Tag Archives: Architecture

Launceston. Not the one in Cornwall.

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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.

And that has been it for our time in Launceston. It has been a delight to walk around in sunshine, after what seems like an age of cold and wet weather. The forecast for tomorrow seems to return to some degree of moistness, but we move on towards the north-east corner of the island, near a town called Scottsdale. Some wildlife adventures are promised there, as well as some impressive-sounding landscapes, but, to be frank, we’re not quite sure how things have been organised for us. So, please join us over the coming days as we find out.
* © Chris Walker

Melbourne – Modern and Historic, Handsome and Scruffy

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Monday 2 September – Having escaped satisfactorily from Kangaroo Island, we now had to escape from Adelaide via a flight to Melbourne yesterday. The process of dropping the bags off was trouble-free, but on arrival at the airport security, it looked like it might take us some time.

Appearances were deceptive; the queue moved swiftly and we got through security smoothly. It helped that small liquids and phones could stay in bags and the only things that needed putting in separate trays were laptops and aerosols. Generally, I’ve been impressed with air travel within Australia.  We’ve used Qantas-based flights so far and their online check-in and at-airport bag drop processes have been well-designed and swift.

Our next flight will be Virgin Australia; I will report back on their User Experience.

The weather for the flight was largely cloudy, so there weren’t many aerial photos to be taken.  However, as we approached Melbourne, we got our first glimpse of the city

and I noticed that some areas appeared to be very densely-packed housing; so densely-packed that at first I couldn’t make out whether the objects were parked cars or houses. This, for example, is the Mt Atkinson area west of Melbourne. The houses appear to be really crammed together.

We had arranged to stay at a friend’s airbnb apartment in the Southbank area of the city, and accordingly followed instructions to pick up the keys at a local convenience store. The code number we had been told to provide proved to be “invalid”, and so there was a great deal of to-and-fro and sitting outside cafés drinking coffee whilst we waited for some kind of resolution. There had been a delay in the cleaners dropping off the keys and so we eventually got our hands on them and headed off to the apartment… where the keys we’d been given turned out to be the wrong ones.

Bugger.

To cut a long story short, we ended up staying the night in a hotel, the rather oddly-named but perfectly comfortable Mantra hotel, where we had an apartment. With milk in the fridge and Earl Grey beside the mugs. The fridge thing gave me an idea, so I went out to get some gin and tonic, which was available in a very convenient local grocery store. And so passed our first night in Melbourne.

A word about the weather, here: we had been booked on a “moonlight kayak tour” on the Yarra River which runs through the city. However, as the exceedingly lumpy but nicely-handled landing at Melbourne showed, it was very windy, and we’d received a message apologising for cancelling the kayak tour. As it happened, given the difficulty with the keys, it was just as well.

Yesterday’s kayak tour was supposed to be our first real glimpse of Melbourne, but the weather put the kybosh on that. We had a three-hour small group walking tour of the “Lanes and Arcades” of Melbourne booked for today, so this was now our chance to get a flavour of the place.  We headed to the meeting point in Federation Square,

where it was reasonably easy to find our guide, Isabel, who was wearing a very distinctive yellow beret. Imagine our surprise, however, when the other members of the “small group” turned out to be Stephanie and Garret, an American couple who had been, alongside the Great Danes, our companions on our Kangaroo Island tour! Life is enhanced by such coincidences.

We actually passed some interesting sights en route to the start of our tour;

Striking building exterior

Melbourne Arts Centre

View across the Yarra

Federation Square is just by St. Paul’s Cathedral

and Flinders Street Station, which is an impressive building (more pictures of it later).

There had apparently been a move to replace the clocks in the picture above with something more modern and, well, operational, but the outcry ensured that the classic clocks remain there above the station entrance.

As in Adelaide, there are many handsome buildings in Melbourne, although everything is more densely-packed and the high-rises rise higher and overwhelm the smaller, older buildings more.

Above is the old GPO building, now owned by H&M. Alongside it is a very narrow alley

which even though it’s had eateries added along its length, shows the scrapes of the old horse-drawn carriages along the side and the warnings about the devil motor car.

