Wednesday 25 & Thursday 26 September 2024 – Our departure from Belrose was also a departure from my habit of taking a taxi to the airport. Lorraine and Paul warned us against trying to convince a taxi company reliably to send someone into the northern wilds of the Sydney suburbs, so we took our first-ever Uber. We had a very pleasant drive with, at the wheel, a lady who was a Brisbane native and who was therefore able to give us a few thoughts about Things To Do In Brisbane. The traffic was a little heavy, and the journey to the airport took about an hour, but we arrived on schedule, with plenty of time before our flight’s departure; and in a thankfully undramatic departure from their established norm, Virgin Australia got us from Sydney to Brisbane without any form of buggering us about. My friend Phil was waiting there to take us to his place, which is in Red Hill, the area of Brisbane next to one called Paddington.
I’ve talked before about connections; thus far it has only been about those formed with fellow travellers. The one between Phil and me is a lot deeper; we have been friends since babyhood. His family emigrated to Australia in 1967 as “ten pound Poms” (a phrase our Uber driver was so young that she’d never heard it, by the way), but Phil and I stayed in contact by letter over the years and met occasionally, as time, location, circumstances and finances dictated. Right from the first time we met again, which was in 1974, it was clear that the friendship had survived; that encounter, and every one since, has been a source of great pleasure.
Phil has a lovely house, which was originally a Queensland workman’s cottage and which, in true Australian fashion, was transported in one piece to its current location. It’s “upside down”, meaning the bedrooms are on the ground floor and the living space upstairs, and this makes great sense, given the usually hot Queensland climate; the downstairs rooms are the cooler ones, and it leaves a grand upstairs deck. Rather magnificently, the deck has a tree growing through it,
which provides shade for those sitting out on the deck with a glass of something cold, which was us, quite a lot of the time.
The Red Hill/Paddington area is an interesting one to walk around and so, for the first couple of days, and, with Phil and his insightful commentary, that’s what we did. Obviously.
The Queensland workman’s cottage vibe is something that is evident over the whole area that we strolled around.
Most of them are well-maintained and in very good nick and some
have been quite considerably extended.
There’s a variety of approaches to decor, from nice paint jobs and interesting roof tiles
to more elaborate flourishes on the larger buildings.
As well as the timber cottages, there are more substantial constructions
and some nice use of street art on the outside of some.
This, for example, is the local cinema
and it’s not just the front of the building that’s been decorated.
If you look at the left hand picture above, you can see that the area is not necessarily flat and level. The gradients of some of the hills are simply breathtaking,
so walking about is akin to a major workout at times,
but the area’s location does mean that you get some superb views over downtown Brisbane.
So steep that handrails are needed to help you walk up it!
Among the many coffee bars and restaurants there are some interesting shops
Short Bach and sides?
and other little artistic touches.
The trees lining the roads make the streets very attractive,
and there’s one majestic specimen which is at the top of a hill
making one (OK, me) grateful for the shady seats in which to take a breather – and watch the laughing kookaburras which had come to laugh at us.
In the centre of Paddington there’s a building which used to be a theatre
now repurposed to house a huge variety of stalls selling antiques, bric-a-brac and a whole variety of other things.
Some angles give away the theatrical origins of the building – you can see the proscenium arch here.
Some wag in the local authority had had the idea to make a “Kooka Trail” around the area, presumably intended as a distraction for kids, but also valuable for the entertainment of passing photographers.
though I prefer the real thing, which we saw in various places, including near Phil’s house.
Apparently, kookaburras have been absent in recent years, and they’re only now making a reappearance. I like them, so was glad to be able to see (and hear!) them.
After two days and 11km of walking around this delightful part of the city, it was a pleasure to be able to sit on Phil’s deck with a glass of something cold as the sun went down
This describes our first couple of days in Queensland. We had two more days before heading even further North! and I’ll tell you all about it – some other time.
Wednesday 18 September 2024 – Given that we had the day all to ourselves and that the weather outlook was decent, I doubt that many of my loyal fans, such as you, dear reader, will be surprised to learn that we went for a walk. Of course we did.
Jane had, of course, done her preparation, and so we had a general sense of which direction we would head out in without actually having any real knowledge of what we’d see. I’d read and heard that Canberra is an odd place because of its provenance – a city custom-built between Sydney and Melbourne, to shut down the late 19th-century arguments the two cities were having about which should the capital of a newly-federated Australia. Canberra was formally declared as the capital on March 12, 1913. This is going to be a long enough post without my going into its location – where aboriginals had lived for 21,000 years – or how it got its name; its Wikipedia entry is a good source for those seeking details.
