Mad Platz in Melbourne

Monday, January 16

Melbourne is a huge and sophisticated city. We decided to explore parts we’d never seen on our previous trips as well as visit some of the places we’d loved.

Our BnB is in Carlton, named 169 Drummond Street, north of the Exhibition Hall and close by the old Italian part of town, Lygon Street. The house is an old 1860s Gold Rush terrace house with typical wrought iron gingerbread and porches overlooking the street. The host, Ian, is helpful and a good guide with good suggestions. Last night he supported our friend Jane’s son, Gus, who had suggested that we have pizza at the local restaurant D.O.C., which stands for demoninazione di origine controllata. The pizza was superb, light crust, fresh buffalo mozzarella, truffles for Ben with broccolini, and speck and wild mushrooms for John. A carafe of house white, a Crittenden donora. We sat comfortably outside in the evening air.

Ian’s major suggestion today was to use the Melbourne Tourist Bus, a red single-decker, that runs on a 30-minute schedule in a 90 minute loop around the city.

We took it down to the old central business district and the Queen Victoria Market (closed on Mondays), through the significantly changed western part of downtown that has been turned from derelict docks into a city of the future, with apartments, boating slips, sports venues, and shops in modern, and not always brilliant, style. We passed through the botanical gardens and the War Remembrance Memorial off St. Kilda Road, passing the TV and movie studios, theaters and art centers that make Melbourne the arts and culture capital of Australia.

We took a step down from the bus at the National Gallery of Victoria, founded when Victoria was an independent colony and Australia had not been established as a federated state (hence the National), and noted that it had a major exhibit of German inter-war art, including a significant mention of Dada, modernist design, and expressionist artists like George Grosz and Max Beckmann. It also included film work by Josef Sternberg and Fritz Lang, the former including Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel (1930) and the latter, Metropolis (1926). We went.
The Exhibit was called the Mad Square, German Art 1910-1937.

Lemme tell you, it’s depressing. It’s not lovely. It has some fascinating bits to it, as the Germans came to grips with the despair of their lives, the degeneracy of 1920s Berlin (think Cabaret), the influence of modernism in architecture, including massive housing centers, and the rise of the dictatorship in the 1930s. John enjoyed some of the Dada, but by and large it is a foreboding kind of exhibit, with our having the retrospective knowledge of how bad it got afterwards. Worth the time we gave it.

We walked from there up St. Kilda Road, which John finds one of the grand boulevards of Western Civilization, across the bridge and past Federation Square, new to us, with its additional National Gallery building that houses Australian art, including Aboriginal art. Tomorrow. The building is almost Gehry in its design, with various angles and different planes interacting to give it a post modern look.

After that we lunched in Chinatown at the Dragon Boat, a dim sum restaurant, which was good, and had a spiced green tea that was excellent. We took the Tourist Bus back to Carlton, got off an went to Brunetti for coffee.

Brunetti is one of the world’s great pastry shops. It’s even well enough known to make it into the New York Times. Ben refused to allow John a pastry; instead we ordered two superb coffees, including Ben’s requisite XXX-dry skim cappuccino with texturing and art-work in the foam. This texturing came with map of Australia!

Now it’s off to dinner with friends Jane, Geoff and Libby, with their sons, Tim and Gus, and Tim’s mates he brought to Washington years ago during their Overseas Experience...and stayed with us for BBQ and Bourbon almost 8 years ago.