Dear blog readers.

We are sorry for the long delay in updating the blog. We are back home in Oslo now and have had a hectic 10 days since we came home. I’ve also had a light case of writer’s block the last days. It has been hard getting back into blogging again. But we are back, and are ready to put in the last effort to cover the final 3 weeks of the trip. As you might remember we were in Melbourne on:

March 28, 2011

Finding an apartment in Melbourne had been a big challenge. For some reason that I did not immediately understand prices were outrageously high during the weekend, but dropped rapidly on the Monday. The most extreme example was an apartment which cost 630 AUD from Sunday to Monday, then dropped to 137 (!) dollars from Monday to Tuesday. Only later did I find out that we were in Melbourne during the Australian Grand Prix. After a long search I finally managed to find something reasonable for us.

Helene unfortunately developed a cold yesterday and was not feeling very well at all. After a calm day of schooling with the kids she gave the rest of us a ride downtown in the late afternoon, before she returned to the apartment to rest and get better.

On our way in to town we passed by an area with nice wooden houses:

Helene dropped us off at the Rialto towers, one of Melbourne’s skyscrapers, where Lonely Planet said there was a very nice observation deck. A must-see for tourists, they claimed. The building is 270 meters (886 feet) tall, including its spire, and is the tallest office building in the southern hemisphere if you measure to the roof (including the spire is a different category altogether). You can always find some “best of” category.

The entrance to the building looked suspiciously non-touristy, with a security guard and a reception desk with a serious old man looking at us above his glasses. The security guard measured us up and down. A father with 3 kids obviously did not fit the mold for normal visitors to the building. He tried to establish eye contact and seemed to want to approach us. By instinct I ducked his eyes and quickly moved in the other direction towards the reception counter. I approached the serious old man and told him where we were going, half-knowing what he would respond. His right hand picked up a small brochure, in a reflex movement, without his eyes ever leaving mine. “The observation deck closed 15 months ago. There is one in the building described in this brochure. Have a nice day.” I wonder if he had had such a request before.

So, off we headed to Eureka Skydek 88 and “The Egde” at the top of the Eureka Tower.

Just outside the Rialto we passed  a cool collection of statues in two parts. Here are the mother and children, coming to Australia:

And on the other side was the father, ready to receive them in their new home country.

The statues are called “Reuniting Family” and has been put there by the Grollo Ruzzene Foundation, a charitable foundation created by an Italian couple. The statues been made in remembrance of “Italian immigrants and all other immigrants to Australia,” an interesting way to put it.

There was a plaque on the wall, telling us that in the fifties it was quite common for male immigrants to move to Australia and work here until they had sufficient funds to get the rest of the family to join them. It could take years before a family was reunited. A bit of web searching revealed that the situation depicted by the statues might be inspired by the life of one of the founders of the foundation, Diana Ruzzene Grollo. Have I mentioned that the web is a cool thing?

Australia is a country that has been populated through migration and immigration. It all started 40 to 50 thousand years ago, when the first aboriginals crossed the Timor Sea and settled in Australia. This is the first known human migration in history where a significant stretch of ocean has been crossed. It seems pretty clear that the aboriginals must have had sophisticated boat technology, much much earlier than any other known people in history (even given the low sea levels at the time). But I’ll save the interesting story about the abotiginal migration to another blog entry. Let’s instead have a look at how Australia was populated after the white man arrived.

Australia’s “western” history is very recent. The first British settlement was created at Sydney Cove as late as January 26, 1788 (now celebrated as Australia day). That’s a year before the French Revolution started. It was when Mozart was finishing his career in Vienna. It was 60 years after Isaac Newton had died and 19 years after James Watt had patented the steam engine. That’s when they started in Australia.

In the beginning, as you all will know, Australia was used by the British as the word’s largest prison. Since the obnoxious Americans had just ungratefully declared themselves independent from the mother nation, and convicts sent to Canada might be inspired by the US resistance, the British decided to relieve their saturated domestic prison system by sending convicts to Australia. Over a period of 80 years 165 000 convicts were sent down under.

But already from the 1790s free immigrants also came to Australia. However, it was very difficult to attract settlers. If you wanted to leave Europe you could either go to the lush prairies of the United States, the boat trip would take 4-6 weeks. Or, you could go to the relatively unknown and dry Australia, the boat trip would take a little over 4 months and cost you much more. In addition the conditions on the ships were appalling and many died during the trip.

At the end of the 1830s the government of New South Wales realized they had to do something to attract badly needed workers. They came up with the brilliant idea of keeping land prices high and using the proceeds from land sales to highly subsidize immigration. This gave results and created a new immigration boom over the next decade.

However, the government could have saved a lot of money if they had waited a few years. In 1851 a gold find sparked the Australian gold rush, fueling a massive immigration from fortune seekers and those who could live off them. Between 1848 and 1858 Australia’s non-indigenous population trippled to reach 1 050 000. Sadly, aboriginals were not considered part of the population back then, and were not counted.

Many ethnic Chinese came to Australia during the gold rush years. Competition in the goldfields led to conflicts and the different Australian governments reacted by setting restrictions on Chinese immigration. By the 1880s laws were put in place in all the Australian colonies barring Chinese from immigrating to Australia.

Queensland’s growing sugar cane industry demanded cheap labor in the 1870s and the solution was to bring in thousands of Polynesians, sometimes through kidnappings. The growing competition for jobs led to protests against non-whites taking the jobs of whites. And this in a continent where whites had taken power from aboriginals less than a hundred years before.

