Kind of Blue

A radio microphone can be deadly in the wrong hands. For our ten hour round trip to the bewildering Blue Mountains – New South Wales’ sprawling eucalyptus rainforest 260km (161 miles) west of Sydney – a rabble of English, Scottish, Swedish and Japanese tourists unknowingly form a captive audience for the idle chatter of Nick the bus driver. As a burly, knowledgeable scout leader, he would be played by Brendan Gleeson in the film version, doing his best attempt at resigned, quiet contempt. Nick’s gift for rhythmic, hypnotic narration has been perfected over the years to resemble that of a soothing day nurse: it’s the sort of measured tone you need when you’re administering some form of heavy sedation.

After an hour of staggering through Sydney’s ceaseless traffic and suburbs (over 600, apparently), it quickly becomes apparent that Nick’s patience for the job exhausted many years ago. Although he’s impossible to ignore, threads of monologue seep through, like when you're skipping through the stations on an AM radio. From Nick’s take on Sydney’s infrastructure crisis to predicting the weather forecast, the next thing I remember hearing was about the research into his family tree. “Fire destroyed the records… so many facilities these days… traced back to the 1500s…”, and then later, “You may be an adult but you’ll always be my child.” I suddenly started to envy the Malaysian lady in front of us for not being able to understand English. “My son’s six foot one… seriously, 30 years of age and he won’t leave home…” And so it went on, and on, and on.

The weather is a concern, of course. If cloud sets in over the mountains then visibility from the designated viewing platforms will be seriously limited, particularly the one over the fabled Three Sisters - a famous procession of three tall rock formations. But then the Blue Mountains has always been regarded as a world onto itself: encompassing over 4400 square miles of dense, fiercely unremitting terrain, the valley resembles a boundless sea of green from the higher reaches with gorges some 760 metres deep, and is practically impenetrable from the inside. This would have been the view for those first European settlers who within 25 years of claiming Sydney had expanded so far north and south (to the natural boundaries of the Hawkesbury River and the Royal National Park in the south) that the only route left for development was west, directly into the path of the mountains.

Kent born farmer and wine maker Gregory Blaxland is credited as the first European settler to cross this dividing range, leaving in 1813 with fellow explorers William Lawson and William Wentworth, and “attended by four servants, with five dogs, and four horses laden with provisions, ammunition, and other necessaries,” according to his diaries. The expedition only succeeded after the team listened to the advice of the local Aborigines who directed them to higher ground and to avoid the dry river beds, which had led so many previous expeditions into complete disaster. So formidable was the fear of the forest that prior to Blaxland’s successful crossing, the Blue Mountains were regarded as the ultimate deterrent for any escaping convicts. At ground level it’s easy to see why: not only is it vast, sheer and dense, but it all pretty much looks the same.

People still get lost in it today. In 2009, a nineteen year old backpacker from London left a Katoomba hostel on a 10 mile hike and wasn’t seen for 12 days. While living off seeds and berries, a team of 400 people fought through thick fog and bitter temperatures in the height of a New South Wales winter to try and locate the boy. His father was clearly less than sympathetic when he was finally reunited with the boy: “I can’t say I’d kill him because it would just spoil the point of him being back,” he said to the press. “But I'm going to kick his arse.” According to Nick, the teenager, called Jamie, was originally part of one of his tours. Once we had reached Katoomba ourselves and had been released from another one of his inane ramblings, I can easily understand why Jamie chose this point of the trip to quickly make a dash for it.

Katoomba is an idyllic township which now shuttles tourists deep into the bowls of the valley thanks to a couple of ingenious methods. One is a hair-raising cable car some 200 metres high, which is obviously quite unnerving, but positively breezy compared to the alternative: the World’s Steepest Railway. This train drops you down 415 metres of track from a nearly sheer cliff face at an angle of 52 degrees at the sort of white knuckle pace that could only ever have been designed for freight, rather than, you know, humans, with families and respiratory systems.

Upon the discovery of coal in the range, Katoomba became a key mining town from 1878 until the late 1930s, despite the mines being located in possibly the most awkward place on the planet. But human endeavour is never stronger than when commerce is concerned, so the staggeringly powerful train dates from roughly the same period, used to transport coal from the valley depths where some 100km of tunnels wind their way through the rock, all picked and blown and smashed by hand. We travel backwards up the thing in a practically vertical state, dragging us to the top of the mountain like some strange train wreck in reverse. It’s completely terrifying.

But then you’re catapulted back into a gift shop so quickly that it’s as if the violation was just some scary nightmare. Too quickly, actually, as we soon found ourselves away from Nick’s grasp and with time on our hands. This is where we tend to resort to a brand new game where we think of alternate messages to write inside the wrappers of Mars Dove Chocolate Promises, which usually contains trite and nonsensical whimsy like, “Money talks, chocolate sings” and, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”. I personally can’t wait for the day when a disgruntled Mars employee rolls into work and replaces all the messages with things like “Have a shit day” and “Go fuck yourself”.

While dozing on the way back into Sydney, Nick effortlessly relies on his successful capability of disengaging his mouth from his brain to keep his passengers awake. I distinctly remember regaining consciousness at one point and hearing, “…the standard procedure is to take on as much ballast as you can,” before trying to think of more messages to write inside chocolate wrappers. “You’re going to get fat” seems somewhat appropriate.

The Rock Show

Our Virgin Blue Embraer E-Jet 170 plays a risky game of chicken with a neighbouring aircraft as we start our descent into Sydney, like Saturday shoppers racing for the same park. Clive James said that “nothing should be allowed to detract from a proper celebration of that first, and continuing, impression of Sydney and its harbour,” but the heady mix of both goading and plummeting was distracting. James continues: “It remains one of the Earth's truly beautiful places,” and “the place is too multifarious to be captured by the pen.” But then he was born there. We rubberneck to see vanishing views of “Venice without the architecture, and more of the sea,” of bridges and beaches and schooners and a pointy opera house, but we’re efficiently parked before the scene can truly settle. This is our last glimpse of the blues and greens of Earth before our trek “through the guts” and into a contrary, arid Martian otherness.

Virgin Blue don’t fly direct to Ayer’s Rock Airport from Brisbane, so your flight south to Sydney takes one hour and ten minutes, followed by a journey northwest of three hours and thirty minutes: a combined travel time of four hours forty minutes. Leaving from London Heathrow, you could travel to Cairo in roughly the same time. Looking down over endless tracts of land - seemingly uninhabited, unperturbed and increasingly unremarkable - the sheer scope of the ground below takes on a breathless uniformity. Although we were only stopping halfway across the country, this is a scene that goes on. And on. And on.

That is until The Rock comes into focus like a giant mutant hump on the landscape. The initial reaction is almost comedic: it is both instantly identifiable yet incredibly alien. The only thing to do is gawp at it, which has been the standard response of tourists for well over 50 years, since Northern Territory aviator Edward ‘EJ’ Connellan learnt quicker than most about the financial implications of dropping people into the country’s red centre. When Connellan started chartered flights to Uluru, his business advisors were adamant, asking “Who would ever want to visit that?”

