Category Archives: Exploring Australia

Victorian lace

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Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Victorian Society study-days are an excellent way of learning about architecture and art from acknowledged experts, and I particularly enjoyed Function and Fantasy:  decorative iron and Victorian architecture at the Art Workers’ Guild on March 24th 2012.

The leader, Paul Dobraszczyk, author of the fascinating book Into the Belly of the Beast (Spire 2009), fielded a high-performance team of specialists on iron-founding, railways, the seaside, prefabricated iron buildings for export and conservation.

From the outset, Paul made it clear that in the Victorian age cast-iron was particularly exciting because it was the first completely new building-material for several hundred years.  There were structural problems involved in using cast- and wrought-iron, many of which were eventually resolved as cheap steel became available towards the end of the nineteenth century.

When we recognise the innovatory qualities of a material we now take for granted it’s easier to understand the sheer exuberance of the Victorians’ use of decorative ironwork in every kind of structure from shop-fronts to fountains, bandstands to urinals.

I was interested to hear David Mitchell, who spoke about Scottish iron-foundries, firmly knock on the head the legend that the decorative ironwork which Australians call “lace” was exported from the UK as ships’ ballast.  No-one in their right mind would use such a material simply as dead weight.

The more likely truth is that the Australians used pig-iron ballast to cast the ironwork which embellished so many of their nineteenth-century houses, pubs and public buildings.

For details of future Victorian Society events, see http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/events.

 

Australia explored

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Monument to Robert O'Hara Burke & William John Wills (d 1861), explorers of the Australian Outback, General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

Monument to Robert O’Hara Burke & William John Wills (d 1861), explorers of the Australian Outback, General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

As I flew out of Australia, wishing there were such things as child-free planes, I started to read Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963;  Penguin 2006), which for its periodic sentences, its allusions to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and its finely poised irony deserves the epithet “magisterial”.

By reading the historical context I’m slowly beginning to understand a little of what I’ve seen.  I begin to see how each of the states came to adopt its own attitude to the others, how development was bedevilled by inter-state disagreements, from differing railway gauges up to the vehement present-day disputes about water distribution, how the different “interests” of the emerging nation – colonialists, convicts, settlers, squatters, Protestants and Catholics – set up a network of snobberies that governed politics for generations, how the utter inability to reach out to the Aborigines and the effects of the explicit early twentieth-century policy of “White Australia” are still not fully resolved.

I can’t presume to make judgements about any of these matters, but as I become aware of them I see how fascinating this great nation has been and is.

Almost without exception the Australians I met were charming, open, keen to share the delights of their country.  I talked to a man in a coffee shop who came from Dundee, was demobbed from the British Army in Malaya, came to Australia for a couple of years and stayed:  he’d travelled from Brisbane to a sports event in Melbourne on his pensioner’s entitlement of four free rail-tickets a year, and was looking forward to a cruise from Fremantle to Plymouth, England, which he said would take the Biblical forty days and forty nights.

Post-1960s multiculturalism now means that people of any ethnicity may be in fact Australian.  An African taxi-driver compared at length the land-use in Western Australia with Kenya and Uganda and the resultant effect on lifestyles.  An Indian lady in a lift described the weather as “muggy”, and when I remarked that was an English expression said her grandparents were indeed English.  Oriental hotel receptionists greet you with “G’day”.

Over my three weeks’ travel I’ve come to associate the Australian accent with honesty, cheerfulness and an interest in other people.  In my experience, it goes with unabashed eye-contact, straightforwardness and a desire to please.  To me it’s inimitable:  at least, I can’t work out how to change a simple syllable like “No” into “Niye”.

I can’t wait to come back.

 

Exploring Australia 15: Sydney Opera House

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Opera House, Sydney

Opera House, Sydney

The one building in Sydney that can’t be missed is, of course, the Opera House, the youngest of all World Heritage Sites and a world-class icon.  The whole building is a magnificent piece of sculpture, and it houses two astonishing auditoria.  It provides Sydney with a cultural feast all the year round:  on the day I visited I would cheerfully have booked for three of the five productions on offer.  Sydney people tell me that it has a curious quality of drawing people in to performances, and then releasing them at the interval into the stunning setting of the harbour in a way that no other theatre or concert hall in the world can possibly do.

Its story is remarkable.  Planned by the conductor Eugene Goossens, on a location that had previously been of all things a tram-depot, the architectural competition was controversially won by the Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, whose sketchy but inspired design was pulled out of the reject pile by a Finnish judge who recognised its potential.  The penalty of choosing an inspired design based on imprecise drawings was that work started on the foundations before anyone had any idea how to build the superstructure.  Even the great engineer, Ove Arup, eventually despaired, until Jørn Utzon spotted a simple way to conceive and construct the unique geometry of the shapes which people generally refer to as “sails”, though to me they look more like shells.  By the time the exterior was completed far behind schedule, with no final specification for the interior and a monumental budget over-run, the New South Wales government lost patience with Jørn Utzon, who resigned.

Once the Opera House was opened in 1973 it was quickly recognised as one of the great, arguably the greatest of modernist buildings of the twentieth century.  At the end of his life, showered with honours, Jørn Utzon was re-employed to update his building, which is today overseen by his son, Jan Utzon.  Jørn Utzon never set foot in Sydney after his resignation, and never saw the completed building except in images.

For all these reasons, and the sheer pleasure of the place, anyone who loves buildings, theatre, music and art really must see the Opera House if they’re in Sydney.

