St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne Museum, Hosier Lane

When I left the cafe where I had lunch today in Melbourne, the expected rain had not only held off, but it started to clear. However, the strong winds of this morning persisted. And I began to suffer one of the other predicted weather factors, high heat.

The clearing skies suggested outdoor activities. The high winds and oppressive heat suggested otherwise. I decided to take in two nearby indoor sites, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Melbourne Museum.

To be fair, the combination of heat and wind provided a benefit. The wind created a convection oven effect so I cooked more evenly.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

I tend to visit churches primarily in Europe because that’s where most of the grand old cathedrals and churches reside. But the walking tour app I use highly recommended St. Patrick’s Cathedral as “one of Australia’s most impressive religious buildings and a leading example of Gothic Revival.” The cathedral was consecrated in 1897, a youngster by European standards.

The exterior is imposing, but it probably would look quite different after a good sandblasting. The stone walls are a dark soot-gray colour. I thought I detected hints of a sand colour underneath the gray, but I’m not sure.

When I arrived, a young woman barring the door told me I couldn’t go in for fifteen minutes because there was a mass. I hope they had a good doctor inside to investigate that. Some masses can be cancerous.

The wait wasn’t a big deal. The cathedral has a nice garden out back with a fountain, the water of which runs down a stepped channel. I found a bench in the shade to reduce the heat burden and waited.

When I went in, the height of the cathedral made it at least as imposing as the exterior. There are beautiful stained glass windows on the curved area behind and around the sides of the altar. Apart from that, the cathedral is minimally adorned.

But St. Patrick’s Cathedral had one very positive feature today. It was cool inside. I spent longer there than I might otherwise have.

Melbourne Museum

The Melbourne Museum is in another of Melbourne’s parks, Carlton Gardens. The park also contains another impressive building, the Royal Exhibition Building. I had to walk past that to get to the Melbourne Museum.

When I was there, the University of Melbourne was holding a graduation ceremony in the Royal Exhibition Building. I deduced this from the large number of graduates walking around and into the building wearing their graduation gowns and regalia, and from the huge banners hanging from the building reading,

“CONGRATULATIONS
University of Melbourne Graduates”

It’s December. My first thought was, “They do things differently here. Back home, the big graduations are after the winter/spring term, before everyone heads out for summ… Oh, yeah, the southern hemisphere. They do graduation the same way here, but the seasons are reversed. Never mind.” Sometimes I can be a complete idiot. Other times I’m just 87% idiotic.

But enough about that. On to the museum.

The Melbourne Museum is a fair-sized, modern museum. I don’t know how much of what I saw were temporary versus permanent exhibits, so don’t blame me if the exhibits I describe here aren’t there should you visit.

The Melbourne Museum includes a large exhibit space devoted to Aboriginals—their creation stories, their geographic areas, their culture, their old tools, and some of the suffering that outside explorers and settlers brought with them, such as a smallpox plague. The exhibits in the Aboriginal section are informative and engaging.

One of the first things that greets you on the other side of the museum from the Aboriginal section is a giant blue whale skeleton.

The museum also has a fair-sized dinosaur exhibit with skeletons of a few different types of dinosaurs, which may be models rather than fossilized bones. I don’t know. However, one large subsection of the broader dinosaur section focuses entirely on triceratops. Upon entering the triceratops exhibit, you pass through a room with animated illustrations filling all the walls depicting the triceratops’ environment and the other dinosaurs it interacted with.

After that, you enter a room with a dramatically lit, large triceratops skeleton. According to the text, it’s a real fossilized triceratops skeleton rather than a model, and it’s about 85% complete.

The dramatic lighting slowly shifts colour and is usually dim. I had to wait for it to change to a white light to get a decent picture.

From this room, you climb some stairs and can view the triceratops from partway up and at the top. There are more exhibits about triceratops on the upper level. For instance, I learned that infant triceratops had a lot of predators. But the only predator that could take on an adult triceratops was a T-rex.

The Melbourne Museum also has a good exhibit on insects and some exhibits directed mainly at children.

The indoor exhibit space at the Melbourne Museum forms a squared-off, roughly “U” shape. Outside, between the sides of the U, is the museum’s Forest Gallery. It’s a small forest.

You can view the forest from inside through floor-to-ceiling windows. You can also go outside and walk around the sides of the forest. In addition, there are paths through the forest that you can walk along on days when the wind isn’t too strong, i.e., days not like today. Today, chains blocked off the paths. Signs on the chains said it was closed due to high winds.

I guess they were afraid that the winds would knock over one or more of the trees and kill some visitors. I’d imagine that killing visitors might have a serious negative effect on an attraction’s TripAdvisor rating.

Hosier Street

By the time I left the Melbourne Museum, the sky had darkened considerably and looked threatening. But based on my non-meteorologist, uninformed evaluation of the clouds, I formed the opinion that I likely had at least an hour before the rain started. I decided to press my luck and visit one more sight.

One of my guidebooks recommended Hosier Street as one of Melbourne’s most celebrated laneways for street art. The book said crowds flock there to snap pictures.

Another advantage the site had was that the route to it from the Melbourne Museum took me not too far from, and then beyond, my hotel. If it started raining along the way, I figured I could make a dash for my hotel and forget about Hosier Street.

It didn’t start raining, but I should have dashed to my hotel anyway. I wasn’t impressed. Hosier Street might have been beautiful at one time had newer graffiti tags not been painted over some of the existing street art.

But the book was right about people coming to take photos. If they were like me, they probably thought, “I got suckered into coming to see this farshtunkena graffiti, I’ll be damned if I’m leaving without taking some pictures.”

With that, I called an end to my afternoon’s activities and returned to my hotel.

The threatened rain didn’t start until evening. I avoided it by ordering room service for dinner.

Tomorrow’s forecast still calls for all-day rain. We’ll see how it goes.