From 1959, Connellan ran Qantas ‘Butterflies’ and Douglas DC3s from an airstrip directly beside the rock. Archive images show aircraft narrowly avoiding the monolith as they come into land. In 1962, tourist numbers reached 5,500. Now, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park gets around 400,000 visitors a year. Wisely, a new airport was opened in 1984 outside the recognised National Park boundaries, some nine miles north of the Uluru site. This is the beige brick, steel pole and corrugated iron structure that you still arrive at today, seemingly modelled on a British leisure centre from the 1980s. It is still called Ayer’s Rock Airport, which is confusing, considering 26 years have passed since the land was handed back to the native Anangu traditional owners. Staring at a departure screen with the technical capabilities of Ceefax, Sydney suddenly feels thousands of miles away - both literally and metaphysically. Elemental things like time and space seem to serve very little purpose here.

In a trait so adorably Australian, the inherent dangers of the outback are everywhere. “Be prepared for dingoes and wild dogs,” says one sign, slightly gloating, I feel, and featuring this fabulously contrary advice: “If threatened by a dingo – STAY CALM!” Step outside, and within seconds a swarm of flies assemble into a makeshift beard to buzz around your face. Tourists, blurry eyed from a long haul flight and starting their outback journeys in the desert, may be averse to assume that they had not only landed on Mars, but also travelled back in time and been turned into defenceless prey for marauding beasts and insects. And that’s before they've even seen the resort.

The Ayer’s Rock Resort, located in the manufactured community of Yulara, is a purpose built holiday park run by the cast of Adventureland – mostly gap year, rosy cheeked sorts with time to burn and money to save. The resort currently employs 800 people. This number jumps to 2000 in peak season: chefs, janitors, Japanese interpreters, masseuses, bus drivers, newsagents, doctors, police, all employed to assist you in your gawping.

I am fascinated as to why anyone would purposely choose to stay here in complete isolation for longer than is truly necessary. The nearest town, Alice Springs, is 266 miles away. Our waiter Andy has been here for a year and possesses the resigned weariness of a man unsure as to whether he should spend his time polishing the cutlery or stabbing the implements into his knees. “I quit today,” he tells us. “I’m over it.” I’m told by one of the tour guides the average length of stay for employees is three months. We’re here for three days, and I would think that should be more than adequate.

Bill Bryson has a theory about this, that the rock possesses such a captivating, arresting, hypnotic quality that once you’ve seen it, it is hard to pull yourself away. “You realise that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it.” We talked to people on their third, fourth or fifth visits. Our tour guide, the indomitable Cheryl, is one week into a year long stint, travelling out there at 5am most mornings to catch the sun rise over the rock. We follow her out there one morning, and I can see why she does it.

Once you’ve paid the $25 entry fee to gain access to the park, it takes a good 20 minutes of driving until you can successfully bask under Uluru’s looming shadow. Now, considering that such a vast amount that has already been said on the subject, I want to make it clear from the outset that attempting to quantify and express those initial emotions is probably rather perfunctory, because even if you haven’t seen it, you can probably imagine just how amazed you will be when you finally do. Like Bryson says, “It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock.”

So here’s what you already know: it’s big. It’s huge, actually. It even looks big from the resort’s designated look out points, and they’re 20km away. To take a photo on ground level with the rock in full frame would almost certainly involve having to stand around 5km away from it. It is 1150 feet high, five and a half miles round. The base walk takes three and a half hours. Yes. It’s big.

It is also the same colour as the ground surrounding it due to the iron in the sandstone, which creates a rusted cover of redness. A very gradual erosive process is marking Uluru with dripping, clay-like contours and indentations on the surface, as if the whole thing is melting in slow motion. The rock has hills, and large crevices, caves, imprints and bizarre cavities. It has a front and a back. Every view from the ground level is unique; it never appears the same way twice. To dismiss it simply as a rock does Uluru a great disservice: it has personality.

This might explain Aboriginal dreamtime stories attributing the rock’s creation to giant snakes and lizards. The spiritual significance that the Anangu place on the rock is still very prominent: it is prohibited to photograph certain parts deemed sacred for ceremonial purposes, and despite signs imploring people not to, hoards of people still attempt to climb it.

Of course, it would be quite simple to stop people from doing this. You would think that the sheer exertion involved would be discouraging enough. Small sections of guide rope and a slight dirt track have been planted into the rock for assistance, but it’s a small gesture. There have so far been 38 deaths from people attempting to climb it – eight from falling off. But Cheryl thinks the figure could be in the hundreds. “People get back to their hotel rooms and don’t come out,” she says.

Quite recently, a family had to be rescued from the top with second degree burns when the searing heat caused their Crocs footwear to melt. Considering the temperate out here can reach 45°C (with the lowest evening temperatures recorded at -4°C), it is little wonder that Uluru is often closed to climbers. The Anangu have a word for people who climb the rock: minga. Ants.

Cheryl offers a more geological explanation as to how a giant rock might end up in the middle of such a vast, expansive and relatively flat nothingness. Uluru is in fact only the tip of a much larger underground sandstone mountain which descends 6km (around 3.7 miles) into the earth. To even comprehend this, you need to imagine a time of around 500 million years ago when huge fragmented clumps of sandstone were being rapidly transported from newly formed mountain ranges via fierce flowing rivers and dumped into oceans which have long since vanished. The ground around Uluru is still diminishing, unearthing more of the slowly eroding rock in the process. “Come back in 20 million years time and Uluru will be about two kilometres tall.” And Andy will probably still be working there.

In contrast, consider Kata Tjuta, which is actually 200 metres taller than Uluru and much bigger with a circumference of 24km (nearly 15 miles). Visually, it is much more staggering than it's iconic neighbour. Made up of 36 ‘domes’, it is located 16 miles from Uluru, and famously referred to as The Olgas. This is down to a somewhat elaborate display of brownnosing from intrepid Bristol born explorer Ernest Giles, who saw the protruding, phallic-like anomalies from a look out point at King’s Canyon and, for some reason, immediately thought of naming the tallest peak Mount Mueller, after the German born explorer Baron von Mueller, who happened to be funding his expedition. Mueller, instead, named it after Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia as a way of returning the complement for being made a baron. It is highly likely that Giles spotted Uluru at the same time, although all credit seems to go William Gosse, who gave it the name Ayer’s Rock in 1873 in recognition of South Australian Premier Sir Henry Ayers.

At Kata Tjuta, Cheryl leads us directly into a giant gorge amongst the domes, where vegetation thrives at even the highest, driest points. Here, we learn of the ancient techniques used to create paints for early Aboriginal rock art, and a brief lesson in botany: “Do you know why they call this a Dead Dog Tree?” she asks. “No bark.”

