Meet Up in Melbourne Day 3

It’s been a week and I have not finished posting about my trip to Melbourne. On my last full day in Melbourne, my cousin did not have to go to his downtown office and was working from home. Instead, my uncle dropped me off at a nearby train station. From there, I rode the train from the suburbs to downtown Melbourne. I had a map and a plan to go to places I missed yesterday.

My first stop: the Victoria Police Museum. (For those not familiar with Melbourne and Australia, Victoria refers to the state.) My father is a retired Royal Hong Kong Police officer and he had taken me to a police museum in Hong Kong when I was twelve. Naturally, I wanted to see the history of the Victoria Police. The museum was on the map. I had the Google Maps app. And as you can probably guess from where I was going, I couldn’t find the museum at first.

Did you know Australia also has a World Trade Centre [sic]?

After circling around once, I had to ask for directions. Turns out the museum was on the second floor of a building next to the World Trade Centre. The daytime temperature was getting warmer by the hour and I was glad to be indoors again.

The museum was not very large, but there were several key exhibits. There is a small collection dedicated to the history of the first female police officers. The three pictures below documents the earliest; the exhibits for the modern female officers were just as interested. I just did not photograph them.

The other exhibit that I took pictures of was the one dedicated to EOD.

I spent about an hour or so in the museum. Beside the pictures, I bought a few things from the gift shop: a fridge magnet with the Victoria State Police insignia and a pair of cuff links also with the VSP insignia embossed on them.

It was time to go. I had no idea where to go next. The Melbourne Aquarium? $43 AUD just for one person to get it. PASS.

I decided to go east and see the Old Treasury Building, Treasury Gardens, and Fitzroy Gardens. The Old Treasury Building had been turned into a museum. It had once been built to house all the gold the miners had found in the west but the gold fields ran out before the building was completed. It was a government building for a while. More on that later. I went to the Treasury Gardens first.

I was surprised to see a John F. Kennedy Memorial.

It was fitting to see the memorial; I saw the Memorial on November 23, 2017. President Kennedy had died on November 22, 1963. Given the time zone differences, close enough.

East of the Treasury Gardens is Fitzroy Garden where there are three places to see: Captain Cook’s House literally shipped from England, the Model Tudor Village, and a conservatory.

These four are from the Cook House. This was the house that belonged to Captain James Cook and his parents in England. It was turned into a museum in Australia after the Australian government bought it and had it shipped over.

Nearby is the conservatory I mentioned. I was confused about what is in conservatory until I went inside. Conservatory is Anglo-Australian for what Americans call a green house or nursery. What’s inside? Flowers of all sorts.

 

The most disappointing part: the Model Tudor Village. 1) It was hard to find in the very large Fitzroy Gardens and 2) it was a lot smaller than expected. Kinda like seeing the difference between seeing a burger in a TV commercial and what it really looks like after paying $8.00.

Here is the rest of the village.

I doubled back to the Old Treasury Building and stayed for about another hour until it closed. It turns out of the staff members is a librarian from New Zealand and she gave me some more information not necessarily part of the tour. That was after I told her I too had a library degree.

Here, you can see the vaults and the tunnels. The “gold” nugget is a replica of the largest nugget ever found. The other thing: the Old Treasury Building sits in front of the current Treasury Building.

I still had another 2 hours left before getting on the train at Southern Cross Station. It was at the Southern Cross Station where I got hurt. In my haste, I was going up some steps 2 at a time and tripped. I went forward, grazed my knuckles, and had about $6.00 AUD in coins drive into my right thigh- the meaty muscle part. The knuckles hurt the most immediately. It was not until I returned back to the US when the injury to my leg became apparent. More on that later.

This was my last day in Melbourne and I am definitely coming back.