Spooked out on the William Barak footbridge

It's taken three days to do a diary, and it's not that Melbourne is dull – far from it, in fact. But what can you really write about a beautiful city with a bright and humble skyline, naturally built for walking, home to more cultures than is generally thought, where everything seems to work, the queues are orderly, the people mostly polite, the electricity on, and water can be had from the tap? Only the weather is tempestuous.

There was a certain drunken weekend boorishness to proceedings in the city centre over Christmas and that can be intimidating if you're not drunk yourself, or new. I'm told it's harmless, and I think most of it might be good-natured, but there is a fine line to these things. And as I walked down the spookiest bridge I've ever walked down, late one night, with a man of no hair and much drink jogging to nowhere in particular along the same path for much of my journey, I shivered and scuttled a little. Newspaper headlines about attacks on Indian students here.

The William Barak footbridge improves the link between the MCG and the Rod Laver arena to the heart of Melbourne CBD (Central Business District). Barak was an early, influential aboriginal advocate for social justice, and also an artist; the 525m bridge named after him is actually is as pleasant as things of concrete can be.

But the sound installation project Proximities, conceived as "a sonic corridor of human voices" for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, as you walk across gives it a different feel. There are 56 speakers in all, each with different voices, sounds and music, literally culled from around the world; Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, indigenous sounds from within Australia and New Zealand. But the thing is, at night, if there's no one else on the bridge, the mesh of sounds is disorienting and worrying, especially if your ears are not attuned to some of the sounds. Noble it is, but spooky it can be.

Drink and public behavior are issues du jour. Launched at the MCG yesterday was the "Know When to Declare" campaign, a bid to get people to control their drinking during the cricket. It'll take a little time if the woman who lurched into an MCG lift, loudly and screechingly convinced that Hollywood actor Jack Black was in it, is anything to go by. A local spectator said generally drinking among younger folk has increased and is a problem. Perhaps, says another voice, it just gets more media attention now.

Is an echo to be found in the public worry over the Australian team's poor behavior on the field and in recent years?