A Tale of Two Cities at War
Trip Start
Nov 08, 2003
1
31
74
Trip End
Oct 22, 2004
Melbourne,
Australia
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
Well, Sydney had the sights and Melbourne has the tag as the world's most liveable city, but who's the overall winner? We'll be the judge of that.
25/4/04
After dropping the van off in the very un-Australian sounding suburb of Brooklyn and waiting an hour on a chilly Sunday morning for a taxi, we finally jumped into the back of one heading towards the city
Flinders Street Station
. Another guy had been waiting for a taxi as well and seeing he was going our way we let him share the ride, well he shared the ride but not the fare as he jumped out in traffic near Port Melbourne with a quick thank you and an even quicker jog up a nearby alley. Blimming cheek.The $25 fare was left to us as we arrived at the Albany Hotel in South Yarra, a leafy well-off suburb just a mile or so south of the city. The hotel had recently been given a facelift of the trendy kind, especially the dining room which had white walls, white curtains, white tables, white chairs and a bowl of green apples to interrupt the glare.
Our room was big and clean with a TV, fridge and view of the car park, and after what seemed an eternity waiting in the cold for a taxi we fainted onto the bed for an hour's Sunday morning TV.
The blanket coverage on all channels of marching war heroes and the drone of old fighter planes overhead coinciding with the lack of taxis finally spelled it out for us, it was ANZAC Day.
A walk into town today would have been a bit difficult as our route would have taken us past a gridlocked Shrine of Remembrance so off we set in the opposite direction along Toorak Road and twenty minutes later we had arrived in Chapel Street, one of Melbourne's better shopping areas and home to cooler-than-thou Melburnites
Hang the architect
.At the crossroads of the two streets we popped into a 1950s burger joint called Soda Rock for burgers, fries and shakes before stepping back into the cold and a walk along Chapel Street's café-society crowded pavements past hairdressers, boutiques, cinemas and a nice-looking bedding shop that wins my award for shop name of the year, Holy Sheet!
As the sky grew darker and we grew colder we hot-footed back along Toorak with cold feet and into the welcoming arms of a warm hotel room for a night of reality TV to beat them all, My Restaurant Rules, The Block and American Idol. TV Gold.
26/4
After a filling breakfast of home-made muffins in the 'white room' we headed to the top of our street which led to the southern gate of Melbourne's 160 year old Botanical Gardens, and after a leisurely stroll through immaculate grounds of perfectly curved flowerbeds we found ourselves at the northern gate and the city itself was just a walk over the Yarra River
I call this 'Sunset over Melbourne'
.Before crossing the river we spied the National Gallery of Victoria which needed investigating and with not an admission fee in sight we waltzed in. After a fleeting visit to the Egyptian antiquities section for a potter through rows of broken pottery (Cleopatra and her cronies suffered from butter fingers) we made our way over to a temporary exhibition by Guy Bourdin. Like the true philistines we are, we'd never heard of him but his work looked interesting from the posters that were dotted around, and it must be said his work bordered on the contemporary and we had promised ourselves never to be seduced by the C-word again, but it was no use as we handed over our $10 admissions in a trance-like state while being sucked through the entrance by a projector beam of contemporary nothingness.
It was as expected with the pride of place being reserved for a continuous video of a scantily clad model from the 60s being thrown around on an exercise machine cum bucking bronco. Modern art at its confusing best, ingenious.
A short walk over the bridge and we were in the business end of Melbourne. On our left was the famous old Flinders Street train station and on our right was the soon-to-be-famous Federation Square but on we walked along Flinders Street past a stream of rattling trams to the Old Customs House which had been reincarnated as the Immigration Museum
Jana Pitman and Soph mingling with wildlife
. We had an interesting stroll through the different stages of the process seen through the eyes of various immigrants who had fled their homelands to escape poverty, conflict and persecution, and in the British people's cases, the weather.(True fact: To be a proper Australian city you must have an immigration museum, an old gaol (preferably spelt G-A-O-L), a museum of modern art, a botanical gardens and a central business district that consists of a rectangle of dead straight roads criss-crossing each other at right angles. Lack of just one of those and you're thrown before Aussie trade descriptions.)
