Melbourne, Then and Now
I didn’t know Melbourne as well as Sydney growing up; the only time I saw it as a kid was passing through on the way to Ayers Rock on a family road trip in 1979. As a new postgrad in 1991, though, I brought my car up from Tassie via the ferry to Melbourne, and was back a few times in the 1990s: for a brief stop on the way home in 1995, for an Apple conference in September 1998, and for a few more visits in the late 1990s as J. and I got to know a good friend I’d met online years before and in person at that conference. We used frequent flier points to duck down for a long weekend at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, kicking off a decade of comedy-going that continued in Edinburgh. On the way back to Canberra from Tasmania in 1999 we stopped in Melbourne for the New Year’s Eve to end all New Years’ Eves, trusting that the Y2K bug wouldn’t trap us there.
In 2000–2001 we ended up living in Melbourne for several months, as recounted in my early weblogs. In hindsight, I didn’t take many photos of it at the time, although the ones I did plus the rest of my ’90s shots make a decent gallery.
I spent two nights in Melbourne on my way home from Tassie last month, staying with my old mate from the 1990s and seeing a couple more old friends while I was there. There wasn’t time for much sightseeing, but I took a few photos while we were out and about, mostly while walking his labrador. Continuing the lamington theme, here’s one I bought on one of those walks; click through for a gallery of the rest of that brief visit.
