Melbourne to Adelaide

We recently returned from a trip to Australia starting in Melbourne with a couple of nights in the lovely area of East Melbourne where there are quite a lot of 19^th century terrace houses (photo shows a detail of an 1873 building). We visited the National Gallery of Victoria (both the Australian art section and the international section in different buildings); the State Library, various churches, and parks, and my husband went to see an Aussie rules football match.

We then stayed with family outside of Melbourne. With them we went to Bendigo Art Gallery to see the Paris exhibition from the Carnavalet museum in Paris.

From Geelong we hired a car and drove around the coast over a week to Adelaide where we stayed a few nights before flying home.

There’s too much to cover, so I will include only a few highlights. The second day with the car was one. We did a lovely forest walk in the Otway National Park, visited Cape Otway lighthouse and surrounding historic buildings and then saw some of the rock formations that the Great Ocean Road is well known for.

At Warrnambool Art Gallery I was impressed with the Eugene von Guerard[1] Tower Hill painting and it’s nearby ‘companion’ by Australian contemporary artist Hobie Porter (https://www.hobieporter.com/#/unnatural-history-1/ ).

On leaving Warrnambool the next morning we drove past Tower Hill Reserve, but didn’t realise that until we had passed it. Tower Hill Reserve is an extinct volcano believed to have erupted 32,000 years ago. The Park Notes say “little was known about the original vegetation until the dusty painting by Eugene von Guerard (commissioned in 1855) resurfaced. This painting is so detailed that some individual plant species can be identified…. More than 300,000 trees have now been planted.”

In Adelaide we enjoyed the Art Gallery of South Australia – we visited twice as there was a lot to see. But I was rather taken with the Museum of Economic Botany in the Botanical gardens – a 19th century museum, although renovated, still looking like an old museum. These papier mâché models of fruit and fungi were bought from Germany from the 1860s to 1890.