Ian Warden | The everyday ballet of the MCG

I have just spent a few days in Melbourne, my now Canberra-attuned, Canberra-dulled senses marvelling at the Victorian city's sheer broad-shouldered bulk and teeming human bustle.

So for example, as a citizen of a city that seems so eerily uncontaminated by people (how scarce human Canberrans are, how vastly outnumbered by trees and cockatoos!) my evening spent among 90,000 others at the MCG for the AFL-season-opening Richmond vs Carlton match was thrilling in the extreme.

For this enthralled Canberran the actual game was quite eclipsed as a phenomenon by the spectacle (and the sounds and smells) of the terrific metro-congregation there to be engaged by the game.

The getting to and especially, later, the leaving of the stadium (in the darkness the great far-larger-than-life effigies of Warnie and of Dennis Lillee looming like the statues of gods) required one to be excitingly borne along as part of the ebb and flow of a river of folk.

After the match and flowing out towards our railway stations, we swirled past the bases of the mighty gods' plinths like busy river waters swirling around giant mid-river boulders.

And what an amiably matey, chatting-freely-to-total-strangers host we were, with not a hint about us of hurried jostle let alone of mob stampede.

I wished some of the famous theorists of the rampaging awfulness of crowds (authors such as Wilfred Trotter, author of the influential Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and especially Charles Mackay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) could have been there to see and study us, to see the contradicting civility and sanity of our good-natured urban herd.

Canberra life offers nothing like this, and perhaps to spend too long in eerily people-poor Canberra is to develop a kind of metro-hankering.

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the narrator (it is the explorer-traveller Marco Polo) diagnoses how the city-deprived man eventually always "feels a desire for a city" and goes in search of one. If you are the typical Canberran always taking your holidays in a big, true city somewhere (and never in any of the world's countrysides) you are (perhaps subconsciously) showing Marco Polo's diagnosed unquenchable desire for a real city, a desire Canberra can never satisfy.

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Home now, I notice how in Melbourne I revelled in crowds, as well as enjoying the everyday pedestrian teemingness of the CBD, deliberately going to places (to the MCG for football, to the Arts Centre for ballet, to the NGV for a blockbuster) where I'd be assured of the thrillingly unCanberran experience of finding herds to join.

My appreciation of the might and mystique of herds like these (albeit later finding I had caught Covid from one of them, almost certainly the infectious toffs at the ballet) is deepened by new research just published this month in the journal Science.

With elaborate experiments and observations of crowds in crowded places, mathematicians at the University of Bath have shown (see online the Science News piece Stick to your lane: Hidden order in chaotic crowds) that what looks like chaos in the ways crowds go about things is often a subconsciously choreographed matter.

There is much unconscious arranging of massed folk into mathematically well-defined lanes and as well into all sorts of "complex curved patterns such as ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas".

Perhaps we need the big "cast" of the continuous "ballet" of a teeming city to fully demonstrate for us what Annie B Parsons calls "the choreography of everyday life" in her brilliant little new book (part New York city Covid-lockdown diary) of that name.

How beautifully she points out the dancing going on in all the moves we make. Sensitised now by her book, I got an especially big kick out of Melbourne this time and sensed how, after the big match (itself a ballet with 36 dancers engaged at any one moment) the 90,000 of us danced away from the MCG.

"[Think of] walking down the street," Parson invites, observing the most everyday-looking activity of all.

"In this case it's about an agreement among strangers, which is one of the things I appreciate about city life, how eight million of us, without language or plan, gracefully find a group rhythm as we walk down the sidewalk."

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