Melbourne had all these so I wouldn't be reporting them and we headed deep into the shopping centre looking for weird and wonderful little shops but only found department stores full of assistants of the Mollie Sugden variety. It was getting a bit chilly once more and without the shelter of worthwhile shops to keep us warm we decided to find a cinema showing Kill Bill 2, and after a fruitless search around the town centre it was looking as if we'd have to go back to Chapel Road as we'd seen a cinema showing it on our travels the previous day. We boarded a number eight tram back to Chapel Street from Flinders Street Station shunning proper sightseeing for the afternoon with a trip to the cinema
Olde Worlde Tram
. With bellies full of Tex-Mex grub we took our seats at 6, watched a good film get progressively soppier and came out of the cinema to a steady drizzle, the type of which makes you wetter than jumping in a swimming pool, I don't know how that works either. Along the road was a bottle shop into which we dived for a few bottles of the local vintage before hailing a taxi for the trip back along Toorak to the hotel. It wasn't a great evening on the box but it became better after each glassful, and primetime viewing was 'Who wants to be a Millionaire?' although in English currency rates it would be 'Who wants £400,000' but it doesn't quite have the same ring. The quizmaster is Eddie McGuire, the president of the local Aussie Rules Footy team Collingwood, which is kinda strange, a bit like Roman Abromavich taking over from Chris Tarrant. Billionaire presents Millionaire. Although any Australian will be wondering what I'm going on about because Chris Tarrant is also a famous footy player for Collingwood . . . I've actually lost the plot of this whole paragraph now so I'll leave it there. Now what city are we in again?
27/4
After another nice breakfast of muffins (some we pilfered and snuck in our bag for lunch) we walked out into a sunnier Melbourne day once more heading for town on foot. Just to the side of the botanical gardens looking up the St Kilda Road towards the city, is the Shrine of Remembrance and with ANZAC day just passed we thought it'd be a good time to visit. It was certainly an impressive monument and the outside hid an equally impressive interior complete with stairs to the top for views of Melbourne and stairs underground to a crypt and small museum displaying works of art, both modern and old, and walls of shiny medals donated by relatives of soldiers who had passed away
On the Shrine of Remembrance
. At 11.25 a small service was held upstairs and we gathered around a stone slab with a poem inscribed onto it, and on the stroke of 11.30 a shard of light shone through a window above our heads and directly onto the word 'Love'. It's a minor miracle that happens each day the sun shines.Everything was really thoughtfully presented and we could have stayed longer but we had a busy afternoon of sights to see, so off we shuffled around the park being overtaken on all sides by fit young Melburnites power walking in their lunch break. Before long we were at the architectural disaster that is Federation Square, a mish-mash of glacial Lego bricks that had obviously been designed at the same time it was being built.
"How about a sticky outy glass block on the side of that other sticky inny glass block, Tarquin?"
"Hey Judey baby, how about we put glass doors everywhere to really confuse the public . . . and forget about signposts, they're soooo, like, yesterday".
It was as if the building had been built elsewhere and then dropped into place from a great height, dislodging all the blocks and cracking all the windows
Still can't escape
. Call me old school but it doesn't half jar against Flinders Street Station.A number of park rangers stood surrounded by inquisitive locals holding all kinds of creatures and on closer inspection the Healesville Animal Sanctuary had come to town to promote their wares. We'd already visited the sanctuary but couldn't resist another fondle of a furry friend or two. Victorian dignitaries mingled with the crowds including the tourism minister who was named John Papadapapapadapalos, but I could be mistaken, who gave a fact riddled speech on the joys of Victoria, and an Aussie athlete who I recognised as Jana Pitman, their 400m world champion, who stood by the side of proceedings serving as the event's eye candy. We joined in with the mingling ourselves as we stroked koalas and wombats, and observed from a distance the eagles and snakes.