I have to say that in the initial stages of our walkabout, the place did feel weird. Looking at the street layout, it’s quite clearly a confected city.
City Centre streets
Government Area streets
It has many architectural flourishes and artistic touches which don’t quite gel into a place with a soul. It’s interesting to walk round, though.
The first place we explored was City Hill (centre of left map above). It’s not much of a hill, but it’s been planted with conifers and a sodding great flagpole, flying the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) flag.
On the hill’s periphery, there’s the Canberra Centenary Column
which contains a time capsule containing 100 representative items of Canberra’s history. A lot of thought has been put into alignment of things.
Wanting to walk around the city, we found our way to City Walk in the hope that it would be helpful in shaping our strolling. To get there we passed the Melbourne Building
which, completely unsurprisingly, given Canberra’s provenance, is opposite a mirror image of itself called the Sydney Building. Both buildings have a nice cloister along the sides
and the Sydney Building even has a Tardis halfway along one side,
though quite why I’m not sure; a couple of locals walking past it were puzzled – clearly not Whovians.
Although most of the people we saw seemed perfectly affluent, it’d clear that not everyone is comfortably off.
Generally speaking, the buildings in that area are functional, rather than photogenic
but we passed many artistic installations of various sorts as we walked along.
Pavement mosaic
Road crossing
We found murals in a couple of places
though there were many unofficial additions to the originals.
There were also many floral touches.
OK, I’ll confess: we did have a specific objective to include in our walk, as the hotel receptionists had told us about it when we checked in. We were lucky enough to be visiting Canberra when Floriade, the biggest celebration of spring in Australia, was on. There were pointers to it all over the place
and so we made our way to Commonwealth Park to see what it was like. It was lovely. If you like tulips, it was positively orgiastic.
There were some non-floral artistic touches on display
An entry into the Gnome Knoll competition
There were various stages (yes, there was a Tulip Stage among them); on one of them, a bunch of kids were singing
to an audience, who were sometimes joining in
each in their own key, of course.
There were many retail opportunities
the most striking of which, for us as UK residents, was
Christmas items. Perfectly normal here, of course, but I don’t associate celebrating spring with celebrating Christmas, so I was a bit startled.
One retail opportunity was, however, right up our street.
so we popped in to try a few samples.
After Floriade, we turned our steps towards what is pretty much the city’s raison d’être – the government centre. We could see bits of it across the lake from Floriade.
Our route there took us past the Cook Memorial Globe
beyond which we could see that, sadly, the Cook Memorial Jet (i.e. fountain) was not operational today. The globe is a detailed piece of work, showing the routes that Cook sailed in his explorations from Plymouth
and around Australia.
The Government Zone has many imposing buildings,
National Library
Treasury
and, of course, the Parliament Building on Capitol Hill (which is not much of a hill either, to be honest)
with its very dramatic, though somewhat leaky roof.
OK, it’s not really the roof, it’s just a, erm, well, how would you describe it? [ An over-the-top flag holder? – Ed ]
We did go up on to the real roof, from where we could see the old Parliament Building
with a bloody flagpole in the middle of the bloody view (grrr!). A further piece of designed city alignment here – as you can see, the route from old to new Parliament buildings aligns exactly with the peak of Mount Ainslie.
The inside of the new Parliament Building is quite impressive,
(I sneaked a look through an open door and saw that there was a massive piss-up on the cards in the near future)
and, outside, the alignment and symmetry continue.
We had passed by the Old Parliament Building on the way to the New One, but its rather lovely garden was full of schoolkids on an outing. In fact, I think that Wednesday must be National Schoolkids Visit Government day, because there were several parties of schoolkids all over the government estate. However, they’d left the gardens by the time we passed by going back, so we could see (and smell) the fantastic wisteria that was blooming there.
We saw some birdlife in and around these gardens. One bird I saw walked like a pigeon, but Jane thought it couldn’t be one because of its crest.
Google Lens showed us that there is, after all, a (rather alien-looking) bird called a crested pigeon. Sulphur-crested cockatoos were in abundance – probably loathed by the locals, but for us a lovely sight. We spent several happy moments stamping around after them to try to get one to show us its crest.
Hurrah!
