Cork Tree plantation at the Canberra Arboretum

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

January 31, 2014 in Travel, Landscape, Museum

We spent Christmas 2013 in Canberra visiting my family, which we've done several times since they moved there from NZ. Canberra isn't really a big tourist destination, and after visiting half a dozen times I'm not really sure what to visit anymore. The National Museums are very good however and worth repeat trips.

The only really new activity we did this time was a couple of visits to the Canberra Arboretum, which is a giant tree plantation on 250-hectares of land that was completely burnt out in the 2001 and 2003 bushfires. I've seen the site driving past on previous trips while it was being planted, but it only opened in February 2013 and is proving to be a new drawcard for tourists and locals. The very large site includes plantations of 100 different blocks of different trees and 100 gardens, as well as long walking, biking and horse riding tracks.

The Arboretum was actually quite nice to walk around, despite the lack of shade provided by mostly baby trees from the hot Canberra sun. There are also two plantations of older trees spared by the fires, including these Himalayan Cedars and Cork Oaks planted under direction from Walter Burleigh Griffin, the original city planner of Canberra, and namesake of the big lake surrounding the centre of town. The Cork Oaks were particularly interesting as they are still regularly harvested for their bark (which makes cork, duh), giving dark lower and pale upper trunks.

One thing that I do most times I go to Canberra is to visit the Australian War Memorial Museum, which is an impressive monumental building with a very good collection of military hardware and stories from both World Wars, as well as Australia's other engagements. The WWII aircraft are my favourites, including some of my favourite planes like the P40 Warhawk, and a massive Lancaster bomber named 'G for George' with associated sound and light show every hour! We were at the museum for closing time, where they perform the Last Post ceremony every day including a story about one of the 102,000 names inscribed on the roll of honour.

Wide Brown Land and the Black Mountain Tower in the background

Melbourne Beaches and Buildings

January 22, 2014 in Travel, City

Following on from the previous post... we had another couple of days in Melbourne after NYE and my birthday, and plenty of activities to occupy our time. One day trip we made which was particularly interesting was out to Brighton (Dendy St.) Beach in the south of the city suburbs to check out the famous colourfully painted beach huts. We actually went to St. Kilda first, thinking the huts were there, as images of the huts seem to always crop up in the tourist literature about St. Kilda! After some quick research figuring out our mistake during a cafe breakfast, and picking up some giant baked goods from one of the famous St. Kilda cake shops, we braved a local bus to get us a few more beaches down the road.

Arriving at the beach, we first sat down to test our bakery treats... unfortunately it seems they were baked for their impressive size rather than flavour, something only tempt the tourists perhaps. Or at least that was the case at the shop we visited. Not recommended, and in fact we finished neither our giant custard square nor our giant éclair. The cakes were disappointing, but at least the beach was not! It has one long row of 82 huts down a quite skinny beach, all painted in bright colours and some with interesting patterns or paintings of wildlife, kangaroos, space invaders, or Australian flags. The huts are now a valuable icon of Melbourne, and sell for up to AU$200k each, despite having no amenities or running water... literally a shed on the beach! The council even proposed to build 6 new ones in 2009 to raise $1 Million in council funds. To keep them locally owned, you may be a rate paying citizen of Brighton to buy a hut.

Other than our beach trip, we spent quite a lot of time just walking or tramming around the city looking at things. Of course I had to visit the main Melbourne Cathedral, in order to add to my collection of pipe organ photographs. This wasn't the biggest or most impressive compared to old European ones, but it was still nice, and makes for quite a cool photo with the horns poking out at the bottom I think.

I really enjoyed seeing the old Melbourne architecture spread around the CBD. We stumbled across some interesting buildings, such as the ANZ bank branch still in an original colonial building, with it's grand foyer and central teller island. If I lived in Melbourne, I would be sure to use that branch... almost makes it worth a special trip instead of doing it online! There were lots of other buildings like this we didn't get to go inside, including many old grand theatres. Auckland City has the Civic theatre I guess, and maybe the ferry building, but that's about it as far as interesting old architecture in town! Melbourne is certainly more interesting in that respect, and had the best collection of old architecture I've seen outside of Europe.

