Melbourne-Yass

Nothing like tripping over your feet and face-planting the footpath going in to the pub instead of coming out. Scone, knee and wrist all debatable for a day or two afterwards. Punters looking out from inside no doubt chortling for a week.

Someone lost their spirit level laying the pavement at Yass but the Guinness, porterhouse and State of Origin inside the Clubhouse pub, if not the punters’ sorry headshakes, compensated well enough.

So too, the colonial shades haunting The Globe Inn’s Georgian lodgings, the more contemporary spirits at the neat little Yazzbar, the heritage streetscape architecture and the Yass River, a pretty Murrumbidgee tributary, gurgling through the southern New South Wales township.

A regional centre forever, Yass is a tidy stop-off on the north road to old Sin City but it is morphing into a peri-urban aspect of Canberra as new greenfield estates pop up, reshaping the landscape and demography for its third century of white settlement.

Best get in soon if you want soak up its extant heritage elements. If you’re staying in motels, check them first. Some untidy over-priced 1950s jobs, poorly renovated somewhere in the ’70s, aren’t quite the heritage you’re probably after.

Yass hosts a fair scrip of music, arts, film and first nations festivals, along with theatre, classical and jazz concerts, exhibitions, markets and intimate acoustic music sessions, regulation ‘live music’ jukeboxes and trivia nights that speak to vibrant contemporary entertainments.

Even Tim the Yowie Man is revving up to poke a spotlight at the “hidden underbelly” of the explorer Hamilton Hume’s nearby Cooma Cottage. Hopefully, he gives his expeditionary offsider Hovell the spray he so richly deserves.

For all that, Yass is still a sleepy country town, so take that for the peaceable equanimity it garners the soul.

 

Colonial architecture, Yass

Yass-Sydney

Fighting your way into Sydney’s southern burbs on mid-winter, peak-hour, drizzly dusk is navigator catnip. If you have a navigator on hand.

Then battling your way into an unfamiliar domestic airport terminal to extricate an arrival is even more fun for any cartographer/surveyor/Gerard Mercators you might have in the passenger seat.

Failing those resources, your car’s nav system is sure to send you round in circles, rhomboids, parallelograms and geometric conundrums. Not quite the AI you’re after, so a co-pilot with a sharp eye is still a handy backstop.

Handy, too, when the frazzled passenger you pick up happens to know her way about without any need for cyber breadcrumbs. So onwards and upwards from the overpriced Crowne Plaza, which is cheaper and better than basically every hotel or B&B nearer the CBD, but which will lock you upstairs in the lift when you go to retrieve the room keycard you left downstairs.

Onwards to revisit Circular Quay for the first time in yonks. Ocean liners, Boaty McBoatface harbour ferries, a giant tessellated coathanger and Danish-inspired sails soaring crooked carapaces into the night … place hasn’t changed so much. Apart from a maze of eateries and thousands of office lights reflected in the water.

Obligatory pedestrianism out of the way left only one thing for it. Repair to the waterside Whalebridge retreat for a little Gallic charm a la d’Abricot sours, onion soup and no, garcon, not the burger, I ordered the bourguignon.  Quelle horreur but they were lovely about it. Might have all been speaking French, you know, if you check your Sydney history books.

Whalebridge, Circular Quay

Next morning, DiDi into town, it’s about half Uber, and ferry out to Taronga Zoo to find animals enjoying probably the best view there is of Sydney. Not for the elephants, though. That game’s had its day and the erstwhile pachyderm digs are now museum pieces to animal cruelty.

Set a couple hours aside to get a proper handle on this exquisite zoo and everything from its birds, tigers and meerkats to reptiles, farmyards and colonial cannonades.

Tooronga Zoo

After splashing your way back to town, head for George Street’s Hilton Hotel and its Marble Bar, the boozy architectural legacy of Tattersall’s founder George Adams. Mahogany and marble magyk at every turn, it’s a rescued heritage-listed piece of Victoriana on par with just about anything in the Old Dart antipodes.

Don’t hold back on throwing the bar-keep a curly cocktail request, either, they love a challenge, even if they don’t seem to know much about the history of the place. And don’t miss the jazz nights, either. Nothing quite like good underground music.

The Marble Bar, The Rocks’ Hero of Waterloo Hotel

When you’re finished there, a brisk walk north will get you up into the gentrified underbelly of an old Sydney once so over-crowded, unsanitary and full of bubonic plague it was all but demolished back around 1900. Much tidier now, but still leaching history and old ghosts from every crevice of its sandstone firmament.

Trick tip, get on to the EatClub app and you’ll save up to 40 per cent, maybe more, off your meals – and drinks – for last minute walk-ins at several of its pubs and eateries.

Still got a day up your sleeve? Head over the bridge and down Military Road for a ramble around the ridiculous real estate you would have seen from the zoo ferry. Neutral Bay, Cremorne, Mosman, Balmoral, plus the Platypus submarine base … plenty to ponder in the undulating well-treed waterside northern burbs.

Can’t go wrong at the Mosman Rowers Club for a smart lunch and early imbibe watching the McBoatfaces working their way to and from the Mosman Bay Wharf just a magnum hoik over the water. But don’t try that: “We don’t do that sort of theng in Mothman,” as the locals say, usually when newcomers prune the greenery for better views of the bridge and the Opera House.

Last trip I made there, some yonks ago, involved a water taxi race across the harbour with a very late and very miffed driver in pursuit. They don’t do that either, apparently, but I always thought it’s the quick and the dead in old Sydney.

Probably been that way a while, some 3000 years or so if you go by the overhang cave shelter by the road at Balmoral Beach. Been tidied up in recent times of the tip-site depredations it suffered for many years. The average age of the good folks grubbing inside the Balmoral Bathers Pavilion up the road a ways is probably not far off that, either, bless them.

Mosman Cove, Balmoral Beach

Another evening in the bosom of The Rocks, flitting between pubs, outside eateries, Guinness and pinot noirs – thankfully not face-planting anywhere – is a nice way to wrap up 48 hours in town.

But not before a requisite Negroni or two, in memory of Bourdain if need be, somewhere like Alleyway off the top end of St on the way out. The lava murals opposite are schmick but not a patch on the staggering sandstone ngarunga nangama calm water installation around the corner by artist Judy Watson in the lobby of 200 George St, tapping quite extraordinarily Sydney’s ancient Tank Stream, archaeology and the Aboriginal significance of the site. Worth a trip to Sydney in its own right.

 

Judy Watson’s ngarunga nangama calm water

Sydney-Wodonga

Back out on the road a rainy day, across the huge river gorges south of Sydney and before long into a landscape like a old National Bank calendar image, all rolling hills and ‘lightly wooded’ eucalypt stands as per the old surveyor parlance. Geology and geography all a reminder why it took Euro pioneers so long to get across the Blue Mountains.

Green Murrumbidgee country and its pretty off-freeway towns eventually cede way to the Murray and the Albury-Wodonga border and a new road game of dodge the Victorian pot/sinkholes. Into a Quest redoubt, with a polite upgrade, and off to the cleverly re-imagined Goods Shed with its pizzas, piano-singer background warble and craft beer-only totalitarianism.

Cold nights in this snow country neighbour, which is a jumping off point for northeast beauties such as Yack, Beechworth, the Mitta and Nariel valleys, Snake Gully Stanley and swags more tiny bush villages. If you’re up to it, head down to Omeo and Bairnsdale and come home the long way through Lakes Entrance, Metung and Maffra.

Maybe check out Lake Tyers and its Waterwheel Beach Tavern – aka the Devil’s Hole Hotel. You might like to drop a line but a word of caution from singer-songwriter Van Walker and his bandmates in The Ferriters:

“Be careful where you cast out,

“Cause there’s something down beneath,

“Nobody’s ever seen it but it will drag you down to hell,

“And nobody will save you at the Devil’s Hole Hotel.”

Fair drive back to Bearbrass from there. Get home safely.

The Goods Shed, Wodonga