There’s nothing like a sense of place. I’ve never had a stable place of residence for more than a few years in my life, but for almost two decades my surrogate emotional home has been the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.
I’ve been going to the Vic Market most Saturdays since 1994, sitting with friends at one of the metal tables in the lane beside the delicatessen section. Fruit and vegetable shopping is the stated aim of a visit to the market but the real interest is in meeting old friends, conversation, coffee and immersion in the vibe.
There are lots of families with children, tourists passing through, couples sitting quietly together, buskers with guitars and solo singers, dogs of every size and kind, and fat overweened pigeons. I love the way you can watch people change over the years – children who grow into fine adults, stallholders taking their breaks sitting on milk crates and smoking in the lane; the friendships that come and go, and those that last. The market’s not just a backdrop to life – I imagine it having a transformative effect, a catalyst for the best in all of us. At the very least, it’s an affirmation and celebration that we are, after all, social beings.
And then there are the Vic Market legends: the time a certain reviled politician and his wife out for a casual stroll were sent fleeing after word of their presence got out in the lane; The Band Who Knew Too Much, whose joyful swinging sound attracted impossibly large crowds; and Jim, the craggy-faced seller of the Big Issue and his familiar cry, “Getcher copy of the Big Issue ‘ere, only five dollars.”
I think place is very important to human happiness. These days there’s an emphasis and tendency towards mobility – rootlessness is seen as OK because technology allows us to hook into communication networks from anywhere. But being a “person of the world” can be harmful if there are no places that are meaningful to us and with which we have a deep relationship. Places hold memory and so are part of our development, make us who we are. They are part of the weave of our lives, resonating psychologically and spiritually. Places evoke particular responses and moods that can be positive or negative – some are uplifting, others make us uneasy, dull or stupefied. At the Vic Market, I’m always reflective and deeply appreciative. For me, it’s a place to just be. I’m thankful for its presence in my life.
For thousands of years people have gone on pilgrimage to holy places. The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi, Muslims are asked to go to Mecca at least once in their life, Jews and Christians have Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Catholics the shrines and cathedrals of various saints, and Buddhists and Hindus significant geographical places and temples. Salvation is in the journey to the holy place and in the prayer or ritual conducted there; the journey is a pilgrim’s preparation for meeting with the divine, arrival the point of connection with God. Ritual renews and strengthens the bond a pilgrim has with their particular deity or expression of the divine, as well as providing a sense of union, meaning and depth in life. Power is created when the ritual happens in a group, the individual merging both with the religious community and the divine mystery/presence.
Mircea Eliade says in his brilliant book, The Sacred and the Profane, that sacred places channel a human need for connection, transcendence and meaning. They act as spiritual centre points from which meaning emanates and to which people need to return to reinvigorate their lives. Eliade points out that there are still echoes of symbol and ritual in the contemporary secular West, and people have a continuing need for transcendence. My experience at the Vic Market has something of this quality for me. It is a psychological centre point to which I return, a place of reflection and comfort. And I don’t believe that it’s solely a projection of my needs and desires onto a particular place, though an element of that is certainly there. There is a relationship between me and the Vic Market, which is re-established and remade every time I visit. This fine, unseen level of reality exits despite our materialist age and is not diminished; whether we acknowledge it is another matter.
Maybe somebody someday will set up a little shrine at the Market as an expression of thanks. It would be a concrete spiritual gesture and something perhaps for which we are not yet ready. The truth is that people show gratitude in myriad ways there anyway – buying food, chatting with the stallholders, appreciating the colour and variety of the wares, eating with friends, enjoying the ambience. Our actions have deep and lasting reverberations.
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