Surprises in Australia

 

Returning from 17 days visiting Australia this week, it wasn’t hard to recall a good number of surprising and unexpected things we discovered that happened “down under.”

Our first stop, Sydney, and nearly all other cities we visited long enough to get a good impression of them, which included Melbourne, Geelong, Hobart, and Port Douglas, have far more cultural diversity than most cities we’ve lived in the US. And they seem far better for it. While we have a strong Hispanic and Latino population here in Phoenix, we lack the strong Asian, black, or indigenous populations that seem to be present in these Australian cities. Not only that, the various races seem to be all mixed together and not segmented into neighborhoods or sections of a particular city, although I could be wrong about that. Plus, there are constant reminders of Australia’s connection with its indigenous people, on train announcements, in every museum, and in art galleries and shops where gift items are sold. These reminders contribute to the feeling that nearly everyone in the country, except for a small minority of indigenous peoples, are immigrants.

The other surprise in these cities was how functional and easy mass transit works, especially the trains. They’re easy to board and pay (tap a credit card when you get on, tap again when you get off), they come at frequent and regular intervals, are spotless with great maps and directions. Even the announcements are understandable.

The MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania, was an outstanding experience. This large, privately funded museum is amazingly innovative and forward thinking. It surprised me at every corner I turned and each room/gallery offered something totally unexpected. Its art wasn’t always easy to take, such as a substantially large “poo machine” mimicking the journey food takes through the body from ingestion to defecation, and sometimes could be challenging. But it was so unusual and different, I found it amazing. Not everyone in our party was similarly impressed, but I could have stayed another hour or two, and that is something I have never said about an art museum before. Ever! And while on the subject of Tasmania, our room at The Tasman, the hotel where we stayed in Hobart, was probably the best hotel room I’ve ever occupied. It was so much fun to have two nights in this large, luxurious suite with a host of amazing automated features.

The primary reason for this trip was the chance to meet other members of Chris Hawkins’ family, our youngest daughter’s fiancé. We met his sister Sarah and her husband Jamie, Peter’s wife and Chris’s mom, Sandra. We loved them all, but then it went beyond that. Peter accompanied us not only to Hobart in Tasmania, but then on to Cairns and Port Douglas. This was a generous gift of his time and attention, which paid off big time, especially on our visit to the Great Barrier Reef. Without him, everything would have been more difficult.

Using Port Douglas as a hub for our Barrier Reef visit, we visited the Mossman Gorge, a 135 million-year old rain forest, far older than the Amazon rain forest. The next day we took a five mile Skyrail Cableway trip over the Barron Gorge National Park. The ride features incredible views of the Barron Falls, a massive structure 410 feet high and 850 feet across. The falls began forming over 400 million years ago and shaped by earth movement and the power of water over millions of years. The third day we spent entirely on the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef, 30 nautical miles into the ocean, takes an hour and a half to reach. There we experienced up close what makes this part of the world so spectacular, the largest living structure on Earth. The Reef spans 2,300 kilometers and is visible from space. It was amazing to discover it from under the surface and learn of the amount of care given to minimize human impact and in protecting it.

It would be hard to list everything we liked, but here are some things that stood out:

– Chris obviously had done a massive amount of thinking and planning to ensure everything went smoothly for us and it really did. Maggie and I surprised ourselves with how much we could see and do, and I suspect Chris’s planning had something to do with that. I expected either Maggie or I would give up at some point, run out of gas and just want to sit, but we were always busy, going, going, going.

– Chris’s dad grilled fish as the feature dish for our first dinner and I fell in love with it. It’s called Barramundi. It has a mild, buttery sweet flavor I found irresistible, and I ended up ordering it frequently over the next two weeks. It has a firm texture and large, moist flakes and very little fish odor. Think tilapia or cod but with much more flavor.

