Wednesday, May 14, 2014

May 12 -- Melbourne, Day 3

Sculpture representing a large petition with 30,000 signatures
presented to Victorian Parliament in 1891 demanding the vote
for women. Victoria was the last state in Australia to grant the
right, in 1908, well before the US.
Today there were no formal tours until dinner, which was on a colonial era tramcar, so we slept in! Yay! I think I needed a day to relax (and then we went out and walked over 23,000 steps and 10 miles -- so much for relaxation!). When we got our act together, we headed out for the church corner (passing by the Parliament building in the process): St. Patrick's (Catholic Catheral with flying buttresses), St. Peter's (Anglican and much more subdued), and a Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (even more subdued). There was a synagogue in the area too, tho we did not find it. From there, we ambled over to Fitzroy Gardens, which has a couple old cottages and a conservatory. One cottage had been used by a park gardener,  the other was Cook Cottage, which belonged to Captain Cook and had been shipped out from England. The conservatory was very small, but had very lush plantings.


Lutheran Church

Sinclair Cottage, oldest substantial building originally built in Melbourne

Cook Cottage, built in 1755 and transported to Melbourne in  1934.

Jim in the Conservatory

From there, we walked down to the waterfront to get a better view of Federation Square's modernistic buildings and to see what the options were for a boat tour. We decided the boat tour would have been better for a day where we weren't going to an early dinner and skipped it and walked around some more to get an idea of where we were going to dinner.
One of the wildly modern halls at Federation Square

Another Federation Square building. Notice
the small red streaks -- this is connected text
that scrolls across the building.


After lunch, we went back to the hotel, cleaned up and went to the Immigration Museum which was
sort of on the way to dinner. We took a bit of a detour to get a picture of a coffee shop with an interesting name: The Church of Secular Coffee.  Since I give immigration tours on Angel Island, I was interested to see how Australia's policy compared. While they were less consistent on the topic of Chinese (sometimes restrictive, sometimes not), they had a "White Australia" policy officially and not so much for about 70 years, starting with independence in 1901. One way to keep people out was pretty diabolical: There was a dictation test that could be given in any northern European language, regardless of where you were from. You had to correctly repeat 50 words. If you passed and they really didn't want you, they could keep on having you tested in other languages until you failed. Now there is a lot of focus on encouraging diversity and tolerance and the society is becoming less white and we saw many mixed heritage couples. People who come without permission are not called 'Illegal Immigrants' but 'Asylum Seekers' and there is another group called 'Overstayers' who don't leave when their visas expire. This is a source of some debate in the country.

We got to the tramcar pickup early and were lucky to get put on the first tram. The interior was lovely and the meal was fabulous. The tram ride was a bit odd as we were onboard for an hour and a half and the tram route was not that long, so we went back and forth a bit. Overall, a worthwhile experience. We hustled back to the hotel in time to catch most of movie night -- a private showing of "Ned Kelly" with Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom.

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