Queen Victoria market is huge.  About 25% is inside the rest outside under huge tin roofs. Sells everything from fruit and vegetable, leather, souvenirs (tacky), meat fish, shoes, blankets, animals etc. etc. etc.  This is part of the delicatessen section.  They had fresh bread here as well, and the smell of the deli food and bread was yummy.  Outside people lounged around eating!  Lots of cheese:

Preserved sausages

The baker.

The Australian Deli.

Meat, olives and cheese:

Including:

We walked from the market back down to centre of Melbourne.  On the way we spotted this lorry doing a cooking oil delivery to a shop.  The pipe ran from the tanker into the shop and presumably into their storage containers.  The waste wasn’t collected though – so presumably down the drain or dumped.

This week is comedy week in Melbourne.  The guy on the LHS, with a lot of Merde, did an acrobatic comedy act involving lots of kids and adults from the audience in Federation Square.  Needless to say Paul and I slithered our way to the back.  The Ian Potter Gallery and Motion Picture Museum is the building to the RHS.  St Pauls Cathedral is on the LHS.

Various bits of the city have been set aside for street art as part of Youth Projects.  We came across a load of kids painting the wall here near Chinatown a couple of days ago.  You can just make out piece of paper next to this young man’s rucksack on which his graffiti design had been drawn.

The street was manic with people spray painting.

Another example near Federation Square. 

Unfortunately, some ****** has painted lots of graffiti onto of nice graffiti.

Some of the designs are brilliant.

This painted two faced thing was on the waterfront at the entrance to Melbourne Park.

View of CPD from the Southbank.

This is really sad.  In a scruffy part of Melbourne – Enterprize Park - wedged under an overpass and squeezed beside the river and railway sidings, where these totems.  Melbourne Aquarium is in the background.  The park is situated at the ‘pool’ or turning basin of Melbourne – the point that Europeans first landed and the ships turned.  Traditionally aboriginals would take pieces of bark from some trees to make canoes, shields or baby cradles. The trees were called scar trees, and these totems are part of the Scar Project.  The scar trees would serve as signposts to other clans to let them know that they had entered the land of another community.   The totems represent scar trees and were constructed by indigenous artists out of some of the original wharf poles from Queens Bridge – just upstream from this point.  You can see a digging stick and fish hook here. 

These carved figureheads represent boats just above the turning point at Enterprize wharf on the river Yarra, Queens Bridge is in the background.  Originally the river was very shallow here and there was 3 m waterfall over a rock reef.  The reef prevented the saltwater penetrating up the river, and ships going any further.  It was the only place for miles that the aboriginals could cross over the river.  They believed that the falls were created by Bunjil (the eagle hawk).  Unfortunately for them everything changed when the Enterprize (from Van Diemen’s Land now Tasmania) sailed up the Yarra to create the Melbourne settlement.   The Yarra’s waterfall was destroyed in the mid-19^th century to allow tall ships to access the wide basin or ‘pool’ just downstream of this point.  The five carved figureheads are called Constellation and are supposed to evoke the spirit of these ships.  The destruction of the waterfall totally destroyed the freshwater ecology up river of the falls.  What was once freshwater wetlands became brackish water salt marsh.