Of course, out in the desert of the Northern Territory, you’re probably more likely to come across a group of feral camels than you are wild dogs. While you ponder which one you would prefer to meet, rest assured that the federal government are doing something about this. In the sort of headline that quickly makes you realise how very far away you are from Leeds, Thursday’s NT News reveals an Egyptian businessman will construct an abattoir in South Australia with plans to process around 100,000 feral camels a year. Shipping camel meat to the Middle East will generate 250 jobs and $60 million a year.

I’ve now sat on the back of a camel twice. If the camel I encountered in Marrakech was a Ford Fiesta, then ‘Murphy’ in the Northern Territory is a Holden Commodore: a giant, snorting, 6 cylinder beast. Camels are so endearingly awkward in appearance that I’m not sure I like the thought of seeing one of them on my dinner plate. They’ve proliferated in the outback since their arrival from the Canary Islands in 1840, where they were used to help carry cargo during the building of cross-country telegraph lines. Their Afghan pilots didn’t have the heart to kill them when the work was done, so instead they let them go. Not being native to Australia and free of any serious diseases, the camel population is now increasing by some 90,000 a year. We even spot a group of them coming back from Kata Tjuta, and the desert’s a big place. The ominous array of footprints strewn across the red sand proves just how you're never quite alone when staying in the middle of nowhere.

Our final night is spent at a boisterous alfresco buffet as the sun sets over Uluru – its bright red hue altering in the twilight to a shadowy brown, before being silhouetted by the silver moon. Scott is our astronomer for the evening, pinpointing a blanket of crystal clear constellations from the Southern Cross to the rings on Saturn. I doubt there are many better places on the planet for someone like Scott to live, given the desert’s nightly palette. He has a degree in astrophysics, a masters in psychology and is about to start studying for a doctorate. His colleague Brett, however, has merely downloaded the Stargazer app for his iPhone. “You’ve wasted your time, mate,” Brett says. Scott chooses to ignore this.

Scott’s decision to up sticks and hit the desert links in with Bryson’s theory of obsession, and we find evidence of this everywhere. I talk with Heather Duff, the ‘artist in residence’ at the Ayer’s Rock Resort who travels up from Melbourne for three months every year to sell her bright Uluru landscapes. For her, the rock is a constant source of inspiration. I can only agree: the hardest part about leaving Uluru is actually forcing yourself to stop looking at it.

Honestly. Just go there.

Green Streets

South Australian Liberal senator Mary Jo Fisher lost her flippin’ marbles in parliament this week with a quite incredible rebuff to Gillard’s carbon tax proposals, drawing barmy metaphorical collusions between coalition policy and the Timewarp from Rocky Horror Picture Show. But this was a tame protest when you discover the sort of phone calls Independent MP Tony Windsor has been getting this week, one of which concluded with the words, “I hope you die, you bastard”.

Windsor copped some flack for taking the threat straight to Channel 7 instead of the police - which is more like the sort of thing a normal person might do - and then broadcast the message on the ABC, comparing the vitriolic response to the anger which sparked the shooting of American congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That might sound a bit rich, but then Opposition MP Sophie Mirabella trounced Windsor by comparing Her Maj’ Ms Gillard to Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi. It was more in reference to his deluded ‘my people will die for me’ comments, rather than all the killing and stuff.

Even The Terminator stepped in at that point. “I think that's a pretty colourful way of describing the Prime Minister, and it’s not language I would normally use myself,” said Tony "shit happens" Abbott. Now we have a media war with lefty organisations pointing fingers at talk radio shock jocks for fuelling the fire. Like 2GB’s Alan Jones, who had an on-air argument with Her Maj (pictured left with Greens leader Bob Brown) after she arrived ten minutes late for his breakfast show interview. “Surely courtesy has to be part of the way in which the public are treated?” he tuts, probably tapping at his wrist watch. “Alan, I believe I am a very courteous person. I’m also very busy…” The tiff continues, descending - quite inevitably - into name calling. Children, please.

Extending political similes further, this is far from Her Maj’s Poll Tax moment. Australia is well placed to cement its standing as a world leader in combating climate change, what with Green Party influence amongst a sympathetic coalition that recognises the potential of leading by example. But no one said changing the world would be easy.

There’s an old adage that tells of how the rich and powerful lose their connection to ‘the people’ when they forget the price of milk. Aussie diary farmers do not share such dilemmas: just the sight of the price tag alone is enough to cry over, spilt or otherwise. A price war has erupted in which the Big Two (that’s Coles and Woolworths, who share a supermarket monopoly with an equally repugnant and exploitative business sense) are both selling own-brand milk for $1 a litre. That is quite clearly outrageous, and completely cripples the farmers they claim to support.

Multi-million dollar conglomerates can afford to do this kind of swindling financially, but not morally. We have fresh organic produce delivered to our door and we try to get all of our meat from the local butcher, and I’m sure many others do the same. Australia doesn’t need to import produce in the same way Britain does, and the bush farming community is highly valued. Insults like this one will be hard for shoppers to wear. As Julian Lee writes in the Sydney Morning Herald: “We would like to see some truth in advertising, so the next time I see a supermarket ad with a farmer in it, I expect him to be in a headlock rather than an embrace.”

The campaign for daylight savings time in Queensland has stepped up a gear, judging by this graffiti I discovered on the back of a bus seat. Granted, the 345 to Aspley isn’t particularly a front runner when considering potential hotbeds of political unrest. State Premier Anna Bligh should have no reason to be losing sleep just yet. Brisbane residents want daylight savings so that they can enjoy the sunshine for an hour longer, which in turn puts north Queensland farmers out of whack as they are quite accustomed to the idea of starting and finishing earlier. Queenslanders are often faced with the prospect of a referendum regarding daylight savings - the topic is likely to be re-packaged for Queensland’s 2012 elections. Small scale campaigning may already be under way. After all, the writing's on the wall. Or, the bus seat, rather.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Laid’ (ABC1)

With minor exceptions, finding a good Australian sitcom amongst the turgid quagmire of American guff is a bit like discovering Solomon’s treasure. Not surprisingly, when I told an Aussie friend how good ‘Laid’ was, her reply was self-evident: “really?”, said with complete incredulity.

‘Laid’ is a black comedy in the Bridget Jones mould which is both intelligent and silly, awkward and charming, detailing the frumpy sexploits of Roo McVie who finds herself inexplicably cursed on the path to true love when her former sexual partners start dying in increasingly bizarre circumstances. In last week’s episode, two of them pop their clogs choking on hors d’oeuvres at an emergency meeting of Roo’s ex-boyfriends. Roo’s desperation in dealing with the revealing sinful extremities of her past is funny enough - she visits the hot-tub of a self-taught ocker shaman in attempts to dispel the curse - but then she must also face future implications for any potential new suitors.