Circling the rectangular city of Melbourne, if that's possible, was a free tram called the City Circle which we hopped on for a semi-circular right-angled trip to the north and a visit to the Melbourne Museum. We jumped off prematurely for a visit to the Princess Theatre box office to see if we could procure a couple of tickets for tomorrow's matinee of 'The Producers'. We'd heard good things from local press about the show and secured a couple of cheaper seats in the Gods for the following afternoon
The Botanical Gardens
.We continued our trip to the museum on foot and arrived at another angular, glass fronted building that had been built to the effect that it looked like one end of the structure was slowly sinking into the ground. It was a good first impression but from then on impressions took a turn for the worse (oooh, I'm such a critical critique). For a museum about Melbourne there were some tenuous links, and some of the exhibitions needed a good freshen up. The first room on Melbourne's lifestyle was pretty effective with a life-size 'Neighbours' set, a natty model of the Melbourne Cricket Ground and a typical school environment built from actual parts of an old college up the road. It was all pretty original if a bit rough round the edges, and subsequent rooms presented histories of diseases, aboriginal stories to keep their landlords happy, a famous racehorse who had died from mysterious circumstances and a graphic representation of how bodily waste comes to be, complete with sound effects. Maybe we'd been spoilt by a certain other city's museums but it all seemed a little tired looking to the trained eyes of a couple of professional museum worshippers like ourselves.
We continued our tour with a tram trip around to the west of town, skirting the new Telstra Stadium and a regenerated docklands, a must for any city, before arriving just before sunset at a certain skyscraping building called the Rialto Tower
Top of the world ma
. Can you see what it is yet? (Bit of Rolf for you there). Yep, it was time for another view from the great height of Melbourne's tallest building, and word on the street said you had to be up top at sunset so we heeded the word and shot up in a lift laden with our Oriental friends who were sweating like reformed addicts as they resisted their carnal urges to unleash their million Yen Sony ultra-zoomed, multi-faceted, feature-laden, tea-making, mega-pixelled cameras onto the dark insides of an elevator.Well what can we say, the views were . . . as expected. Blimey, I'm a tough cookie today. From the south we saw St Kilda and Port Phillip Bay, from the east we just made out the ridges of the Dandenong Ranges, from the north it was views towards the bush and to the west . . . well you got me there, but it was a long way.
Once our height fix was fed we headed back to base and dinner at a restaurant at the top of our road in an effortlessly well-to-do suburb called The Domain where prawn curries and canard avec pommes de terre dans un jus de vino rouge were downed in record time at a swish little bistro called either Café 182, 183, 184 or 185, anyway it was one of those trendy establishments who haven't the creativity to think up a name by themselves settling for the easy way out by naming the place after the street number (here I go again, I better go and have a lie down).
28/4
After another muffin fuelled breakfast we headed back upstairs for a lazy morning watching a new-found Aussie hero of ours, Bert Newton or Old Moon Face as the locals call him, who presents a morning chat show on Channel 10. His interviewees are generally from the theatrical stage and he's a genuine housewive's favourite who punctuates his interviews with quips and double-entendres that sail close to the edge of decency for that time of morning. Export him to the UK now!
Funnily enough he's a bit of a luvvie as well, and later on that afternoon we'd be seeing him on stage in 'The Producers' in the hilarious role of a Nazi. That'll take some doing.
So after our lazy morning we headed into town through the botanical gardens again and onto the free tram to the Princess Theatre where the whole of Melbourne's blue-rinse population were loitering outside in a zimmer-framed gridlock in readiness to see their matinee idol, Bert Newton.
The Mel Brooks penned 'The Producers' had been a multi-Tony award winning musical on Broadway with the lead role being played by Matthew Broderick. The question was whether these drama queens from Down Under could pull it off.
Three hours later from our back row seats it was safe to say it had been the best thing we'd seen on stage ever (I hate it when I have to write nice things). It was full of Nazis, gays and Swedish blondes, fun for all the family and Bert blew the audience away and had little old ladies fainting as he took the stage in his lederhosen in the role of a German pigeon-fancier who had written a dire musical called 'Springtime for Hitler' which turned out to be a Broadway smash much to the dismay of the two lead actors who were due to make a killing from it being a flop. Sounds dubious, but was hilarious.
