Melbourne is one of the world's most liveable cities. What will it look like after a second lockdown?

There was a time during the 1980s and early 1990s when Melbourne was considered to be a little bit daggy.

There were few tiny bars and cafes back then, hardly anyone was working on a novel, and the economy was as sluggish as the Yarra River. The city was many things – sports-mad, storied, well-planned – but cool was not one of them.

Then something shifted in the early part of the new century. Melbourne was suddenly hip. It was actually better than Sydney, which, let’s face it, was just drunk on the power of its beautiful harbour and agreeable Goldilocks climate.

Melbourne, the most European metropolis of all the Australian capitals, had independent retail stores along its tramlines (Sydney Road, Brunswick Street), consistently good food, and a substantial arts scene. It was also a great city to be young in, and there is little coincidence that the coming-of-age TV series The Secret Life of Us was set in the now unaffordable suburb of St Kilda.

Sydney was for tourism, but Melbourne was for living.

Plaudits came our way as The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Liveability Index voted Melbourne the World’s Most Liveable City seven years straight, and we became a UNESCO City of Literature. Life was pretty great in Melbourne: big enough to have a career in, yet small enough to form a community.

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When Covid-19 threatened our way of life we flattened that curve, with premier Dan Andrews chiding us all not to ruin our stellar run by “getting on the beers” with our mates.

Now as Melburnians struggle through a second lockdown, feeling very much like the pariah cousin that has been cast out of the family, we are far from smug.

Residents are suddenly not so chuffed to be in Melbourne right now as we weather the remainder of our biting winter indoors, hoping we will be allowed to re-emerge in spring. Melbourne winters are tough enough without feeling uncertain as to what the future holds.

Many of my Melbourne friends are squaring up to the lockdown with a kind of veteran’s weariness but a certain resoluteness: we will get through this winter, we have no choice.

But you have to wonder how much a city’s fabric can be pulled at before it takes on a new shape, before its identity is indelibly altered.

If part of the new normal – aka life without a vaccine – is this sporadic surge in community cases then it’s hard to imagine how Melbourne’s dining scene and way of life can ever be truly “Melbourne” again.

We took a certain masochistic pleasure in eating tapas in tiny cafes, perched on uncomfortable milk crates, while buffeted by chilly winds off the Antarctic.

Big open spaces that weren’t the MCG were not to be trusted.

Large chains and franchises tried to stake their claim, but our high streets remained distinctly our own. Starbucks, famously, was squeezed out of Lygon Street’s Italian café culture in 2008 after failing to impress locals with oversized sofas and caramel macchiatos.

It is now likely that many cafes, shops and restaurants will not survive a second move to takeaway-only trading, and may close permanently. It is not economically feasible, after all, to impose social distancing in venues that are no bigger than a home study.

Businesses will suffer, but so, too, will young people and students who overwhelmingly rely on these cafes for employment. We are encouraged to look for opportunities in crises, but what is clear from this pandemic is that opportunity is the preserve of the most privileged: people with savings, life experience and income.

If I plant my younger self, and her shaky finances, in the current pandemic, I don’t see the years of exploration and freedom that I enjoyed.

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I see an alternative reality: a return home to my parents, maybe giving up my arts degree for something more secure like mergers and acquisitions. I see fear and anxiety, and the need to dig deep to draw on some wellspring of resilience when being young should be about trying things on – jobs, partners, opinions – to see if they fit.

But here is an optimistic perspective: Melbourne, and its diverse groups and dining culture, will surely re-emerge.

Our melting pot of cultures and backgrounds – with suits and students lingering side-by-side in cafes and cuisines from every corner of the globe – will find a fresh expression, a new assertion, even in the age of social distancing. The city has changed immensely from the days when the beer taps were turned off at 6pm, and it will change and adapt again.

The day Melbourne’s second lockdown was due to start, I popped in to one of my favourite lunch spots at the top end of Bourke Street, where many other diners were eating and working outside in the winter sun, enjoying their last Melbourne supper for a while.

I asked the owner if she was planning on offering takeaway only during the second lockdown.

“Nope,” she said, “but I will see you back here in six weeks.”

• Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist.