Daylesford Town

Along Raglan Street in Daylesford, Victoria. We saw wrought iron balconies like these all over town and in Melbourne.

As mentioned, part of our Australian trip was spent in Daylesford, a small town only about a ninety-minute drive northwest of Melbourne. It's a popular weekend destination in the hills of the Macedon Range for people in the city so it has plenty of hotels and bed & breakfasts. Mostly it reminds me of sleepy but touristed towns in the American West. With the area's gold-rush history and Daylesford's numerous mineral springs it particularly and pleasantly reminds me of Glenwood Springs in Colorado.

Perfect Drop is a good wine bar attached to a bohemian, living-room restaurant serving lots of locally produced food.

The Passengers sat outside on the patio of the local wine bar in the long shadows of a late spring sunset and watched the architecture turn colors. A very pleasant way to vacation. The scene went well with a Temptress Chocolate Porter from Holgate Brewhouse: highly recommended.

Raglan Street in Daylesford again. Further up the road from the first picture.

Good beer from northern Victoria, Australia

UPDATE (19 December 2011): David Sedaris wrote about a visit to Daylesford in a 2009 essay in the New Yorker.

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop…

Kookaburras

Lake Daylesford in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia

The Passengers went to Australia last week – our very first trip Down Under. We had a fabulous time in and around Melbourne, about a seven hour flight from Singapore (Sydney is further. Perth is closer.).

Among the highlights of our trip was staying at a bed and breakfast in the spa town of Daylesford. Every morning, and on some evenings, we walked around the very scenic lake, seen above. At the beginning of one stroll we heard the cackling of kookaburras in the bush, and we were delighted when a pair of them alighted on a low branch just beside our path. Click on the pictures for larger images.

Kookaburras are carnivorous. They even eat poisonous snakes.

On our first morning in Daylesford we definitely heard kookaburras in the bush. This was the second pair we sighted on our trip.

UPDATE (19 December 2011): I found the essay David Sedaris wrote about feeding a kookaburra in Daylesford for the New Yorker in 2009. 

... I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer [to feed a kookaburra]? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath the weight. 

“Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand. For that’s what this thing’s beak was—a serious weapon. I held a strip of raw duck, and after yanking it from my fingers the bird flew back to the railing. Then he took the meat and began slamming it against his wooden platform. Whap, whap, whap. Over and over, as if he were tenderizing it. 

“This is what he’d do in the wild with snakes and lizards and such,” the waiter said. “He thinks it’s still alive, see. He thinks he’s killing it.”

The kookaburra must have slammed the meat against the wooden platform a good ten times. Only then did he swallow it, and look up, expectantly, for more.

Wanna go halves on a teen pregnancy?

The Gruen Transfer on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) may be the cleverest act of media jujitsu executed by state-supported television in decades. I know this post wanders features neither Anglo or American culture nor life in Singapore, but the show's format and mission are seriously interesting and simultaneously entertaining. Essentially the television program deconstructs the mechanics of advertising using, in large part, the talents and words of top Australian marketing firms. The same people who came up with the hilarious Big Ad and beer catapults turn out to be really engaging behind-the-scenes characters.

Teaching the public about the methods ad men use to sell products to their audiences constitutes an unassailable public mission for a broadcasting corporation supported by license fees. The real twist comes from the choice to include, or maybe even co-opt, the advertising firms themselves in presenting the revelations. Reality programming has demonstrated that few people can resist the opportunity to appear on television, but it's the weekly Pitch that keeps the show entertaining rather than preachy and makes ad firms clammer for inclusion. The Pitch features two major ad firms in a head-to-head showdown to see who can sell ice to Eskimos and convince Australians to keep cane toads for pets, i. e. selling the unsellable. The results capture the Australian spirit of self deprecation while gently dismantling the insiduous displays that interrupt commercial broadcasting. It's almost like an extended case for state-supported, commercial-free media.

Unsurprisingly, good programming will always serve as the best argument for continuing the BBC-inspired license fee model of state media. I have embedded above and below a couple highlights from the first season of the Pitch.