From the theatre we walked to Lygon Street for a walk through Little Italy's endless rows of Italian restaurants before cutting through some backstreets and into the hippy-drenched area of Brunswick Street to the north-east of Melbourne where we stopped for superb pizza and pasta at Don Vincenzo's. Back in town we hopped onto our usual tram number eight and headed home for a night of Pop Idol, Oz-style.
29/4
It was our last day in Melbourne and once more we gulped down homemade muffins at breakfast and sloped away with hidden pastries and guilty looks. Today we headed south on a tram to the seaside suburb of St Kilda where we strolled along Fitzroy Street to the seafront with the fashionable eateries of Stokehouse and Becco, past Melbourne's very own Luna Park (apparently older than Sydney's) and into the main thoroughfare of Acland Street. It was a nice sunny day for a change and the area gave off the nice laidback vibe we were expecting as we sipped cappuccinos outside a backstreet café trying to blend in with the fashion victims of this out-of-town community.
Once we'd had our fill of St Kilda we ventured back into town for a look around an area to the south east of the city that was a suburb in its own right, Stadiumville. In a few square miles of prime real estate, a ten minute tram ride from the centre you have the Melbourne Cricket Ground, home to cricket matches and Aussie Rules footy; the Olympic Stadium of the 50s and now home to their rugby league team Melbourne Storm; Melbourne Park incorporating the Rod Laver Arena, home of the Australian Open; and the Vodafone Arena where numerous high-profile concerts are staged including Radiohead who were appearing that week.
Our planned trip to the much recommended Gallery of Sport was postponed as the MCG was in the process of being knocked down and rebuilt so we jumped on the nearest tram and somehow found our way back at the hotel to drink lots more Victorian wine and watch yet another of our favourite shows on Oz TV. You may have noticed we try to watch as much TV as we can when we have the opportunity as the long lonely days on the road in a TV-less campervan can take its toll on the malleable minds of the cathode-ray-tube tribe like ourselves.
The Footy Show is an off-beat couple of hours previewing the weekends Aussie Rules action. The host is . . . one guess? Eddie McGuire, our footy president quizmaster from 'Who wants to be a Millionaire', as there must be a real lack of good TV hosts in the country, but he does play a good straight guy to his co-host, Sam Newman, an ex-footy player and a genuinely funny bloke who pulls no punches with prima-donna players who come onto the show as guest reviewers. The other night he told a top player (A David Beckham equivalent) that his team were going to get stuffed the following weekend and it wasn't worth them turning up, and he was ultimately proved right. We could do with a Sam Newman on our own football shows, a refreshing change from the bottom-licking exploits of Messrs Hansen and Lawrenson. A natural comparison would be Gary Lineker laying into Emile Heskey ranting that he's an overrated muscle-bound lump who couldn't hit a barn door from five paces . . . hang on, he is an overrated muscle-bound lump who couldn't hit a barn door from five paces.
So the next morning we were on the road again for a 16 day drive along the Great Ocean Road that would ultimately lead us to Adelaide, but before then I know you're all dying to know who wins bragging rights in the battle of the heavyweights.
Melbourne has a very European feel, liveable leafy suburbs, a couple of good shopping districts north and south of the city, a sunny southern seaside suburb for townies to escape to for the weekend, some pretty good museums of note, a free inner city transport service, lots of green open spaces to exercise yourself and the pets, quality restaurants in scenic surroundings, a plethora of stadia to watch every sport under the sun and a climate to suit all - not too warm, not too cool.
So why do we still prefer Sydney?
We have no idea.
Maybe it's because we've lived in London so long we can relate to Sydney and its more urban feel compared to Melbourne's villagey atmosphere. I'm sure the majority of people who visit both may well opt for Melbourne's overall positives and ask us in ten years time and we'll probably plump for Melbourne, but for now, with our tourist's perspective, it's Sydney who wins by the width of a footy post.
Know-all & The Tele Addict
xx
