Assor­ted Melbourne II

Published Categorised as Australia, Travel No Comments on Assor­ted Melbourne II

Melbourne was a boom town in the 50s and 60s with people want­ing to leave post-war Europe (and also places like Leban­on) and there are loads of great peri­od shop fronts still around.

Lots of the trams are new and gleam­ing, but there are also some really 80s look­ing ones doing the rounds. Some of them have a cord running along the wall to request a stop rather than buttons on the poles.

I had lunch here. It was indeed good, but in fact I’d say it was their baba ghan­oush that sold it.

 

There’s lots of street art going on too.

Cock rock will never die in Australia.

  

Lots of back streets of Melbourne look like this- terraced brick houses very simil­ar to the UK, except with a sunporch with chairs and sofas on. Being from the UK my brain goes “no! don’t put it outside! It’ll be rotten in a week!” but of course it’s fine in the drier, some­what warm­er climate in Melbourne. (Victor­ia has cool­er weath­er than most of the rest of Australia).

The Kulin people lived in what was to become Melbourne, making a living from fish­ing, until simil­arly to San Fran­cisco there was a gold rush in 1851, bring­ing in huge amounts of incomers (and all their diseases unfor­tu­nately for the Kulin) and spark­ing a build­ing boom that created the large city that is now here.

Not all of Melbourne is crum­bling old bricks covered in wheat paste illus­tra­tions however, there are a lot of gleam­ing new towers in the Cent­ral Busi­ness District.

And around the hospit­al and the univer­sity.

I’m not really a fan of shop­ping centres, but I had to go round all the depart­ment stores to get a new suit­case after the airline broke my (to be fair, knackered) case. Here disproves people’s idea that Melbourne is always a hot, sunny place. I was there at the end of their winter (Septem­ber is like our March) and there was plenty of rain to be had.

Melbourne Cent­ral Station is pretty retro look­ing as well.

And Flinders Street Station has an old black and white photo­booth (along with Sticky Insti­tute zine shop, which I will come to later).

Later in Hobart I made the mistake of post­ing a box of things home to myself and discovered how fuck­ing expens­ive Australia Post are.

Anoth­er local thing in Melbourne is that lots of medi­cines are only avail­able from phar­ma­cies and cost an abso­lute fortune (rules on this vary from state to state- it defin­itely wasn’t as bad in NSW or Tasmania). £1 is $2 AUD, and I can get this exact same thing as a gener­ic tablet at home from the super­mar­ket for a couple of pounds. You also had to get the brand name version in Victor­ia. Lemsip was equally as over­priced.

The main thing I wanted though was some Australi­an strength suncream (they start at 50SPF) and some of this lotion which is fant­ast­ic for excema spots.

Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.