What has been done well is to keep the facades or exteriors of some of the more notable buildings, such as the old post office building above, and also to keep as much of the interior as makes sense.

Here’s another example.

A mall off to the side of The Block, a very handsome arcade,

features some great mosaic work

and is generally very photogenic.

It features the oldest tea rooms in Melbourne, called The Tea Room 1892. I wonder how old it is, really?

The Block is also home to L’Occitane, which has a wonderful hand-painted ceiling.

Another very handsome arcade is the Royal Arcade.

Isabel also showed us into the Manchester Unity Building, which has a sumptuous interior

and surroundings

including Melbourne’s first-ever escalator, originally installed in 1932 to much excitement and lining up for a ride.

We had a very engaging chocolate tasting in The Block, at a specialist boutique called Mörk (Swedish for “Dark” – the operation has a Swedish connection in its ownership)

which, apart from very delicious hot chocolate drinks, offers some unusual variations on chocolate flavours.

Blue cheese Caramelised Yuzu, apparently

As well as the handsome buildings, many of which could do with a bit of a tidy-up,

Isabel showed us some of the street art. We saw one or two larger installations

and there are many more of these around the city; but we didn’t have and won’t have time to explore these. What we saw was much smaller-scale and very much less formal.

Caught them at it!

It’s difficult to distinguish between what’s art and what’s graffiti, which is why I say it’s informal – we even saw a couple of guys adding their last touches to something or other. One of the best-known streets for art is Hosier Lane, which is either a riot of colour or a complete mess, depending on your point of view.

I’m sorry I couldn’t do more justice to Hosier Lane, but it was hurling down with rain at this point, making photographic essay work somewhat unrewarding.

A side note: we returned here later at night, having met a friend for cocktails, and walked through an after-dark Melbourne to get back to the apartment.  As we walked down Hosier Lane, we were passed by a van with a pressure washing trailer.  We chatted to the two guys operating it, and they had been given the job of removing some of the graffiti towards the bottom of the street. The plan was to paint it over with black, and their view was that it would last maybe a couple of hours before someone started daubing again.

STOP PRESS

The black area is still there. We discovered this on the way to meeting other friends for lunch. We found some more street art en route, and so the complete set of photos of it is on Flickr.

We also saw a couple of inexplicable installations on Russell Street

and some nice brass work in the paving outside city hall.

The after-dark walk enabled a different perspective on Melbourne.  Flinders Street Station’s impressive building

is quite something else when lit up.

Federation Square

and the view over the Yarra

also look very different after sunset, as does the Arts Centre.

Sadly, we’re not likely to get more time to explore Melbourne; I feel we haven’t been able to spend long enough here to get to grips with the place at all. But it has been interesting to see what we have seen, despite some very poor weather. Tomorrow we have an all-day outing, and the day after we have a lunch date with friends, and who knows what state we’ll be in after that. I will, of course, report back, and I hope you’ll visit these pages again to find out how everything unfolded.

 

Wandering around Adelaide

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Thursday 29 August 2024 – We’ve been in Adelaide now for two and a half days, having arrived off the Ghan on Tuesday morning. The train was a great experience, on several levels – relief at being able to cope in a small cabin, excellent sights and scenes on our excursions and great food and service from the crew, who all worked really hard to make sure that people enjoyed themselves as much as they could.

So, as we pulled into Adelaide at around midday, we said our farewells to various people that we’d met and talked to on the train, disembarked and linked up with our (very chatty) driver, Alan, as we waited for the suitcases to arrive.  When they did arrive, there was the usual feeding frenzy as people lunged for their bags,

but we got ours quite quickly, and Alan ferried us to our hotel,

where thankfully there was a room ready for us. And I have to say how much I enjoyed having lots of space once more; we had a substantial and very well-organised room on the 18th floor. It even had kettle and milk and so we were able to have a Nice Cup Of Tea as we pondered what to do with ourselves during our time in Adelaide; we actually had nothing formally organised and so had the rest of the day and two more full days at our disposal.

