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.