Tag Archives: Street Art

Auckland – Ambling, Art and Architecture

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Wednesday 11 February 2026 – The internet is a great and good thing and even social media has its good side, despite what The Mainstream Media would have one believe. Having said in public (i.e. this blog and Facebook) that I wasn’t sure what we’d get up to today – our last day in Auckland – given that the city, whilst a pleasant place, hasn’t got a huge list of must-see items, I was deluged with suggestions. Well, a couple of friends piped up, anyway. Waiheke Island was one of the suggestions, and indeed we had considered this. It’s well known as a wine destination, and a decade ago, the words “ferret” and “trouser leg” would have sprung to mind. However, neither Jane nor I drink wine these days, so that isn’t a particular draw any more. There are all sorts of other exciting things to do there, like ziplining, but somehow these weren’t much of a draw either.  Another suggestion was the Tiritiri Matangi Island Nature Reserve, which had actually been on our original idea list until Jane spoke to them and they pointed out that it would be overrun with a conference and school trips today. We also had a recommendation for the Antarctic Adventure at Kelly Tarlton’s, but we’ve actually been to Antarctica, so weren’t sure how much we’d enjoy that. And among all this cogitation, Jane had discovered that there’s an area to the south of the city, based around Karangahape Road, which features street art, something we’re both interested in seeing.  So, that was what we decided we’d do.

However, despite eye-rolling from Jane, I insisted on adding another destination to our ambling around, because I’d been cleaning my teeth with a handraulic toothbrush for the last two days and really wasn’t happy about that, so wanted to find yet another store that might stock what I wanted. Pathetic, I know, but I really thought that finding a Sonicare toothbrush head for sale in a major city shouldn’t be a problem. It turns out that it is. Rather like my brother in search of a mobile phone SIM on one of his travels, I have been mildly obsessed with trying various establishments that might stock such a thing. Without success, as it turns out. So, reluctantly, after today’s abortive excursion to Warehouse Central, I capitulated to fate and bought a cheapo battery toothbrush that I hope will do a satisfactory job. En route there and back, we passed the former Auckland Civic Administration Building

which has now been developed into apartments, but which still has on its side the rather handsome Auckland coat of arms*

featuring Kiwis Rampant.

Our shopping done, we could head to Karangahape Road and start fossicking about looking for the various bits of street art on display.  Our route took us through Myers park, a pleasant and quiet green space

which has an attractive play area for the kiddies

and a statue of Moses for the grown-ups.

As we approached the exit of the park we came across the first piece of street art.

and soon emerged into an area where a lot of work had been done with a lot of spray cans.

The passageway shown in the last photo above was extravagantly decorated all the way up the steps

and led to an arcade, called St. Kevin’s Arcade. No, really. It even has it own website. It’s a colourful space

and debouches on to Karangahape Road, which, it quickly becomes clear, is a very hippy area.

We pottered up the road a bit and looked into the Symonds Street Cemetery, because Jane has a bit of a thing for cemeteries. It’s a substantial one, with, as one might hope, an air of calm about it.

The cemetery is split into various areas

with the Jewish section being the nearest to Karangahape Road.

There’s an installation in the nearby Pigeon Park

which is called Karangahape Rocks; I suppose you’d expect that a hippy area rocks, wouldn’t you?

We kept going for a bit, crossing over the motorway via a bridge so that we could see one picture that takes up the side of a building

and probably looked a lot more impressive before the trees grew up to obscure it. And then we were off on the trail along Karangahape Road and some side streets in search of various bits of art. We found quite a lot of it. And we also noticed some really rather attractive architecture as well. Auckland is a relatively junior city, having been founded only in 1840, and there have been waves of architectural styles sweeping across it in the last 20 years; many of them can be seen in this area.

So here are a couple of galleries, one of the art we saw and the other of the architecture, colonial, deco and modern, that is sprinkled around the place.

First, the art:

Then, the architecture.

Pretty much the final thing we saw was an advertisement as well as a piece of street art. The advertisement was for AT – Auckland Transport, and was a long mural.

As you can see, the mural is of a train, with a variety of fanciful passengers shown in the windows, with doors periodically along it. What marked it out was that two of the doors occasionally (and prompted by what, I don’t know) actually opened!

So, well done to AT for exploiting the zeitgeist of the area with imagination and humour.

It was a happy couple of hours wandering around seeking out and photographing these scenes. As well as the visual impact, we also, of course, experienced an area of the city that is radically different from the somewhat effete downtown and waterfront areas. The Karangahape Road is more scruffy, more raffish and more colourful, and it was very interesting to have walked around it. It was quite a ramble!

 

We relaxed for a short while back at our hotel before heading once more towards the waterfront in search of sustenance.  We found it in the shape of Dr. Rudi’s Rooftop Brewing Co. Booking was not possible but we managed to find a shady space on the terrace and we were allowed an hour there before a private function took over the space. Dr. Rudi’s offers a modern dining experience – QR codes to view menus, order and pay. The website was split into various sections: food, wine, cocktails, etc. And the cocktails section was, one might say, Rudi mentary – it had the glaring omission of a simple G&T. How modern is that, eh?  Jane was able to order her Hugo Spritz OK, but I had to go to the bar to ask for my arcane and, I might add, expensive specialty drink to be prepared, which took a while.  The food was good and tasty, but I can report that they have an odd idea of what shape a pizza should be and also of what actually constitutes chorizo. Nonetheless, we were well fed up and were able to exit gracefully just as they were about to clear the area, and tottered back to the hotel to begin our preparations to depart on the morrow.

Auckland has been a splendid introduction, to the country and to being back on the road. We’ve had a couple of days to work our way into the feel of the place and to get over our jet lag. Tomorrow, we pick up a hire car and head off into the wilds of the Coromandel Peninsula. Stay tuned to find out how that all went, won’t you?

* Auckland’s coat of arms was adopted in 1911. Its arms consist of a cornucopia (‘horn of plenty’), reflecting the wealth of the land; a pick and shovel, symbols of mining in the region; and a sailing ship, showing the city’s close relationship with the sea. The closed visor in the crest represents Auckland City’s status as a corporation and the flowering plant is native flax. The supporters are kiwis (the national bird), and the motto is ‘Advance’.  https://teara.govt.nz/en

Interjection – completing the Melbourne staff work

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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.

 

 

 

 

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.