Roo is played by Alison Bell with a endearing lightness of touch; her roomie Celia Pacquola is hilarious. The show’s writers Kirsty Fisher and Marieke Hardy cite ‘Gavin & Stacey’ and British comedies as their main influence, and there’s no denying a certain post-Gervais overtone to the show's dry humour. I first fell in love with Hardy as a regular guest critic on Jennifer Byrne’s ‘First Tuesday Book Club’ - with this show, she seems to have spearheaded a crucial movement for female comedic talent offering a better and more relevant alternative to the country’s dated, male-dominated gag blowers that you find on shows like ‘Good News Week’ and ‘Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday’, many of which are about as funny as heart surgery.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, I should rightfully add ‘Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth’ to that list, which I intended to watch for this week’s AU Tube but couldn’t quite muster enough energy to sit through a whole episode. The tortuous, creaking sound of Elton’s career flat-lining was just too overbearing: the jokes are so bad not even the studio audience quite know what to do with themselves. The discomfort is palpable. I’m guessing the show hasn’t had a British airing, but it takes a particularly brazen act of disregard from Elton to presume that such a prehistoric show could ever carry weight for an Australian audience, especially when a program like ‘Laid’ proves so convincingly just how much native palettes have matured.

The A Team

Those accustomed to the dilapidated nature of English football grounds will be suitably awed by Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. Maybe all football stadiums are like this now - plasma screens, airconditioning and inbuilt food stalls selling nachos. The beauty of supporting a team like Swindon Town is that it’s possible to believe that nothing has really changed much for the past hundred years.

Given the sunken nature of the Suncorp pitch, the ground resembled a leaky goldfish bowl when the Big Floods hit in January, retaining the waters which climbed into the first ten rows and no doubt seeped into the boys changing rooms. The first game back on the freshly drained and sandy turf was last week’s football game between Brisbane Roar and Gold Coast United - the last game of the A-League - and judging by the 20,000 strong crowd, with their faithful flags, Magnum Ice and $6 beers, you would be right in thinking that the whole ghastly catastrophe of the previous month had all just been some terribly messy dream.

‘Roar’, of course, sounds more like a breakfast cereal than a football team. They play in a sort of fluorescent orange; a dribbling vision of monosodium glutamate. Gold Coast United have a more boring name and possess an unfortunate affliction of having to play in the same colours as the Brazilian national team. But you won’t confuse the two: Roar win with a convincing 4-0 victory (the first of which is scored after three minutes), securing their place as A-League champions and not without a certain flair. Roar winger Henrique is particularly sprightly; he may be more Julian Joachim than Michael Owen, but he’s still the sort of ferreting annoyance to cause any defence an awful bother, while the fourth goal was a training ground tap in thanks to a napping Gold Coast who were already half way down the M1 by that point.

All of which concludes a triumphant season for the local Brisbane team, who finish top of the league and with a 25 game unbeaten run. That’s pretty good, considering they finished second from bottom last season. Brisbane Roar now go through into a ridiculous play-off situation to decide the overall A-League champions, which is something synonymous with American sports and thankfully unheard of in Europe. By this token, and despite an incredible season, a team like Central Coast Mariners (who finished second) could still possibly go on to nab the final trophy. As someone brought up to believe that points mean prizes, I find this a baffling concept. Regardless, Brisbane Roar will play Central Coast Mariners tonight, the first of two legs, while Gold Coast United play Melbourne Victory tomorrow.

I should make some horribly glib remark regarding the quality of the football being particularly accurate for someone already accustomed to watching Swindon Town, but then the English often forget just how lucky they are to have the best football league in the world. Not that the fans have any chance of watching it, of course. Thanks to a special discount designed to get bums on seats, we acquire six tickets for the game for only $60. That’s ten bucks each - around six English pounds. You’d be lucky to buy braising steak from Woolworths for that price.

But the A-League and football in general has a larger following here than you might think, particularly over the last few years, even enough to warrant a faction of noisy, aggressive fandom. We’re not quite talking the likes of Leeds’ Service Crew here - the ‘Den’ and the ‘Orange Army’ have a fair bit of disgraceful catching up to do in that regard - but their small legion of psychotics already have a small set list and an enthusiastic drummer, and that goes a long way. Bizarrely, they may even have a political agenda: a banner during the second half reads ‘Justice for the NT’ to the bemusement even of my Australian company. Perhaps a statement against social inequality in the Northern Territory? I might be wrong, but if I'm not, then I think Millwall fans could learn a lot from these hoons.

When Australians discuss the Big Things, they’re not always referring to issues like aboriginal land rights, or excessively right wing immigration policies, or Julia Gillard’s dress sense. They might be, of course, but more than likely they will be referring to Things of a much grander scale. Perhaps as an antidote to the boredom of long distance driving, or maybe as a result of all that vast, empty space causing eccentric country settlers to completely lose their grasp on normality, but a wonderfully pointless series of giant objects can be found up and down the land - hidden, mostly, but completely wonderful in their pointlessness.

Green-bashing nay-sayers may bemoan the elegant spinning wind turbines that charge across parts of the British countryside, but at least they serve a purpose. The same can be said for electricity pylons, telephone masts, satellite dishes. Ugly to some, yes, but indispensable to the way we live. Some Big Things are there just to be there: the Eiffel Tower, the Angel of the North, the Washington Monument may present nothing more than a minor threat to low-flying aircraft, yet their awesome artistic stretch and sense of identity never fails to inspire. But if you head north along the Pacific Highway out of Brisbane and into the Sunshine Coast town of Nambour, Queensland, you’ll find the type of monolith that quite defies all you thought you knew about the Big Things in life.

Because this is where you’ll find The Big Pineapple. Built in 1971, I’m not certain of its specific measurements, but I’m sitting next to it in the picture opposite and, as you can see, it’s pretty damn big. Pretty big for a piece of fruit, anyway. Many of Australia’s Big Things are merely promotional gimmicks - the awesome Big Prawn in Ballina, the Big Banana in Coff’s Harbour, a Big Hotdog in Radcliffe - but this grossly oversized fibre-glass construction sits outside a macadamia nut farm, which just doesn’t make any sense at all. Research reveals that there is also a Big Macadamia on site, but we arrive on a Sunday and we can’t get close enough to confirm this.

A sign on the gate reveals that The Big Pineapple is “closed for future changes”. While you ponder what sort of changes could possibly be required, I should add that it is possible for visitors to climb inside the pineapple and, peering through it’s tropical plumage, observe the nut farm, petting zoo and its surrounding environs like some kind of pioneering fruit Tsar. Once upon a time, there was another giant pineapple further up the road in Gympie - “the original,” apparently, presumably said with some menace - but this was quite upsettingly pulled down in 2008. You seriously have to question the merits of a place with such a spoil sport mentality, especially one with a name like Gympie.

But a similar fate that may befall this Big Pineapple, as the site is now under new ownership following a $533,700 bill from the Australian Taxation Office forcing the previous owners into receivership. It’s future is uncertain, which evidently explains why the place is practically off limits, bolted shut with desolate car parks (yes, there are two car parks) humming to the tune of bored boy racers performing handbrake turns across a stretch of empty bitumen. That’s right: the Big Pineapple might get the squash.