And so, some 11km later, we arrived back at the hotel, having had a very engaging walk around Canberra. Yes, the bits we saw felt a bit odd, because it’s a confected city, but it was very interesting to see it; and Floriade was lovely.
We only have the one full day here. Tomorrow we travel to Sydney.
Well, we might.
Virgin Australia, who have managed, in ways both large and small, to bugger us about for every flight we’ve taken with them so far, have warned us that high winds are expected and this might affect our travel. Listening to the wind whistling round us on the sixth floor of the hotel, I wonder indeed what outrages outages we might expect tomorrow.
Thursday 12 September 2024 – Long post alert! Time to get a drink and settle down, I think.
Our task yesterday was quite simple – get ourselves from our Peppers hotel in Cradle Mountain to one in Launceston, some 150km away. With no excursions booked at the far end, we had the rare luxury of a relaxed schedule; Jane had found a couple of Things To Look At en route, one of which closed at 3pm, but we had plenty of time. Strolling over to breakfast took us past yet another pademelon
(which you can see was soaking wet from the ceaseless rain) but otherwise the morning was unremarkable.
Since kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, pademelons and quokkas are so similar in overall appearance, Jane did a bit of research to try to understand how to tell them apart. It turns out that the only obvious criterion is size. There is a bewildering variety of subspecies of each animal, but the only way to tell many of them apart is by examining their DNA, which is complex. So: size, it is, then. Consider the whole macropod phenomenon to be several varieties of quopadewallaroo.
As we set out, we passed through a landscape that could have come from the blasted heaths which make up the army-controlled areas near Aldershot.
Otherwise the landscape continued to be wet and marshy, and occasionally mountainous
as it had for what seemed like several days now. We stopped to admire the scenery caused by the Cethana hydro electric works
and also to look at a couple of murals plastered on the outside of a hydro-electric facility.
I’d have got better photos, but the layby was being actively used by some very large lorries which were attaching and/or detaching huge bits of plant machinery on trailers, so our freedom of movement was not what it might have been. But the point of the murals is important; they are part of an expanding project started in the nearest town, Sheffield.
During the 1980s, Sheffield was going through hard times. At a public meeting in 1985, the idea of painting murals around the town was proposed, with the hope of emulating a similar program’s success in the Canadian town of Chemainus. From this idea, a mural by John Lendis was commissioned, becoming the first of now several dozen murals in the town. There is even an annual Mural Fest, with a mural painting competition that gives nine new installations an airing.
Street art such as this is catnip to us on our travels, so we stopped there and went for a walk. Obviously. The town is a pleasant enough place anyway,
but it’s unique because everywhere you look, there are murals, and it makes for a splendid sight.
By the visitor centre is an area – Mural Park – with lots and lots all set up together.
I don’t want to bore you with all of the photos I took, but you’re welcome to overdose on them in my Flickr album if you’d like. But one of those in the Visitor Centre area display is worth pulling out.
It’s a picture of Greg Duncan in front of a section of The Wall, the astonishing installation he has created that I wrote about a couple of days ago. If you didn’t read about it then, shame on you – go and take a look. NOW!
By the time we’d reached Sheffield, the countryside had changed; we were driving through farmland. It hadn’t quite stopped raining, but the landscape was more open and bucolic and a lot less wild.
We had planned to stop at a steam engine museum in Westbury, but we had spent so much time in Sheffield that it had closed by the time we got there. However, seeing Sheffield was a delight and I’m glad we did spend time there.
Our destination, Launceston, was not much further on. We arrived at the Peppers Seaport Hotel in mid-afternoon and were awarded a splendid apartment, with kettle, mugs, Earl Grey, milk in the fridge and – praise be! – laundry facilities! “These things are important, you know”*.
The Seaport in the hotel’s name is a nicely gentrified area
which features many eateries, among them the rather oddly-named but very decent Rupert & Hound, where we availed ourselves of such local produce as Gummy Shark, which goes nicely as part of a fish’n’chip meal, and then retired for the night.
That was yesterday, Wednesday 11th. Today, we had a full day in Launceston with no activities or excursions formally booked. So when we woke up to find that
the sun was shining brightly, we sprang out of bed with a song on our collective lips and went for a walk. Obviously. In fact, we went for two walks, because Launceston (pronounced “lawn cess ton”, by the way, not like what they do in Cornwall) has a variety of attractive things for walkers to walk around.
