Exploring Australia 13: Sydney 1

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Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

People make a great fuss about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, but as an interested visitor I can’t see what’s not to like about either.  It’s like knowing two very different siblings, appreciating their qualities and tolerating their differences.

Sydney has the unrivalled advantage among world cities of its commodious and varied harbour, more intriguing than San Francisco, more complex than Hong Kong.  It also has organic growth, having been improvised from the original First Fleet settlement: there are axial streets in the centre, but the place doesn’t have the rigidity of the gridiron plans of Melbourne and Adelaide.

On my first morning in the city, venturing from my hotel downhill towards the station, looking for a laundrette, I felt I could easily be in a British city, negotiating streets that crossed at angles and investigating side-roads with obviously ancient names like “Reservoir Street”.  I was staying on the neighbourly Surry Hills (spelt as Jane Austen did), only a short walk from the Central Business District.  It’s a borderline backpacker’s district, and in due course I found somewhere within walking distance and entirely acceptable to have breakfast, Strawberry X [1a/23 Mary Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 – now closed], and somewhere to have an evening meal, Good Morning Saigon [127 Liverpool Street, Sydney, NSW 2000], and returned to both each day rather than eat my way round Sydney.

A harbour cruise is surely the way first to see Sydney, just as the ferry across the Mersey is the best introduction to Liverpool.  With the blue sky reflected in the water it’s idyllic.

I’d made careful advance plans through my travel agent, having missed the Vatican on my first visit to Rome and Alcatraz on my only visit so far to San Francisco:  I was determined not to miss the Sydney highlights.

Locating the Magistic Cruises [http://www.magisticcruises.com.au] vessel on King’s Street Wharf in good time gave me the opportunity to ride the vessel round to the Circular Quay and back, taking photos from an empty deck and being almost first in the queue for the buffet lunch.

When I went back on deck I found a lady with a head-microphone and a Russian accent setting up stall to guide her group.  Gradually the place filled with Russians with beer bottles and loud voices, who spent much of the time photographing each other standing in front of the sites.  When things quietened down I asked her if they were working her hard and she smiled ruefully.  I said it looked like herding cats, and she thanked me for the phrase.

At the end of the cruise I joined an APT city-tour [http://www.aptouring.com.au/content.asp?Document_ID=80563#nsw] in a coach driven by Scott:  I wish I could guide as sharply and precisely as Scott did while driving a bus in heavy traffic.  He took us through the city-centre out to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, carved for a governor’s wife on a promontory overlooking the harbour, to Watson’s Bay and The Gap overlooking much of the outer harbour, and then to Bondi Beach which is as splendid as you’d expect from any surfing movie.  The tanned and bleached jeunesse d’orée were impressive, but what impressed me most was the history behind them:  standing proudly on the foreshore is the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club (1907) [http://bondisurfclub.com], the founding association of technical beach lifesaving.

I’d booked a bridge-climb tour, but I took one look at the Harbour Bridge and decided that there was no way I would climb that thing in such heat.  There is a constant procession up and down the outer girder, and I imagine it’s a tremendous buzz to stand at the top, but the tour takes three and a half hours and involves a lot of exposure to the sun.  The breathalyser test and the long climb I would willingly have dealt with, but for me the clincher was that cameras are understandably not allowed, in case they drop on the traffic, trains and pedestrians below.

The Bridge is of course magnificent:  curiously, the steel structure – the so-called “coathanger” – isn’t actually supported by the stone piers;  it’s free-standing, and the piers, while supporting the carriageway, provide visual balance to the whole design.  It was designed by Dorman Long, Middlesborough, and much of it was fabricated in Britain:  construction took from 1923 to 1932.  It’s interesting to compare it with the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle (1925-1928):  spans – Sydney 503m/Newcastle 161.8m;  height – Sydney 139m/Newcastle 59m;  length – Sydney 1,149m/Newcastle 389m.

Exploring Australia 12: by rail from Melbourne to Sydney

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Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Taking advice from the invaluable The Man in Seat 61 website [http://www.seat61.com/Australia.htm], I’d booked an ordinary economy ticket for the train from Melbourne to Sydney.  The Man in Seat 61 points out, and illustrates, that the seating is identical in both economy and first.  My fare, for a twelve-hour journey, was A$110.70 [approximately £70].

