If you believe the latest travel magazine polls, this is the favorite destination city of American travelers. It beat out Paris, San Francisco, London–even Chicago. In fact, all of Australia ranks high with the Yanks.
Recently, I wandered through part of the country to see if I could agree. From Sydney I proceeded to Melbourne, then to Adelaide and finally up to Cairns. Having traveled that far, I also decided to visit a little of the Australian countryside, which Aussies refer to as “the bush.” Those reports will appear later.
Six states (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia) and two territories (Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory) make up a country nearly as large as the contiguous United States (pop. about 258 million), excluding Hawaii and Alaska.
Most of Australia’s 18 million people live along the coasts, and only a few gravitate toward the vast, arid middle ground.
So it is in the cities, where human presence is easy to detect: Listen for the incessant use of “mate” in casual greetings. And keep an ear out for such Australian oral shorthand as “garbo” for garbage collector, “journo” for journalist and “bikies” for Hell’s Angels. Then sniff the air for traces of Vegemite halitosis.
Vegemite? That’s simple, mate. Rather than throw out the tarry yeast clinging to his vats and barrels, a ’20s-era brewer began marketing the stuff as a healthy topping for biscuits and toast. Australians took to it the way Pooh lapped up honey, much to the bafflement of outsiders.
During a tea break on a south coast motor coach tour, the driver broke out a jar of Vegemite and some crackers. One passenger ventured a nibble, turned her head and spit it out. “Everyone says you develop quite a taste for it,” she growled with a Scottish burr. “I am not convinced.”
Visitors can find out more about Vegemite at an informative exhibit in the Sydney Powerhouse Museum, a vast repository of industrial, cultural and scientific achievement housed in–what else?–a former powerhouse.
I didn’t take long to figure out why Sydney, with a population of 3.8 million, has weaseled its way into the hearts of U.S. travelers. For one thing, its setting is superb, a sprawl of urbanity across fingers of land that separate natural coves and inlets off Port Jackson, where the Pacific meets the Paramatta River and heavy ferry traffic provides a nice, Hong Kong touch.
Of course, the Opera House punctuates it all, an Opera House as uniquely and quirkily Australian as Vegemite. Locals insist on retelling horror stories of its cost overruns and delight in pointing out that its Danish architect, Jorn Utzon, refused to come back and look at the finished product when it finally debuted in 1973. Have you seen the facility? We might have a snapshot of it here, somewhere. I think it raises a sort of Zen question: Would anyone recognize Sydney if it weren’t for those delightful Opera House shells? Would people mistake it for Houston?
“I could live here. The place is fairly manageable,” Linda Greenawalt remarked during a city tour we had joined. An Atlantic City, N.J., resident, she had been temporarily assigned by her employer, the Showboat gaming and hotel company, to organize the food and beverage service at Sydney’s new casino.
As we chatted, however, Greenawalt began to have second thoughts. “The prices for some things–like cars–are really high,” she complained. “And,” she added sadly, “the Aussies really don’t like Americans.”
I said the natives seemed friendly to me, but Greenawalt insisted. “They hate us. The people on my staff sort of confide in me now, and they say Americans are too set in their ways. They expect everything to be just so. They’re not flexible.”
I thought that even the most inflexible Americans would find the shopping malls, hotels, galleries and the majority of other amenities quite to their liking. Upscale restaurants have caught on to the universal trend toward “light, Euro-Asian” cuisine, for instance, the restrooms are clean and the language bears a striking resemblance to English.
In fact, I found so many similarities to America that I was forced, at one point, to sit on a bench at the glossy shopping/hotel/museum/IMAX Theater complex at Darling Harbour and give myself a good talking-to.
I needed reminding: Despite all evidence to the contrary, this is a foreign country. It had taken the better part of a 24-hour day just to fly here. The government requires a visa and a passport. The people follow cricket and “footie” (soccer), not baseball and football. A simple cup of coffee takes an eternity, just as in France. I repeat. Australia is a foreign country.
But not too foreign.
Darling Harbour, for example, is a familiar California-style glass and steel entertainment complex with a lot of new construction going on. The aquarium and maritime museum appear to be state of the art; the food court in the shopping mall covers most international munchie faves, from pizza to scampi.
All this newness appears to be part of the preparations for the year 2000 summer Olympics, which will take place on what currently is a wide-open suburban site filled with dueling construction cranes.