You probably won’t believe me, but at it’s peak, Their Royal Highnesses Charles and Diana popped in to The Big Pineapple to have a ride on one of their toy trains during a recce of the plantation in 1982. They were growing pineapples back then, too, presumably before an insurmountable expenses bill caused the humble Queensland farmer to diversify and flounder, struggling against the monetary force of their own fruit salad. Blimey, who would have thought that giant fruit could be so depressing?

The week long, biannual Lifeline Brisbane Bookfest - which takes place in a convention centre roughly the same size as Moscow - is much more than a place where fads go to die, although if pictures paint a thousand words, then this photo would presumably include much better words than those of Dan Brown's in The Da Vinci Code, which seems to have been so eagerly abandoned that the organisers had to give the book its very own section. There were similar drop off points for Pamela Stephenson’s Billy and Halliwell’s Film Guides from the 1980s. The target for Lifeline was to raise $1 million in funds for Flood Relief, and they had successfully made well over half their total just on the opening weekend.

The Bookfest is an epic, endless search for those with the time and the inclination, and I just adore second hand book sales. I love the nosey, sticky beak nature of it almost as much as the hunt for that rare find: from a books’ ghostly inscription (“For Mum, Merry Christmas, 1977”) to the odd surprise of finding some misplaced family relic, like the photograph of someone’s child in the goat enclosure of a petting zoo that I found in a copy of Bill Wannan’s Folklore of the Australian Pub.

And how cheap! In a week that the Borders book store goes into administration, there can surely be only small condolences for a store which charges such astronomical prices for products that could be obtained at a fraction of the cost on the internet. The death of the corporate chain will only make niche independent book stores more relevant. Just remember to really stock up next time.

Kiss My Yasi

On Wednesday, News.com.au ran this rather terrifying superimposed graphic of what Cyclone Yasi would look like if placed over the continents of the world. With a diameter of 250 miles (400km), the storm quite comfortably swallows the whole of England, the state of Louisiana, and half of New Zealand.

Furious gusts of up to 285kph - flattening the towns of Tully, Cardwell and Innisfail - somehow managed to avoid killing anyone, but certainly made an aggressive attempt. Quickly identified as a Category 5 cyclone, Yasi was more intense than both 2006’s Larry and 1974’s Tracy, the latter of which convincingly destroyed the town of Cairns and 71 of its inhabitants over the Christmas period. And that was a Category 4 cyclone. Category 5 is the highest you can get: “extremely dangerous with widespread destruction,” according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website, which over the past month has become the home page for nearly all Queenslanders.

Channel 7 cancelled their scheduling for another hysterical non-stop talk fest, whipping the winds into a further frenzy and giving Queensland Premier Anna Bligh an ample platform to reclaim her soap box. She earned it well and truly with her compassion and sentimentality during the January floods, where she actually broke down in tears during a press conference, inspired by the selfless nature and courage of those affected by the carnage. This is now referred to as The Queensland Spirit. You can even buy your own slice of The Queensland Spirit on three CDs, with all proceeds going to the Flood Relief Appeal.

Bligh was back like a rampant Rambo commanding the TV coverage with her well honed, Churchill esque rhetoric, as if she might be preparing to head north and physically wrestle with the cyclone from the state’s shoreline. This was no storm in a teacup, as Bligh issued her final warning: “You have to take this window of opportunity now. Do not bother to pack bags, just grab each other and get to an area of safety. People are irreplaceable. We shall fight this on the beaches. We will never surrender.” Yes, OK, I may have embellished that a little, but with such positive public support, surely Bligh couldn’t possibly fail to retain her premiership when it comes to next year’s state elections. Heck, you would believe she was practically running the country right now, making sour-faced Labour compadre Ms Gillard look like some form of robotic intern.

If such a thing exists as The Queensland Spirit, then surely it's very embodiment can be explained by a simple sign in a Cairns café which reads, ‘Kiss my Yasi’. So it might be an idiosyncratic mixture of both tenderness and bravado, of laughing in the face of adversity, and a sort of underdog mentality: like the Bulldog Spirit, but a bulldog in thongs and a singlet. It’s actually a media invention, mostly, purported by the likes of Channel 7, who threw caution to the wind and their sanity out the window with the sort of excruciating news coverage that could actually warrant the end of the earth.

Still buoyed by the horrifically captivating scenes of Brisbane’s monumental floods, the network went into full 24-hour disaster porn mode, reporting on news that hadn’t even happened and, then when it did, a complete loss of power guaranteed that the majority of it would be completely incomprehensible. At one point, nonsensical two-ways were broadcast via Skype and a reporter’s iPhone. With journalists clearly exempt from evacuation notices, the most anyone could possibly deduce from this garbled interference was that actually, yes, it was really very windy outside. “But just how windy is it?” and so on and so on and so on.

But it’s hard to take such excessive scaremongering seriously when members of the public are continuing with their daily routines in the background. Category 5 cyclones may be unique in their severity, but storms are not unfamiliar to Australia. We are now entering a tropical cyclone season. There is actually a specified season for this, and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting more cyclones to follow.

Being English and completely unaware of what to do in this situation, you can be sure that Toxic Math is taking precautions. I’m told the safest place is the bath tub. But without one, I’ll just be standing in the shower until this whole thing blows over.

One of the reoccurring debates on Australia Day is the design of the flag - it's an annual patriotic sticking point, like having the Queen on a postage stamp. Modern consensus seems to suggest that the Southern Cross bit is quite alright, but what really gnaws on the public conscious is that Union Flag in the top left. I was a bit surprised at the extent of vehemence considering just how many Australians proudly fly the flag even when they’re not annually obliged to do so. I can honestly say that I have never felt the need to paint a flag on my face. Any flag, for that matter. Yet Australia Day passed in a sea of blue, red and white, seemingly proud of it’s symbolic gesture despite the design.

All of which links us back to the country’s colonial past and the significance of January 26 as the date when the first British fleets sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 (and not when Captain Cook first landed in Australia, which actually happened in April some 18 years earlier). But what most Australians actually prefer to celebrate is the notion of not having to go into work, bolstered by a unified but jovial sense of celebrating their national identity. Which is why the day is traditionally spent around a barbecue, tucking into lamingtons, damper and assorted bush tucker, with the odd eccentric past time to boot: cockroach racing, for one, and even the odd thong-throwing competition. Sadly, I’m completely stumped to conjure up a British equivalent, other than eating fish and chips, at a bus stop, while it rains. On a Tuesday.

Australia Day is instead referred to as ‘Invasion Day’ by some, used as evidence of yet another aspect of marginalising the country’s indigenous population. Given that the oldest Aboriginal art in parts of South Australia are estimated to be around 40,000 years old, and that the indigenous population possessed the lay of the land for about another 20,000 years on top of that is food for thought especially to those who seem to regard Australia as a young country. I noted a greater sense of inclusion and compassion on the day in recognition of the country’s first Australians, but more can and should be done on all the other days. So perhaps a new flag is necessary, but one with a bit more yellow, red and black.