Some of the new architecture however left a bit to be desired. The many skyscrapers in the CBD were par for the course in any large city, but one thing I didn't appreciate was one of the 'shard' buildings on Federation Square, which was a direct ripoff of the Judisches Museum in Berlin, one of my favourite buildings! I had to stop and check on the internet to make sure it wasn't designed by the same person (Daniel Liebeskind) but it was not - my outrage was justified, they just made a poor copy rather than design their own building. Federation square as a whole I didn't find too bad, but supposedly the architects who designed it didn't get any more work for some years afterwards! That was hearsay, but fun to assume it is true so I'm not going to fact check.

That's about it for Melbourne. I'm afraid I didn't actually get many good photos given the rich environment, but I still had fun exploring around. My usual slow process of wandering around and following my nose for photos isn't really practical with other people as they quickly get annoyed of alternately backtracking, going in circles, and standing still for extended periods! But Melbourne is definitely somewhere I'd like to visit again.

Melbourne New Year

January 17, 2014 in Travel

I'm still a couple of days of photos behind schedule from Berlin, but I've gotten bored of those temporarily, and thought it best to move straight on to our xmas holiday trip to Australia. We visited my family in Canberra for Christmas, but Canberra isn't a particularly pretty looking place and I hardly took out my camera save for some trips to the 'Arboretum' which may crop up later. On the way home we visited Melbourne, which was really interesting. I hadn't been there since I was about 12yrs old, so it was pretty much new to me. We have a friend living in Melbourne, who Abby visited last year, so she at least remembered where to go and navigated us around pretty well.

I really liked Melbourne as a city for walking around. It's all laid out in a convenient grid pattern, it's reasonably flat, there is really good public transport on the tram network, and best of all it is full of interesting old buildings and architecture mixed amongst the modern boring office towers. There is also a lot of street life and things going on in the city... maybe not everyone would appreciate the number of homeless people and buskers, and the odd pepper-spraying, but at least it isn't sterile and boring. I don't do a lot of classical 'street photography' of people, but I see Melbourne would be a pretty rich hunting ground for someone like my friend Sven...

The 2nd of January was my birthday, so we made a trip on the tram to the suburb of Fitzroy for breakfast, where the most interesting collection of shops, crumbly buildings, and most importantly, cafes, is to be found. One other thing Melbourne has going for it is a cafe culture similar to Auckland, where you can find pretty good coffee, even to my standards.. There are bad ones around as well, and in Auckland too, but at least the hit rate is miles higher than most places I travel to... looking at you, USA!

After breakfast, we wandered around Fitzroy looking at the buildings and attempting to visit the (closed) Centre for Contemporary Photography. Failing that, we went back into town to spend my birthday afternoon at the National Gallery of Victoria. There was an exhibition on of the photographer Edward Steichen which I particularly wanted to see, and also a large and quite good collection of European paintings and sculpture.

National Gallery of Victoria - bucket dome thing

The coolest thing I saw in the first couple of days was the Latrobe Reading Room in the public library, which took a little bit of exploring to find, but i'm glad we did. I spent quite a while walking around in there, and up and down the stairs to the different levels taking photographs. I'm not convinced it was a very efficient use of space as a reading room, but at least it looked cool! And a good example of the old and interesting buildings scattered all over Melbourne. Parts of it remind me of New York, both the public library and the city centre as a whole, just on a smaller scale with an Australian accent.

I always enjoy wandering around new cities looking at stuff, and Melbourne was really good for this! Lots of variety, interesting buildings and people, and great transport. Some more photos from Melbourne to come next time, but that is plenty for one day.

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

Melbourne Beaches and Buildings

Melbourne New Year

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