That said, I was disappointed by the building tour I went on.  My heart sinks when a guide hands out headsets:  I know that I’m going to be subjected to ambient noise, the sound of doors being unlocked, mutterings and individual, irrelevant conversations.  This particular guide had a habit also of switching off her microphone (to give her voice a rest, she said) and then walking off talking.  She also took us into an undistinguished auditorium, carved out of the basement, to spend a long time asking each of us where we were from:  I could see no purpose to this gratuitous exercise, except that it saved her telling us about the Opera House.  When she asked for questions, someone asked when it was built:  she replied that she’d tell us later, when we’d seen the video.  Later I overheard, through my headset, someone ask her if there was a basic factsheet:  no, she said, but there’s a book you can buy in the bookshop for A$20 [about £12.50].

The videos were peculiar.  The footage was excellent and the commentary informative.  I simply couldn’t understand why, in a world-class venue with six auditoria and lavish conference facilities, we had to view the first film on a plasma screen while sitting on a flight of stairs, the second projected on to the bare sculptural concrete that the footage described (an interesting art concept but not flattering to the images), and the last two in a bar-area where most of us had to stand.  It felt arbitrary and unwelcoming.

We had the privilege, which alone was worth the price of the tour, of stepping inside both major auditoria, in one of which a lighting check for a touring production was taking place.  Both spaces are unforgettable.  The great shell-shapes (for so I can’t help seeing them) provide acoustically efficient, visually spectacular, remarkably intimate spaces in which respectively 2,678 and 1,507 people can watch and listen to the greatest drama and music the world can offer.

Having travelled across the globe to see this place, I felt offended that the tour I was offered did such poor justice to the building and its story.  I appreciate the practical difficulties of herding groups of 30-40 people round a working building (and while I ate lunch on the terrace afterwards I watched at least four other groups set off in succession on the same hike within less than an hour).  I don’t see why it’s beyond the wit of the Opera House management to offer a clear exposition of the building, its layout, its chronology and its excitement to an audience which includes everyone from casual tourists to knowledgeable students.  After all, Jørn Utzon and Ove Arup eventually found a way to build the place.  Managing guided tours of it should surely be on this side of what Jørn Utzon called “the edge of possibility”.

 

Exploring Australia 14: Sydney 2

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Harbour Bridge from The Rocks, Sydney

Harbour Bridge from The Rocks, Sydney

The following day I started my exploration at the magnificent Sydney Central station.  Sydney has varied transport opportunities, most of which I didn’t use:  the rail-system appears to be comparable with services out of London Waterloo or Victoria, running double-deck carriages that were developed to avoid lengthening station platforms; there is a single LRT tram route which trundles through the station forecourt and disappears off the top-left-hand corner of the street map;  there is even a monorail, similar to the one I remember in Butlin’s Camp, Skegness, in the 1960s.  There is also the waterborne alternative of the Sydney Ferries, crossing the harbour to outlying districts.

I used the open-top sightseeing tour operated by the same company that runs the tours in London, Edinburgh, Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon (and Malaga, Marrakech and Tallinin for that matter) www.city-sightseeing.com.  As might be expected, their tour is comprehensive and the commentary informative.  The open top deck is, of course, a major advantage for photography.  The disadvantage is that the bus exhaust is at upper-deck level, and having wondered about the black discolouring of the seat cushions when I sat right at the back I found after a while that my eyes stung so much I had to sit downstairs.

There is a competing tour company which runs single-deck coaches on a longer route including crossing and recrossing the Harbour Bridge:  in this case, the opportunities for photography are relatively limited by the roof.

The major snag about either tour is that they run only one way:  I did the entire open-top circuit to get my bearings, and then wasted considerable time riding round to get to places that I later realised were within walking distance.  For speed I could, if I’d had presence of mind and read the map carefully, have got around more quickly on the inner-city free circular bus, route 555.  The result was that in the time available I saw a little of a great deal, and my quality experiences were rationed.

One of these was the Queen Victoria Building [http://www.qvb.com.au/About-QVB], an extremely grand former produce market that after many years of neglect is now a lively shopping centre.  The story goes that its demolition was stalled because of trade-union objections to the vandalism of destroying such a magnificent part of Sydney’s heritage.  It fills an entire block but is actually quite narrow:  on the central axis are two entrances with swooping staircases which give close-up views of stained-glass windows that run through two storeys.  It reminded me a little of the Midland Grand Hotel at London St Pancras.

I dawdled productively at the Powerhouse Museum [http://www.powerhousemuseum.com] built, like the Kelham Island Industrial Museum in Sheffield, into the former tramway power station.  The original industrial buildings, with overhead cranes and other paraphernalia left in place, are huge enough to lose an entire steam-locomotive, a governor’s saloon, a signal box and the destination board from Sidney Central Station in one corner.  The place is on the scale of Tate Modern on London’s Bankside.  For me, the greatest delight in this superb museum was the Strasbourg Centennial Clock, which tells more time than you’d ever want to know, reproduces exactly the locations of the planets in the solar system, and features on the hour the Twelve Disciples receiving benediction from Christ, with the cock crowing at Peter and Satan keeping a baleful eye on Judas.

Having wasted precious time misusing the bus tour, I was privileged, after meeting some colleagues from the Australian Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, for whom I’m returning to Australia to lecture next year, to be taken from the Opera House across the Botanical Gardens, by Lawrence West, a retired architect who pointed out all manner of interesting buildings on McQuarie Street and Park Street.  Of these, the highlight for me was the interior of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, a scholarly Gothic design of 1868-1882 by William Wardell, equal in length and grandeur to many of the European originals on which it is modelled.  In comparison, the Anglican cathedral, St Andrew’s, is a more modest building of parish-church proportions on a cramped site next to the Town Hall.

I should have taken the opportunity to ride on the Sydney Monorail in 2010 or 2011.  It closed in 2013 and has been entirely demolished.  I didn’t return to Sydney until 2017.

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.