Caledonian_La

Idling menacingly between Lonsdale and Little Bourke Streets is Caledonian Lane – a viperous voodoo Valhalla containing the constant feeling of night. The same eerie backstreet ether that oozes out of Taxi Driver, Bringing out the Dead, and William Friedkin’s Cruising. A blackened, anything-can-happen, twitchy kind of feeling, where sounds become ominous and important.

Defiantly counted among Melbourne’s many hidden wonders, Caledonian is the darkened shooting star on the tourist’s lap of the laneways. But where Hosier Lane is the twinkle in the city’s eye, Caledonian is its kool-aid alter-ego – a candied darkness delight loaded with fangs, lip gloss and love in the gutter.

From heaven to earth there is evil heat and adventure: shoes are strung up and hung by their entrails, elderly hookers swish by in vinyl, speed freaks judder and stutter, lobsters decompose in the gutter. If a DJ cut a sample stealing the spirit of the lane, the leering laughter of Screaming Jay Hawkins would justifiably be jammed on a loop with a snuff film beating on reverb.

A simple pick and roll out of Little Bourke Street reveals the fun-bunker of St Jerome’s. Now closed, the bar is famous for not only being a skin-tight haunt of many Melburnians, but also for spawning its travelling laneway festival which plays through cities across Australia every year. St Jerome’s threw a two week wake/street party to signify the end of its five-year era in March this year.

The closure of St Jerome’s is not the only reverse swing in Caledonian. With boarded up barbershops and every store front laying departed, you see for yourself that the bump and bam and right-hook rumble of Myer’s $500m redevelopment of Lonsdale and Ltl Bourke Streets has the laneway on the run.

It is estimated that by final throws of 2012 Caledonian will have been redeveloped and the laneway will no longer exist as we see it today. Instead, it will populated by truck parks and loading bays. No stories, no life, no artwork, no dice.

If Melburnians went nuts and began hanging prosthetics instead of Nike Airs and pairs of stolen T-Lands, Caledonian Lane is probably where it would be. Unfortunately, it may be the life and death of this laneway that the streets could be celebrating.

Reviewed: November 2009