– In Sydney, we especially loved the Chinese Friendship Garden, three acres of serenity, quiet and peace in the very heart of this bustling city. We loved its waterfalls, tiny lakes filled with shimmering koi, exotic plants, and traditional Chinese architecture with pavilions and bridges. The Sydney Zoo and Botanical Garden were fun, and we enjoyed the Australian Museum. The runaway hit for me in Sydney was the Art Gallery of New South Wales with its amazing lower Tank exhibit. Built into a massive, disused. underground World War II era oil tank, its ceiling is 7 meters high (23 feet) and has 125 columns in its 2,200 square meters (23,680 feet). I felt like I was in the “Kingdom Under the Mountain” from the Hobbit. Entering the totally dark space was just eerie, but the acoustics were out of this world. We also enjoyed the Harbor Tour, Sydney Bridge and Opera House.

– In Melbourne, a magnificent walking tour of Chris’s old haunts and favorite things and meeting some of his friends for dinner was just fantastic. We even loved the cool train ride to/from Geelong to Melbourne and back.

– I fell in love with Australian Rules football, wearing my Geelong Cats baseball hat everywhere. More on sports in a bit.

– We liked the super nice fancy restaurants we got to experience but also loved finding some of the more local spots- like Higher Ground in Melbourne. In Geelong, a gin bar in the Black Sheep was unique, as was the Davidson’s elegant space. We also found some “after work” pubs and bars in Sydney, like The Fortune of War in an area of the city called the Rocks, supposedly the oldest pub in Sydney.

– We loved getting a 30-40% discount on everything given the favorable exchange rate. When we visited, the Australia dollar was worth just 63 cents. Like that painting for $100? Well, buy it and notice after the charge goes through on the credit card, it’s only over $60.

Now let’s talk about sports: We had no idea we’d be this involved and learn this much about Australians and sports. The US may be obsessed with sports, but Australians go one notch further. When first arriving in Geelong, we learned they have a highly regarded Aussie Rules professional football team, in the AFL, the premier professional governing body, just like the NFL in the USA. Like American football, the game is highly physical with players allowed to tackle opponents, although they do not wear protective gear, making it one of the toughest sports in the world. Unlike football in the US, play does not stop, but goes constantly, like soccer. Two teams of 18 players each compete on a large, oval-shaped field with goal posts at each end. The field is 200 yards long vs. the 120 yards (including end zones) in US Football, although occasionally, some fields are smaller. Players move the ball by kicking, punching the ball to another player or bouncing the ball as they run—one bounce every 15 meters. Throwing the ball is not allowed. The Geelong Cats had the first game of the season while I was there. I was given a Cats ball cap and the chance to watch the game (with a pint or two) in a bar on a big-screen television. It was a lot of fun.

Next up was the Formula One auto race, which kicked off its first race of the 2025 season in Melbourne during our visit. Again, we got to watch the race on television and McLaren won! What could be better?

And yet there is one more sport, among Australia’s many, that bears mentioning—lawn bowling, for instance. Think of curling (the game on ice where you try to get big, heavy granite stones with handles closest to a distant target with sweepers influencing the stone’s path), but lawn bowling is played on a flat, rectangular grass surface called a green with asymmetrical balls called “bowls” which curve as they begin to lose velocity, hopefully toward the target, a small white ball called a jack. And like curling, getting closest to the target is the goal and players can knock other bowls (balls) out of the way. In Geelong, Peter introduced Ginger and me to the Eastern Park Bowling Club, where he plays the position of Skipper. At a practice session the previous day, I got the chance to meet many of the players on his team. The following day, Peter took me and Ginger to his own club where we met the President and secretary of the club and had time to roll some balls on the club’s amazingly smooth grass surface under the supervision of Mick Chandley, one of Peter’s best mates. After watching us play for a while, no effort was made to recruit either of us, but we sure had fun.

We found much to love about Australia. We liked that tipping is uncommon and not expected. The people are laid-back and less work-oriented with a surprisingly witty and self-deprecating sense of humor, especially Chris’s dad, Peter—although some slang terms took a while to learn. Chris’ family is incredible! We liked his sister and her husband. We especially loved meeting his mother, a highly engaging and principled woman. They’d warned us there were hundreds of things in Australia that could kill us, but we noticed nothing threatening. We saw enormous bats, but they couldn’t be bothered with people. It takes a while to get there as it’s on the other side of the world, but the trip is a breeze on the way over, a bit of a slog on the way back, and more than worth the effort. I highly recommend it.