Updated by: May 11, 2026
There Is No Place Like Home
I have been lucky enough to have travelled to a lot of places. I have stood in front of the Colosseum, walked the streets of Hanoi, watched the sun set over Uluru and felt the warm Pacific on my face.
And I always come back to Melbourne.
I have a theory about Australian cities. Sydney is your beautiful girlfriend. Melbourne is your beautiful grandmother.
Sydney is spectacular in the way that a supermodel is spectacular. You see it and your breath catches. The Harbour, the bridge, the Opera House — it is almost unfairly beautiful.
But Melbourne knows things Sydney doesn’t. It has depth. History. Character earned over time rather than bestowed by geography.
This was Marvelous Melbourne — the city that the gold rush of the 1850s turned into one of the wealthiest places on earth almost overnight. Grand Victorian architecture rose from the mud of the Yarra River. The Royal Exhibition Building. Flinders Street Station. The Block Arcade. Buildings that announced to the world that this young city intended to matter.
And beneath all of it — beneath the coffee shops and the laneways and the tram lines — 40,000 years of Aboriginal culture. The Wurundjeri people knew this land long before the gold rush, long before the colony, long before any of us arrived with our grand ambitions. The rivers, the plains, the sky above — all of it named and known and understood for thousands of generations before a single bluestone was laid.
Melbourne does coffee better than anywhere else on earth. I will not be argued out of this. The flat white was born here. The laneway cafe was perfected here. The barista as artisan — that’s Melbourne. My order never changes — a latte with one sugar. It sounds simple. In Melbourne it is never just simple. It arrives exactly right, every time, in a way that cities I have visited across the world have never quite managed to replicate.
The sport is something else entirely. The AFL Grand Final at the MCG — one hundred thousand people inside the greatest sporting stadium in the world, the roar so loud it becomes physical. The Australian Open — the world’s best tennis players under a summer sun that has no mercy. The Melbourne Cup — a horse race that stops the entire nation for three minutes every November.
And the weather. Four seasons in one day is not a joke. It is a way of life. You leave the house in sunshine and return in a coat. You learn to carry both. You learn to read the sky the way the Wurundjeri always have.
I have lived in other cities. I have considered other places. But there is something about Melbourne that other cities simply do not have — a quality I have never been able to fully articulate but have always been able to feel the moment I land.
It is the best coffee you have ever had, served by someone who cares deeply about it.
It is 40,000 years of history beneath your feet and 170 years of gold rush grandeur above your head.
It is four seasons before lunch.
It is home. And there is no place like it.
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
