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Loading ...Gay Australia beyond Sydney
EXPLORING THE CITY
Instead of looking at a map to get an overview of the city (as I typically do when arriving at a new destination), I took the fastest elevator in the world to the summit of the new, ultra modern Eureka Tower, the tallest residential structure in the Southern Hemisphere, in under 40 seconds.
Eureka Skydeck 88 is the highest public view of the city and offers the chance to experience “The Edge” – a thrill-ride of sorts that feels like a live version of IMAX. Step inside a chamber. The doors close and the floor moves 10 feet beyond the building wall (nearly 1000 feet above the earth). Heavy metal music permeates the space and, piece-by-piece, the darkened walls and floor become windows.This is how a bird might see Port Phillip Bay, the Yarra River, and the city below.
Back on land, I explored some of the offerings found along the lanes. I enjoyed a wine tasting at a pub that used to be an auto repair shop (there are lots of these sorts of places). I then stepped inside a cool wine bar and restaurant called Syracuse, with hardwood floors, crown moldings, and all that, where Ms. Kylie Minogue (the Aussie Madonna) filmed one of her recent videos.
Real Melbourne Bicycle Tours is also a great way to make some tracks and see the city. The tours begin at Waterfront City at the Melbourne Docklands – acres of restaurants, shops and clubs. Hidden Secrets Tours offers shopping, wine and architecture tours, both private and group.
GREAT EATS
Ask the locals to recommend the best restaurant in town and you’re likely to hear Vue de Monde. It’s considered one of the top restaurants in town (or the country, for that matter – reserve your table when you book your flight).
This is traditional French cuisine prepared by 27 chefs. Each bottle of wine has a uniquely designed decanter to deliver its true taste.
Botanical – a former pub turned elegant eatery – has a terrific menu and wines from around the world, though as I prefer to eat and drink local, I stayed with the Aussie offerings. If you love seafood, you can’t go wrong – it’s all fresh from the waters around the city. If you’re a size queen, you’re in for a treat – the scallops in Australia are the size of hockey pucks.
100 Mile Café’s motto is “Think Globally, Eat Locally” – so of course, all produce served is sourced from within 100 miles of the restaurant.
It’s tough to get a reservation at Taxi, so I went before the dinner crowd. The Asian fusion cuisine is terrific, but the views from the top of Federation Square really sell it. You’ll see the Yarra River, Flinders Street Station, and more.
TO DO LIST
Federation Square, spanning an entire city block, from the business district to the Yarra River, was constructed without any right angles – so it’s a work of art in its own right.
Colorful buildings, comprised of geometric chards of glass and stone, gather around an irregularly shaped piazza. This is home to the city’s artful offerings, such as The Ian Potter Centre – NGV Australia, housing the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection of Australian Art (more than any gallery in the world), and Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the largest center dedicated to the art of film in the world.
During my visit, the Pixar exhibit was winding down. It also houses the only exhibit space in the world dedicated to video games – just for gamers.
There are plenty of other museums to explore, including the Melbourne Museum, and small shops, such as Outré Gallery on Elizabeth Street, specializing in graphic arts, Tiki, Bettie Page, and the like. Jemma, the owner, says many of the artists are from the U.S. No wonder I felt so at home.
Next page: Loving the nightlife
great articles guys, I’m from melbourne and living in London & Amsterdam now and really miss Melbourne… (btw for foriegn readers “friendly” rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney explains some of these comments) come and enjoy our great cities!
Why is Mark of Australia calling New Zealand a “colossal hole of colossal proportions?”
As an Aussie, I’m all for you guys coming over and checking out stuff beyond Sydney. Melbourne is wonderful – one of my favs – and Tassie is beautiful. But don’t forget that Sydney itself is more than Oxford St and the Mardi Gras. I live in Sydney. The fabulous hub of cosmopolitan and queer-friendly life is Newtown-Enmore-Erskineville in the inner western suburbs. It has the highest concentration of shopping (on actual streets, not malls!), live music venues, bars and clubs outside of the CBD, including gay, queer, drag queen and drag king venues. Check it out!
