Moving across the Equator towards the other side of the world, also involved finding a familar-looking place, which looks rather like parts of the UK, hence the paradox.

Met by Lydia at Melbourne airport, which made us feel like VIPs. After finding our feet in the neat little flat which has bern lent to us in Fitzroy North and doing something mundane ( going food shopping) we caught up on some lost sleep.

Took the tram into the city centre to meet Julian at the telephone-provider Telstra shop to get an e-sim. We have since visited this shop several times, which is why it deserves a mention. Wandered round the area, visiting camping/ sports equipment shops and tasting one of Melbourne’s best ice cream shops, Kori (Japanese icecream).

Melbourne felt clean, modern and stream-lined in comparison to Asia,  sometimes similar to England, apart from the sky.

The heat matches Thailand and Cambodia, but burns into you a different way. Hats and sunscreen are definitely compulsory.

Walked back through Melbourne Museum and Carlton gardens, appreciating the city skyscrape.

The next day we achieved our rather ambitious plan, starting at the luscious and beautifully planned out vast botanical gardens.

We then walked slowly in the heat to the Melbourne Gallery of Art to see Legacy of Light, a marvellous exhibition about women pioneer photographers 1900-1975. Here are some examples. 

This portraits definitely looks like my mother Dorothy, when she was young.

This exhibition illustrated neatly, not surprisingly, the noticeable and vidible gender shift  after Asia where women’s occupations were limited to traditional norms. Just as we saw women gardeners and others fixing electric roadworks, so the women photographers converted a domestic occupation into a profession and experimented with aesthetic avant garde photographic art.

After a break and a walk we went to the very instructive, not purely factual, immigration museum. Although the spiel recognised the dispossession of First Nations peoples and did not cover up the horrendously century- old racist immigration policies, favoring white native English speakers, it somehow managed to paint a rosy picture of Australia’s inclusiveness. This imposdible feat was attempted by highlighting multiculturalism in  the contemporary section, while focusing on a single identity label. Contemporary testimonies confirm, unsurprisingly,  that racist attitudes prevail. Even I, as a pretty well-educated native English speaker (a qualifier which some of you like to put in doubt), failed the dictation test, introduced in 1902, miserably. The test was deliberately skewed, since it sometimes required immigration applicants to take dictation in a language with which they were not familiar. 

After a long walk back with Lydia, punctuated with occasional rainy showers, our day felt particularly diverse and enriching, crowned with an Italian meal at cheerful Tiamo’s.

Other Melbourne highlights include a coffee and long chat in the Ceres community park and a walk with Michele and Brian, who showed us some of the best of E Brunswick, A1 and Luthers (another Melbourne ice cream speciality). Thanks to them, we were able to savour, visually and auditorily, the spectacular jazz rendering of one of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films, The Adventurer, accompanied by Sally Ford and the Idiomatics, as well as Modern Times. A lot of laughter was heard and we saw Melborne illuminated at night time.