Across Swanston Street from Flinders Street Station (probably the most photographed building in Melbourne) is Federation Square. It’s sort of the meeting place for the city; cool stuff like one of the National Gallery of Victoria locations and the Australian Center for the Moving Image is located there. It also has a very nice visitors’ center with all the things that a visitors’ center should have, like maps and souvenirs and people to help you book tours and things like that. It also has a fleet of volunteer Greeters that provide three- to four-hour tours, absolutely free of charge.
I had read about this service in my trusty guidebook, “Melbourne, Free & Dirt Cheap,” and once I settled in with Mylo-the-cat, I checked the web site and sure enough, there was a way to book a spot on the tour. Following the specific instructions, I was there at 9 a.m. sharp (the first one, I would like to note for the record) and met Hans, a German gentleman who moved to Australia I the ’50s, worked, raised a family, retired and decided to volunteer and give tours. This presented yet another accent challenge to me: a German Australian accent. The group grew to a total of six: an Asian girl, a young German couple (that held hands throughout the entire tour) two young German girls, and me. I was the oldest by a number of years, sort of bridging the gap between Hans and the 20-something-year-olds.
The first stop was Flinders Street Station (shown above at night and on the right) located, appropriately, on Flinders Street and Swanston, two main streets in the Central Business District (CBD). There are photographs of this lovely Victorian lady on just about every piece of tourist literature available. Flinders was the original train station, the first one, the oldest, the Grand Old Lady, as she is called. And yes, this building is female – substantially female. About half a million pass through every day: Melburnians on their way to and from work, tourists exploring the CBD, pensioners out and about at the museums. Although the exterior has been meticulously maintained, the interior is due for a refurbishment. In fact, the building itself (including the Railworker’s Club Ballroom) can’t be used because it’s not up to code. The problem is that the city can’t shut any of the platforms down to accommodate an update without causing all kinds of disruption to the already overloaded system. So, Flinders Street goes on as it is.
I made mention of how Sydney was difficult to navigate because of how its street evolved from pig trails. Melbourne, however, is a planned city that its founders built on a grid. Straight streets and a terrific tram system (largest in the world) make it quite easy to get around. Well, if you get the right tram, anyway. I have a tendency to just get on the first tram that pulls up at a stop without looking at the route number. After riding the tram from midnight to after 1 a.m. one day, I learned my lesson. So I should qualify this by saying that it’s easy to get around if a person pays attention.
Hans, already acting the instructor, asked us if we noticed anything in particular about the streets. Umm – there are trams? Yes, he said, there are trams. Do you notice anything about that? We all remained silent as a class that didn’t study for the test. Well, he pointed out, they have trams and cars, and wide, green boulevards running down the center. Melbourne was built before the automobile by those of European descent and by all rights, should have been like Sydney with its narrow streets. But the Yarra River was really the center of the city when Melbourne was founded (on gold money) as a financial and manufacturing center. All the beautiful old Victorian buildings downtown are edifices that housed front offices, clothing factories stretching out behind them. Materials were shipped from Port Phillip up the river, unloaded onto carts and then pulled up the streets by ox and horse teams. The streets, therefore, had to be wide enough for the beasts to pull a U-turn. Now they’re wide enough to accommodate both tram and car traffic.
We walked beside the Yarra where the landscaping is no longer sleeping quarters for the homeless. In fact, I haven’t seen many homeless people around, most likely because they’re being helped, although Hans did mention that he would show us their newest popular hiding place. We walked onto Southern Cross Bridge, which is decorated for the Holidays. We looked over the river at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Arts Center with its spire. We went to visit an eccentric opal dealer where we saw his collection of lizards and spiders and how an opal is cut. We walked the laneways of downtown Melbourne, strolling Collins Street and Little Collins, Flinders Street and Flinders Lane, Bourke Street and Little Bourke Street. (Just because it’s on a grid doesn’t mean it’s not confusing.)
Hans was a little bit too interested in the scatological history of Melbourne. He put on the pedant’s hat once again and asked us if we knew why there were so many laneways in Melbourne. Again, we remained silent. So he launched into a general description of how people back then didn’t have indoor plumbing and used chamber pots, and someone had to dispose of the waste, so they’d put the pots out in the lane and at night, a guy with a big tank would come along and take it away. And dump it in the river. Where all of the rest of the waste from manufacturing was dumped. When indoor plumbing was finally installed, Hans told us the toilets were always put at the back of the building. Sure enough, he showed us the tangle of pipes on the back of just about every old building. Of course, once there was indoor plumbing, there was no longer a need to set out the chamber pots ever night and the lanes were used for delivery of materials and such. But now that manufacturing has ceased and the factories have been turned into chic lofted flats or cool offices, the lane have become full of shops, some that you can practically touch both walls at the same time. Every third one is a coffee shop and/or bakery.