I will end on the results of this year’s Triple J Hottest 100, which is slowly announced over the course of Australia Day on the ABC’s flagship Gen Y radio station. And just what did those rebellious, pill-popping, know-all teen layabouts in their trendy sneakers vote for as the nation’s best record of the year? ‘Big Jet Plane’ by sleepy folk siblings Angus and Julia Stone. I know. Those crazy bastards.

Four Seasons in One Day: Welcome to Melbourne (Part II)

In January 1990, there was a bit of an incident involving a limestone formation on the coastline of the Port Campbell National Park in the very south of Victoria. Called London Bridge - named after its rocky resemblance to the English landmark - an eroded section connecting the faraway point of the stack to the shoreline dramatically collapsed into the sea. This is pretty much academic to anyone with even a basic grasp of how the world is formed, but here’s the interesting bit: two people were on it at the time.

To come so close to death’s squelchy grasp and survive is one thing, but to pray witness to such a shape shifting event is quite another; the moment when an area of Victoria just disappeared into the ocean. Of course, land patterns aren’t permanent no matter where we draw the line, and more limestone will be chipped away and eroded to equally dramatic effect in the ensuing years, transforming cliffs into caves, caves into arcs, arcs into stacks, and stacks into the inevitable absorption of the sea. Nowadays, London Bridge is known as London Arc. Pretty soon, it will just be ‘London’. Then ‘Lon’. Then nothing.

Which makes the lauded Twelve Apostles even more dramatic, especially if coastal morphodynamics is your thing. These are a series of limestone stumps dotted along the Victoria coastline, although there seems to be some contention as to where the name comes from, because no matter how many times you count them, there is still clearly seven of them. There were eight, apparently, although one of them gave up somewhere in 2005.

Nowadays, you can choose to pay a healthy sum to take a ten minute helicopter ride over the Twelve Apostles and see the diminishing attributes of Mother Nature in all her tempestuous, foamy glory. It’s worth doing, because you get views like the ones I have attached. We also check out the structures at ground level from the designated viewing plinth, but after a ride in the chopper, that’s basically the equivalent of starting a meal with your pudding.

Anyway, back to those stranded souls who found themselves, quite literally, on the precipice of an earth-shattering event. This is where I will introduce Matt, our tour guide, who makes no qualms regarding the volume of the music in his minibus. “The speakers are right at the back so I have to have it on pretty loud,” which is at least some form of an excuse. He sports a porkpie hat in the manner of a singer from a ska band: Buster Bloodvessel, without the cholesterol. It’s not the volume of the music that’s striking, but rather his choice of songs. Matt makes a habit of accompanying his storytelling with tactful musical referencing. Which explains why our descent from London Arc is accompanied by the apt sounds of Fontella Bass singing ‘Rescue Me’. (This is quite a fun game for anyone with time to spare on a shuttle bus: we decide that he could just as easily opted for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ and, of course, ‘Help!’).

The dramatic beaches near Port Campbell are also infamous as the residual resting place of 19th century shipwrecks which still pot mark the treacherous landscape of Wreck Beach. The Victoria gold rush of the industrial age brought as many as 100 ships a day from Britain to Melbourne full of eager prospectors, and up to 200 ships would meet their end in these waters, trickily navigating the 80km channel between the Bass Strait islands and the limestone sea stacks. One sea weary captain at the time described navigating this passage as being like "threading a needle".

This is where you can still find the rusted anchor of the Marie Gabrielle, a French vessel which ran aground in 1869, and the British steamer Fiji which hit the rocks in 1891 killing its entire crew. “For the impoverished coastal farmers, any wreck was a tragedy, but it could also be like Christmas,” writes Tony Perrottet in The Weekend Australian. “The locals descended in droves to pillage the Fiji for its wood and cargo: liquor, European clothes, porcelain, toys, even a couple of grand pianos.” We do manage to get down and see Loch Ard Gorge, a violent swell of tortuous sea and shaggy rock which would prove fatalistic to a British ship leaving Gravesend in 1878 with its sight set on Melbourne. Only two would survive the famous Loch Ard crash out of the 54-strong crew, including a boy, Tom Pearce, who miraculously managed to land on the only patch of sand in the gorge.

Pearce heard the screams of another passenger, Eva Carmichael, clinging to a chicken coop. She was rescued, and Pearce somehow managed to scale the high cliffs to alert the villages of the disaster (there are some stairs there now, including a handrail). Despite calls from the press for the two to be engaged, Pearce returned to a life at sea where he later found himself the victim of two more shipwrecks before deciding that enough was, indeed, enough.

The reason you can’t just walk down to the fabled Shipwreck Coast is because it’s officially outside of the Great Ocean Road tourist trail. In fact, the cliff tops would prove so overbearing for even the road’s builders that they were forced to make an inland detour around Cape Otway just to avoid it. The Great Ocean Road, Australia’s most scenic route, is some 270km long (nearly 170 miles) and every inch of it was constructed by hand without the aide of explosives or machinery. The Memorial Arch in the town of Anglesea explains how the road was eventually completed in 1932 by some 3,000 soldiers returning from the First World War, a war in which Australia would suffer the highest casualty rate out of all the allied forces: somewhere around the 64% mark. Returning soldiers seeking employment in 1918 were put to work building the road and paid well for the trouble. Matt plays Sheryl Crow singing ‘Every Day is a Winding Road’ as the bus shimmies through a breathtaking, industrial masterpiece.

Matt does three driving tours a week and he’s been up since 5am this morning. “I’ve done this tour so many times I can do it in my sleep,” he says encouragingly, adding, “that’s why I wear the sunglasses.” He drives us through Geelong, which could have been the equivalent of what Melbourne is today if the city's bay was big enough to accommodate larger ships, and then onto Torquay, which is officially where the Great Ocean Road starts.

Australia’s Torquay has a proud heritage to rival that of England’s Torquay, which is now destined to forever be associated with Helen Chamberlain and ‘Faulty Towers’. Torquay is the surf capital of Australia, not only the home of the Quiksilver and Rip Curl brands, but also Bells Beach, which even I had heard of; probably something quite rare for someone with a complete aversion to swimming in the ocean. Quite coincidentally, I can pinpoint the blame for this to a holiday in Torquay, England; braving the bitterly cold, litter-strewn sea while dodging a spare jellyfish. In hindsight, it is unlikely that this was a jellyfish, and was probably a plastic bag of some kind, submerged amongst the dank swell, but still the fear remains.

Bells Beach is mentioned in the film Point Break, you see, which had Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze cast as quite believable surfies, and is now probably old enough to be deemed ironic. “I watched it again recently,” Matt says over his microphone, “I thought it was better in the 90s.” Matt’s derision doesn’t end there: the climax of the film sees the two central actors go to Bells Beach to tackle a once in a lifetime killer wave, dude, but the scene was actually filmed in Portland, Oregon. Bells is still the only certified surfing recreational site in the world, with rights in place to protect the area from damage to the environment. I’m guessing this must have been before that big car park was built, with space to accommodate a daily turnover of ogling tourists, which is certainly something to dwell on as we hit the road again and Matt blares out the greatest hits of The Beach Boys.

