.
CITIES BY THE SEA MELBOURNE
English version
Melbourne is situated in the southeast of Australia.
It is said to be one of the world's most liveable cities.
Among the 4.4 million inhabitants,
there are many young, creative people.
Melbourne, for me, is the best city if you want to live in a city.
Life is generally a lot better here than in other places.
When I was working as a bicycle courier,
I'd be riding through all the different laneways of the city.
You'd start seeing all the posters and big murals.
I was like in the veins of the city, like in the underground.
Mike Makatron loves working outside the studio.
He studied art in New York City
and travelled around the world painting walls.
Now he has returned to Melbourne as a street artist.
Mike uses his graffiti art to comment on life in the city.
And in this place here used to be a cat hotel.
Where people drop off their cats when they go on holidays.
It used to be cats all around, but they moved out.
So I thought we could take out the whole wall whilst in between use.
I don't know how long it will be empty.
Maybe there'll be a building in a month.
Maybe it'll be two years.
We don't have permission for today, but we're doing it quick.
Melbourne has become a hotspot for street art.
Many locals are proud of their graffiti walls.
They attract tourists, too.
The city is generous in granting permissions
and sometimes even provides surfaces for painting.
Mike designs his murals in his studio.
The sketches are necessary
in order to achieve perfect paintings on large surfaces.
I mean, everybody starts being an artist at the same time,
when they're two, three, four, in kindergarten.
And in my house, there were six kids, and everyone was kind of crazy.
In an old part of the house,
we started drawing all over the walls when we were under ten.
I started getting into street art and graffiti as a teenager.
Partly vandalism, partly just for fun.
The appeal of that type of art is the extreme side.
To climb buildings and put your art up somewhere.
To go in tunnels or abandoned places.
Mike is one of the best-known street artists in Melbourne.
He is increasingly commissioned directly by building owners
who ask him to decorate their walls.
Every time you paint in the street, it becomes part of the city.
And the city is like a living thing, like it breathes,
and it has its ups and downs and changes and stuff.
And art is just a reflection of that.
I think it's a reflection of a healthy city
when there is public art.
Melbourne architecture.
Postmodern buildings right next to colonial houses.
These contrasts create a very particular charm.
The urban space appears very alive.
There are many colourful and offbeat people in Melbourne.
To stand out from the crowd, you have to be particularly original.
It's interesting, the reactions and stuff you get.
Sometimes you get people who don't really appreciate it.
But I think, the positive energy you get,
making a whole bunch of people smile or some little kid being like,
"Mum, it's a fairy!" Those moments are pretty awesome.
Nixi Killick studied fashion design and launched her own label.
Her fantastic clothes attract interest all over the world.
She considers her clothes a wearable art.
So, this is the piece that Lady Gaga wore for her tour campaign.
And it's a 3D-printed powder composite
that I created through body scan.
3D body scan of her neck.
And then you print layer by layer with pigment in each piece.
So, you can see it's pretty delicate.
So, this is ... a bra that is made from foam.
And this metallic fabric my friend brought back from Thailand
as a special little treasure piece.
And I only have this much, so all I can make is this,
and I can never repeat it.
Super special, just enough to fit around the corners.
So, these are laser-cut earrings.
You can see the ...
plexiglass piece comes out.
And then ... attach ... hair to them.
And this hair is human hair,
so that you can cut it and dye it and straighten it and crimp it,
so you can give your earring a haircut.
Nixi is constantly exchanging ideas
with other creative artists in Melbourne.
She loves experimenting with new materials and new methods.
Being kind of a nerd makes ... it easier.
So many incredible machines that you can do anything with.
But they're used for one thing,
but I can use them for something else, which is really exciting.
So, I think that's where most of these things ...
Like forming plastics like this as well,
to create shapes in anything that you want.
The machine is for making car headlights,
and I can make sculptural amazing shapes.
But the machinery is already there. It's just about kind of hijacking it
for what you want to do, which is really exciting.
When she has a new idea,
Nixi puts it down on paper in the traditional way.
I grew up in the bush, miles away from anywhere.
And it's this incredible fantasy place.
It's incredible out there.
I think that's where a lot of natural references come from,
just this really deep bush. This sense of nature being everywhere.