So we went for a lot of walks. Obviously.

Over the last two-and-a-half days, we’ve covered about 30km as we explored the city and the various aspects that interested us. I could bombard you with the photos we’ve taken, but that would make for an exceedingly long post, so I’ll summarise here and point you at albums on Flickr should you wish to see a greater range of photos. Basically, though, we’ve really enjoyed our time here – Adelaide is a lovely city to walk around.

One of the attractive things about it is the old, colonial-style architecture, with elaborate ironwork decorating many buildings. There are also many impressive edifices squeezed (rather like London) between more modern skyscrapers. Here’s a taster.

You can see a whole lot more of the photos in this Flickr Album, which covers the main part of the city.  North Adelaide features a couple of streets with several notable buildings in them, and we made this the special destination of one walk, which yielded several more photos of this traditional architecture.

We came across a lot of murals as we walked around.

More of these can be found here on Flickr.

One particular installation is worth picking out, though, something just behind our hotel.  It looked like just this wall above a mural

but closer examination showed that it had model vehicles of all types stuck to it

in their thousands!

Yet again – Why? Who?? How???

There were lots of other things to be enjoyed as we walked around – the Central Markets, some other street art installations, the interior of the Catholic Cathedral, the Botanic Gardens and more.

The laughing chap above is one of Australia’s greatest comedians, Roy Rene, later known as Mo, some of whose catchphrases entered Australian vernacular: “Don’t come the raw prawn with me” is one of the best known. The Australian entertainment industry’s annual award for excellence in live performance is named the “Mo Award” after him.

The Palm House in the Botanic Garden is a restored Victorian glasshouse imported from Bremen in Germany in 1875; it arrived prefabricated but almost all the glass was smashed in transit and so new glass had to be fitted in situ!

The Queen Victoria waterlily, a native of the Amazon, is the second largest of all waterlilies and has huge leaves – these in the Botanic Garden were easily 1 metre in diameter and it can grow much bigger.

We found some amusing uses of the language.

There’s lots more photos here on Flickr.

We had more amusement looking out for the name of Polites. I first saw this word writ large on the outside of a building near our hotel

and wondered what it meant.  It turns out to be the name of one Constantine Polites, a Greek man who grew up in poverty but worked his way up into being a major property tycoon in the city; every building he bought in the Central Business District (CBD) featured his name. Some still feature it and we had fun looking out for them – Toujours Le Polites!

Near the Botanic Gardens is the Botanic Park, and Jane had read that it might be possible to see flying foxes – fruit bats – there.  So we included this as we walked back from North Adelaide. And, indeed, you can see some fruit bats there.

Lots of them.

No really, lots.

Apparently this colony migrated from Eastern Australia as its food source dried up there and found its way into Botanic Park. There are between 20 and 40,000 of them to be seen! We spent a good few minutes watching them as they flew about

and I took some video of them as they squabbled among themselves about the best place to hang about.

The last thing we did was to catch the Adelaide tram down to the seaside suburb of Glenelg. (We nearly didn’t catch the tram because at the first stop we awaited one I’d failed to notice that there was no weekday service.) It was mentioned as being worth a visit, and so we walked around it, obviously; but we were out of season, and so it wasn’t really at its best. It has a smart town hall

but the beach is a bit weedy by the jetty (well, we think it’s seagrass, actually, which is a good thing if somewhat fragrant)

and is still a work in progress elsewhere.

It’s very clearly a seaside-y sort of place

which seems to be waiting for the season to get under way.  There are some cute touches

some posher bits, such as the Marina Pier,

and, clearly, a heavy investment in Norfolk Island Pine trees,

but it was pretty quiet. I can imagine it’s more lively once spring moves towards summer.

So that is Adelaide in a nutshell. We’ve really enjoyed walking around and taking it in, and it’s been really nice to be able to decompress in comfort after the cultural and touristic overload of the Kimberley and the Ghan.

Tomorrow we’re back on the Relentless Tourism Treadmill as we head to Kangaroo Island, and I’ll try to keep these pages updated as we dive back into the maelstrom of our great Australian Adventure.