Category: Explore

Brutalism arrived in Australia in the 1950s through architects who had studied or worked in Britain, Europe, and the United States and returned to a country in the middle of the most sustained period of public investment in its history. Post-war Melbourne w…

There is a version of Melbourne that the city reserves for the six-to-seven-thirty window on weekday mornings, and it is the most honest version the city offers. The CBD is quiet enough to hear the tram cables above the road. The Yarra is flat and still, ru…

Port Phillip Bay is 1,950 square kilometres of sheltered water, and the phrase “sheltered water” requires qualification. The bay has an average depth of thirteen metres, which means that when the afternoon sea breeze builds — typically northwest-to-southwes…

Daylesford arrived at its current identity the way that places which have genuinely found themselves always do: through accumulation rather than planning, through the successive waves of people who came for one thing and stayed for another, and through the…

Three hundred and sixty kilometres northwest of Melbourne, the Grampians rise from the Western District wheat and sheep country as a sudden, improbable thing: a series of sandstone ranges running north-south for 90 kilometres, with sheer western faces dropp…

The southernmost point of mainland Australia is a granite headland at the tip of Wilson’s Promontory that juts into Bass Strait at 39 degrees south latitude. Antarctica is 2,500 kilometres beyond it. The Southern Ocean that lies between — the roughest ocean…

Port Phillip Bay is 1,950 square kilometres of enclosed water fed by the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers and connected to Bass Strait through the narrow gap at the Heads between Sorrento and Queenscliff. It is not an ocean beach. The water is calm most days, g…

St Kilda has been gentrified at least twice and rediscovered approximately six times in the past thirty years, and it is still not entirely clear whether the suburb that emerges from each cycle is better or worse than the one that preceded it. The Fitzroy S…

The Yarra Valley begins where the road east of Lilydale climbs out of the outer suburbs and drops toward the valley floor. From that point, roughly 45 kilometres from the CBD, the world changes in the way that only altitude and agriculture can change it: th…

Phillip Island exists in the Melbourne imagination primarily as two things: the penguin parade and the Motorcycle Grand Prix circuit. The penguin parade draws a million visitors a year to watch Little Penguins waddle up Summerlands Beach at dusk — a genuine…