Australia: The Culture of Distance - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 293

Unlike Sydney, which takes pride in its convict beginnings, Melbourne takes pride in
the fact that it was established as a colony of free settlers. Sydney has a spacious harbor;
Melbourne is reached by traveling inland along the Yarra River. Melbourne's area is about
2,300 square miles. Melbourne has its share of high-rise office buildings, but its central
business district is urban-traditional—low-rise buildings of traditional design and building
materials. One building, “The Block,” is worth the visitor's eye; it is described in a city
guide as “exuberantly stuccoed in the Baroque manner.” In keeping with tradition, Mel-
bourne has its trams (streetcars) that run on steel rails. In Sydney (or so it is said) money
counts, but in Melbourne, it is old money that counts. Perhaps nothing better displays Mel-
bourne's reputation as a city of tradition than the Melbourne Cup. The Cup is run in early
November. Like Cecil Beaton's Derby Day tableau in My Fair Lady, on Cup Day, the ladies
of Melbourne going to the horse races and lunching in the city wear large, elegant hats with
dresses and gloves to match. Their gentlemen escorts, some in morning dress, complete the
tableau.
On any day, Melbourne is a city to please visitors. Streets are wide and, for pedestrians,
easily crossed and navigated. There are ample green spaces and parks where walkers can
rest and strike up casual conversations, and the State (of Victoria) National Museum has an
excellent display of Aboriginal art.
The city of Hobart has a population of about 214,000 and is the capital of Tasmania,
an island-state that lies south of the Australian continent across the Bass Strait. About 140
miles separate Tasmania from the continent, but before steamships, they were hard-won
miles. Tasmania sits in the “roaring forties,” a belt of strong winds that blow across the
globe from forty to fifty degrees south latitude. Like Sydney, Hobart began as a convict
colony in 1803. It was the place of second exile, the prison for the hard cases not suit-
able for Sydney. When free colonists began to challenge Tasmania's Aborigines for land,
the small size of the island doomed them to extinction (there was no vast, uncharted out-
back to shelter them). Extermination hunts were organized, and when those failed, the sur-
viving Aborigines were persuaded to move to offshore islands, where they died of many
causes, including smallpox and other European diseases. The last survivor, a woman named
Truganini, lived on until 1876.
Today, Tasmania's green and pleasant land of farms and forests belies its harsh history.
Hobart, its capital city, rises upwards on the slopes of Mt. Wellington (4,167 feet high).
From the top of Mt. Wellington, Mt. Nelson comes into view. It was once a signal station
flashing messages from Hobart to the waterfront and inland from Hobart. (Clues to the date
of a city's founding can often be found in the names Wellington and Nelson, the two great
heroes of Britain's long war against Napoleon.) The waterfront area is a pleasant place for