If you Google “Melbourne Sydney rivalry”, an option comes up “song”, and a 2015 story pops up from the Leader-Herald Sun website headlined “10 Great Songs About Melbourne.”

As journalist Caitlin Ryan gushed, you couldn’t compose such a list without a song or two from “the great Paul Kelly”.

“We all know Melbourne is better than Sydney, but in this track from 1985, he nails the divide,” Ryan writes. She then quotes “these classic lines” from Kelly’s song From St Kilda to King’s Cross:

I want to see the sun go down from St Kilda Esplanade,

Where the beach needs reconstruction, where the palm trees have it hard …

I’d give you all of Sydney Harbour (all that land, all that water)

For that one sweet promenade.

Australians living in places other than Sydney and Melbourne are probably long over the niggle between these two cities, and very happy to be where they are. But the competition between the NSW and Victorian capitals for who’s best and dominant has been going for 181 years, since 1837 when Robert Hoddle was commissioned to draw up a plan for a town on Port Phillip Bay.

Read the full story at theaustralian.com.au.