After Perth…..

I am sat in an airport hotel in Brisbane as tomorrow I fly to Auckland, so my time in Australia is at an end and I don’t know where the time has gone!

After Perth I flew to Adelaide which I did not know much about apart from the fact that a friend from Taunton lived there! I worked with Lucy very briefly back in Taunton around 1994, but then a few of us colleagues had children at the same time which led to us hanging out together. Lucy and her family then emigrated to Adelaide and we sort of kept in touch through social media, as you do! When I was planning my trip I got in touch with Lucy to see where she was and she very kindly invited me to stay with her and her parents who move out to Adelaide recently. I accepted her wonderful offer and I am so happy I did, I was made to feel so welcome from the moment I stepped in the door, we chatted to catch up on the last 20 years and I got the impression that she is very happy to have moved there. It was great to meet her parents and we spent a day together where they showed me around some of the beaches in the area.

Adelaide was founded in 1836 as the capital for the only freely settled British province in Australia, distinguishing it from Australia’s penal colonies, Adelaide does not share the convict settlement history of other Australian cities. Colonel Light one of Adelaide’s founding fathers, designed the city centre and chose its location and the design is now listed as national heritage, set out in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and entirely surrounded by park lands. As a result it is nice, calm city with Architectural Digest claiming it to be ranked as the most beautiful city in the world in 2024. I found it really easy to navigate and it was very ‘British’.

After staying in hostels for the previous 3 ish weeks, it was so nice to be welcomed into a family home and catch up with Lucy. I also got to some washing which always a bonus 🧺.

Lucy’s parents very kindly gave me a lift to the airport for my flight to Melbourne, my next stop

I really enjoyed my time in Adelaide, I met some of Lucy’s friends, we had a BBQ, I cooked, we chatted – it was a wonderful oasis in the world of travel and hostelling!

Melbourne

I had been to Melbourne before but to be honest had made no plans, I know that I wanted to drive the Great Ocean Road but had not booked a tour or anything. I also want to try and catch up with Lesley’s daughter Jess and her family, but I had been so disorganised that I forgot to tell her when I would be in town and we could not make things work – totally my fault! Lesley and I met whilst working at County Hall years ago and we all used to spend a lot of time together so I am kicking myself for not sorting things!

Melbourne is the capital of the state of Victoria and the second most populated city in Australia after Sydney, and was founded in 1835 with the arrival of free settlers from Van Dieman’s Land (modern-day Tasmania) It was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837, and named after the then-Prime Minister William Lamb, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne.Declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847, it became the capital of the newly separated Colony of Victoria in 1851. During the 1850s Victoria Gold Rush,the city entered a long boom period that, by the late 1880s, had transformed it into Australia’s, and one of the world’s, largest and wealthiest cities.

I am really not sure why but I took against Melbourne pretty much straight away but I do think that that was due to the hostel more than anything else. Nothing wrong with it at all but it was big and everything done through the phone so no interaction with anyone. My room mates were great to be honest, they were over from UK for a conference which was highly academic which they tried to explain but I have no idea what it was about! We could not take our own alcohol but they had a bar – cool! The residents were young travellers and the communal space was drum and bass orientated so not for me.

I don’t know, maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the top bunk, but I decided to rent a car for 2 day and drive the Great Ocean Road – really good decision!

The Great Ocean Road is a 240-kilometre stretch of road along the south-eastern coast built by returned soldiers between 1919 and 1932, and dedicated to soldiers and an important tourist attraction.

I took the highway out of Melbourne to the 12 Apostles so that I got in the afternoon after the main tourist rush. The weather wasn’t great and I wanted to take a helicopter ride but wasn’t sure if they were still going ahead – luckily they were and I waited until there were enough people. It was a 15 minute flight and was well worth the time and the money – it was awesome, in every sense of the word.

The stacks are made of limestone, they are called the 12 Apostles but apparently there were never 12 of them, probably only 9. They were originally known as The Pinnacles and The Sow and Pigs but later named as The 12 Apostles to encourage tourism 🤨, due to erosion, I think that there are only 7 left.

I stayed overnight at Apollo Bay in the YHA, it was basic but fine, a bit chilly but everyone kept telling me how odd the weather was, it was never normally wet and windy! Not a huge amount in Apollo Bay but I did find a hotel bar to sit in and have dinner, there was a really funny picture which I will add below!

The next morning I started the drive back to Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road, but not before I took some pictures of the awesome waves, above. This worked out well as I would be travelling the opposite way to the day trippers. It is a well travelled road and lots of guides on where to stop and I made my way to Lorne for breakfast and Torquay for lunch before ending up back in Melbourne around 4pm. It was a really cool drive, vast space on one side and just ocean on the other and the pictures I took are fairly all similar but still lovely scenery.

Tasmania

Tasmania had not been on my list originally but a few people had told me that it was worth a visit and so I planned in 4 nights flying in to Hobart. I booked the Montacute Boutique Bunk House as it had a connection Montacute House in Yeovil and it looked nice – well looks can be very deceiving and the place was dire! My dorm was outside the main house and the nearest loo was inside the house – WTAF??? The owner was a nutter, had no boundaries and obviously didn’t want to be there! I couldn’t get a refund so I just got on with it. On the flip side, I met some great people and had some really interesting conversations.