In my work, there's a way of trying to create a "hyper colour",
sort of how I would like to see the world, maybe.
Like the colour is already there, but maybe you can turn it up.
Turn up the volume and try and figure out
how to illustrate those colours in a really colourful, crazy way.
Nixi works hard to succeed in the fashion business.
And at the same time, to remain true to herself.
She found companies in India and Nepal
who sew her clothes according to her high ethical standards.
Success to her means not only financial success.
And I think, in Melbourne, there's a really huge push
for innovative design and interesting twists
on technology and fashion and different disciplines and stuff.
So I think, here it's really amazing,
and the feedback and support I've had in Melbourne has been incredible.
According to a recent study of sleeping patterns,
Melbourne is the city where people
get the most hours of sleep worldwide.
Even so at one of the inner city restaurants,
the lights are on at five o'clock in the morning.
Joost Bakker likes getting up early.
Especially when something is bothering him.
At the moment, it is the topic of waste.
We just have cleaned earlier. - Yeah.
But we're not ... - Your job is hard.
This poor guy comes here every Monday morning and tries to clean up.
If he doesn't clean it up properly,
everybody complains that they haven't done a good job.
But how are you supposed to clean this up?
It's so frustrating.
And every week, it seems to be getting worse and worse and worse.
The weekly delivery of milk.
Joost gets it in kegs.
This basically saves us about 80,000 bottles a year.
So, plastic bottles that don't need to be purchased by the farmer,
but they also don't need to be thrown away by us.
So we just have these, you know.
I just wash them out and reuse them.
Over and over again.
Joost has banned all kinds of one-way packaging
from his restaurant and prefers reusable containers.
He goes even further in his effort to avoid waste.
He gets leftover bones from top restaurants to make fresh broth.
It's just society today that we haven't cherished them.
We've got replacements for this now, man-made alternatives for broth.
Which is such a shame because this is
one of the most beautiful foods you can possibly eat.
Joost's most recent acquisition is an electrical composter.
It reduces all organic leftovers
and transforms them into natural fertiliser.
So, the composter is filled with a microbe that's found in lava.
It was discovered under a seabed.
It's a very unusual microbe because it tolerates really high salt
and really high temperatures. Normally it's one or the other.
And what this microbe does: It breaks it down
from organic waste very fast.
So, in 24 hours, it breaks down organic waste
from 100 litres to 10 litres.
Joost processes 50 tons of organic waste a year.
He then spreads the compost on his land on the outskirts of Melbourne,
where he grows more than 200 kinds of plants.
Next to his home, which he designed himself.
The facade is covered by tens of thousands of strawberry plants.
The house is built with non-toxic, recycled and recyclable materials.
This way, Joost wants to prove
that his vision of sustainability can be put to practical use.
An architect should know, if he chooses a material,
what impact that has when the building gets pulled down.
Or a doctor should understand nutrition.
Or ... you know, we're all so specialised that we don't know enough
about what impact our choices are making on the rest of the world.
So, if we think about everything that we produce
being endlessly recyclable, then most of our problems are solved.
Not far from Melbourne, you get an idea of what the country looked like
when the Australian Aborigines settled here 30,000 years ago.
Mark Olive follows in the footsteps of his ancestors.
He is Australia's most popular chef.
He is very interested in indigenous food and ingredients from the bush.
This is paper bark.
When you use it, it's almost like alu foil.
Because when you wet this, and you put in whatever meat,
maybe kangaroo fillet or even a little bit of fish,
it releases this lovely smell, and it almost infuses the fish with it.
The fertile land in this area
is the result of previous volcanic activity.
This was a great food bowl, basically.
And a great food source for a lot of these, you know,
indigenous people from this area.
So, there's lots of kangaroos and lots of emus.
So, that's where they got a lot of their protein from.
In Australia today, there is still very little known
about the habits of the indigenous Aborigines.
Mark has collected and recorded information
for over 20 years.
And he uses many indigenous Australian ingredients
in his recipes.
This is called a kangaroo apple.
Now these fruits make great relish, chutneys, anything like that.
Really nice to put on pizzas as well. Really, really nice.
But in the day, for aboriginal women, it was known as a contraceptive.
On his way back to Melbourne,
Mark drives along the legendary Great Ocean Road.
SWR 2018