Although the incoming train arrived and departed an hour late and lost a further half-hour getting out of the Melbourne suburbs, the on-board service compensated for the genuinely unavoidable delays.  The female train captain made meticulous announcements after every stop about the continuing delay, sometimes as little as seventy-odd minutes but usually ninety.  Each time she apologised, citing a signal failure on the incoming journey and track maintenance “which is necessary for your safety and comfort”:  I assume also that our train had lost its path, as railwaymen say, and was fighting against other traffic running to time.  We arrived at Sydney Central at 9.30 pm, exactly twelve hours after our departure from Melbourne.

The buffet car was a dream, with efficient staff and meticulous PA announcements.  The idea of a “Devonshire cream tea” (the complete tea, jam, scones and cream version) as a mid-morning refreshment took a little time to sink in.  Otherwise, decent airline-style cooked meals, interesting orange and poppy-seed cake, reasonable tea and excellent coffee filled the intervals of the day.

This was the most visually interesting journey of my odyssey across Australia.  The landscape was verdant heading east out of the state of Victoria.  We passed Australian backyards, small towns fronting on to the railway tracks and farmyards.  It was noticeable that the sheep stations loaded their stock on to road vehicles, not the railway line as they do in the more remote areas of Western and Southern Australia.

Some stops stood out as landmarks on the journey:  Seymour, clearly a historic railway town with a large steam museum, a town which I thought by the PA announcement was called Manila or Vanilla but turned out to be Benalla, a place with the strange, delightful name Uranquinty and the major settlement, Wagga Wagga, which the locals call “Wogga”.  Some railway stations have original or authentic signage at Junee and Moss Vale – “Ladies’ Room” and “Telegraph Office”.

After Junee the entire character of the journey changes.  The line becomes double track, and crosses the mountains by wiggling up and down hills continuously:  there is hardly a straight stretch for many miles, and often the line ahead is visible at right angles to the direction of travel.  At one point the two tracks diverge wildly, crossing and recrossing at the Bethungra Spiral.

This is working rail travel.  Passengers got on and off at each stop, unlike the set-piece Great Southern luxury trains.  The largest and loudest man in Australia helped fellow passengers with their puzzle books, in between phoning his relatives ahead with repetitive news of the delay.  I chatted to a young man from Surrey who was working his way round the world driving combine harvesters in preparation for managing his father’s farm on his return to the UK.  Outside the window, train-spotting kangaroos sat by the track, with that odd limp-wristed stance as if they’ve just finished washing the dishes.

The arrival into Sydney Central, cathedral of the age of steam, is an apt overture to a great city – an engaging contrast with the airy, modern steel and glass of Melbourne Southern Cross.

A nice taxi driver took me on a brief tour of Sydney before depositing me at my hotel, which I discovered the following day is three minutes’ walk away.  At that time of night, after twelve hours on a train, I’m more than happy for someone to hump my luggage and drive me around for five minutes for A$8 [about £5].

There’s a well-edited 2018 film of the northbound daylight XPT journey at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMztI752wWI.

Exploring Australia 11: Rippon Lea Mansion

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Rippon Lea Mansion, Melbourne, Australia: fernery

Rippon Lea Mansion, Melbourne, Australia: fernery

Because I was in Melbourne on my own, I chose to avoid the obvious tourist sites that I might visit with other people, and sought out the quirky places where I wouldn’t dream of taking folk who don’t share my interests.

I spent half an hour photographing the late nineteenth-century housing around Albert Park, with characteristic filigree cast-iron lace verandas manufactured, so I’m told, from the ballast and scrap of ships that ended their days in Melbourne harbour.

I spent an hour in the Melbourne General Cemetery, a hot and unshady place, where the Necropolis Company has clearly done a roaring trade in narrowing the paths, so that ranks of ostentatious Italian black-marble family tombs stand in front of older, more English monuments, and there is, near the modern funeral chapel, an astonishing grotto in memory of Elvis Presley, inaugurated barely three months after the singer’s death in August 1977.

