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.

Wet Christmas

In hindsight, that bit last week about Bundaberg reaching 28 degrees on Christmas Day might have sounded a tad optimistic, but it did actually reach a top of 29 degrees, if only combined with the city’s worst flooding since 1942.

The seriousness of the situation was only brought home when we saw that American networks like CNN were running reports: 200,000 people affected; 22 towns and cities inundated or isolated; forced evacuations; affecting an area larger than France and Germany combined. Combined. And in some places, it’s only getting worse.

We’re a week out and Bundaberg still resembles a lumpy soup. At its height, a third of the city was under water, forcing nearly 400 people to be evacuated. The Burnett River - usually looking resplendent with moored boats, hundred year old bridges, daily trawlers of sea-faring fish folk and the sweet smell of molasses from the sugar plantation carried on the cool breeze - rose to a peak of 7.9 metres, swamping everything I just mentioned along with it. Aviator Burt Hinkler famously flew his aircraft underneath Bundaberg's old railway bridge: if he was still around to do it this year, he’d need to pack a snorkel.

The city of Rockhampton, around 300 km north of Bundaberg, hasn’t yet reached the height of its problems, with the Fitzroy expecting to peak at 9.4 metres tomorrow, taking hold of nearly 50 per cent of the city. The Herald Sun in Melbourne highlighted another rather terrifying prospect for those residents currently swimming away from their possessions and towards drier confines. Wendy Hilcher is an ambulance officer for the RSPCA, who has been rescuing people’s pets all week, but an attempted rescue on Sunday was aborted when she noticed a crocodile in the water. Brown snakes have also been spotted. “It's not just the safety aspect of getting to these places, it's what's in the water itself,” she said.

Scenes of cataclysmic flooding is a particularly familiar media sight nowadays: cars breached with only their rooftops on show; the two-way reportage with bone-dry journalists, usually with a lake in the background which used to resemble a shopping centre; then into the houses, where a defeated couple sludge through their possessions, some even managing a weary note of optimism: “I’ve never seen it this bad,” or “it’s a good job we’ve got some Wellies.” My girlfriend's reaction to seeing her old netball courts - the ones she played on as a child - completely submerged sparked a clearly more personal response. And expletive, it would seem. Once safe in Brisbane, she could only gasp in horror at the scenes unfolding, saying the word ‘shit’ repeatedly.

Complete helplessness, and a sort of resigned acceptance; those were my feelings when the rain hadn’t stopped since we had arrived a week previously on Christmas Eve. Quite alarmingly, we were told when we arrived that it had “been like this for two weeks,” and many agreed that, yes, they had never seen it this bad.

There is science behind all of this, by the way, as the east coast of Australia is currently enjoying a particularly severe La Nina affect (the opposite of an El Nino), which has something to do with cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that has caused Queensland’s rainfall to increase by six times over the December average. But when you’re there, in a state of limbo, during a religious festival, facing the relentless pitter-patter and steady drowning of a quiet country sugar town, you can’t help but feel a significant biblical overtone - real Old Testament stuff, that of great plagues, vengeance, apocalypse. The relief of having a one year old in our midst with the name Noah was at least a little reassuring.

As rivers swelled, peaked and spilled, the main concern was a swift exit from Bundy before high tide hits, the only roads are blocked and we’re done for. The house suddenly resembles a particularly serious scene from ‘CSI: Bundaberg’ with would-be forensic experts on the phones to police advice bureaus and relatives surveying the ground for clues, analysing depths and water gages like trainee meteorologists, discussing locations of evidently severe importance: “Kendall’s Flats is totally under,” says one. “McCoy’s Creek is up. If you get through the Isis in South Childers there’s further damage at Maryborough with the Bruce Highway blocked towards Gympie.”

We were restless, awaiting a parting of the waves, eventually fleeing a derelict scene just before the air lifting started. And if you need further proof of Australia’s vast meteorological unpredictability, when all of this was happening, a heat wave in South Australia saw temperatures reach 43 degrees. In Bundaberg, however, you could forget goannas running up gum trees, or even cricket in the garden, as the constant rain ultimately proved the season to be not too dissimilar from a damp, traditionally English Christmas.

Here are some more of our Bundy Christmas photos.

And my personal favourite...