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.
Thursday 19 September 2024 – Stop Press! Virgin Australia managed to get us from Canberra to Sydney without buggering us about! Another Saab 340B flight, uneventful except for a very lumpy descent into Sydney (possibly the most turbulence I’ve ever experienced in an aircraft), saw us on the ground, met by our driver and transferred in very short order to our hotel past a bit a street art that I don’t yet understand.
Our room wasn’t ready, of course. It was only midday by this stage, so this wasn’t a surprise. Official check-in time was 3pm, and so, having handed in our bags for safekeeping, we had three hours on our hands, the sun was shining and the temperature was warm. So we went for a walk. Obviously.
Actually, this was very convenient, as it gave us a chance to find out about a couple of transport options – train and ferry – that we would need to use over the coming days. The train bit was easy to understand, but the ferry timetables and destinations much less so; the map said that ferries that we were interested in taking went to one destination, the timetables insisted they went elsewhere. Our puzzlement was evident from our body language, which attracted one of the local Redcoats – volunteers patrolling the area to help bewildered tourists. It was nice to chat to him, but less comforting to know that he, too, found the ferry information confusing.
It was good to re-acquaint ourselves, after nearly a quarter of a century away, with Circular Quay, probably the principal tourist area of the city.
An aboriginal chap regaled us with chanting
as we walked along, heading for The Rocks, with its jumble of older buildings
and its views back towards the city,
Circular Quay,
and over to the iconic views of the city: harbour bridge
and Opera House.
It’s a very photogenic area, looking towards Luna Park fairground and North Sydney.
We could also see Sydney Tower, which was called Centrepoint when we visited it on our last trip here.
The date of that visit is memorable: twenty-three years ago, we’d just emerged from three days on a luxurious train journey from Brisbane, entirely insulated from the affairs of the world. It was a shock then to find out that the unexpected extra security measures in place for our visit to the tower were a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, which had happened just the day before.
We stopped for a bite of lunch and then headed back to our hotel, the Intercontinental, where our room was ready. The view from our 21st floor room was excellent,
but we had little time to enjoy the view as we had to get ready to go out for a late afternoon/early evening rendezvous with an ex-colleague friend whom I hadn’t seen for many years. We had agreed to meet in Newtown, a short train ride away.
Although it’s close to the city centre, Newtown is not a place where you’ll find lots of tourists.
It’s, erm, “vibrant”; lively, and a bit scruffy, and – at least for the bit we walked along – practically wall-to-wall eateries and drinkeries.
Our rendezvous was at the Newtown Hotel
which is a splendid building with quite a noisy interior (with a few artistic touches)
and a balcony, where we could sit and have a drink.
It was a good venue for meeting someone I hadn’t seen for many years and her husband, who we met for the first time. We had a grand chat for a couple of hours before they had to go for a family event and it augurs well for the next few days, where – here and in Brisbane – we’ll be meeting friends we haven’t seen for some while; it’s rather nice to be able to indulge ourselves with travel and simultaneously keep in touch with friends in far-away places.
After our drinks, we pottered back to the station
past reminders that not everyone is as fortunate as us
and, having taken one last look at Luna Park, now illuminated in the dark,
turned in for the night. We have nothing formal organised for the morrow, but our chat this evening has given us one good idea for somewhere to go that looks like it could be an interesting excursion. Come back and find out where that was, won’t you?
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.