Most enjoyable of all, and prompted by Gabriel, the Victorian aficionado I met on The Ghan, I visited a Victorian Victorian mansion, Rippon Lea, in the southern suburbs [http://www.ripponleaestate.com.au].  (It’s disconcerting to English ears that in this part of the world Victorian means located in the state of Victoria.)  If I’d remembered to take my UK National Trust card I could have saved A$12 [about £7.50], but I could hardly begrudge such a delightful Australian National Trust experience, complete with a pot of properly-made tea at the end of the afternoon.

Rippon Lea was the creation of a Melbourne clothing and drapery merchant, Frederick Thomas Sargood, inspired by his English parents’ retirement villa in Croydon, South London.  Designed by the Melbourne architect Joseph Reed, who favoured polychrome brickwork, Rippon Lea was begun in 1868 and repeatedly extended as Sargood’s family grew.  In style it veers between French and Italian, and is graced with ironwork verandas, including a particularly fine porte-cochère.

The glory of the place is the garden, landscaped, irrigated and drained from unpromising sandy wasteland, with sewage disposal integrated into the provision of fertiliser:  the Australian National Trust aim to restore it to full water-supply self-sufficiency.  The most beguiling feature is the gigantic iron-framed fernery, built to protect and conserve specimens gathered world-wide.

After Sargood’s death in 1903, the property was bought by the appropriately named Sir Thomas Bent, described by another Prime Minster of Victoria as “the most brazen, untrustworthy intriguer” ever to sit in the Victorian Parliament.  Bent proceeded to parcel up the Rippon Lea estate for housing development, and used the house only as a venue for political gatherings.

Bent died in 1910, before his syndicate could sell off the entire property, and Rippon Lea was then bought and lived in by a furniture dealer, Benjamin Nathan.  When his daughter Louisa inherited in 1935, she chose to cheer the place up, overpainting the gold-embossed wallpaper and marble columns and fireplaces, adding mirrors to gain light and demolishing Sargood’s iron-framed ballroom.  She created a new ballroom which opens on to a Hollywood-style swimming pool and terrace in 1938-9.  After a considerable controversy over an intended government-backed compulsory purchase, it became a National Trust property on Louisa’s death in 1972.

As displayed, the house is a palimpsest, based on English models, adapted to the sunny Melbourne climate, designed and built to the highest standards of its day, and then forcefully modernised for a 1930s lifestyle.  Pam, our guide, discussed at length how much is still being discovered about the house and its contents.  Australian history is, as the taxi-driver told me on the way to Alice Springs airport, short but “busy”.

 

Exploring Australia 10: St Kilda

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St Kilda Pier, Melbourne, Australia

St Kilda Pier, Melbourne, Australia

St Kilda is lively at night, and laid back by day.  It’s so easy to nip down there by tram from the centre of Melbourne that I took to eating breakfast and an evening meal there.  On Sunday morning there is a craft market.  When I return to Melbourne next I’ll seriously consider staying in St Kilda rather than in Melbourne itself.

It has three living monuments to the history of entertainment – the Palais Theatre, Luna Park and the St Kilda Pier.

The pier has a chequered history.  The original timber jetty was replaced by the present concrete structure on a slightly different alignment.  The charming and much loved pavilion, known locally as the “kiosk”, was destroyed by fire in 2003, and as a result of vehemently expressed public opinion was rebuilt in its original form, with a cool, glass-fronted modern extension behind which houses Little Blue [www.stkildapierkiosk.com.au].  Here you can eat either in air-conditioned comfort or wafted by natural breezes:  I had a restorative risotto, while others around me tucked into Sunday brunch.

Beyond the pier and its kiosk is a breakwater, part of which is fenced off as a wildlife reserve.

I liked The St Kilda Pelican [16 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, 3182 VIC] for its intriguing wooden veranda with circular openings through which to see and be seen, its relaxed, sunny, morning atmosphere, and its eggs Florentine for breakfast.

There’s a plethora of choices for an evening-meal venue at St Kilda Beach.  I stumbled upon The Street Café [www.thestreetcafe.com.au] which I enjoyed so much I made a second visit.  This return visit showed that what I thought was pumpkin and lamb soup the first time was in fact pumpkin and lime.  (I still have trouble with Australian vowels.)  The service at The Street Café is highly polished, and it’s possible to sit by the window watching the people go past in the evening sun.  Food and entertainment is what the seaside should be about.

