[hkskyline]

Continuing my Great Australia series ... I visited Melbourne twice actually. The first visit was just a quick weekend hop with a friend, where we wandered around the city exploring about. The second trip was just after visiting another friend in Adelaide, where I focussed more on the natural scenic spots along the Great Ocean Road.

1. I didn't put this place on my 'to visit' list at first, but the tourist guidebook showed a picture of the skyline from a very interesting perspective, so I asked at the tourist information centre and was on the train soon after to see it for myself.

2. There was also a nice beach along the walk.

5. There was also another attraction - bathhouses! That's how people of the old days enjoyed the water.

9. The Docklands is an emerging area with lots of new residentials, but there is still a lot of empty space to be redeveloped. I hope they improve the connectivity to the city centre though. Despite its central location, I don't think there are enough trams getting people into the offices nearby.

11. The free trams that circle the city centre were a great way to sightsee!

17. Once the development is complete, this should be a very nice neighborhood to live in.

20. Quite some interesting architecture abound.

27. My impression of Docklands was quite good at first. I was happy to see a variety of architecture, but somewhat disappointed by the connectivity problems. I think this is a common problem among redevelopment zones. Once all the pieces are in place, things will work out well. Transit is easy to put in. If they didn't build the spaces properly, that problem would not be so easily fixed.

Whole Collection : http://www.globalphotos.org/melbourne.htm

 

[JasonParis]

Great pics. Some of the architecture reminds me of Rotterdam and while I don't like all of it, the splashes of colour everywhere are quite refreshing I think.

 

[urbanboom]

Beautiful!

It kinda reminds me of a giant cityplace. How new is the city?

 

[Long Island Mike]

Good Melbourne pics here!

HK: Good pics from the neat "Down-Under" city of Melbourne-now in the heart of their Summer. LI MIKE

 

[hkskyline]

Beautiful!

It kinda reminds me of a giant cityplace. How new is the city?

Docklands is a redevelopment project, which is somewhat like Cityplace. Construction will go on for another 10 years or so.

More info : http://www.docklands.com.au/cs/Sate...86483&pagename=VicUrban/Layout&site=Docklands

 

[taal]

It's not really comparable in that sense to City Place - it's more like all the projects you see going up around MLSE + ICE.

It's not just residential in other words.

 

[lordmandeep]

is it just me, but Melbourne reminds me of LA.

A much more cleaner and denser version of course.

 

[Brian69]

Free...downtown...trams...?!? Surely this is a misprint. A public service funded by taxpayers that doesn't charge on top of revenue collected? It's as alien as an ostensibly free museum (and I'm looking at you, London).

Only in Australia you say?

Pity.

(nice pics)

 

[W. K. Lis]

The bushfires near Melbourne doesn't help.

Bush fire toll soars past 166
TheSpec.com -

By Tanalee Smith
WHITTLESEA, Australia — Police declared incinerated towns crime scenes Monday, and Australia’s prime minister spoke of “mass murder†after investigators said arsonists may have set some of the country’s worst wildfires in history. The death toll rose to 166.

There were no quick answers, but officials said panic and the freight-train speed of the fire front — driven by winds of more than 90 kilometres per hour and temperatures as high as 47 C — probably accounted for the unusually high toll.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, visibly upset during a television interview, reflected the country’s disgust at the idea that arsonists may have set some of the 400 fires that devastated Victoria state, or helped them jump containment lines.

“What do you say about anyone like that?†Rudd said. “There’s no words to describe it, other than it’s mass murder.â€

A nation in mourning

More than one dozen fires still burned uncontrollably across the state, though conditions were much cooler than on Saturday.

Evidence of heart-wrenching loss abounded. From the air, the landscape was blackened as far as the eye could see. In at least one town, bodies still lay in the streets. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks, farmland to ashes. The Victoria Country Fire Service said some 2,200 square kilometres were burned out.

Hell in all its fury

At Kinglake, a body covered by a white sheet lay in a yard where every tree, blade of grass and the ground was blackened. Elsewhere in the town, the burned out hulks of four cars were clustered haphazardly together after an apparent collision. Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported a car in a small reservoir, the driver apparently steering there in desperation.

“What we’ve seen, I think, is that people didn’t have enough time, in some cases†Victoria Police Commissioner Christine Nixon told a news conference. “We’re finding (bodies) on the side of roads, in cars that crashed.â€

But there were also extraordinary tales of survival.

On man leapt into his pool to escape the flames as they roared over his house, leaving it unscarred but razing the neighbour’s. Another woman sheltered with her children in a wombat burrow as the worst of the fire passed.

Mark Strubing sheltered in a drainage pipe as his property, outside Kinglake, burned.

“We jumped in the car and we were only literally just able to outrun this fire. It was travelling as fast as the wind,†Strubing told Nine Network television news.

He said he and a companion rolled around in the water at the bottom to wet their clothing as the flames started licking the pipe: “How we didn’t burn I don’t know.â€

Elsewhere in Kinglake, Jack Barber fled just ahead of the flames with his wife, his neighbour, driving in two cars packed with birth certificates, insurance documents, two cats, four kittens and a dog.

“We had a fire plan,†he said Monday. “The plan was to get the hell out of there before the flames came.â€

Their escape route blocked by downed power lines and a tree, they took shelter first at a school, then — when that burned — in an exposed cricket ground ringed by trees, where they found five others.

“All around us was 30 metres flames ringing the oval, and we ran where the wind wasn’t. It was swirling all over the place,†Barber said. “For three hours, we dodged the wind.â€

The wind surged and changed direction quickly time and again on Saturday, fanning the blazes and making their direction utterly unpredictable from minute to minute. Local media had been issuing warnings in the days leading up to the weekend, but many people guarding their homes with backyard hoses would have been outside when the wind changed, and thus could have missed the fresh warnings.

At least 750 homes were destroyed on Saturday, the Victoria Country Fire Service said.

Officials said both the tolls of human life and property would almost certainly rise as they reached deeper into the disaster zone, and forecasters said temperatures would rise again later in the week, posing a risk of further flare-ups.

Nixon said investigators had strong suspicions that at least one of the deadly blazes — known as the Churchill fire after a ruined town — was deliberately set. And it could not be ruled out for other fires. She cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

The country’s top law officer, Attorney General Robert McClelland, said that people found to have deliberately set fires could face murder charges. Murder can carry a life sentence.

Police sealed off Maryville, a town destroyed by another fire, with checkpoints, telling residents who fled and news crews they could not enter because there were still bodies in the streets. Armed officers moved through the shattered landscape taking notes, pool news photographs showed.

John Handmer, a wildfire safety expert at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said research has shown that people in the path of a blaze must get out early or stay inside until the worst has past.

“Fleeing at the last moment is the worst possible option,†he said. “Sadly, this message does not seem to have been sufficiently heeded this weekend with truly awful consequences in Victoria.â€

Even if a house is set ablaze, it will burn more slowly and with less intensity that a wildfire and residents have a better chance of escape, he said.

Victoria state Premier John Brumby on Monday announced a commission would be held to examine all aspects of the fires, including warning policies.

“I think our policy has served us well in what I call normal conditions. These were unbelievable circumstances,†Brumby said on Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

Blazes have been burning for weeks across several states in southern Australia. A long-running drought in the south — the worst in a century — had left forests extra dry and Saturday’s fire conditions in Victoria were said to be the worst ever in Australia.

In New South Wales state on Monday, a 31-year-old man appeared in court charged with arson in connection to a wildfire that burned north of Sydney at the weekend. No loss of life was reported there. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

The country’s deadliest fires before the current spate killed 75 people in 1983. In 2006, nine people died on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula.