After half a dozen or so speakers the protest culminated in a meandering march around a few city blocks. The crowd attending the protest was sizeable enough that it blocked an entire lane on the road, and Sacha was surprised to note the equanimity with which the motorists and tram-passengers met this obstruction to their progress. Of course, there was a police escort for the march, police officers climbing into their cars with the laughter of private jokes fading from their faces, turning on the flashing red and blue lights and setting a stately pace at the for and aft of the march.

Sacha had been on many protest marches, attended many rallies, in the past, but they hadn't been like this one. For a start, they had in the main been during daytime, back in Canberra: at lunch-time in Civic when the office workers could take extended flexi-time lunches and join the crowd; or in Garema Place, in the chess-pit, on a Saturday morning wedged in between morning chess sessions and earnest afternoon concerts staged by Korean Christians. This protest, now, was different - and in a large part it was because the city itself was different: there was so much more happening besides, here in Melbourne, and though people stopped to watch the protest march it seemed less of a community event, more of a spectacle. Perhaps, thought Sacha, that was why the other road-users were so tolerant of it: here it was all a part of the night-life. When people in Melbourne went into the city on a Friday night, Sacha thought, they probably expected to be inconvienced.

Which was part of the reason why she didn't come into the city herself all that often: it was more hassle than it was worth, not just because of the expense of the tram tickets in and back out, from Fitzroy to the city and back again (ten minutes each way); besides that, well, there just didn't seem to Sacha any real need to go into the city. Of course, even without being on a budget she wasn't much of a one for shopping - not unless it was for books, and even then she wasn't fussy: borrowing from a library would suffice if she wanted to read something. She certainly didn't feel any pressing need to buy new clothes very frequently. Or cheap opals. Or expensive souvenirs of Australia.

It was all so crass in the city - that was the main thing she disliked about it. Every time she caught the tram down Collins Street she was reminded of the gold rush in Melbourne's early days: the grand, extravagant buildings at the top end of town which seemed both majestic and vulgar, flamboyantly elegant. She grimaced and changed the channel every time some new entrepreneur announced on the T.V. news his plans to build some "tallest building" of one kind or another. The tallest things in Melbourne were the cranes that hunched over the city, wielded like giant tweezers delicately assembling a ship inside a bottle. Melbourne seemed like that, sometimes: insular. Whenever she started to enjoy living here she read some special feature in the newspaper about how terrific Melbourne was, and didn't you agree? And how it was one of the world's "most liveable cities". It made Sacha laugh, and it made her grit her teeth in frustration at the same time. Yes, thankyou, she was already living in Melbourne, she didn't need to be continually told how wonderful it was.

And she was living here. She still found herself a little surprised by it: she'd lived in Canberra all her life up until now. She liked Canberra, she liked the people there and the way they looked at the world and the way she could walk down the streets without breathing lungfuls of car exhaust. Yet here she was, on a crowded, windy Friday night in Melbourne, surrounded by people marching and whistling and chanting slogans, holding up traffic. It all seemed strange to her. Not like home at all.