Inner Sydney, as well, pulses to the beat of jackhammers with an Olympics deadline, but the main attractions, the places that might stir a traveler’s emotions, are farther out in the neighborhoods or down by the sea.
Personally, I left my heart at Circular Quay, a San Francisco-style pier complex and major transportation center, where ferry boats and tourist vessels toot and foghorns groan, mimes and jugglers perform, while tourists and residents alike dine in quayside cafes, stoke up at vendors’ stalls and buy trinkets in cunning little shops.
A few steps farther on, visitors encounter The Rocks, the oldest part of town. The meticulously restored and shop-filled buildings in The Rocks just barely hint at their role in the birth of Australia, which started in the 18th Century as a dustbin for England’s excess prison population. The convicts’ gentrified keepers lived on The Rocks.
From Circular Quay, it was no problem at all to catch a speedy JetCat catamaran to a section called Manly, which occupies a strip of land dividing Sydney’s North Harbour from the Tasman Sea. Manly has the feel of an entirely separate entity–a beach town with resort-style commerce but also a bedroom community with modest bungalows, hillside ranch-style houses and tallish flats.
Shoppers strolled a pedestrian mall that looked vaguely like a throwback to the 1940s–a jumble of Art Deco hotels, snack counters and suppliers of swimming togs. The beach proper was a long, sandy crescent with scattered sunbakers (another Aussieism) and one group of loud, obnoxious teenage boys who played tag through people’s picnics.
In Australia, a sudden eruption of such “blokey” behavior usually happens only at the beaches and during sporting events. Sydney newcomers with tender sensibilities can easily avoid the shouters in places like the handsome Art Gallery of New South Wales with its impressive collection and its tranquil setting in the Domain, part of Sydney’s extensive harborside park system.
I like to walk in cities, and Sydney is perfect for that. To expedite movement, I bought a three-day Explorer pass ($42) that provides access to all of the metropolitan transit system, from subways to ferries. Special red Explorer buses stop at most of the sights within the core of the city, while blue buses roam farther out.
By getting off at the proper stops, I could stroll through charming Potts Point and the attractive residential areas off Macleay Street to admire wrought-iron balconies and carved portals, then elbow through the bizarro crowds on the sidewalks of such bohemian enclaves as Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, both evocative of London’s SoHo and San Francisco’s North Beach.
Bondi Beach was on the blue-bus route. It’s an impressively long and wide swathe of sand monitored by those famous lifeguards in their red and yellow bathing caps. Buildings across the street from Bondi (pronounced BOND-eye) Beach had a pleasing, salt-encrusted aspect, painted in pastels and faded by the sun.
Hours later, I walked along the Cowper Wharf Roadway, a bleak but busy thoroughfare that runs past sprawling naval dockyards and the commercial moorings of Woolloomooloo Bay. I had nothing to keep me company but the long, gray flank of a Royal Australian Navy vessel, the HMAS Perth. But then I looked up and saw the smokestack. It was painted with a bright red, jaunty kangaroo. Delightfully exotic, that.
On the flight to Melbourne, I told my seat mate, Robin Stonehouse, that I already had my fill of Australia’s take on Standard International Style, i.e. guys with ponytails, girls with purple hair and cell phones, restaurant entrees with sprigs of arugula, and so on. I sought additional equivalents of that red kangaroo. So what was unique about her city, I asked. “Check out Victoria Market,” she suggested. “And be sure to see the gardens. They are lovely–and so green.”
Cuisine? Stonehouse turned up her nose. “Uh, Australian food is pie. Just ordinary pie. I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re better off sticking to the ethnic food.”
Melbourne turned out to be different from cities at home, even from those elsewhere in Australia. And in a most exquisitely satisfying way. With a population of 3 million and a rich ethnic mix, it should feel overwhelming and huge. Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.
From my little “boutique” hotel, the Magnolia Court on Powlett Street, Melbourne came off as intimate. I could walk a few blocks from my pistachio-tinted courtyard building to Wellington Parade and catch a tram downtown. Or I could easily stroll to the central core through Fitzroy Gardens, one of several spaces the city has set aside for broad lawns and flower beds. Either way, the transition from residential quiet to downtown excitement was virtually seamless.
