Soaked in Pole Position

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA - 18th December 2009

After various gold-mining, paddle-steamer boating and gliding escapades up in the bush, it was back down to Melbourne on Wednesday to catch a bit of the city-life action. Yesterday (Thursday) saw me head into Melbourne's city centre (or "CBD" as they call it here) for the first time and take in a few of the city's tourist traps.

Things began when I jumped off the train at Flinders Street Station, which boasts a striking outer facade featuring a copper dome and frontage that more than matches the much heralded forecourt of St Pancras in London. The golden sandstone of the station is set off beautifully by the red limestone of St Paul's Cathedral that sits diagonally opposite the main passenger entrance/exit. Sadly, both these buildings are now adjacent to Federation Square - an ultramodern development featuring a congregating are flanked by various buildings whose architecture is described (in the LPG) as "a riotous explosion of steel, glass and abstract geometry". I'm not particularly critical when it comes to buildings - it's usually a case of "Roof? Check. Walls? Check. Job done" - but Federation Square I could not stand. If it was the centrepiece of a Star Wars Convention, it'd probably be quite fitting... but putting it smack opposite one of Melbourne's finest turn-of-the-century pieces of architecture is, frankly, akin to constructing a giant mobile phone mast and planting in the middle of Christ Church's Tom Quad.

Thankfully, Fed Square is pretty much a one off, and moving around the city's various precincts provides a nice blend of everything from historic arcades, shopping havens (of absolutely no interest to me), sporting stadia (the Sports Precinct features the MCG, the Rod Laver Tennis Arena, and 1956 Olympic Park), theatres and parkland. The Victoria State Parliament is one of the most stand-out buildings around, though this is for its sheer scale rather than its uniqueness - there are no shortage of Parliament-type buildings around the world that follow the same classical formula of stone structure, Greek order columns, pediment on top...

However, one of the more poignant features of Melbourne is its Shrine of Remembrance, constructed atop of a hill directly south of centre of town in such a way that anyone looking south down Swanston Street/St. Kilda's Road will see the Shrine towering above the road below (as illustrated in the postcard, right, from the 1960s). The Shrine was constructed in the early 1930s as a memorial for Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldiers lost in the Great War - particularly in Gallipoli, but has subsequently developed to commemorate those lost in the Second World War, and subsequent conflicts involving Australian servicemen from Vietnam to Iraq. What makes it unique, however, versus its contemporaries around the world, is not so much its impressive architecture as the town planning that has gone into its location - Melbourne has been developed so as to make this Shrine the focal point of the city; a status augmented by the tree-lined approach and surrounding parkland where each tree commemorates a particular battalion.

Anyway, the weather had left much to be desired all day - we'd gone from a 38 degree scorcher on Wednesday to a full day of English overcast skies and light drizzle. I was right at home with the drizzle, but somewhere south of the Shrine the rain started to pick leaving me more than a little damp. However, I'd already set my mental GPS on to Albert Park - the large expanse of land featuring a rather large lake in the middle (that hosted the rowing regattas in the 1956 Olympics) and, of much greater interest to me, the streets around the lake that make up the racetrack for Melbourne's annual Formula 1 Grand Prix.

In what turned out to be a slightly ill-advised decision, I decided to start walking around the circuit (all 6km of it), all the while having to picture the circuit from TV or PlayStation games to try and figure out where I was. Much like Monaco, the road used in Melbourne is just public road the rest of the year, and without all the barriers and gravel traps and grandstands surrounding the roads it's like a different world. Nevertheless, I was suitably excited seeing Turn 3 - the site of this spectacular Martin Brundle crash in 1996:



More exciting still was the start-finish straight, which apparently becomes a big car park! I managed to snag a couple of photos from the grid (the painted starting grid boxes still visible from last March) looking down to the first corner, and even managed to wander up to the podium above the pit lane and pretended (read: imagined) spraying a load of champagne around. (Photos of this, and everything else, will all appear in a few days time...)

At this stage I was almost exactly half way around the circuit, on the other side of the lake and therefore as far away as I could possibly be from Flinders Street and my return train journey. So it is no surprise that it was then that it proceeded to absolutely piss it down with rain for the next hour or so as I trudged 5km round the rest of the track and up to the station on the bank of the Yarra River. And sure enough, arriving at the Yarra, out came the Sun. Sod's law.