Melbourne - Friends, family, and a tour of food and drink

Melbourne

Our main plan for Melbourne was to eat, drink and socialise. We certainly achieved that. I mentioned that the Fitzroy area we were staying in was great for places to go out, and we valiantly ploughed our way through many of the options.

And when we needed an occasional respite, there were some lovely independent shops around, and a nice little market too.

Melbourne

It was an interesting place, as whilst it was certainly trendy - lots of hipster beards and man-buns - it wasn't that achingly hip, 'don't even try to get in if you aren't wearing the right uniform', kind of area, that personally I (a) don't meet the criteria, and (b) couldn't stand to go out in even if I did. It actually has a really relaxed and friendly feeling to it, much like most of the areas that we visited in fact. We loved it.

Melbourne

The area has developed a shabby look, with lots of dishevelled looking buildings, and graffiti. We heard that some of the establishments here have paid a lot of money to achieve just that right level of peeling paintwork, and the graffiti is not that awful tagging, but really rather impressive street art. We did wonder slightly about the syringes that we saw on the ground, but soon realised that the only drug at work here was sugar, as these were the syringes used to fill your designer doughnuts with your flavouring of choice.

Melbourne

Not that the look of the place went down too well with my aunt. While we were here, we met up with one of my dad's sisters, who emigrated to Australia around thirty odd years ago. I had never met her, so it was nice to have the chance to do so while we were here.

She and her husband collected us at our 'home' and were quite concerned that we were staying in such a bad area. We did reassure her that it isn't really like that, as did her daughter later, but I'm not sure she was convinced.

Chandon Winery, Melbourne

They drove us out to Mount Dandenong, where we were able to take in the view of the city, and have lunch, at a restaurant called Skyhigh. The food was plentiful, and the views were excellent. After lunch, we popped in to Chandon Winery for a taste of their wines, and then went out to their home, where we saw a resident kookaburra pop over for dinner. It was lovely to meet another branch of the family, and to see another side of Melbourne.

Kookaburra, Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne

Back in the city, the main hub in Fitzroy is Brunswick Street. We rather liked The Fitz, for a good lunch or brunch, and we couldn't resist trying out The Shifty Chevre, which as you might guess from the name, specialises in cheese. It is a great place for a cheese platter snack, especially if you come when one of their offers is on, such as when the sparkling wine is half price. However the main reason we came was to check out the cheesy cocktails. Honestly, I can't say that they were my favourite drinks, and I'm not really convinced of the merits of putting cheese in your drink as opposed to with it, but it was fun to try.

I had no complaints about the cocktails in two of the other establishments in the street though. The Black Pearl and The Alchemist were both excellent. the lists were interesting and varied, the staff were friendly, helpful and - most importantly - made wonderful cocktails. And whilst cocktails are rarely cheap, I thought that for drinks of this standard, in a city like Melbourne, they weren't too badly priced. I would highly recommend both places.

Melbourne

Somewhere else I would definitely recommend, is a restaurant called Charcoal Lane, in Gertrude Street. This place is a bit on the fancier side, but the food is great. It is a social enterprise project, that gives disadvantaged young people, many of whom are Aboriginal, a chance to have a fresh start and training, either in the kitchen or front of house.

The food is different too, with a focus on bush food, with options such as emu and wallaby, and other ingredients like lemon myrtle, wattleseed, rosella flower and muntrie berries.

A couple of streets over, technically in Collingwood rather than Fitzroy I think, is another road to check out - Smith Street. There is a huge range of eateries and bars here. We found a place that specialised in meatballs, which made a change, but perhaps wasn't as good as we'd have liked.

Melbourne

There was a rather nice wine bar called Smithward, which had only recently opened, and did a rather nice raclette. The owner was very interesting to chat to, and was taking the unusual approach of only stocking wines that he and his wife had tried at the winery in question.

Thankfully they have been to some nice wineries. And we really liked MJR TOM, which had friendly staff, good cocktails, and very tasty bomba and empanaditas.