I loved the way Melbourne kept smoothly undulating that way–from gigantic to cozy, from space-age to Edwardian, always with those old-fashioned yellow trams trundling by, never far from a garden or a warm little tearoom.
Downtown, I could lose myself in department stores and narrow arcades lined with all manner of emporia. This was a vestige of the personalized retailing that malls have virtually wiped from the collective memory, a world of creatively wrapped parcels, knowledgeable clerks, lovingly constructed displays.
I spent far too much time admiring the artful arrangements of sandwiches and cakes in the food courts and reveling in all the other labor-intensive downtown stuff–highly polished Victorian ornamentation, elaborate signage, dust-free frosted glass . . .
Then I could turn a corner and face a tidal wave of fin de siecle ambition, complete with Italian suits, limos and expense-account interaction. It seemed impossible that just a few blocks away was my temporary neighborhood, sedate and rather British with a milk bar (deli) up the street and dog-walkers everywhere.
Every morning, Gabrielle Wild, the friendly woman at the front desk, would hand me a little map showing Magnolia Court in relation to the rest of Melbourne, and I would set off.
One time it was to the hurly-burly of the sprawling Victoria Market, where people sold goods ranging from sneakers to cantaloupes from scores of stalls. Outside the sheds, a busker tended an immense calliope called the Concert Street Grand Organ, favoring shoppers with renditions of “Elephants’ Picnic” and “New York, New York.” Next door, the sign on a rusty caravan converted to a food stand announced “American Doughnut Kitchen.”
Joyfully, I found very little American about Melbourne. Occasionally I would ask Gabrielle if I had seen everything yet, and she would smile enigmatically and roll her eyes. It would take all the time I had just to absorb the smells and flavors, never mind the worthy historic sites, museums, theaters and public buildings, not to mention the world-famous Cricket Ground, race track and Tennis Centre.
Melbourne may be Australia’s jock capital, but now when I see that dateline on the sports pages, I can’t help but picture a little tray of sweets and a pot of tea on a marble-topped table in the Royal Arcade–or that woman tending the Swanston Hotel front door. She stood erect and dignified in her heavy gray overcoat with braided shoulders, and I marveled at her poise. Maybe I should be getting out more, but I had never before seen a doorman who wasn’t male.
For me, it was another aspect of the city’s multifaceted personality, like the scruffy seaside delights of the St. Kilda area or the twee little British-style diversions in Fitzroy Gardens.
At twilight, I stopped to look at the Fairy Tree in Fitzroy, a thick eucalyptus carved and painted in the ’30s by writer Ola Cohn. The scene she created depicts a menagerie of Australian creatures from emus to kangaroos, plus assorted pixies and elves. It has become a beloved Melbourne institution.
A few feet away, I saw a woman and two rambunctious children looking at a miniature Tudor village, another one of the park’s wonderfully innocent attractions. The children hardly paid attention to the little wood-beamed and thatched cottages, the crooked chimney pots and cobbled pathways. They preferred to twitch and tease.
“Their mum is having a baby right now,” the guardian confided apologetically. “I’m their grandmother. We should know if it’s a boy or girl within the hour. So it’s hard to keep their attention.”
“Of course,” I said and moved on.
The next day, I moved on all the way to Adelaide. Better than a million people live in Adelaide, but, like the people of Melbourne, they have contrived to make their city appear small. The downtown, filled mostly with uninspiring modern buildings, forms a perfect rectangle, surrounded by a wide border of parks, followed by rings of residential sections.
I stayed several miles from downtown at Thorngrove Manor in the Adelaide Hills, a turreted confection, all slate and stained glass and Gothic sculpturing in a tweedy district that might have been lifted from the English countryside. The owner, architect Ken Lehmann, operates the lodging with his wife, Nydia, and daughter, Tanya, neither of whom would I see. Nor did I encounter any of the guests staying in the three other units. Thorngrove Manor is an extremely private estate. Even Lehmann, the innkeep, appeared only to hand me the heavy iron key. Oh, yes, one evening he did serve dinner in my suite, “The King’s Chamber,” and wore a frock coat for the occasion.
I dined alone on game hen in surroundings that dripped with medieval tapestries and cut crystal. Massive carved-wood furniture, including an antique German piano, made the place positively baronial. I wondered how such an old lodge could have been possible in such a young country (Australia’s first English settlers did not arrive until 1788). Then, on a table near my canopied bed, I spotted a lavishly calligraphied history of Thorngrove Manor. Its Olde English locutions revealed that Lehmann had built the place from scratch in 1986.
