Australia
November & December, 1989
The only things that I have to reconstruct a journal for this trip are pictures, with no captions, and my faulty memory. I do remember that I went back to Australia, particularly Victoria, because I liked to country so well in 1988 when I did a bike tour (you can read about this in Bike Tours on this site). I was also very unhappy with my job and wanted to see if there was any possibility of moving to Australia; I soon found out that at 45 years of age I was too old for this to happen. I might note that was also true in finding a new job here in the USA after quiting my bank job. I have shown the time that I was there as being in November & December but that might not be correct, it is possible that it was only December. I know that I visited Melbourne and its suburbs for about a week and then went to Adelaide, Mildura & Paynsville for about ten days and then back to Melbourne for a total of three weeks. The exact number of days in each place is only a guess. I have combined all of the pictures of Melbourne and suburbs together from the beginning and end of my trip and have tried to group them in some reasonable way rather than when I took them. With all that said, here are those pictures with memory captions added.
Melbourne: This is Magnolia Court, the Bed-n-Breakfast that I stayed in while I was in Melbourne. It is across the street from Fitzroy Gardens and a short walk from Finders Station. Three pictures of Finders Station area. The first is Finders Station, the second is a shot of the light rail in the streets of town and the third is part of the train rail system.
A couple church pictures. The second is from the 1800s undergoing restoration (many of the historical buildings are or have been restored), the first is an active church probably also from the 1800s. Six pictures of the streets or buildings that interested me in Melbourne and Geelong. In the second picture from the right, second row, there is an older house undergoing restoration, then you see a new home in the next picture that has retained the same style as the old.
Port Phillip Bay: This is the main dock area in Geelong. The pictures above are from Geelong, a suburb of Melbourne on Port Phillip Bay, that I went to one day on the train. The first two pictures show the highrises in the center of Melbourne with a large number of boats in the bay foreground.
Port Phillip Bay Beach & Path:These ten pictures are of the beach along Port Phillips Bay. I almost certain that these pictures were taken during the week but it would be hard to find a beach in Southern California that was as deserted as this on any day of the week. There are also pictures of a path that I found and walked that followed the beach and then some small hills and thick brush (all of Melbourne was covered with this growth before being developed).
Zoo: These four pictures were taken in the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens, more commonly called the Melbourne Zoo. The first picture is near the entrance where the spring flowers have all been removed at the base of an elephant sculpture and summer flowers have not made an appearance yet. The next two pictures are at the monkey compound where the residents always appear to want their picture taken. A difficult picture to get while in the Butterfly House: a greenhouse-style walk-through exhibit for tropical butterflies. There were hundreds of them flitting around but my shutter speed is to slow to get a picture while they were doing so, I need to find some that had landed and taking a rest. I did not get a picture of the platypus that I saw; they where in a tank with a window that allowed you to see them but they swam past very, very fast! I also did not take a picture of a North American elk that I saw with his antlers in velvet. This is November or December (autumn) for North American elk they have velvet in the spring? I asked about this and one of the "keepers" told me that the first year the elk was in the zoo he had no antlers at all, then his internal calender shifted around and now they reappear in the southern hemisphere spring.
Zoo: A poor picture of a koala - they are never very active and prefer the shade during the day so it is always hard to get a good picture. But an emu walked over and gave me this "what are you looking at stare". Above there is a red kangaroo, the largest of the many species, at his leisure in the shade. An echidnas that was rather shy, couldn't get him to pose for a facial portrait. The wombat that I waited and waited for to come out of the shade.I remember that I caught a bus from Melbourne, Victoria to Adelaide, South Australia and went through Ballarat, Victoria so the route was probably on Highway 8 also known as Dukes Highway Western. The travel time was about 9 hours and I remember that most of it was during daylight but we arrived in the early evening. I had a hotel reservation that was an easy walk from downtown but I don't recall anything about what I did that evening nor anything while I was there for two and one half days except what the pictures bring back to mind. So be it, here are those pictures.
Adelaide - Downtown: As you can see there are Christmas decorations up so I was probably there in December. The picture on the left is the hotel that I stayed at which is not technically in downtown but only a short walk away. The last two above are of homes in the older residential area surrounding downtown.
