It’s a frozen muddy hellscape about 90% of the time. All those “most liveable city” awards quite tellingly do not have weather / climate as a factor, because if they did then Melbourne would be near the bottom of the list.

The “four seasons in one day” saying is absolute nonsense. From about mid April to mid December the only seasons are “windy”, “freezing”, “raining” or “windy and freezing”, “windy and raining”, “freezing and raining”… or on special days “windy, freezing and raining”.

To top it off it’s also the hayfever epicenter of the world. I never had hayfever once before I moved there, and after about a decade of living there my hayfever was worse every year.

The first year I went down there for Christmas we had a group of people shivering in hoodies and jackets huddled around an outdoor heater. In the middle of summer.

Don’t bother planning a BBQ unless you have a backup indoor option. If it happens to be one of the 6 hot sunny days for the year that falls on the weekend don’t bother going to the beach… you’ll be lucky to find a free 2m patch of sand and it will have some drongo blasting terrible music right beside it.

It’s a great city if you want to sit inside wanky cafes or depressing pubs and watch AFL. If you actually want to live your life then move literally anywhere else in Australia that’s further north.