As it is, now, suddenly and officially Christmas Eve here in the Melbourne city centre, the hostel here has offered a $50 all-you-can-piss booze cruise, apparently with 250 attending. People often say there is little to do in small towns. I suppose this is some of the teeming multitudes that cities have which small towns don't.

No, tonight I'm not so inclined. I've never had to choose what to do for Christmas Eve. For 23 years in a row, I've been with the fam, and it's always been pretty automatic from there. Since this one will be different, I fancy this Eve' to be rather a night to smoke a cigar and puff smoke rings for Santa to fly through while he guides his reindeer in between skyscrapers on his own round-the-world tour. As it stands that I do not have a cigar, instead I look out at the neon corporate badges of the city-scape of Australia's second-largest metropolis while drinking a Coke.

I stare out a bit longer. Santa is late. He'll never get around the world in time at this pace. Maybe all these people in the business center have been naughty this year. Surely there must be an altruist among them. Surely.

Impatient, I glance back down at my Coke can. Yet Santa does not come. Perhaps he's waiting for me to find a cigar. While contemplating this, I reflected on a chat I had with a Kiwi in Port Douglas. An honourable guy, he brought up the fact that he didn't understand why people lie as freely as they do - to their friends, family, and even children. The Santa Claus example naturally came up. He said he would never tell his kids about some mystical fat man that snuck into the house one evening to surprise them with gifts for the morning. He felt this was implicitly teaching kids at a very young age that lying, or at least deception, was okay. My parents felt the same way. To this man, being truthful was a very basic tenet of morality, and one that was very easy to follow.

At the time I couldn't really articulate any response, but now looking out this high-rise window I recall a few things of interest about the Lie. Such a powerful word isn't it? All of these skyscrapers. No one works there now, on Christmas Eve, yet some 50 floors each are all lit up at night for the security cameras. Ahh, the myth of energy conservation. A lie. What about the lives people lead in these buildings? Are they good lives? Some, certainly. Others, certainly not. Which lives are lies? When does deception, or even self-deception, become a lie?

I suppose the conundrum doesn't come down to avoiding lying - this is almost impossible. The ideal is finding and resolving the lies that bury themselves unnoticed inside us.

With a shudder, I turn away from the window. It's almost time for bed, but before I turn in, there is one more detail worth mentioning. Melbourne in many ways comes across much like any other city, but it is at least a city with an air of artfulness and intelligence about it, rather than the iodized mass that Sydney impressed upon me. Proof rests, as it does more often than you might think, in the bathroom stalls, whose collective scrawlings here have sparked more inspiration than some collegiate lectures. This evening, por ejemplo:

LOVE THE LOVE
LIVE THE LIFE

... which was accompanied by the response:

WHY ALL THIS ENDLESS POSITIVISM?
ARE YOU ALL BLIND OR SOMETHING?

There's nothing quite like the realization that you're sharing the same cramped space where both neohippies and quasi-French philosophers once "took care of business." But back to business, as per a life's philosophy, which is the lie? They can't both be true.

And what of Picasso's definition of Art - the lie that tells the greater truth? Should some lake monster be nothing more than the product of fanciful imaginings, or worse, blatant hoaxes, is it just a lie and nothing more? Or is it a lie that tells us something? You might guess my opinions on the matter.

Perhaps all of this prelude on lies is just preparation for the entry ahead. It is, after all, about time I updated you on the history and cultural influence of the Bunyip...