 

Exploring Australia 9: The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant

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Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, Melbourne, Australia

Colonial Tramcar Restaurant, Melbourne, Australia

The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant [http://www.tramrestaurant.com.au/en/] is a stroke of business genius.  There is no more appropriate place to dine in Melbourne than on a tram.  This popular tradition, dating back to 1983, operates twice nightly, providing a five-course dinner and liberal amounts of alcohol while gliding and occasionally grinding along the streets of central and southern Melbourne to the greatest hits of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Abba.  Irresistible.

There are actually three trams, clearly the same American-style model as the City Circle vehicles, and from the outside they look surprisingly tired, in a dull red-brown livery with lamps missing from the illuminated display above the door.  Inside, however, the two restaurant compartments are a feast of plush curtains and mirrors and extremely comfortable seating in twos and fours:  each of the two compartments seats a total of eighteen.  The maitre d’s introductory announcement mentions that the evening takes 3½ hours and that the on-board lavatory is the smallest in the southern hemisphere.

The staff of three that I witnessed at work was the acme of teamwork.  No sooner had the wheels begun to turn than the champagne came round, and as we pottered back and forth, reversing from time to time, they presented a choice of pâté, a choice of entrée (the Australian term for a starter), of which I had duck risotto, and a choice of main course, of which I had an excellent, thick and perfectly cooked steak.  The trams are fitted with stabilisers, and there was – wisely – no thought of soup.

Individual service was leisurely, in keeping with the steady ride through the streets, while the staff worked non-stop to maintain an efficient and apparently effortless service to thirty-six covers.  And all the time the wine, a simple choice of red or white, was poured and poured again.  It was one of those wine-waiter situations where the only way to slow the flow is to keep the glass full.  I forgot.

There’s something magical about gliding through the streets, gazing through tinted windows at the ordinary world we customarily inhabit – people waiting at crossings and tram-stops, yellow taxis picking up fares, shop windows, houses.

There was only one discordant moment, somewhere around the University, when the car paused opposite a tram-shelter where there was what in England is called a tramp and in the United States a “derelict”, complete with his carrier bags, seated in state.  The tram moved forward to reverse in front of a urinal.

Most of the time we processed back and forth around the centre and out to the beach-resort of St Kilda, which is magical in the evening.  After the main course, the three trams parked up at Albert Park for a cigarette-break, and then dessert (in my case date pudding), coffee and liqueurs were served.  Eventually, in good time, we were returned to our starting point, where a fleet of taxis was lined up waiting.  I sauntered into my hotel thinking I’d quite like a malt whisky, but fortunately the bar was shut.

The following morning I didn’t want to move very fast.  At the coffee shop (I’d given up on the hotel breakfast) the barista made a great deal of noise bashing and grinding behind his big machine.  When I walked across to the Southern Cross Station the locomotives were roaring very loudly.  I caught a tram, which shook a great deal, to St Kilda and sat very quietly until I felt better.

The Colonial Restaurant Tram is not cheap, and worth every cent.  But it’s a good idea to keep the wineglass full for much of the time.

Update:  The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant is not operating at present because of an apparently acrimonious dispute:  Melbourne’s famous tram restaurant sues Yarra Trams (theage.com.au).

Exploring Australia 8: Melbourne

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City Circle tram, Melbourne, Australia

City Circle tram, Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne largely moves on steel wheels on steel rails.  It’s certainly the only city in Australia, and arguably one of the few in the world, which still runs a complete, traditional street tramway system.  This isn’t an isolated route with heritage overtones, like Blackpool or Adelaide, or even a vestige like Boston or Rome;  this is a full-on, in-yer-face tram system, with 27 routes covering most of the city, running single-deck vehicles of different dates and sizes up to the very latest 21st-century sophisticated models, operating with very cheap fares and some free travel.  Buses, I eventually noticed, are a rarity.

The suburban rail system is also ubiquitous.  There are some places in the city-centre (which the locals call the Central Business District, or CBD, rather like Chicago’s Loop) where it’s possible – with trams screeching round tight curves and trains rumbling overhead on viaducts – to imagine you’re sitting in the midst of someone’s gigantic train set.  There is even a compact version of London’s Circle Line, circumambulating the CBD sub-surface between five stations.