To start with, we headed for Cataract Gorge, through which the River Esk flows. There are very well-organised and clearly marked trails along each side of the river, and we headed for the one that started on the far side of the Esk, the Cataract Gorge trail. To get there, we crossed King’s Bridge,
passing a sort of adventure centre with accommodation, created and run by Penny Royal.
There’s a water mill there
and various other entertainments
including a cliff walk which requires you to get a safety harness so you can navigate the cliff face. We didn’t do this. We just went for a walk beside the river,
which one can now do free of charge, but for which there used to be a toll, payable at the toll house.
It’s not called Cascade Gorge for nothing,
but the cascades are not the only attraction along the walk. The views are quite nice, as one might expect,
and after a kilometre or so, one reaches a suspension bridge which allows one to cross to the other side.
Careful examination of the photo above will reveal that there appears to be someone suspended in the middle of the bridge. This is an illusion caused by the presence of the slowest chairlift in the world, in which one can ride in a very leisurely fashion, from one bank to the other. To get to the lift station on our bank (in pleasant gardens, with a bandstand and a cafe, albeit not open today as this side of the river was suffering a power outage!), we passed a peacock and several wallabies
and gravely allowed the attendant to explain how to get on the lift for the ride without mentioning the several hundred chair lifts I have ridden during my skiing years. The chair may be slow, but it does have the distinction of having, at 308 metres, the largest single span of any chairlift in the world. The ride down gives a nice view of the suspension bridge and the park on the other bank.
The park features a café, which we stopped at for a coffee, before exploring the suspension bridge further,
Looks just like Bristol, don’t you think?
and then heading back towards Launceston along the Zig Zag Trail, which is clearly signposted as being “steep – hikers only”. And with good cause, too;
the trail climbs a good 80m before descending 100m to King’s Bridge. En route, we got a good look at a Tasmanian Nativehen (called a “turbochook” by the locals, apparently)
and a curious crystal formation on the rockface.
This is zeolite, a hydrated alumino-silicate mineral, rarely seen in such an accessible site, probably derived from molten magma associated with the cooling rock.
We also got a nice view over Launceston,
at around the same place as we passed a group of climbers who were, erm, climbing the rock.
As we headed back to the hotel, we noticed that the mural virus had spread to Launceston; the wall surrounding the King’s Park beside the hotel was decorated
on both sides,
although the picture above does seem to be of more informal decorative work.
By this stage we’d covered about five miles, but we still hadn’t explored the city of Launceston itself. So we went for another walk. Obviously.
Heading into the city, we passed the Custom House
and could see a huge brewery.
This is James Boag, which produces beer that’s very popular in Tasmania, although it’s not a major player in the overall Australian beer market. As we passed it, a chap sat on a bench recommended a visit, which seemed a good idea. But first we thought we’d explore the Tramway Museum (Launceston had a tram system between 1911 and 1952, apparently). We headed off to where Google told us it was and pretty much failed to find it. We eventually realised that we’d actually walked past it at about 3pm
but it was closed, despite a notice telling us it was open until 4pm. We did find an old tram station, though – Inveresk Launceston.
By this stage, the brewery seemed an attractive idea, so we walked past the vast array of buildings that it is comprised of and went into
The Brewery, where we were able to sample various of Boag’s beers,
and visit the Brewery Museum. This had pretty much normal brewery museum-type stuff
with a couple of exceptions. One was a photo of the vermin elimination machine
which was always called Oscar, whichever gender it happened to be, and whose vets bills were passed off in the books as repair costs for the machine. The other was a mystery object.
It’s called a Meteorphonium. It’s a musical instrument. No, really. Please spend a minute watching a very charming video about it. (Sorry, for technical reasons, I can’t embed it here. Grrrr.)
After this refreshing interlude, we walked around Launceston in order to take a look at the old buildings for which is well-known. We started by going past the Albert Hall
towards the City Park
(note how the brewery dominates the skyline). The park gave us an opportunity to get a closer look at Masked Lapwings
which have really spooky faces
but very cute chicks.
Then we walked along Cameron Street, where most of these old – and very attractive – buildings are.
The Post Office stands out particularly
and one can go in; but although they’ve kept a lot of the fabric of the original building, they’ve filled it with a modern post office in a box, which I think rather ruins its interior charm.
Of course, not all the buildings are old or attractive,
but we enjoyed looking around the parts of the city that we saw. And the beer was quite good, too.
We ended our walk with a meal back at Rupert & Hound, a choice of staggering unoriginality but one which gave some confidence of a decent meal.
So steep that handrails are needed to help you walk up it!
