The Young and The Restless | Sleepless in the city

By Bree Harding

Aug 20, 2024

I am no Annie, though I am a journalist, and my companion was no Sam, not even a man, but the skyhigh deck we stood on had views as impressive — if not more so — than those from New York’s Empire State Building.

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As plutonic friends, we didn’t have a Sleepless in Seattle moment, but you don’t need one to feel the romance of a place such as Melbourne Skydeck by night.

It is the Southern Hemisphere’s highest observation deck and offers a 360-degree view of our state’s capital city, our country’s second largest.

I’m easily impressed by views from even a mildly elevated platform, so you can imagine just how much my Spidey senses tingle when you put me almost 300 metres up.

You can spend hours pinpointing landmarks between illuminated arterials when you’ve got a bird’s eye view in the dark. Photo by Bree Harding

Like a bug, I’m also drawn to and easily mesmerised by lights.

So chuck me up there at night-time and it’s a sensory smorgasbord.

Melbourne Skydeck is right in the city, at Southbank.

It’s open every day, even Christmas Day, at varying times, so you can either traipse up the 1642 stairs from level one to 88 and get a good 30 minutes of lung-burning exercise or you can take the lifts that are said to be the fastest in Southern Hemisphere.

I mean, the whole place is over-achieving with its hemispherical records, right?

I guess if you’re going to build such an ambitious tourist attraction in the centre of the city and want people to come (and more than once), you kind of have to make it impressive.

I expected it to be an overpriced experience, given its infrastructure.

I thought those highest decks and fastest lift crowns would be funded by a highway robbery.

But even an “ultimate” package that provides a taste of everything on offer at Skydeck — admission, virtual reality theatre, Edge experience with digital souvenir photo, virtual reality plank and a voucher at Bar 88 — is only around 70 bucks.

Sporting venues and landmarks are easily recognisable when lit up in cities that don’t sleep. Photo by Bree Harding

My friend and I had been having a girls’ weekend in Melbourne that included a stay in a unique boutique hotel, a hidden bars tour and a game of mini-golf at Holey Moley.

Our activities had finished up earlier than planned and we were all for making the most of our limited time in the city with a bit more fun, so we made a spontaneous decision to cab it over to Skydeck for a look.

I’d experienced it before with the kids, but only in daylight.

My friend hadn’t been at all.

It seemed the perfect way to end an epic day.

There were no Tom Hankses or Meg Ryans up there, or matchmaking children, but there was availability remaining to experience The Edge in the dark.

Forget the Southern Hemisphere, according to the website, this thing is a world first experience that “suspends daring guests in a transparent glass cube that projects out from Melbourne Skydeck, leaving them suspended nearly 300 metres above the streets of Melbourne”.

Taking photos from heights through glass windows in the dark really just makes for selfies, but I love the illusion that I’m sitting in the sky. Photo by Bree Harding

The cube sits on a carriage that glides slowly outward from the main building, to a soundtrack fit for a moment of movie suspense, and at first the floor is opaque.

I suppose it gives anyone with a fear of heights a chance to acclimatise.

I mean, even if you consider yourself not scared of heights, this little jutty-outty contraption might make you think again.

It did me.

Heights don’t bother me unless there’s no guard rail, nothing to steady myself on, or an absence of a harness snugly hugging my body.

In this little moving glass box I actually felt quite vulnerable and exposed, like I was in the middle of an oval in spring while a magpie dive-bombed me relentlessly; nowhere to take shelter, nothing to hide under, nothing to grab hold of.

So when the mood-setting sound effects chime in with a faster-paced and almost ominous tone and the floor’s opacity vanishes beneath your feet, you’ll probably feel that split second pang of fear, no matter how seasoned to heights you are.

It takes a few moments for your brain to remind you where you are and realise you’re not going to pin-drop to a concrete footpath 285 metres below.

It’s a great experience, but I wouldn’t call it relaxing.

Thankfully there’s a bar around the bend on the same level that makes delicious cocktails to calm thy nerves.

Cocktails to calm the nerves. Photo by Bree Harding

There are a couple of other things to experience at Melbourne Skydeck that we did not have time for (nor were we prepared to make time, aka sacrifice cocktails, for), including the multi-million-dollar Voyager Theatre.

It’s the first of its kind in, you guessed it, the Southern Hemisphere, and it takes guests on an augmented reality voyage through Melbourne and Victoria in super high-definition 8K video with six-dimensional sensory immersion.

Sounds cool, but it’s being shelved until the next time we find ourselves Sleepless in the City while the night is still young.