Melbourne December 4-11

Melbourne was a bit weird for us. Well to be more polite, our visit to Melbourne was a little strange. All travel is very subjective, but what we most remember of this city is just hanging out, relaxing and searching for new places to eat out, of which there are countless great examples. I think we were just tired out from all the fast-paced sightseeing and driving in Tasmania and all the places before.

We did manage to visit a few places during our time here, but they were all rather unsatisfying. The Immigration Museum included a guided tour, but the guide focused mostly on the architecture of the building itself, which she obviously found fascinating. There was one nice story to illustrate the power held by the immigration officers. Until about the 1930’s, they could use tricks such as the grammar test, in any European language to mark people as unsuitable for immigration. The story goes that a political activist was very much unwanted, so the immigration officers tested him in 6 different European languages, all of which he spoke, until they finally tried Gaelic, which he did not, so they were able to refuse his application on the grounds of insufficient language skills.

In poor weather, we took a free tour bus, but it was very popular, and completely packed, so that we had to sit separately. We walked to the end of St Kilda on a blustery day to see the kite surfers, but though it was beautiful, we couldn’t stay long because it was too chilly.

There was also quite a lot of what you might call family time. Andrew took Emma to see an excellent evening outdoor ballet performance of the Nutcracker Suite. We viewed the botanical gardens, and during a feeding session there, Andrew dropped some baby food in such a spectacularly clumsy way that it covered everybody in a 5m blast radius. We explored the fantastic war memorial, where Emma became lost for a few minutes, and had a minor scare. We crawled all over an art museum, where we nearly bought some aboriginal artwork. Emma later started to spontaneously produce aborigine-style dotted pictures, which were very good. All of these were important to us, but probably don’t deserve more than a short mention here.

Melbourne Museum was a nice surprise. It had an indigenous people section, including some moving stories about the disastrous government programs in the mid-20th century to “civilize” the aborigines, basically by removing their children and raising them in white foster homes. This sounds insane to us now, and it scarred many families, but it’s interesting to note that they took responsibility for it. This is what the Australian prime minister was talking about, when he made his public apology a few years ago, for previous government treatment of the aborigines. Like most other uninformed foreigners, I had always assumed that it was about forcing them off their traditional land. The museum had an excellent kiddies section, so Emma enjoyed playing at excavating dinosaur bones and measuring her height in terms of giraffes (0.25 giraffes) and wombats (4 - stacked up, of course)

We did come across some evidence of the massive Hungarian population, located here and in Sydney, when we visited a second generation Hungarian café. It was nice to relax with some familiar food, while Emma entertained the other customers.

So that was the end of our Australian trip. We had enjoyed it greatly, but now it was time to move on to the other half of our adventure, New Zealand.