On Sunday I could travel the entire network – trams, trains and buses if I could find any – for the price of a Sunday Saver ticket, A$3.10 [less than £2];  on Monday the same facility for Zone 1, which extends as far as a visitor would reasonably need, cost A$6.80 [around £4.25].  Notices on the trams and tram stops showed that Christmas Day travel was free of charge, and on New Year’s Eve trams ran throughout the night until the New Year’s Day timetable began.

One consequence of the plethora of tram tracks is that Melbourne motorists perform a manoeuvre called a “hook turn” to ensure trams have priority at green lights.  To turn right at a tramway crossing (the Australians drive on the left), it’s necessary to move into the left-hand lane on the crossing, wait until all traffic has passed by and then make a tight right turn just as the lights change.  I repeatedly saw this operation completed with skill and grace, but I think I’d be a wimp and take three left turns round the block rather than put myself in such a situation.

The ideal way to orientate in Melbourne is by means of the free circular tram service which circumscribes the CBD, following almost exactly the route of the underground line, with a dogleg spur to the Waterfront City on the redeveloped Docklands.  This is operated by distinctive heritage trams, rugged streetcars with an American appearance.  There is a recorded commentary and, unlike visitor tours in many places, trams run in both directions so it’s easy to hop backwards and forwards between sites.

The CBD is an elongated oblong:  it’s a comfortable stroll across the short axis, but quite a tramp along the long axis from Southern Cross Station to the Parliament House.  The City Circle tram, with its commentary, makes it much easier to visit the city-centre sites, such as the Parliament House of Victoria, the Old Treasury (now the City Museum), the Old Melbourne Gaol and the Victorian Arts Centre.  I used it to visit Melbourne’s cathedrals, both impressive, the Anglican St Paul’s and the Roman Catholic St Patrick’s.

The only place I ate in Melbourne CBD was a delight.  Federici is attached to the Princess Theatre, opposite the Parliament House, and offers bistro-style food at all hours.  I missed the opportunity to see Jersey Boys at the Princess, because I had a prior engagement with the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant.

Exploring Australia 7: The Overland

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Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia

Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia

The Adelaide cab-driver pointed out, as he took me to the Parkland rail terminal, that there are quicker ways to Melbourne, but travelling on The Overland, the train that leaves Adelaide at breakfast time and makes it into Melbourne 10½ hours later, was part of my intention of seeing how big Australia is.

I travelled Red Premier class, which provides comfortable seating adjacent to the buffet car and a limited, rather relaxed trolley service.  Food is marginally more generous but no more ambitious than an average British rail company:  there was a customer stampede in late afternoon when the remaining pies were sold off at $2 [around £1.25] each.

The most interesting part of the journey from Adelaide is the first, because threading the line through the Adelaide Hills was clearly an engineering challenge.  The huge American-style rolling stock screeches round tight curves, over viaducts and through tunnels, and there are repeated views of the sea as the line climbs towards its summit at Mount Lofty.  At Mount Lofty station (where, apparently, you can hire self-catering apartments and train-spot to your heart’s content – http://www.mlrs.com.au), the line visibly dips down-grade and heads off into endless plains of farmland, the breadbasket of Australia.

For the remaining nine hours of the trip the train coasts through a gentle landscape, sometimes hilly and rather like southern England, often extensive flat plains stretching to the horizon or to distant hills.  There were few visual events on the journey – crossing the Murray River on a high viaduct with the original rail bridge, now used as a road, alongside, a few large towns like Ararat and Geelong.

At the start of the journey the train captain encouraged passengers to introduce themselves and talk to each other.  Imagine a British train manager suggesting such a thing!  That would really get the conversation going on the morning commute from East Grinstead.

There was an intermittent commentary, which I imagine was informative.  The commentator was BBC World Service in comparison to The Goons on The Ghan, but he read at breakneck speed, reminding me of the apocryphal Nancy Reagan story, where she was asked if she understood poor people and replied, “Yes, if they speak slowly.”

The man in the seat opposite at one point asked if I was bored with the landscape yet.  I said that I was never bored by landscape:  occasionally I dozed off, but I never opened the paperback I’d brought.

At last the train crawls into Melbourne, to the Southern Cross station, a spectacular steel tent draping a curvy roof over the platforms.  Stepping out on to Spencer Street gives an immediate impression of 1950s Glasgow – big, impressive buildings, a grid street plan and trams rattling across right-angled crossings.  The taxi-driver declined my fare, pointing to my hotel which was within sight.

