Welcome to travels with Todd

I acknowledge that I am on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation and acknowledge their custodianship. The Dreaming is still living. From the past, in the present, into the future. Forever. I would also like to pay respect to the Elders past, present, and emerging and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.

A meeting made

(Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait)

You can’t control the weather but you can control your reaction to the way it might complicate your life. Control what’s controllable. This is a statement that can impact so much of our lives and I needed to keep that in mind Monday as I was scheduled to fly from Hobart to Melbourne on a brief hour and twenty-five minute flight. I rode the SkyBus to the airport without incident and arrived at about 08:45 for a scheduled 10:20 flight. I almost got into trouble for taking a picture of this sign

that made me smile (and think of my fellow RS travelers J&M B who had mentioned an airport they travel through that has a recombobulation zone). An airport security guard shut down my first attempt but allowed my second after I’d surrendered my luggage to the screener.

I think the Qantas flight I was scheduled to take is a bit like a tram in that it flies from Melbourne to Hobart, drops off its passengers, and then returns from Hobart to Melbourne. The weather in Hobart that morning was fine. Apparently, this wasn’t the case in Melbourne. The inbound flight, its departure delayed due to weather in Melbourne arrived 45 minutes late. After some additional delay, we finally boarded the plane then sat on the runway for more than an hour waiting for Melbourne’s weather to become calm enough that we got clearance to depart. I arrived nearly three hours later than scheduled.

Like Hobart, Melbourne has a SkyBus service to its CBD and the stop at the Southern Cross Station was less than 400 meters from the Grand Hotel

where I’ll be staying for the next few nights. The late arriving flight meant I didn’t need to try to check-in early and, as an added bonus, they upgraded my room from a suite to a full apartment. The astonishing aspect to me was that the walk down the hallway to my apartment

that was near the far end felt like it was about half the distance back to the train station. (I’d have no problem raising my daily step count just entering and leaving the hotel!)

Soon after my arrival, I began exchanging texts with DB a fellow Road Scholar who had extended her trip with a stay in Melbourne where she’d spent time some number of years ago. She was leaving for her home in Hawaii Tuesday so we made arrangements to meet for dinner.

Feeling the need to walk, I told D I’d meet her at her hotel on  Little Collins Street – it was farther than I’d anticipated – and from there we’d walk to a restaurant called Osteria Ilaria on Little Bourke Street. (Melbourne, at least in the CBD, seems to be full of these parent and child street pairings.)

We didn’t have reservations but were able to take seats at the bar. We each had an entree – mine was smoked eel with salmon roe and I don’t remember hers – and shared a salad and a main of the restaurant’s twist on prawn tortelli to which I added a Cascade Lager. We had a lovely time catching up and she tole me she was sorry she wouldn’t be at home in Hawai’i when I reached Oahu in late December.

I walked with her part of the way back to her hotel before we said our goodbyes and I walked at a leisurely pace back to my hotel / apartment thinking about another long planned meeting that awaited me on the morrow.

A meeting missed

I’m a long time supporter of University of Maryland Athletics and have a bit of a reputation of being passionate and knowledgeable about what the NCAA likes to call the Olympic Sports and that we hoi polloi call the non-revenue (or non-rev) sports. In the early part of this decade, the Maryland Women’s Basketball team had an Australian player and I met and became somewhat friendly with her parents when they spent some time in College Park during her final season. Her father and I traded phone numbers and, knowing that he lived in some proximity to Melbourne, I had reached out to him a few months earlier to tell him I’d be visiting. He seemed excited at the prospect of showing me around and I was excited to reconnect and have a local guide.

I’d updated him occasionally through the trip and although his plans to meet me shifted we finally settled on a Tuesday date in Melbourne. On our watches the time on the east coast of Australia is 16 hours ahead of the time on the east coast of the U S so I silenced my phone nightly to avoid texts, marketing calls, and the like. I woke up Tuesday morning to see a message from A saying his “situation had changed” and he would be unable to meet me. Not only was I a bit disappointed but I had to work up plans for a day that I’d not yet planned.

Art art everywhere

One aspect of Melbourne that I knew in advance suited me was its lively street art scene and fortunately, I’d made a list of places to explore that facet of the city. After a light breakfast, I started by walking a kilometer or so northeast along Flinders Street to get my first look at the famous railway station

that’s Australia’s oldest and busiest. Statistics for the Flinders Street Railway Station built in 1909 show that it sees a daily passage of 110,000 people on more than 1,500 trains. I’d pass this place frequently as I wandered about the city.

The National Gallery of Victoria opened in 1861 as Australia’s first public art gallery. I can’t say whether this had any influence on the development of the street art explosion more than two centuries later but it almost certainly contributed to Melbourne’s reputation as an art friendly city.

This article from Time Out Magazine traces the history of street art in Melbourne. Here are some highlights from that story:

• Street art finds its foundations in graffiti, a hardcore underground movement which arrived in Melbourne in 1983.
• By the 1990s, a grander look had emerged in street art as lettering merged with conventional illustrative art techniques. A community project by Prahran railway station drove a groundbreaking artwork called ‘The Style Machine’ by Duel, Mars and Pest: a three-story high mural with an environmental message showing the city as a nuclear apocalypse, as well as lettering which transforms in style when passed through a conveyer belt.
• The famous Citylights project was born in 1996, merging the ephemeral with the permanent by installing lightboxes which could be viewed for free all day in various locations – one of which was fast becoming the nation’s street art mecca, Hosier Lane.
• By the 2000s, a unique cast of eye-catching characters emerged across the city. Artists like Phibs and Reka populated Melbourne with a cast of countercultural creatures.
• Stencils had a boom, influenced by the cultural juggernaut Banksy. Melbourne became the stencil capital of the world, in part due to Prism’s now-defunct stencilrevolution.com forum which acted as an international town square, and art collectives like Blender Studios and the Everfresh Crew.
• In 2010, the National Gallery of Australia held a dedicated exhibition, cementing street art into the cultural canon along with Space Invaders. The show questioned whether street artists were vandals or vanguards, and charted the transition of street art into fine art galleries.

From this point, I’m going to leave the opinions and viewing to you, reader. I’ll select a few works I liked or found interesting in some way and download them from the full folder that I’ll link at the end of the post.

First Stop – Higson Lane

Next stop AC/DC Lane

On to Duckboard Place

Next, Hosier Lane

Finally, DeGraves Street.

Although I have many photos and I’ll add one more famous piece when I recount my afternoon on this, my second day in Melbourne, I need to stress that I reached only a small sample of all you can see in the city. Here’s that promised link.