Echoing Tony F, Tassie decriminalised sodomy in 1997, and quickly enacted a suit of other progressive laws and policies, including a same-sex relationship register. It is also the only state in which anti-homophobia kits are required in all high schools.
But also, picking up rainbow16, the author is pretty uninformed on a range of issues. I’m a professional geographer, and I can tell you that the official population projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in no way indicate Melbourne surpassing Sydney anytime in the next century! Check out the stats at http://www.abs.gov.au. And, yeah, all major Australian cities have rivers (or several rivers) running through them. Sydney has the Parramatta, Georges and Lane Cove Rivers, along with others. Hmmm…
Thanks for the great article on Melbourne. Come here if you like real Aussie men without the Sydney attitude (see Mark’s comment above for a taste of that.) Don’t forget to check out the scene North of the river-Collingwood in particular–for a good type. Cheers guys. Jack.
Tasmania was the last State to decriminalize homosexuality, but when it did,the legislation was and is the most progressive in Australia. Tasmania was the first state to set up registration of civil unions before the recent legislation in the Australian Capital territory.
The Federal government of Australia has a law that restricts marriage to one man with one woman. Tasmanians are now debating a possible State same-sex marriage law.
If you like hiking, Tasmania is a wilderness paradise, with many famous national park tracks like Cradle Mountain in the centre of the island and the track to Frenchman’s Cap in the unique cool temperate rainforest of the southwest.
Gay Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Greens in the federal parliament, was a leader of the successful struggle to stop the damming and flooding of the wild Franklin River and much of the southwestern rainforest. He continues to lead campaigns to stop the woodchipping of other old-growth forests in Tasmania.
nice article, i used to live in Hobart but never did the interesting stuff and now i live in Sydney, so am required to inform that Melbourne is in fact a hole of colossal proportions. At least you didn’t think we all rode kangaroos or had pet koalas. You did however make a few geographical errors, crossing the Tasman will in fact take you east to New Zealand which is, you guessed it, a colossal hole of colossal proportions. Also there isn’t a Tasmanian sea. And for those of you who think Tasmania is still gay hell, one of the bigger figures in Tasmanian politics is Bob Brown who is, funnily enough, Gay.
I agree that Melbourne is a nice place – less brash and vacuous than Sydney, with lovely public spaces and a buzzing cafe culture (if you like that kind of thing, but I don’t drink coffee or tea so I find cafes a bit pointless…).
Tassie is a great place per se and I thoroughly recommend it for tourists seeking something different providing you can “blend”. As a gay-friendly destination, I’m not so sure – at least not yet. In Hobart you may find some gay people (we didn’t, though my gaydar is all screwy of late) but we found homophobia is still rife when we went outside of central Hobart. We noticed that Tasmania was generally not very switched on to two blokes travelling together. This was in March 2008.
Travellers from the US & Canada may want to note that Australia’s voltage is 240W not 110W so make sure your chargers can cope with different voltages.
Cheers from Nick in Sydney
PS – Michael, please check your spelling – Qantas does not have a “u” (it’s an acronym; see the website or Wikipedia for an explanation) and it’s “wombat” not “wambat”.
Um, almost all the capital cities in Australia (except for maybe 2-3) have rivers running through it. Tasmania is a bit of a backwater, as Rain says… the person who wrote this article seems to be a bit misinformed.
Tasmania?
Not when I lived there. How far they have come, if it is truly as this article states. When I lived there, it carried a possible custodial sentence to be a gay man, and gay women were rumoured to be raped on sight even by police… gay bashing of both genders and trans people was common, and so was deeply hateful vitriol.
This was not in the 1940’s either, this was in the 1990’s.
Good for them. I wish it had been different when I lived there, I was only able to blossom when I moved to the USA. Hardly a bastion of gay acceptance, but at least not so archaic and demonising in the big cities especially.