The Great Ocean Road is a thing of such sweeping, epic and romantic splendour that it rightly resides as one of Australia’s Top Things To See. It is a dramatic achievement as both a memorial for the country’s fallen soldiers and as a testament to the majestic landscape of which they would never return, sacrificed in the murder of Gallipoli and beyond. Through their commemorations, the road has opened a once remote expanse of coastline to celebration from people all over the world, and that is a splendid thing.

The iconic images of the Apostles may end the trail, but there is much wonder to explore along the way; from the beach town of Lorne, home of the Lorne Pier to Pub Swim (surely only in Australia could a sporting event end in a pub?), to the Kennett River Holiday Park where rosellas and koalas abound, and the Maits Rest Rainforest Walk where slender mountain ash trees stretch to their astronomical heights - the tallest recorded at just under 100 metres. Matt’s whistle-stop tour makes an orchestrated stab at catching a glimpse at all of this wonder in a single day, which is no mean feat, and we return to the hotel exhausted.

“Thank you Matt,” we offer, “and get some rest.”
“Can’t mate,” he says, “I’m up at 5am tomorrow to get to Phillip Island.”
Poor guy. He’s had a hard day’s night.

Four Seasons in One Day: Welcome to Melbourne (Part I)

From some of the worst flooding in Queensland’s history we fly south to Victoria and arrive during a Melbourne heat wave. It’s New Year’s Eve and a flashing sign on the Tullamarine Freeway reads ‘Fire Ban Today’ in bright orange letters - but how do you even begin to police something like that, I ask the taxi driver, a Czech migrant who has been living in Melbourne since the late 1960s. I won’t do the accent. “You find that some people will still start a barbecue,” he says. “But just look at this scrub,” he gestures to the embankment. “It is so dry that you only need a tiny flame and, woosh, the whole area will be up.” He thinks even the famous end-of-year fireworks over the Yarra River might be cancelled. But that’s why we’re here. Surely not?

By 6pm, the city has reached a temperature of 41.1. Hopetown Airport records the day’s highest at 43.3. The bitumen in Dandenong has started to melt, and a fire breaks out at Boolite which, according to the Herald Sun, burns 100ha of bush land. That’s 1 million square metres. That’s nearly 250 acres. That’s rather big. But it’s a mere tree in the woods compared to the events of February 16th 1983, Ash Wednesday, when more than 180 fires raged through parts of Victoria and South Australia, obliterating nearly 520,000 acres of land. When the summer had ended, 1.25 million acres in Victoria and South Australia had been destroyed, and 75 people killed.

Given such a catastrophe, when state premier John Brumby predicted that the bush fires on Saturday February 7 2009 would cause the “worst day in the history of the state,” there were over 3,500 fire fighters across Victoria on guard for Mother Nature’s worst. “People need to exercise some real common sense tomorrow,” he said the day before events which will now be forever remembered as Black Saturday.

On that day, the temperature in Melbourne reached an all-time record of 46.4, the culmination of a week long heat wave following nearly two months of little or no rain, coupled with wind speeds of 75mph. By the end of Black Saturday, the death toll had reached 173 people, with 120 killed by a single firestorm. The ferocity of the gale force winds carried the blaze at such alarming speeds that, in many cases, most of the victims had little or no time to react. Bodies were later discovered near their cars or outside their homes.

Black Saturday encompassed 400 individual fires, nearly three times as many as Ash Wednesday, and although many of the fires were caused by falling power lines, reports told of human misdemeanor: a cigarette butt in West Bendigo sparked a fire killing two people and destroying 50 homes. In Marysville, a deliberately lit fire at a saw mill caused the eventual devastation of 80 per cent of the town.

I can’t say that I have ever experienced such searing heat as New Year’s Eve in Melbourne: an oppressive roasting, like being oven baked only without the humidity and comfort of a brief reprieve to be pricked or marinated. It was certainly dry enough to be concerned by the eventual presence of fireworks. Despite the precautions, the banks of the Yarra still swelled with 500,000 revellers, myself included, arching our necks to ‘ooo’ and ‘ahhhh’ at the colourful whizzes and bangs emanating from the rooftops of the city’s tallest buildings. It was an invigorating display in a beautiful setting, but then, forgive me, there is something about fireworks that makes me go all reflective, gooey-eyed and childlike. Blame those Bonfire nights and funfairs of old, which might explain why I always associate fireworks with the taste of honeycomb. Weird, but there you are.

We could see our hotel from the Yarra on Southbank, although there aren’t many places where you can’t see it (it's the third building from the right on the very first picture). Being on a city break and feeling slightly frivolous, we had secured three nights in a Sofitel, and although I’m not completely certain of the criteria required for a hotel to warrant a five star distinction, my feeling is that a Pillow Menu is up there (one that includes the options of foam, feather and Tontine latex). Plus the option of a Champagne breakfast. And a personal massage therapist ordered to your room, as long as you realise that the subcontracted Merkas Health is a “strictly non-sexual service”. This bit had been written in both bold and capital lettering, as if this was the sort of routine misapprehension that really needed to be stressed.

Without wishing to brag, the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins is an awesome, towering, opulent, art deco behemoth made mostly out of dark glass with a central twenties-style lounge and restaurant with overhead awnings that cascade from the very top of the building, some 50 storeys up. It’s times like this when a man needs a top hat. All of which starts on the 35th floor, while the escalator offers no option to exit on any of the subsequent storeys. I'm always slightly unnerved by this sort of anomaly, of confounding space and structure, like when you discover a mysterious gap or space in your home with no entry point that doesn’t seemingly serve any particular purpose. What the hell are they doing down there, and why do they need 34 floors to do it?

Our room is on the 39th floor, but it might as well be on the moon. Apparently, one of Melbourne’s main tourist spots is the Eureka Skydeck 88 (so-called because of the number of floors), where you can not only pay for a hair-raising view of the city from the “highest viewing platform in the southern hemisphere”, but also opt to enter a glass cube which projects 3 metres out from the building. Feeling that $17.50 is a tad too much to ask for essentially vomiting in a box, the view from the Sofitel would have to do, and what an epic sight it is. The picture below looks out to the north of the city - the mock gothic church is St Paul’s Cathedral, built on the site of Melbourne’s first Christian services in 1836; in the centre is a slightly obscured Parliament House, and that rotunda in the top left forms the roof of the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens, which seems a more than apt place to start.

Following the European tradition of international exhibitionism, this massive 12,000 square metres of Florentine inspired space was feverishly constructed in 1880 to host the country’s second international exhibition. With Sydney hosting the event the previous year, this exhibition could arguably be seen as the arrival of Melbourne as Australia’s second city. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne was never settled as a penal colony, but instead made prosperous by the good entrepreneurial fortune of auspicious gold diggers. The Victorian gold rush of the mid-1800s would triple the city’s population, leading to huge migrant communities in pockets of the city that have continued to develop and prosper to this day. The Melbourne International Exhibition would go on to attract 1.5 million visitors, at a time when Melbourne’s population was 280,000.