Montefiore Park: Montefiore Park is huge and contains Adelaide Oval (cricket grounds), Zoological and Botanic Gardens, Victoria Park Racecourse and much more. It surrounds downtown and North Adelaide where my hotel was. The first picture left first row is at the cricket grounds where the Australian National Team is playing the Indian National Team. They had been playing a match since I had arrived and I had watched some of it on TV while in Melbourne. For me cricket has all the excitement of watching the grass grow in the Oval, but occasionally there would be a play that got the fans excited and I would not know why. Then a look across the Park at downtown and two other pictures of the park looking toward the boundary and beyond. The last four pictures show downtown, the Oval and Montefiore Park.
Torrens River: Five pictures of the Torrens River that flows through Montefiore Park between downtown and North Adelaide. The river has a dam at the western side of the Park which creates a long narrow lake within the Park that is navigated by pedal-boats and sightseeing boats.When I was planning this trip I had decided that I would visit Mildura, Victoria on my return from Adelaide, South Australia. I was living in Upland and working for a bank headquartered in Ontario, CA; I had also attended Chaffey Junior College for two years so it seemed the thing to do. In 1881, the Chaffey brothers, George and William, purchased land (which at that time also included the present-day city of Upland) and the water rights to it. They engineered a drainage system channeling water from the foothills of Mount Baldy down to the flatter lands below that performed the dual functions of allowing farmers to water their crops and preventing the floods that periodically afflict them. They also created the City of Ontario and platted the streets, that included the main thoroughfare of Euclid Avenue, with its distinctive wide lanes and grassy median. Then in 1886 the Chaffeys went to Australia and selected a derelict sheep station at Mildura as the site for his first irrigation settlement; signing an agreement with the Victorian government to spend at least $300,000 on permanent improvements at Mildura in the next twenty years. They again platted the Mildura City streets, exactly the same as for Ontario, CA but now Euclid Avenue became Langtree Avenue. I made reservations for a hotel while in Adelaide because I knew that I would be arriving late in the evening. The bus that I caught was an express from Adelaide, South Australia to Sydney, New South Wales that stopped in Mildura. It was a 19+ hour trip to Sydney and the bus had two drivers with a place at the rear of the bus for one of them to sleep. Mildura was about 1/3 of the way to Sydney, or 7-8 hours, and we left around 4:00 PM putting me into Mildura near midnight. With all of that as background, here are the pictures that I took.
I left Mildura by train on the third day and arrived back in Melbourne where I stayed overnight at the Magnolia Court B-n-B. The following day after lunch I caught another train to Moe or Moewell where a friend worked and then she and I drove through Gippsland to Paynesville for a weekend at her parents home. The driving route was nearly the same as what I had bicycled in 1988 but everything always looks different from a car than a bicycle seat. I also saw a lot of the area around Paynesville that I had not see before which I was able to get pictures of and post them here now.
Gippsland Coal: These are pictures of the power plants and coal strip mines in the Gippsland area that provide Melbourne and its suburbs with electricity. I didn't hear anyone complain about the coal fired power plants while I was there nor any talk about closing them down and going to solar. There is an environmental movement in Australia but nothing near the craziness of the USA.
Gippsland Dairy:Dairy lands in Gippsland surround the power plants and coal strip mines. I would guess that the cows generate as much greenhouse gases as do the power plants but there isn't any talk about moving them further away from Melbourne as has happened in Southern California - Australia has a different culture. It is a lot like the USA in the 1950s with some British Liberalism tacked on but generally a conservative society.
Paynesville - Victoria Lake: These pictures were taken while crossing Victoria Lake from Paynesville to a dock on the sand dunes. The first picture is leaving Paynesville dock and the last is arriving at the dunes. From the dunes dock it was only a few hundred yards walk to Ninety Mile Beach. Ninety Mile Beach on the Pacific and along the sand dunes that separate it from the Victoria Lake & Kings Lake estuary. The first picture is looking east and the second is to the west; I walked along the beach for maybe 300 yards and saw not one footprint other than my own - unbelievable!
Epilogue: I enjoyed my three weeks vacation a lot, learned that moving to Australia was not realistic and became even more convinced that I had to quit my banking job. I did quit the following March 31, 1990 and didn't hold another "career job" until I retired in 2005.