“We sort of let it unfold for people,” he told me. “Guests can make of it what they will. Some are married couples who sit at the table in casual clothes and watch television while they eat. And then we get newlyweds who dress up and dine by candlelight.”
The central business district indulges other fantasies. I again regressed back to childhood, lost in another maze of enticing arcades. Most of them branch off from the central mall, a busy stretch of Rundle Street reserved for pedestrians. Farther east, Rundle permits cars again, and they jam a popular section of town filled with restored 19th Century storefronts purveying fashion-forward designs or whimsical cuisine.
No, nothing especially foreign there for an American. But, one afternoon, just a block north of Rundle, I happened upon the changing of the guard of the South Australia Police. This took place on North Terrace Street outside the ornate gates of Government House.
The blue-uniformed police band tootled past Prince Henry Gardens and various Adelaide cultural institutions until meeting up with similarly outfitted men and women mounted on white horses. The music resumed, as did precision marching, shouted commands and countless salutes. A small crowd applauded as if this were Buckingham.
Any Adelaide visit would be incomplete without an excursion to the Barossa Valley, the famous and extensive wine country northeast of the city. It occupies rolling acreage out beyond the General Motors Holden automobile plant and the Edinburgh Air Base.
The Barossa was settled by German immigrants late in the 19th Century, and that ethnic influence is apparent everywhere–except in the wine, which, because of the mild Australian climate, closely resembles French. But the German heritage does come through in the food, the inns and the architecture. Big wineries pop up every few miles along vineyard-lined Highway 20. There visitors may taste and buy and tour the facilities, all of which makes for a pleasant few hours. For the most part, the Barossa is like Napa Valley in lederhosen, except around the Seppelt winery, which has been planted with long ranks of non-indigenous date palms, just to be different.
Another day, in the district known as Glenelg, I found a wonderful blue collar beach resort where decades have been rolled back to reveal the pubs, refreshment stands and cafes of a gentler time. A vintage tram delivers holiday crowds from the central city, where they stroll the Esplanade, fly their kites and watch the excursion ships make their way to Kangaroo Island–a bit of wild Australian bush that nature has marooned offshore.
Melbourne and Adelaide both require a slight journey in order to reach the ocean, but Cairns, up in Queensland and gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, clings to the shore of the Coral Sea. Cairns, hot and tropical with a population of about 100,000, offers a sort of international seaside ambience. Its palm trees belong there and so does the steamy promenade of hotels, open-air markets, a casino and stores selling sunscreen and booze by the liter.
When the tide goes out, the Cairns waterfront forms a vast apron of mud. Surfers and divers must go farther up the coast, and so must those who wish to see Australia’s rain forests and other natural wonders. Consequently, people drift in and out of Cairns, and the city serves them, enthusiastically, as a highly temporary base of operations.
Big Trinity Wharf handles the cruise ships taking divers to the Barrier Reef. Streams of buses and cabs carry the others north to the beach resorts and dripping ferns.
As a result, visitors seldom stay long enough to learn how Cairns is pronounced. It’s “Cans.” That, by the way, is not a matter of correctness, it’s rather a matter of accent. Australians have a magical way of making the “i-r” combo disappear, no matter where they find it.
They can be very exotic that way. And, more often than not, quite wonderful.
FROM HOSTELS TO CASTLES
Getting there: Qantas Airways, the Australian airline, offers a round-trip fare from Chicago to Sydney for $1,783, including tax. It requires 14 days’ advance notice and may involve other restrictions. The fare includes a round-trip flight from Chicago to Los Angeles on American Airlines. After April, the fare will drop by $200.
United Airlines flies to Sydney from Chicago with a change of planes in Los Angeles for $1,732.33, including tax, with 14-day advance notice and other restrictions.
Both airlines (and Air New Zealand, which also services Australia) do offer occasional sales, which can reduce the price significantly. And consolidators may be able to come up with lower rates. Finally, look for packages that include a bargain fare in conjunction with hotel and other land arrangements. Consult a travel agent for fare possibilities and help in obtaining the mandatory, but free, Australian visa.