 

Exploring Australia 6: Alice Springs

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Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs is seriously hot, heading towards 36°C as I stood in the station yard waiting for the most charming bus driver I have ever met to check in his passengers for the shuttle into town.

The drive between hotels crosses several watercourses:  each of them has all the paraphernalia of bridges, cutwaters and culverts, yet consists entirely of sand, dotted with opportunistic grass and trees, indicating that water is present below the river bed.

Alice Springs people tell of sudden flash floods, the most recent in January 2009, when no rain fell in the town but a storm further north sent so much water that houses in the Casino district had to be sandbagged.  When you ask Alice people about the last time it rained, they tend to mention years, like 2000 and 1988, though in fact a few inches falls each year.  Their idea of a drought appears to be anything up to a decade.

Elsewhere in Australia, farmers and local governments contend with the ironies of the climate:  I repeatedly read newspaper reports of farmers in one place rejoicing because their land was replenished by rainstorms while others desperately wondered how many months they could hold out in the drought;  in different parts of the country, authorities battle with flood disasters whilst elsewhere they squabble over apportioning available supplies.

For a town that didn’t exist until the early 1870s and only gained a rail connection in 1929, Alice Springs is extremely proud of its heritage.  There are tours of the Royal Flying Doctor Service [http://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/about-us/visitor-centres/vc-co], tracing the origins and development of a quintessentially Australian enterprise, without which much of the remote regions could not have developed, and the Telegraph Station Historical Reserve [http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/parks/find/astelegraphstation.html], now a historic monument that shows where, how and why the location was first colonised by white settlers:  the original “spring” is actually a waterhole on the Todd River – Alice was in fact the wife of the postmaster-general of South Australia, Sir Charles Todd (1826-1910).

While I was in Alice Springs I bought Doris Blackwell’s Alice…on the line (apparently co-written with Douglas Lockwood 1965), an account of growing up there between 1899 and 1908 when her father was officer-in-charge of the telegraph station.  For a reader who has travelled to Alice Springs overland in the comfort of The Ghan and experienced the summer heat there, it starkly focuses the imagination on the conditions endured by the men who laid out and built the telegraph line and the families who came to this desolate and beautiful place to work and live.

On a Tailormade Tours half-day tour with an excellent driver/guide called Graeme, I also visited the Alice Springs Reptile Centre [http://www.reptilecentre.com.au], and met a two-foot lizard called Fred who ambles about the place getting under people’s feet, and drove to the top of ANZAC Hill, the vantage point that reveals the geography of the place, located on a narrow gap in the MacDonnell Range through which the railway and the road penetrate.

In a short stay I left interesting sites unseen, the Museum of Central Australia, the Old Ghan Museum & Heritage Railway, which runs a steam train along a surviving stretch of the narrow-gauge original line, and the National Road Transport Hall of Fame next door, housed in a hall big enough to contain a couple of road-trains and much else.

What I wouldn’t have missed, however, was the Outback Ballooning [http://www.outbackballooning.com.au] dawn flight over the outback, hosted by the inestimable pilot Frans and his driver Ron (apparently they swap roles from time to time).  A balloon flight is worth getting up before dawn for:  it offers time to see the night-sky in desert conditions, all the practical activity of inflating the balloon and, later, squashing it back into its five-foot-high carrier-bag, the eerie silence of drifting above the landscape with absolutely no sensation of vertigo, the entertainment of surprising kangaroos and horses going about their morning business and – since the route and destination are dictated by the wind – such points of local interest as the jail and the oil-refinery.

The champagne breakfast afterwards, a regular ballooning custom, was convivial:  the watermelon, chicken legs and pieces of quiche were washed down with champagne laced with apple and guava juice, a sort of antipodean Bucks Fizz, and the conversation warmed up considerably.  I spent the rest of the morning drinking strong coffee.

There’s enough to do in Alice Springs to while away several days:  in future I’d make a point of visiting in winter, when the temperature goes down to a cool 20°C.

