23 September 2013 - Sundowner Rockbank Caravan Park, Rockbank, Victoria

Melbourne is just wonderful, and in our opinion, the most beautiful city in Australia. Today we caught the train into the city, emerged at the Flinders Station out into the sunshine and the hustle and bustle of this very cosmopolitan centre. We walked across the bridge spanning the Yarra River, pausing to admire the skyline and the upside down river, as we have before. We fought the crowds gathering for a show or happening in the art centre, hundreds of well-dressed cauliflower heads, and walked on up past the art gallery and on up St Kilda Road past Kings Park, until we reached the Shrine of Remembrance, gleaming in the sunshine on the hill.

We had already ascertained that Victoria’s school children had started their school holidays this week, and so the normal tourists to this popular attraction were swollen with junior members of the state. The war memorial complex is quite lovely and of course the views from the top of the city are just marvellous, although nothing like those from the top of the Eureka Tower. But today we were not there for the views; we had come to see the exhibition titled “The Enemy Within” all about the prisoners of war and civilian internees kept behind barbed wire during the Second World War here in Australia. Between 1939 and 1947 rural Victoria hosted eight internment and prisoner of war camps of the network of about double that number across the entire country. By 1947, almost 26,000 prisoners of war and 15,000 internees had experienced the camp system, all known as the “enemy” or “enemy aliens”.

Of course we have had a glimpse into this side of Australia’s history on our travels about the country, however today I learned more about the repatriation of those internees at the end of the war, how some of Japanese heritage, for instance, were forcibly, repatriated to Japan, a country they had never known, how some who had taken Australian nationality were sent back to the country they had originally come from, their Australian citizenship stripped from them.

Shrine of Remembrance

The exhibition is a collection of stories, photos, a video and objects collected from the times; well worth visiting, especially if it is a side of history of which you are ignorant. We spent about three quarters of an hour before finding a space in the park where we sat eating our sandwiches and watched the hundreds of folk walking or running to improve their health and shape; young mothers pushing prams, groups of men and women obviously on their lunch time from the office, individuals of the same ilk, to name but a few. We were simply satisfied with our amble back down St Kilda Road, especially since we could have instead caught the tram. 

We stopped by the National Gallery of Victoria, the one with the front entrance a wall of cascading water set in from pools and fountains. After checking in our bags, we could not help but note the wonderful “artworks” in Federation Court, around which a couple of dozen visitors sat entranced.

The work is titled “Clinamen 2013” and is a great collection of four different sized white porcelain flat bottom bowls floating upon an intensely blue pool. A concealed pump arrangement causes the bowls to gently circulate the pool, making their own course, gently bumping into each other, gently clinking like wind chimes before they “bounce” away to make their way around again. The effect is mesmerizing, for old and young, and indeed for us. The artist responsible for this rather unusual installation is French artiste Celeste Boursier-Mougenot who apparently specialises in large scale work that combines the visual with the aural.

We were drawn away by an announcement over the PR system offering a free tour  in five minutes. We love free tours and have enjoyed many through the nation’s art galleries, so of course we lined up with the four others. This was not to be a tour of the collection as we have enjoyed before, but a focus tour, and today, focused on the Chinese collection, something we had not really focused on ourselves. Now we were to be educated! And so we traipsed around the Asian floor stopping in front of beautiful pieces and being lectured by a well-meaning woman who umm’d and ahh’d, and used “sort of” and “somewhat” far too often and alas, was unable to convey her own passion and knowledge to us, the uneducated. We became more aware of our aching backs than absorbing the dynastic history of China, and were glad to be set free after three quarters of an hour, rather than slink away part way through the session as one woman did.

We spent some time on an upper floor revisiting beautiful paintings high on the gallery walls until we decided a soft-serve ice-cream from the Scottish Restaurant at the bottom on Swanson Street seemed more attractive.

Our train journey back to Sunshine was more enjoyable that this morning’s commute when we had to stand all the way; Melbournian youth are oblivious to the fact that more senior people prefer to sit than clutch vertical poles in railway carriages to remain upright.

Today we have seen places visited before, back in February and March 2012, so I shall not repeat my experiences here. They are buried here in this blog for you to seek out, should you so desire, and buried in my memory to be pulled up at random.