Time for another digital reprint of one of my articles for Australia and New Zealand magazine, this piece appeared in their May edition. It seems a long time ago now that I spent A Week in Melbourne and I certainly noticed something very un-Brisbane like during that trip. Magazine called it…
Melbourne madness
It’s time to revisit my plane hopping series. Those of you with remarkable memories will remember that I have already plane hopped to a staggering five destinations in Australia, today I can tell you about a sixth; Melbourne.
At this point I would normally start to describe my holiday and tell you snippets of information about the city. In this case, for example, I might have told you that we stayed at St Kilda which is a suburb about 7.4 kilometres from Melbourne CBD, which takes just 11 minutes to drive in normal traffic. Thanks Google.
I would probably then go on to say that if there is a trendier suburb than St Kilda in all of Australia, I’ve not yet been to it. I might have even mentioned the joys of driving around the nearby Mornington Peninsula and enjoying the seaside views that go with it. Or the beauty of the rolling countryside that can be found in the wine regions that surround Australia’s second-biggest city.
I would surely have also described the classic and very colourful huts on Brighton Beach which reminded me so much of Southend seaside where I spent my childhood. But there is no time for that, because there is something much more important that I need to tell you about Melbourne.
Let me explain.
Australia is known as a hot country. I went to Melbourne at the very height of summer here, so you would expect it to be v hot. Had I arrived a week earlier or a week later, it would have been v v hot. Melbourne had temperatures as high as 44°C before I arrived, and the week after I left those temperatures soared right up again.
Whilst I was there though it was so ‘cold’ I saw people wearing coats, jumpers or hoodies during the middle of the day and in the evenings I became reacquainted with the puffer jacket. I hadn’t seen those since England.
Melbourne’s weather is, in a word, unpredictable.
It has long had the reputation as a city that can go through the four seasons all in one day, but locals will tell you that this place can rattle through those seasons all in one hour or so on occasions. I mentioned the word ‘cold’ a little earlier though, I need to define that.
For the most part of the week the temperature whilst I was there was around 20°C to 22°C. That does sound like a summer’s day in the UK, but it’s more like a winter’s day to me being a Brisbane man now. In the scheme of things though, it’s not really ‘cold’.
Before I moved to Australia I was under the impression that Australia = hot, no matter where you went. With Melbourne, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. There’s a saying, if you don’t like the weather in Melbourne, just wait a minute.
There is a reason for this weather madness though; to the north of Melbourne are dry hot deserts, to the south the Arctic. So I suspect it all depends which way the wind blows. The only other time I visited Melbourne it was 36°C one day, 16°C the next.
For those used to English winters and summers though, Melbourne’s climate will surely be a breeze.