 

Exploring Australia 5: The Ghan

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The Ghan

The Ghan

The Ghan backtracks over the route that brings the Indian Pacific into Adelaide, including the section from Tarcoola that the Indian Pacific traverses in darkness.  For someone who watches train-journeys like other people watch movies, this is like watching the last bit of DVD that you missed when you fell asleep – but backwards.

This is the great outback railway, originally opened between Oodnadatta and Alice Springs in 1929, along an alignment that proved prone to flash floods which regularly washed the track away.  Apparently the surveyors never saw any rain in all the time they were planning the route;  the rain only came when it was too late to divert the line.  The idea was always to link Adelaide with Darwin, but in the 1930s this made no financial sense.

In 1980 a new standard-gauge flood-free western route replaced the old narrow-gauge Ghan as far as Alice Springs, and the long-intended link to Darwin, via Katherine, was opened in 2004.

Heading northwards from the suburbs and satellite towns of Adelaide, the line runs through a huge plain of agricultural land – market gardens, crops, the occasional herd of cows, racehorses with coats on to protect them from the sun.  At some point in the past, someone cleared all this acreage to make agriculture possible, probably with no more than horse- and man-power at their disposal.

As the afternoon wore on, and the train glided effortlessly across mile after empty mile, I was aware that this vast landscape was initially explored by nineteenth-century pioneers on horseback, working out what there was and where it led from the vantage point of a saddle.  Before them, this land was the home of the Aboriginal peoples who, according to a self-serving 1938 writer quoted by Bill Bryson, “can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but…cannot withstand civilisation.”  The conflict between the two ways of life lies heavy still on the national consciousness.

I’ve now learned, having travelled on both the Indian Pacific and The Ghan, that the “welcome reception” is a compromise between the attraction of a free glass of champagne and the agony of a badly-handled radio mike with feedback.  Throughout the journey, whoever was in control of the on-board PA system wasn’t:  announcements and music cut in and out without warning and on at least one occasion photographers were told the train would slow down for a landmark in ten minutes’ time and it didn’t – leaving people gazing through windows bemused as whatever it was flashed by.

On this journey, though, the bonus was that I happened to meet a couple, Gabriel and Cornelia, with whom I struck up instant rapport.  They were in the midst of moving house between Melbourne and Darwin, using The Ghan as the easiest way of transporting a car full of luggage while the furniture took a slower route by road.  We share an interest in Victorian history (in the chronological, more than just the Australian geographical sense) and photography, and Gabriel promised me a list of things to see in Melbourne, a privilege I couldn’t otherwise have hoped for.

There was a brief stop at Port Augusta, where the 1980 Ghan route diverges from the original, ill-advised 1929 alignment.  This prompts me to plan to return some day, to ride the Pichi-Richi Railroad [http://www.prr.org.au/cms/index.php], which offers a 1¾-hour ride, often steam-hauled, along the original route in vintage 3ft 6in-gauge rolling-stock.

(Footage of the final journey on the narrow-gauge Ghan can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIIJSxSCX8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztgicynYVw.  A more extensive Channel 7 documentary of 1978 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2Jb_f5XCE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoWBObzkJE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94w94BdCUc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaB0D2Q7How.)

The Pichi-Richi people take the view that the name ‘Ghan’ derives from a passenger on the inaugural sleeping-car run in 1929 who, at an evening stop, rushed on to the platform to place his prayer-mat in the direction of Mecca:  the Australian crew assumed, it is said, that he was an Afghan.  The Great Southern Railway Company prefers to ascribe the name to the Afghan camel-trains which the railway replaced.

Port Augusta is the “gateway to the Outback”:  from there on, the landscape is as arid as the Nullarbor Plain, but more varied.  There are gentle contours, distant mountain ridges, a vast snowy white salt lake, river beds – one, the Finke River, a three-hundred-yard wide channel of bone-dry sand.  The landmarks are minor and far between – a stone marker for the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory, a statue, the Iron Man, commemorating the laying of the millionth sleeper on the 1980 route and, eventually, the MacDonnell Range which marks the location of Alice Springs.

Exploring Australia 4: Adelaide

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A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt (1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt
(1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

The city of Adelaide is really simple to navigate.  Its original surveyor, Colonel William Light, oriented the gridiron street-plan exactly to the compass points.  The periphery of this area consists of four streets, North, East, South and West Terraces, which face the East, South and West Parklands and the Torrens River.  The axial north-south street is King William Street (that is, William IV, after whose consort the city is named).  In the exact centre is Victoria Square.