Melbourne

We popped along to Carlton, where we caught up on a couple of films at the cinema, and we spent a lot of time in Melbourne just walking around some of these close by neighbourhoods, and taking in the city, stopping for refreshment and people watching, and it was an excellent place for that. One of the things that we liked about the look of Melbourne, was the lovely old buildings with beautiful ironwork.

Our friend who picked us up when we arrived lives in Brunswick, so we had a good look around there too, finding some great bars, and a lovely tapas and salsa place, that may have been Basco's but I forgot to write any of the names down so I'm not sure. We also met up with her and some other friends at Federation Wharf in the CBD. We just about made it safely through Federation Square, despite the best efforts of the local zombie wannabees.

One last place I should mention, just for the sheer wackiness of it, is a cocktail bar that was recommended to us by a number of people. It is called Madame Brussells, and it is set up like a lawn tennis club. The staff are dressed in tennis whites, there is fake grass on the floor and everything is just a little bit camp and kitsch. To be honest, I wouldn't recommend it on either price or quality of the drinks, but it is amusing to stop off for a pitcher on the terrace.

Overall, we really liked Melbourne. It was a city that we could easily imagine living in for a while, far more so than Sydney.

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Melbourne - a tiny bit of history

Graffiti, Melbourne

From Adelaide, we took an overnight bus to Melbourne. The journey was OK, but we didn't get much sleep, and we couldn't check in to our Airbnb place until the afternoon, so we were very grateful that a friend from our South America trip, who lives in Melbourne, had offered to pick us up and go back to her place. Being used to overnight bus trips herself, she packed us straight off to bed, and then when we were suitably refreshed after a few hours sleep, we all went out for brunch. Now that is what I call a welcome.

Our Airbnb was in a great location in Fitzroy, just off Brunswick Street. This was a carefully selected area, not too far from the centre, but right in the heart of the eating and drinking hub - and just around the corner from a really excellent cocktail bar.

You may have guessed that cultural and historical aspects of the city were not high on our list of things to do here!

Immigration Museum, Melbourne

We did at least go to the Immigration Museum, which gave an interesting insight into how Australia has handled immigration over the years. When the Federation of Australia was formed in 1901, they brought in the Immigration Restriction Act, which was one aspect of the unofficial 'White Australia Policy' which sought to prevent the entry of any non white-European immigrants.


In the preceeding years, there had been actions to reduce the number of Chinese coming to work in the mining industry - not because they weren't good workers, but because they worked co-operatively, which made them more effective and therefore more successful, and the white Australian miners didn't like that.

Immigration Museum, Melbourne

As Alfred Deakin, the then Attorney General is quoted as saying, "It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors." And according to the then Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." Any of this sounding familiar to those of us from the UK right now?

Now at the time, the UK was a little uncomfortable with the overtly racist approach of 'whites only', (albeit not so uncomfortable as to block it,) so Australia opted for a supposedly more subtle approach of introducing a dictation test which any non white-Europeans had to pass to gain entry. The museum had some examples of the fifty word test, and I can pretty much guarantee that there is a sizeable chunk of 'indigenous white' British people that wouldn't be able to pass it, let alone people for whom English is a second language.

Immigration Museum, Melbourne

And the difficulty wasn't the only issue. The test could be done in any European language, chosen by the officials. So there are examples of people from Malta, with great English, being given the test in Dutch. One political activist, who was fluent in several languages, was denied entry for failing the test after being given it in Gaelic. This test was in use in Australia right up until 1958.

Asian migration to Australia only really began in the late 1960s, after the Labor Party removed the 'White Australia' policy from its platform.

Immigration Museum, Melbourne

Of course at this time, the real indigenous population of Australia, the people who really did have a legitimate gripe about immigrants, were still not actually counted as citizens of Australia when a census was done. A referendum in 1967 overwhelmingly voted to change this and other discrepancies, seeing the first major step forward for the Aboriginal people.

Some sources even suggest that, prior to these changes in legislation, Aboriginal people were in fact counted as part of the Flora and Fauna of Australia, rather than as people. This seems unlikely to be technically true, but the fact that this is still referred to is probably a good indication of how they were treated at the time.

Immigration Museum, Melbourne