
“Hello Governor Margret Gardener [sic]. With sufficient cause I appear. My name is [on the slip, there is a space to insert your name] Sally. I have lost confidence in the government. I instruct you to dissolve parliaments and issue the writs for fresh elections, for every Council and the State Parliament immediately. I instruct you to coordinate with Governor-General Samantha Mostyn, I want all the documents Senator Bill Heffernan produced to the Royal Commission released to the people unredacted immediately.”
They whoop and clap as I walk back to join them. Kathy is filming on her phone. A woman in a felt beret goes next. She recites the ANZAC Day speech, the “Ode of Remembrance.”
“We will remember them,” she concludes.
“We will remember them,” the group intones.
The solitary man takes the megaphone and booms out a speech about the cost-of-living and homelessness crisis.
We walk back to their little camp. I continue plying them with questions. What’s the Royal Commission they’re referring to? (I suppose I should have asked this before agreeing to read the statement.) It’s the Royal Commission into Ritual and Sexual Abuse within Institutions. There is a list of high-profile pedophiles in the report that has been suppressed, they say, and they want it released. Are they on social media? They are not. Are they affiliated with any political groups or ideologies? No. Do they ever attend other kinds of protests? No. Is there any way to find out more about them? Yes. Come back on any given Saturday; they’re always here.
I am confused and even impressed by this group of people. They seem to embody a spirit of pure refusal. They’re Anne Boyer’s “No” in folding chairs. “History is full of people who just didn’t,” Boyer writes in her modestly famous “No” essay. “They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner…”—chilled together in the park?
Boyer’s “no” is oriented towards a specific politics—of working class solidarity—but these refuseniks refuse even that. They decline to make their position coherent. The issues they care about remain unattached to other issues—the opposite of a conspiracy. They’re relaxed and easy-going, with no crazed lights in their eyes. They are not like Donald Trump die-hards, or antifa sorts, or Extinction Rebels. They also seem to have almost nothing in common with most of the people I’ve encountered on my walk around the Tan. To paraphrase Boyer, who I’m not sure would agree with my application of her essay to this group, they have perfected the loiter instead of the hustle. I’ve spent around half an hour with them and their dissenting attitude has rubbed off on me. I still have about half a loop left to go on the official route. But I’d rather not “do” anything more today. Forgoing the rest of the track, I cut through the park, cross Alexandra Avenue, retrieve the Subaru, and drive home.