In fact, most of the major tourist sites sit on the river-side of North Parade, the Old Parliament House, Parliament House, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum, the Migration Museum, Ayers Historic House (home of an early prime minister of South Australia) and the Botanical Gardens.  There’s enough there to occupy a visitor for a day or two.

Another attraction is to take the tram to Glenelg, Adelaide’s beach resort.  This is a second-generation Light Rapid Transit which glides effortlessly through the Australian suburban dream.  A day rider ticket (A$8.30 – just over £5) gives unlimited travel until midnight on all tram, bus and rail services in the city, though in fact anyone needing only to ride between South Terrace and North Terrace in central Adelaide can travel on the tram for free.  Easy.

At the Glenelg end of the line a vintage first-generation tram provides free rides up and down in between the regular services.  Alongside the beach, the shops and the numerous opportunities for food and drink, there is a superb museum in the Town Hall, the Bay Discovery Centre, covering the story of the establishment of the state of South Australia by the first governor, Captain John Hindmarsh, at what was then called Holdfast Bay in 1836, and the subsequent growth of Glenelg as a resort through to the present day.

I spent much of a day in Port Adelaide, where I was underwhelmed by the Maritime Museum, simply because in a small space it seemed to be trying to do too much.  Jamming in the stories of the founding of the port, the shipping, the immigrants, the growth of Port Adelaide as a community, the industrial conflicts, the natural history and something for the children deserved at least as much space as, say the Maritime Museum in Liverpool’s Albert Dock.

In contrast, the South Australian National Railway Museum fills two great hangars and a lengthy goods shed with gigantic locomotives and other rolling stock, clearly explains the engineering in layman’s terms and narrates the epic sagas of building lines in a medley of gauges from South Australia across the continent and then, mostly, rebuilding them in standard gauge so that people could travel from Sydney to Perth or Adelaide to Darwin without repeatedly changing trains or climbing on board a camel train.

The locomotives are clearly from different stables:  many were Australian built, and others carry builder’s plates from Beyer Peacock & Co Ltd of Gorton, Manchester, Metropolitan Vickers of Manchester and Sheffield and the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, USA.  One loco is described as based on a British Great Western design, and – sure enough – it has a copper-capped chimney.

This museum encourages people to climb on some of the locomotive footplates and to step into many of the railway carriages:  these range from the luxurious to the penitential, many without any kind of lavatory provision.  The collection includes some of the rolling stock of the Tea & Sugar train which until 1997 supplied settlements along the Nullabor Plain, complete with a bank and a butcher’s van.

In the heat of Port Adelaide in high summer, I was particularly grateful to Eric and Joan Kirkham, friends of an old friend, for taking me to lunch at the Port Dock Brewery Hotel [www.portdockbreweryhotel.com.au], where we were given an informative tour of the brewery by the 28-year-old brewery manager, a man I admired for drinking Guinness the last thing before he left Australia, drinking Guinness again in the half-hour he spent in England before arriving in Ireland to drink Guinness again, proving to himself that it really does taste different in the three countries.  We drank refreshing alcoholic ginger beer, and ate kangaroo steaks with a wild plum reduction and Asian vegetables – in effect, green leaves in runny red jam.

In the city-centre, round the corner from Victoria Square, I stumbled upon Stanley’s, billed as “the great Aussie Fish Caf [sic]”, http://stanleysfishcaf.com.au/1901.html, where I ate great Aussie fish – a platter of whiting, garfish and barramundi, running from sweet to fishy in that order.  Here is all God’s plenty from the southern seas – bugs (giant prawns, served with garlic, chilli or curry sauce, or in their shells topped with garlic butter and bacon), snapper and calamari.

Another night, across the road from Stanley’s on Gouger Street, I ate at A Taste of Asia [no website, apparently, but e-mails to tasteofspice@adam.com.au], which combines Malaysian food with New Orleans jazz discreetly played in the background.  I tucked into crispy wontons and chilli roast duck, while noting an encouraging proportion of Asian customers, many of whom knew the proprietor and staff and were clearly regulars.  It’s always worth eating where the regulars are of the same ethnicity as the food.