The company put me up in a ritzy suburban hotel that was on the main transit line to downtown Melbourne. I'm sure it was convenient to the Tandem office, but I don't recall the specifics of that. In spite of the time lapse (I'm finally getting these slides online 25 years after the trip), I was able to locate the hotel. I remembered that it was near the F1 race track. The Australian Grand Prix was to be held the week after my visit and I could hear the racers making practice runs. My room overlooked the Albert Reserve cricket and tennis ground.
While I was in Melbourne I visited a church one Sunday and watched an informal Sunday afternoon cricket match in the local park. Who knew that players could take coolers with them to the outfield? Cricket is a slow-moving game. It makes baseball look as rowdy as basketball. Do I also remember that outfielders had lawn chairs? Surely not. There was at least one after work barbecue at a colleague's house and I expect more than one gathering for beer & snacks. It was the Tandem tradition, after all. I learned that nobody drinks Foster's, which most Americans believe is the quintessential Australian beer. There are too many better local brews.
The high point of my Australian stay, however, was a spur-of-the-moment visit to a local Arabian breeder. I got the name out of the Yellow Pages (remember those?) and cold-called them. As it turned out we had horses of similar bloodlines and they invited me to spend the weekend. I no longer remember the name of the nearest town, but it was on the train line south of Melbourne, about an hour away.
They called their farm "Russ-Jen" after their first names: Russell and Jenny. I think that's backwards. "Jen-Russ" would have been more appropriate because generosity was their hallmark. I forget their black stallion's name, but he was a looker and very sweet. Jenny offered to let me ride him, but I don't mess with stallions so I declined with thanks.
They also took in injured wildlife to be nursed back to health and returned to the wild.
They had several mares and foals on their own and borrowed land. I only got pictures of this pair.
Although I had purchased a round-trip ticket on the train, Russell, whose day job is driving a semi, offered to drive me back to Melbourne. Boy, did I jump at the chance to ride in a semi! With the air ride in the cab, it was not unlike riding a loping horse. I'm sorry I couldn't get a picture of the doormen's faces when the big rig stopped in front of the ritzy hotel. It was the cherry on the sundae when Russell and I climbed down and I gave him a big hug and thanked him for the wonderful weekend!
Afterwards I called Jim and told him that my Australian reputation was trashed.
I was glad we could offer some pay-back the following year by hosting their son when he and a cousin who were working their way around the world stopped in the D.C. area. Nice young men.
One afternoon I visited the Royal Botanic Gardens and the adjacent Melbourne Observatory. The observatory was first used in 1863 and decommissioned in 1945 due to increasing light pollution. It is open to the public and it looks like there were some kind of festivities in progress, but I don't remember what they might have been.
This may have been the same day I went shopping to buy a Driza-Bone coat for a friend. She had drooled over the one Jim got me on his own visit to Melbourne some years before. That coat was warm and waterproof. It was great when riding on a cold day, but really made its mark working around the barn. It didn't make the transition to our current home at Kendal, a Continuing Care Residential Community. It actually would have been useful if I could ever have cleaned the barn off and if there had been a place to put it in the off-season. Sic transit....
Since the Aussie late summer weather was cooler than expected, I also bought a light coat that I do still wear.
The garden was full of folks enjoying the beautiful day. I would not have needed my new coat on this day.
Black swans are native to Australia. Before European explorers visited the continent, however, they were a common metaphor, dating to the time of the Romans, for something that didn't exist. In modern times the term has come to signify a high-profile, rare, and hard to predict event.
But what I had really come to see were the bats.
At the time of my visit, the Royal Botanic Garden was home to a colony (or "camp") of grey-headed flying foxes. They are just now starting to rouse for their night of foraging fruit.
The population of bats, which exploded in the years after my visit, required relocation of the camp to other parks because of damage to heritage trees here.
This early riser was going to get first choice of the ripest fruits.
These bats are the largest in Australia with a wingspan of over three feet. Their faces resemble foxes hence the name. Unlike insect-eating bats, they use scent rather than echolocation to find their next meal.
Click your "back" button to return to the previous page or click for our picture album.