I‘m just about to bid adieu, for now, to Australia. I’m sitting in the departures lounge of Melbourne airport waiting for a flight to Auckland, New Zealand. Melbourne, a city embraced by artists & the bohemian types, is the 2nd most populous city in Australia & the capital of the southern state of Victoria. It’s my second time here (I was here for a few days back in 2003) & I’ve spent the last 6 days having a look around. The weather hasn’t been great; the climate down here, on the edge of an Australian autumn, is a far cry from the warmth & dryness of the Sunshine Coast, some 1,500 kilometres north of here and from where I arrived. But it has been fun I developed a real fondness for this most British of Australian cities, so much so that if I had to live in any Australian city, this would probably be it.
Flinders Street Train Station is the central railway station of the suburban railway network of Melbourne. Opened in 1854, it is a cultural icon of the city & is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. Also shown in the picture is one of Melbourne’s iconic trams, just one of the trams running on what, with 250 kilometres of track, is the world’s largest tram network. Melbourne (
), Victoria, Australia. April 19th 2012
Melbourne is a city of parks; it has a lot of them. I walked through & took pictures in quite a few of them – pictures of flowers, water fountains, bushes & general greenery. However, this picture of strollers in Treasury Gardens is my favourite of the lot. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. April 19th 2012.
Melbourne has some of the country’s most impressive colonial buildings but in areas it’s a very rough-around-the-edges sort of place, at least visually. Graffiti is prominent all over the city & its surrounding suburbs. Most of it is viewed as it is the world over – as a problem & an eyesore – but here, in Hosier Lane only a few yards from Federation Square in the heart of the city, it seems to add character. In a city embraced by artists & the bohemian types this just seems to work, or at least it did to me. It’s just one of the many reason why I liked Melbourne. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. April 19th 2012.
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Visit me Richard Bain
Christiana Bain
Gillian Teo
Bryan Teo
Bonny Teo
Alphonsus Gregory