There was continued unrest and increasing racial hatred in Australia during the last decades of the 19th century.

By 1901 the population had grown to 3.7 million people. The same year the Australian colonies joined forces and created the Australian nation-state, the Commonwealth of Australia, which was a dominon of the British Empire. One of the first acts of the new government was to introduction the Immigration Restriction Act, which was the start of the so-called White Australia policy. Early drafts of the law contained wording banning non-European immigration. However, the British government didn’t like this, it could offend their Indian citizens and their Japanese allies.

The solution was to introduce a 50-word dictation test. Immigration officials were given the right to refuse any immigrant who failed the test in the European language chosen by the immigration official. Yes, you read that right, the immigration official could chose a language immigrants could not possibly pass. In practice such tests were only given to non-whites. When they failed the tests, they were then duly deported as “illiterate.” Can you believe that? It sounds like a joke from a political satire movie. My injustometer and kafkaesque-factor meter both went ballistic when I first read about this.

The most famous use of the Act was when immigration tried to expel Egon Kisch, a Jewish Communist political activist from Czechoslovakia, who came to Australia in 1934. He spoke 5 European languages and passed several tests until he was given one in Scottish Gaelic, which he failed.

This ridiculous test was not officially abolished until 1958.

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, after the first world war, Australia fought hard to avoid having a clause about racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations (the predecessor to the UN) and won.

In 1925 the Australian prime minister, Stanley Bruce, said: “We intend to keep this country white and not allow its peoples to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.” That’s a lot of prejudice in one sentence. Luckily the world has changed a bit since then.

After the second world war Australia’s restrictive immigration policy was loosened.  Having narrowly escaped a Japanese invasion the official policy was to populate Australia as much as possible, because more people would then take part in defending Australia. The white-only policy was still strong just after the war, but was gradually phased out. It wasn’t until 1973 that the last parts of the white Australia policy was removed from legislation.

From 1946 to 1982 the Australian population doubled from 7.5 to 15 million.

During the 1970s policy was again shifting to a restrictive one as there were more people wanting to come to Australia than the country was able to handle. Today there are about 22.5 million Australians and in 2006 an estimated 24% of Australians were not born in Australia.

Ooops, sorry.

We reached the Yarra river and could see the Eureka Tower building on the other side. It’s the one on the left.

The Eureka Tower was officially opened on October 11, 2006 and was at the time the worlds tallest residential building. It is currently the building with the most floors available for residential occupation in the world. Yet another creative category created to make something best in the world.

After having crossed the bridge we could see back on the Rialto Towers, It’s the one closest to the sun:

Whoa, the Eureka Tower looked impressive from the street:

It’s peculiar shape contains some nice sharp angles. Probably not a good idea in terms of usable surface area per ton of construction material, but very cool when you want to make scary looking pictures.

The views of Melbourne were pretty nice:

Just in front of the large sports stadium you can see some tennis grounds. Let’s have a closer look with the zoom:

This is Melbourne Park, where the Australian Open is played every year.

The 360-degree view was stunning, including a good view of Port Phillip Bay:

Once we were up there we had to go into “the Edge,” a glass cube which is pushed 3 meters (10 feet) outside the building while you are standing in it. The glass is opaque when you enter. Then you feel a slight movement as the cube glides out. Then, suddenly, the glass is made clear, by electronic magic, and you find yourself hanging in the air almost 285 meters (935 feet) above the ground. A shocking experience for someone with a fear of heights, like me. Here is the cube from the outside:

It was completely illegal to bring a camera inside, but we opted for paying to have our picture taken. When I collected the printed picture afterwards I asked the guy at the counter if I could publish it on a web site. He looked at me like I was from another planet and said “Of course, it’s yours.” Cool! Often, when you get your picture taken like that there is fine print saying you have no rights at all, except possibly to look at the photo you just bought. So, here it is:

As you can see, one of the magic electronic glass plates didn’t work and stayed opaque. That didn’t take away the feeling of floating in the air, though. The kids had fun lying on the floor, looking 285 meters (935 feet) straight down. Luckily, none of them have inherited my fear of heights.

To our big surprise the Eureka Skydeck purchases its weather forecast from yr.no, a weather service delivered by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Read all about it in the little white text down to the right:

Now this:

is just wrong. Highest post box? Give me a break! We were 285 meters (935 feet) above street level, and 300 meters (985 feet) above sea level. I’m pretty sure there must be a higher one in Australia.

Our next destination was the impressive Melbourne botanical garden. It’s pretty big, with over 38 hectares (well, everything is relative, Central park is about 9 times bigger at 341 hectares) of landscaped gardens and over 10 000 individual plant species. It was a beautiful and tranquil place:

Black swans!

A cool tree with a strange haircut:

Next to another strange tree:

The sun was on its way down:

Iseline approached two swans by walking veeeery slowly, until she was just next to them. Sorry for the photo of a bird’s bottom, it ducked at just the wrong moment, but it created a cooler photo in a way.

We headed towards the center again.

After some effort we found a taxi to take us back to our apartment. It had been a great day with the kids. Because of traffic the taxi stopped for a few seconds on one of the bridges over the Yarra river. Just enough time to roll down the window and take a photo:

Helene had rested well and felt much better. She will probably be fit for fight again tomorrow.

 

Eirik

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