Wednesday 4 September 2024 – For subscribers, or those reading through these pages sequentially, this entry will likely cause some confusion and I apologise for that. This page is about our last full day in Melbourne, which I accidentally forgot to write about at the time, possibly in the excitement of discovering the unusual way that Virgin Australia was buggering us about in regard to our forthcoming flight to Tasmania.
One of the great things about our time in Melbourne was – like our plans for Sydney and Brisbane – a chance to catch up with friends whom we hadn’t met for many years. The centre piece of today was A Nice Lunch with Sharon and David, a couple we had met on a walking holiday in Slovenia back in 2016; we had shared a house with them, walks up hill and down dale with them (lots of that in the Julian Alps in Slovenia!) and many laughs over lunch and dinner. We knew they lived in the Melbourne environs and so were delighted that they were prepared to do the slog into the city to share a lunch with us.
The venue was the Flower Drum, in Melbourne’s Chinatown, and a decent walk for us from the hotel. The walk gave us an opportunity to seek out some more of the various bits of street art that can be found in the city streets. On the way, we passed this sign
which might be said to sum up Australia – but only in a lovingly joking manner, you understand.
We revisited Hosier Street
and discovered (as reported earlier) that the painted-over artwork was still surprisingly unredecorated.
There was some grand statuary outside the Grand Hyatt hotel
and we passed the very attractive St. Michael’s Uniting Church.
Jane had discovered other corners to look for murals.
For lunch, we headed into Chinatown
and had a delightful couple of hours with Sharon and David, catching up on the intervening years since we last met. On holiday While travelling, one meets many people, but it’s rare to form a lasting connection with fellow travellers, and it was lovely to find that this connection was still strong.
After lunch we needed to go for a walk. Obviously. We passed Parliament House
and found many more decorated buildings to gawp and attempt to photograph.
There was some great decor to be admired
and – possibly – a genuine Banksy!
This was alongside some other stencilled-type artwork.
On the way back to the hotel, I managed to get a reasonable photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral,
some nice mosaic artwork by Flinders Street Station
(sadly, the chap wasn’t about to leave; I think he was a bouncer) and some more building decoration on the way back to our apartment.
So ended our last full day in Melbourne, and a very pleasant one it was, too. The plans for the morrow were simply to get to Hobart in Tasmania, which we achieved, but not without, as I’d mentioned earlier, a frisson of frustration courtesy of the Virgin Australia ticketing system. To read all about that, the narrative continues here. Meanwhile, I’ll get back to our time in Brisbane, if that’s all right with you. Sorry for the interruption of the otherwise smooth flow.
Monday 23 September 2024 – It turned out that the plans that Lorraine and Paul had laid for our last full day in the Sydney environs involved going for a walk. Obviously. The plan was to walk from Manly to Spit Bridge – right circle to left circle
but not in a straight line; rather via the Clontarf headland. This was not a circular walk, so Paul drove us to Seaforth, just to the left of the left-hand circle, and we took the bus down into Manly. The buses, like the trains and the ferries are (a) cheap and (b) well-organised; using phone or card, one could just tap on and tap off, and the charge for the trip was Aus$1 – about 50p.
Clearly, to undertake the walk, we needed to be fortified by a robust breakfast. Fortunately, L & P had a plan for that, too; frukost på Fika – breakfast at Fika, a Swedish café in Manly. (Fika is a Swedish word to convey the idea of having comfy coffee and cake in a café)
I was particularly taken with the decor in the loo. A quick shout-out to Topaz photo software here. I didn’t realise at the time, but the photo I took of the decor was very out of focus (I was in a hurry and didn’t check the photo there and then as I didn’t want to be seen as as a man who takes photographs of toilets). Up to now, an out-of-focus original has been basically a lost photo, but with modern technology and processing power, errors from photographer incompetence can sometimes be rectified.
Original out-of-focus picture
Sharpened version
The building next to Fika is rather nicely turned out.
and there were a couple of other nice arty touches on our walk through the town
to Manly cove (the other side of the North Head peninsula from the famous Manly Beach).
The start of the walk offered a nice view across to South Head – you can see the Macquarie Lighthouse and the Signal Station.
One of the nice things about walking around these areas of Australian cities is the individuality of some of the houses;
another is coming across things that seem a little counterintuitive.
Apparently, they get Little Penguins here at some times of the year. Not today, though.
The vegetation offered some excellent frames for the lovely views we saw as we walked.
North and South Heads as seen from Manly Cove
One of the great things about Australian beaches is the routine inclusion of ocean pools to supplement the open water swimming available. This is the one at Fairlight Beach, the next one around from Manly Cove.
We came across a couple of fearless sulphur-crested cockatoos as we went along the trail;
for some reason they had markings on their backs
though we don’t know why.
The coastal path we were walking involves a lot of up and down, so I was glad that the weather was benign and not too hot. Climbs were rewarded with some great views across various parts of Sydney Harbour, as well as back towards the city.
At one stage, there were petroglyphs beside the path. Some were reasonably easy to comprehend;
some less so.
(Upside down kangaroo? Really?)
A well as scenery, there was wildlife to admire – a couple of Australian Water Dragons, of reasonable size.
(The one above was actually quite reluctant to get out of the way of the people walking the path, which I found unusual – normally, lizards shift themselves swiftly as humans approach.)
The up-and-down continued
as did the views, which had some sensational colours,
and we passed some formidable rock formations.
A very photogenic corner,
and two sorts of housing: spacious, refined, all mod cons
and less so.
Shortly afterwards, after all the ups and downs of the coastal path, we reached Spit Bridge
which was our planned destination. Trouble was, we were at sea level, and the car was
up 154 steps, so there was one more climb to do. The view at the top was worth it, though,
and you can see, on the right of the photo, that the Spit Bridge is a lifting bridge, something I didn’t know until today.
It was a great walk, just over 11km, or 7 miles,
and, as I say, quite up and down.
Normally, on a 7-mile walk, I’d use about 700 calories; this walk used over 1,200; but it had everything – sunshine, coffee, views, wildlife, historic petroglyphs and lots (and lots) of steps; an excellent day.
Tomorrow, we have to leave our friends in Belrose, but we head further north, to see friends in Brisbane. We have a few days there, so I’m hoping we might get to see some nice scenery and maybe some wildlife. Who knows what the coming days hold?
Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.
So we headed for the ferry and queued up
to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline
North Sydney
and, of course, its iconic structures.
Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,
something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken. Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island: Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently. Watsons Bay is an attractive place
with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.
One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location
is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,
and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.
The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse
with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.
One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.
The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),
who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.
Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.
We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,
and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,
which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building
and what we think were once gun emplacements.
There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra
who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and
inspecting tourists for food value.
We also spotted this dove
which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.
The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.
There’s a historical memorial there, too;
the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks
in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.
first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.
Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.
Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage
and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.
One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry
back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple
and I suppose this one
must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.
The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park
with some remarkable trees
The tallest palm tree I’ve ever seen
and a few quirky sculptures.
My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.
He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,
an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.
By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,
to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos
and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.
Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.
Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?