Qantas will arrange internal Australian flights with a program called Boomerang, which cuts the price of individual tickets considerably. This package should be ordered before leaving home. For example, a circuit covering Sydney to Melbourne, Melbourne to Adelaide, Adelaide to Cairns and Cairns back to Sydney would cost $442 using the Boomerang plan. Call 800-227-4500 for more information.
Getting around: The cities of Australia offer a huge variety of ways to get around. Some involve discounts and universal tickets that provide access to the entire transit system, as in Sydney and Melbourne. Also, a free tram for tourists circles downtown Melbourne, a handy mode of transportation even the locals use. Motor coach companies offer guided tours of the cities and excursions to adjacent outback sights. Those who spend a little time with map and guidebook should be able to easily work out their own tours, employing public transit. In Sydney, that system also includes the ferry boats.
I found rental cars most useful in exploring the wine country and other outlying areas around Adelaide and the extensive shore attractions outside of Cairns. Rates were comparable to those in the U.S.
Lodging: The “hotels” in Australia that look like pubs are pubs with minimal rooms available to satisfy an old liquor-licensing law. Sydney has a good number of those, as well as a full range of accommodations–from backpacker hostel to luxury showplace. Rates there and in the rest of the country run a bit less than do equivalent rooms in the U.S.
One weekend in Sydney, I treated myself to a couple of nights at the Park Hyatt, a low-slung structure that blends in well with the surrounding Rocks district. The hotel offers superb views of the harbor, the Opera House and the Sydney skyline. Strangely, no terry cloth robe–that universal mark of pricy hotels–hung in the spacious dressing room, but all other features, from the Kosta Boda vases and nut bowls to the lavishly equipped entertainment center and bathroom were top rung. The weekend-special rate was $252 a night. Rooms and suites on weekdays range from $330 on up. (All prices listed here are in U.S. dollars.)
I made up for some of that excess by staying at the Magnolia Court Hotel in Melbourne, where my tiny but comfortable room cost $77 and offered the advantages of a quiet neighborhood within a few tram stops of downtown. Of course, the city also provides lodging from the major chains, as well as the grand old Windsor Hotel, built in 1833 and still keeping its brass work shiny.
Adelaide also has rooms appropriate for anything from backpacks to Vuitton. My medieval-theme hotel, Thorngrove Manor (see main story), charged $476 for the “King’s Chamber.” An outlay of $196 buys a night in one of the cozy turrets.
The hotels and resorts in Cairns follow the same pricing patterns as those in the other cities. Hostels can be found in prime real estate above stores on the ocean front, thereby sharing the same street with slightly more opulent high-rise accommodations.
Dining: Not too many years ago, gourmets virtually ignored this meat-and-potatoes country. Now, serious chefs are gravitating to the big cities, creating their takes on Asian classics, or incorporating the natural flora and fauna of the outback into a style known as “bush tucker.” Meanwhile, the push toward quality tends to elevate the standards of less exotic restaurants.
In Sydney, a good example of the latter is the Bayswater Brasserie in Kings Cross, a noisy gathering place in a lively section of town. The busy grill smokes away in the center of the room, turning out lamb chops, kidneys, veal and chicken. An entree with salad and appetizer will cost about $35. Seafood turns up mostly on the roster of daily specials, at market prices. An extensive wine list is heavy on excellent Australian labels that begin around $16 a bottle.
I sampled nouvelle Asian at Wockpool, a vision in white chiffon and damask improbably situated off the lobby of the IMAX theater in Darling Harbor. The long list of poultry, meat and seafood, starting at about $15, were mostly seared in the wok and included “bug,” the mysterious but delicious Australian crustacean that’s something of a cross between lobster and crab.
Red Ochre is a leader in the gourmet “bush tucker” movement. I dined at two–the one in its city of origination, Adelaide, and the other in Alice Springs. But there are branches in Cairns and Melbourne as well. For upscale prices, much like those mentioned above, you can sample yabbies (freshwater crayfish), kangaroo, emu and such bush-exotic herbs, fruits and vegetables as wattle seed, clove lilli pilli, illawarra plums and lemon myrtle. Good on ya, mate!
Information: For more on Australia and its cities, call 805-775-2000 to speak with a travel counselor from the Australia Tourist Commission. Or call 800-DOWNUNDER for a vacation planning kit. Information is also available on the Internet at www.australia.com or www.aussie.net.au.
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Robert Cross’ e-mail address is bobccross@aol.com
