Our flight to Melbourne took five hours and didn’t land ’til 11pm local time. There’s a three hour time difference from Bali, so it felt more like 8pm to us. Probably just as well: we’d not wanted to be half asleep while passing through Australia’s famously rigourous immigration and customs checks. No worries though: we declared our Balinese tea and the soil on our shoes and though we were sent down the red channel we weren’t held up for more than a couple of minutes.
We used Uber to get downtown the next morning, and our driver was just about as typical of an Aussie as you could imagine. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes before the Pommes were being regaled with everything we could possibly want to know (and quite a lot we probably didn’t) about footie (that’s aussie rules) in the greater Melbourne area, and the famously fickle Melbourne weather. We got a great intro to the city and some general slagging off of Sydney. He even diverted a couple of blocks from the most direct route so we could see some of the recently-developed docklands area.
Our accommodation in Melbourne is a 1-bed apartment on the 57th floor of a 65-storey block on Collins Street just north of the Yarra river. The view is nothing short of spectacular.
For our first afternoon in Melbourne we joined the I’m Free walking tour. We’ve done these tours in a few other cities around the world, and it’s always proved to be a good introduction to a new city.
The first half of the tour covered the history of Melbourne, from the dealings of a very enterprising Tasmanian farmer by the name of John Batman – who “bought” the land on which Melbourne now stands from the Aborigines – to the arrival of the Brits, the establishment of the independent colony of Victoria (using the name of the Queen is always good way to get her approval for your plans), and finally the gold rush and the rapid growth that followed. There’s never been a great fire of Melbourne, so there’s original architecture all over the city, much of it designed and built by Italian immigrants.
Our first stop on the tour was Melbourne Gaol, the one-time home of legendary Aussie bush ranger (and mass murderer), Ned Kelly. As we have since discovered, there are several versions of Ned Kelly’s story (indeed, four different movies have been made on the subject), but our guide certainly seemed to favour the more fairytale (and perhaps apocryphal) version of events, where Ned is compared to Robin Hood.
Further north, we wandered through Carlton Gardens, home of the Royal Exhibition Building, one of the first locations for the World’s Fair (also held in London’s Hyde Park, and in Paris, with Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower as their respective centerpieces). This became the first building in Australia to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status.
(One of the many themes of the tour was the great rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, and as a proud Melbournian, our guide took every opportunity to point out occasions when Melbourne has got the upper hand on its more internationally-acclaimed neighbour.)
Several of the trees in Carlton Gardens have a wide plastic band around their trunk. Our guide sincerely explained how these bands prevent Melbourne’s notorious and vicious Drop Bears from climbing up the trees and dropping down onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by. Although only a couple admitted to it, I am pretty sure nearly the whole group (myself included) were hanging on every word… but it turns out that Drop Bears are a Melbourne legend which the locals like to perpetuate in celebration of the fact that every visitor to Australia expects there to be a deadly animal around every corner!
For the second half of the tour, we skipped a century and were introduced to modern-day Melbourne including a look at some of the best of the city’s street art.
The tour finished opposite Flinder’s Street Station, on the south bank. Here we saw Arts Centre Melbourne, quite an unremarkable building except for the Eiffel tower having apparently been dropped onto its roof. The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), Etihad Stadium and Melbourne Park (home of the Australian Open Tennis) are all a stone’s throw from here, so the tour concluded with a bluffer’s guide to Melbourne’s sports teams, including the city’s 10 (yes, ten!!) AFL teams!