It is located 150 miles to the south of the mainland and is separated from it by the Bass Strait and it is the 26th Largest island in the world. In 1803, Tasmania was permanently settled by Europeans as a penal settlement of the  British Empire partly to pre-empt French territorial claims during the Napoleonic Wars. At the time of British arrival, the Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3,000 and 7,000. Within 30 years, this number declined drastically due to violent conflict, known as the  Black War , and the spread of  disease. The Black War peaked between 1825 and 1831, resulting in the declaration of martial law for more than three years and causing the deaths of nearly 1,100 Aboriginal people and settlers.

Under British rule, the island was initially part of the  Colony of New South Wales, becoming a separate colony under the name Van Diemen’s Land  after the Governor of the Dutch East Indies, in 1825. Approximately 80,000 convicts were ‘transported’ to Van Diemen’s Land until after transportation ceased in 1835.

The name as changed to Tasmania in 1856 after the Dutch Explorer Abel Tasman who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642.

Tasmania is lovely, it’s a very green island with lots of inlets and bays and hills which is right up my street. The weather was not great, being so far down south, the next bit of land is the South Pole! It has a nice maritime history so a nice marina and harbour.

It has a rich convict history – if I can actually say that, which interested me. Having said that, it has a dark history in how aboriginal peoples were treated, during The Black War, the Governor declared that colonists were free to kill Aboriginal people when they attached settlers or their property. There was a gender imbalance with male colonists outnumbering females 6:1 and there was anger about the abductions of women and girls.

There were efforts to sweep Aboriginal people out of the region which ended in those who remained alive, some 300 people, moved to Flinders Island where they all died due to disease and not having any immunity. I am aware that I have only written the doom and gloom side, but Tasmania obviously has done well, is know for shipbuilding and the first female member of the House of Representatives and the first female to serve in the cabinet in 1943.

You can see from the pictures and the video how amazing the landscape is. The video is from Mount Wellington and it was VERY windy so standing still was impossible!

As is obvious from my blogs, I am really into history! I had a car and my first destination was Port Arthur about 60 miles from Hobart, and the site of a convict settlement. There are 11 remnant penal sites in Australia built within the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Port Arthur convict settlement was established in 1830, producing logs for government projects by transported convicts. It was one of the harshest penal colonies designed for hard labour, which also included juvenile convicts some aged as young as 9.

It was abandoned as a prison in 1877 and the buildings were put up for auction and some of the buildings became guest houses. Fast forward to 1979 when funding was made available to preserve the site as a tourist destination and then became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Register in 2010 as part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage Property.

The site is all ruins now, some of the houses that were used as guest houses are still standing but the prison and associated buildings are no longer there. Paradoxically, it is gorgeous site, lovely green surroundings along the water, but that does add to the sadness of what the site used to be.

On 28 April 1996, the location was the site of a massacre when 35 people were killed by a lone gun man. This led to fundamental changes in Australian gun law, something that has come up again since the Bondi shootings that happened recently. The cafe where the shootings took place was closed and there is a garden of reflection in its place.

I found the site fascinating and sad at the same time, but I really enjoyed it and spent hours walking around the site and reading all the guides!!

I have not taken a load of pictures but the ones above show the location but the site has foundations and stuff and is very moving, I just wanted to walk around and take it all in.

My next visit was to the The Women’s Factory, not a factory at all but a type of jail. It is a world heritage listed property which tells the story of the displacement, mistreatment and forced migration of convict women and girls. There was a Superintendant and a Matron. I can detail how things worked, how pregnant women were treated and the work they had to do but it is more of the same! I have also realised that I took no pictures of the site, even though I spent a day there no idea why! I did buy a T shirt though, with a phrase from a Judge saying how an inmate was a strumpet! I wish that I had pictures but it was very much an open space and no buildings remained, there were markings of the living spaces and the nursery – all really cruel.

I have realised that so much of what I have written is doom and gloom colonial history but I don’t think that we can get away from that really. From Tasmania I went to Sydney to start my road trip! My main point was to catch up with a very old childhood friend. Some of you may know that I was born in East Africa, Uganda to be exact, my family left to come to London but I had family who then lived in Nairobi. My aunt and uncle had good friends who had kids and we used to go back to Nairobi and stay with them, we also went on holiday together. When the Simonian Family relocated to England, we used to spend half terms etc together – I remember that we all went to see the movie Grease together when it came out and we still talk about it now! Anyway, JoJo now lives in Sydney and Pip in Auckland – there was no way I was going to not see them.

The above are pictures from our Christmas holidays in Mombasa with the Simonian and Anthony families, an amazing experience of my life. I took the pictures before coming away but I should have taken them the right way around! None of our parents are around but I am sure that they all like that us kids are still friends.

So, I will end this rambling post now as I then started my east coast road trip from Sydney, which warrants a new post!

I hope, dear readers, that you find this post interesting as I think that I have turned it into a bit of a personal thing, what with spending time with JoJo and Pip – be good, all, and I hope that 2026 brings peace and happiness.

Signing off from a very windy Blenheim, South Island, New Zealand. 🌬️