My favourite story regarding the development of Melbourne regards settler John Batman, who famously purchased 100,000 acres of land from the Aborigines in an 1835 treaty which must surely be one of the earliest acknowledgments of indigenous land rights. Granted, Batman only rented the land on an annual basis in exchange for “40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and 6 shirts,” but as my trusty guide book identifies, “the fact he bought the territory (…) rather than simply stealing it, was a rare occurrence for the period.” And what would he call such a wondrous new acquisition? 'Batmania', of course. Brilliant.

Unfortunately, the stuffy traditionalist Sir Richard Bourke, who was Governor of New South Wales at the time, stepped in while Batman was dying of syphilis to instead christen the town Melbourne, after Lord Melbourne, or William Lamb, the British Prime Minister (pictured). In his middle age, Melbourne, a Whig, developed a closeness to the young Queen Victoria and a penchant for spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies which is clearly a topic for a completely separate blog post, one that I'm sure we will eagerly return.

Nowadays, of course, people go to Melbourne to “do shopping”, which at least acknowledges the city’s gold rush heritage with every corner of the consumerist conscience is covered. Even the Sofitel is positioned above a shopping centre, located at the top of Collins Street where the Church of Scientology makes comfortable bedfellows with the Church of Louis Vuitton. The major drawback of any capitalist structure is how every city street appears to have turned into endless, identikit malls of Prada and Mcdonalds. Melbourne could be Rotterdam, or anywhere.

But forgive the thought, as Melbourne is still an invigorating, lively and genuinely welcoming place, nothing nearly as staid as Sydneysiders claim, although the changeable climate seems to be an acknowledged truth: following the peak temperatures of New Year’s Eve, the following day reached only 17. It even rained. No, worse: it drizzled. ‘Four Seasons in One Day’, as Crowded House once sang. Victoria is the size of Great Britain, and with all the Victorian architecture and bad weather, it’s enough to make a pom quite homesick.

As for the touristy things, visiting a Victorian prison may seem like a particularly unpleasant thing to do on New Year's Day - and of course you would be right - but we reached the decision on the basis of two quite polarising figures in Australia’s history. Captain Cook, whose stone cottage was transported brick by brick from Yorkshire in 1934 to a location just down the road from our hotel, and Ned Kelly, the metal-headed bush-ranging so-and-so who was executed at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1880. My girlfriend’s patriotism won out: “why would I want to see where Captain Cook lived? He wasn’t even Australian.” Well, quite. How dubious an honour of posterity when you discover a nation and still lose in a popularity contest with a gun-slinging murderer. I should probably add here that, as it happens, the cottage actually belongs to Cook’s parents and there is no evidence that Cook ever lived there. I failed to raise this fact with my girlfriend for fear of tarnishing the man’s reputation further.

I won’t go into too much detail regarding Kelly for fear of repeating my previous blog post, but mainly because the story of the Old Melbourne Gaol is such a ghastly one that it extends way beyond the Kelly mystique. For starters, Kelly was only one of over 130 prisoners who were executed on these grounds. You can still see the gallows, follow Kelly’s final steps, take part in a trial re-enactment, and poke your head into each of the damp, cramped, stony cells, which now speak of graphic tales regarding child killings, prostitution, opium dens and murder, the incriminatory backlash to the desperate slum life of Melbourne’s over populated gold rush communities. Happy new year, by the way.

Opening in 1841, the first public execution to take place here was in 1842, and a dogged mess it proved to be. ‘Bob’ and ‘Jack’ were Aborigines, sentenced for the murder of two whalers. Given the manner of using prisoners as executioners, the job fell to John Davies, a shoemaker who stole a sheep in England and ended up on a ship to Sydney. In exchange for a limited pardon and ten pounds, Davies pulled the lever, only the drop failed to fully open. The scaffold had to be repaired while the two men were left choking. Davies was paid only five pounds and his freedom was refused.

The horrific stories continue in this vein: stories of female ‘baby farmers’ who were taken to the gallows with a drawstring around their skirts to stop their dresses from billowing as their bodies fell. Capital punishment was abolished in Victoria in 1975, and the Gaol chooses to focus predominantly on tales of grave social injustice, like the death of 65 year old Basilio Bondietto, a charcoal burner accused of murder who spoke no English and had no interpreter at his trial. Or the story of Colin Ross, blamed for the death of a 12 year old girl on the evidence of hair strands found on Ross’ bed, despite his continuous protests of innocence. This was the first use of forensic science in a murder trial and, thanks to the reopening of the case in the late 2000s, the investigation proved that scientists at the time had got it wrong. Very wrong, actually, as Ross was sent to a slow death in 1922, taking somewhere between eight and 20 minutes to die. His last words were, "I am now face to face with my Maker, and I swear by Almighty God that I am an innocent man." Ross would prove to be the first Australian to receive a posthumous pardon.

You won’t need long within the Gaol's confides to satisfy all of your morbid curiosities, especially when you see the prisoner’s death masks. These are moulds of the prisoner’s faces made soon after execution (Ned Kelly's is pictured), which was a standard practice for phrenologists to investigate and draw their nonsense conclusions. Phrenology is pretty much discarded now as a scientific study, in which it was argued that criminology could somehow be hardwired into your neurological make up rather than taking into account things like upbringing and mental health. The waxwork heads of executed prisoners is disturbing enough, but what really concerns is a simulated miniature hangman structure where groups of children are encouraged to push a button and watch as a plastic figurine drops through a hatch, attached only by the hangman's noose. The punishing vigour possessed by some of these children was really quite remorseless. Lets hope they can eventually be coaxed into an alternate career path.

Let us close on a more comforting thought. The portrait pictured on the right is called Chloe, and can be found upstairs in the innocuous setting of Victoria’s oldest pub, the Young and Jackson, opposite Flinders Street station. Originally owned by John Batman as the site for Melbourne’s first schoolhouse, it was established as a pub and hotel in 1861 and bought by two Irishmen in 1875, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Young bought the Chloe portrait in 1909 to add to his growing art collection, and she has become a sort of naked mascot for the city ever since. Those closeted Victorians from the 'Ladies Branch of the Anglican Social Purity' caused much harrumphing when Chloe debuted at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1883 and was exhibited on a Sunday. She was stripped down, if you will, after only three weeks.

Chloe was painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre in 1875 and depicts a passage from a Andre Chenier poem regarding a lady who hears the beckoning call of her lover from behind the trees. Quite why she's completely starkers in the middle of the woods is a bit of a headscratcher, but I can tell you that the model is a 19 year old Parisian called Marie. Seeing such a striking painting in the top room of what essentially feels like a Wetherspoons is a bizarre but beautiful surprise. Tragically, two years after Chloe was painted, the model Marie committed suicide. She boiled poisonous matches and then drank the fatal concoction. I'm sure you can probably order something similar at the bar.