By Michelle Griffin
Will jazz hands and show tunes persuade young American backpackers to come to Melbourne?
Tourism Victoria's latest promotion is a YouTube video ditty performed by a Canadian blogger and a cast of local amateur musical buffs, who dance and sing through the city singing its praises in harmonies that would fit right in on the geek-pride US television show Glee.
Tourism Victoria hired biology student Mitchell Moffit, 21, last year to compose a Melbourne tribute in song and dance after his unsuccessful musical audition for Queensland's "Best Job in the World" on YouTube made headlines around the world.
Moffit and his sister Kim, 26, were flown to Melbourne last July on an all-expenses research trip, and the young would-be performer was loaned a digital camera and recording studio when he returned in September to make his video.
Have your say on the video here
Melbourne, Australia — The Musical was only uploaded to YouTube last week, six months after it was filmed. In scenes reminiscent of Channel Seven's long-running Hello Melbourne promotions of the 1980s, Moffit sings his way through the city's laneways, around the Royal Exhibition Building, over Fed Square and into the Butterfly Club, a cabaret venue that recruited several of the hand-waving cast.
Lyrics are vague on Melbourne's particular charms, although "the museums, the culture, laneways galore" get a mention, as does "a game of footy and a meat pie".
Instead, the city is celebrated with classic musical lines such as "Melbourne! Don't want to leave it, cause it's Melbourne! And it brought us here, together, our lives for ever more".
While Tourism Victoria will be hoping for the video to go viral, 10 days after it was uploaded to YouTube it had clocked up just over 1000 views.
But Moffit's musical video arrives amid good news for Tourism Victoria, with figures showing the state is attracting more overnight international visitors than the rest of the country, with 30 per cent of tourists coming to state in 2009.
A Tourism Research Australia's International Visitor Survey showed Victoria's tourism industry was outperforming every Australian state with the number of overnight visitors increasing by 3.5 per cent, compared to the national average of 0.2 per cent.
While the baby-faced Moffit waxes enthusiastically about Melbourne in song and on his blog, he wasn't persuaded to move here. The man who originally wanted to live in Queensland to escape the Canadian cold is now studying at James Cook University in Townsville, and posting photographs of himself swimming between classes.
Perhaps we shouldn't have flown him here in July.
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