But Hans, for all his interest in the history of Melbourne’s potties, was quite informative, as well. He showed us laneways full of street art, AC/DC Lane (Digression: The rock band started its performing life here. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So launched AC/DC Lane with the words, “As the song says, there is a highway to hell, but this is a laneway to heaven. Let us rock.” Bagpipers then played “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll. What’s not to love about this city?) We also toured the wonderful shopping arcades, the balcony on Town Hall where the Beatles waved to the Melbournian crowds in 1964 (Paul came out with a boomerang). We walked past the Atheneaum theater, where The Women’s Library was (and still is, it’s just called the Athenaeum Library) named such because when Mum and Dad came to town to do the marketing, Dad would stop and have a few at the pub and where was Mum to go? Well, they started a library for the ladies to gather and improve their minds while the men were taking care of business. I would have thought that allowing women to read while men were off doing something else would be a dangerous business, but these Australians are fairly liberal.
Hans also pointed out the 975-foot Eureka Tower, with its crown of gold and streak of red symbolic of the 1854 Eureka Stockade in the gold mining community of Ballarat, or “blood under the Southern Cross.” Until 1901, Australia was still a group of colonies under the rule of England, with any and all resources discovered deemed property of the Crown. In order to look for gold, a Miner’s Licence had to be purchased. Licence fees were high, and had to be paid monthly whether gold was discovered or not. Some miners banded together to protest the practice. One of the groups, the Ballarat Reform League, passed a resolution: “that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny“. The meeting also resolved to secede from the United Kingdom if the situation did not improve. Sound familiar? A flag was designed – the Southern Cross – a beautiful flag. Hans said that Australians are ambivalent about symbol now; it enjoys a similar reputation to our Bars & Stars rebel flag. Hard to imagine a nation thinking that one rebellion of mistreated miners is equivalent to our bloody, years-long conflict. Perhaps another Australian misconception of the United States. There are some that insist the conflict had nothing to do with Australian identity whatsoever. Others believe that Australians revere this riot, the only one in its history bearing any resemblance to the French Revolution, the American War for Independence or the Irish Civil War.
The rebellion was in fact a brutal slaughter. Of the 36 casualties, 22 were fatalities. Troops had to be ordered to stand down and stop bayoneting the miners. Women threw themselves over men to appeal for mercy and stop the killing. Licencing practices were changes after the rebellion.
Eureka Tower is the highest residential building in the world, the second tallest in Australia, and the 34th tallest in the world. The building’s gold crown represents the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, with a red stripe representing the blood spilled during the revolt. The blue glass cladding that covers most of the building represents the blue background of the stockade’s flag, the white lines, the cross and stars. The white horizontal stripes also represent markings on a surveyor’s measuring staff.
Melbourne (actually pronounced “Mel-bn” or “Mel-brn” but NEVER “Mel-born”) was given its name by Governor Richard Bourke in 1837, in honor of William Lamb, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, who served as Britain’s Home Secretary and then Prime Minister. He is best remembered for mentoring the young Queen Victoria in the ways of politics, but never presided over any wars or great conflicts, so history often sort of ignores him. The city was also the first capital when Australia was united in 1901. Government stayed in Melbourne until 1927 when it was moved to the planned Australian Capital Territory. (Victoria and New South Wales each believed that they should host the seat of government, so ultimately, a separate area was formed, much like we did with Washington, D.C. )
As Hans pointed out the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is really the area dedicated to all athletic endeavors in Melbourne, he informed us that football (that’s rugby) in Australia is a religion. He looked mournful as he told us that his entire family is for such-and-such, but his daughter went off and married a guy who is for so-and-so. Now that they’ve had a son, it’s difficult to say how the child will be brought up. Right now the parents plan to take the boy to both teams’ matches and then him choose when he gets old enough to decide on his own. I was going to tell Hans that these things are often traced through the maternal side, but I stopped myself. Hans had difficulty with both my sense of humor and my accent.
After four hours of constant information, Hans left us somewhere downtown – I think it was right across from the Myer department store, where people line up for hours to see the annual Christmas window displays. I wasn’t interested in looking at the windows right then because it was nearly 1 p.m. and I hadn’t had lunch yet. So off I went to get even more thoroughly lost than I was and eat. Melbourne may be set up on a grid, but all these lanes are like rabbit warrens that you wind through until you pop out the other side, blinking in the bright light like a mole. While we were on the tour, I saw a dress I planned to go back and try on. After all, it turns out that I will be at the Opera House on New Year’s Eve. I still have not managed to find that store, and doubt I will, except maybe by accident.
Next, Bendigo, another gold rush town and a place that I absolutely would be happy to live.
