New Year’s Eve 2017 found us in Melbourne, Australia, at the top of the Eureka Tower watching fireworks exploding around us. Eight years and a few months later we were back in the city we both fell in love with, to visit family and find explore anew.
Our 2026 Australian adventure began with a three-leg journey from London to Sydney via Muscat in Oman and Bangkok in Thailand. And how lucky we were. We happened to transfer in Muscat just an hour or two before Trump launched his deeply misguided war with Iran, sending missiles flying this way and that across the Gulf. Thankfully we avoided the missiles – and the endless chaos so many travellers had to endure – by the thinnest of margins.
We’d spent more than enough time in Sydney on our last visit to Australia so we allowed ourselves just a night there. After dropping our bags at the Intercontinental hotel, we took a walk around the Botanical Gardens in an effort to stave off jet lag and later walked in the warmth of an early March evening to The Rocks and had a bite to eat at the Hero of Waterloo pub.
Next morning we took the flight to Melbourne, where our first stop was with family in the suburb of Maidstone. It made for a different experience to the normal city breaks, which are invariably focused on the touristy centres and popular attractions. This was more about being at home, relaxing amid the everyday, eating in neighbourhood restaurants and seeing the city through the eyes of locals.
Other than recovering from our long journey and spending time with the children, we enjoyed a few hours with Graham’s brother at the National Gallery of Victoria in the city centre. Next day, with the children at school or in day care, we adults drove out to the arts, crafts and cultural centre at the converted Abbotsford Convent, a vast and somewhat forbidding complex that was once one of the largest convents in the state. We had a nose around the various arty businesses based there, took a walk in the gardens and tucked into a pleasant lunch at the neighbouring city farm.
Next up was a trip to Western Australia and a stay at Daylesford, but at the end of our holiday we stayed for three days in the centre of Melbourne on Collins Street to give ourselves the time to do more typical touristy things. It’s a great city with a great vibe, offering great food and bars. For example, we filled ourselves with seafood and fish at Waterfront on Southgate, overlooking the Yarra River, and had some fantastic Japanese just a few yards further on at Saké. I love the mix of architecture you find in Melbourne too – from colonial grandeur to the modern – as well as the grunge of districts such as Chinatown. Narrow, walkable lanes, filled with attractive stores, cafes and restaurants, link the big thoroughfares. And many of the streets in the busy centre are full of trees, which provide such welcome shade on sweltering days.
It was, however, a bit gloomy when we went for a walk around Fitzroy Park and its gardens, taking in the ridiculous Cook’s Cottage. This was supposedly Captain James Cook’s parents’ home and was shipped from Yorkshire to Melbourne back in the 1930s as a symbol of the country’s British heritage, but it’s a bit of a joke as there’s no evidence that Cook himself even lived there. Today it stands as a symbol of the questionable colonial era and all that it represents, which at least is given a good airing in a film we watched in one of the rooms.
Far more interesting was Melbourne Museum, housed in a striking modern building in Carlton Gardens. It’s one of those places that has a wide range of stories to tell so there were galleries on everything from dinosaurs to aboriginal history and the story of the city’s growth. The highlights for me were a spectacular collection of rocks and minerals and the fascinating Forest Gallery – a recreation of the state’s mountain landscapes with giant gums, flowing water, birds and other wildlife. Walking through it, we spotted an owl and terrapins and a host of fascinating flora.
On our last full night in Australia, we went on a Drinking History Tour called Hidden Bars & Laneway Legends that began in Federation Square. A handful of us joined a guide who was very knowledgable but overused the words ‘like’ and ‘yeah’ to the point of distraction. Still, we went to three great bars that we’d never have found on our own and learnt a lot about the history of the lanes, some of their characters and the city’s street art. I was probably a bit tipsy by the end of it as well as foot-sore.
Our last day was a full one so we took the train out to the modest but attractive suburb of Ripponlea to visit the Rippon Lea Estate, a National Trust property. Built in the 1860s by Frederick Sargood, a wealthy businessman, it’s a curious polychrome building that has only moderate kerb appeal but we went on an (exhaustive) tour with a witty guide to learn about the people who lived and worked there. Much more my thing were the attractive gardens, orchards and fernery, which we had a wander round while dozens of school kids larked about on an educational visit. These days the grounds are much reduced from the estate’s heyday, portions having been hived off over the years for TV studios and homes for local people.
And that was it. The holiday was over. The long, three-leg, tedious journey home beckoned after saying goodbye to family on the doorstep in Maidstone. The war still raged, and I approached the journey with a degree of trepidation but our stop in Muscat was uneventful and we detoured away from the at-risk flight paths.
With luck we’ll be back in Australia to see the family in the not too distant future. But even if they weren’t there, the draw would be great. It’s such an appealing country with such an enviable lifestyle, so many fascinating things to see and places to go, that it would be rude not to.