An Evening With The Penguins

Friday 1 December

Having slept well, we were up early again (not quite so early as yesterday) to meet the coach coming to the hotel to collect us for our tour of Melbourne. We had time for a quick continental a breakfast (Colin couldn’t miss breakfast two days running) before the coach arrived a little early at 07.40. It took us through some very wide streets and some narrow streets – with cars parked on both sides, so it was almost impossible for the coach driver to manouvre in places – to the meeting place in the centre of the city. Here we changed coaches for the ‘City Tour’.

Melbourne covers an area of 100 sq kms (one of the largest cities in the world by ground space), but the main city centre is a rectangular grid of straight roads criss-crossing, making it easy to find your way around. Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of Australia asked a man named Robert Hodder from Sydney to design the new town. Hodder decided that a lot of people would be using bullocks and drays to move materials and goods from the port to the settlement (just a few kilometres away, so the roads needed to be wide enough for a bullock and dray to turn easily. Within the grid pattern, every other street is 99 feet wide and the intervening ones 33 feet wide. The roads run north to south, and east to west, the narrower streets being known as ‘Little’, such as Little Bourke Street or Little Collins Street, offspring of the larger street next door. Originally Elizabeth Street was a stream, but this has been redirected in a storm drain under the road. There are some smaller alleyways in between streets, but these are very narrow – just wide enough for a car. John Batman, the first Governor of the town named the city Melbourne in honour of the English Prime Minister, and many of the street names have English Royal Family or political connections.

The wide streets have meant that an extensive system of trams – two lines of rails - could be installed in the centre the wide roads and these have priority for passengers getting on and off as they cross the vehicle lanes. Each tram car holds 140 people so lots of people choose this method of transport to get from the suburbs into the city each day to work, or for shopping – they are environmentally friendly being electric, and travel is cheap – the circular route around the edge of the city is free.

There are lots more “old” buildings here than in Sydney, where the facades or outer shells have been maintained. Most of the older buildings are made from local blue stone or basalt stone on the lower level, which is mined in the nearby Grampian hills, topped with red sandstone. There are many fine examples such as the Town Hall, Parliament Building, the old Bond Building and Flinders Station, at the end of Flinders Street (if Matthew Flinders came back, I wonder if he would be surprised at how many streets and buildings have been named in recognition of his feat of surveying the coast of Australia). The roads are lined with plane trees along the pavements and often through the middle between the tram lines, offering shade in the heat of summer, although they are deciduous and leaves are a bit of a nuisance in the winter months.

Most of the population of Melbourne (around 4 million) lives outside the main city, in houses in the suburbs, but more and more of the older buildings in town are being renovated into apartments. Melbourne has a large Asian immigrant population - the largest Japanese settlement outside Japan, as well as loads of Koreans and Chinese – and these peoples are used to living in tenement blocks. One fifth of the city is gardens and parks - it is known as the Garden City of Australia - and they are investing research to find ways to keep the city green, while at the same time minimizing the amount of water required to keep the trees and flowers at their peak, all year round – like the rest of Australia there has been very low rainfall here over the past five years or more and water restrictions constantly apply. There are many deciduous trees here, brought over from the UK a hundred or more years ago, such as oaks, elms, silver birch, and of course, the plane trees lining the streets.

Driving around the city we saw the church built by Donald Mitchell, so that he and his daughter could sing – she went on to become the famous opera singer Dame Nellie Melba – the two large cathedrals – one protestant and one catholic, both built at the end of the 19th century – streets of shops and department stores - although not a Marks and Spencer, which I am surprised about, as the feel is of Oxford Street in London – not many decorations for Christmas, only a few cardboard Christmas trees - many opulent hotels – none more so than the Crown Plaza on the river front, with its flashing crowns on the roof, and a huge casino within the gold coloured building. Melbourne underwent a modernization programme in the 1950’s, and became an important finance centre of Australia, with most of the important banks and finance houses having centres here.

Melbourne is very proud of its strong sporting connections and crossing over the Yarra River, we saw the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) where the English team will take on the Aussies in the fourth test on Boxing Day. This was originally built as the Olympic centre when the city hosted the 1956 Olympics – the first time it had been held in the southern hemisphere. The driver has a ticket for this match (it has been booked out for months) and said it is a tradition for Melbourne people to go to sporting events at on Boxing Day – it is the start of their main summer holiday period, lasting to the end of January. Across the road is the Rod Laver Tennis Courts, where the Australian Open Tennis takes place in the middle of January each year, and next door the Olympic pool and Athletics arena, where the Commonwealth Games were held earlier this year. We also saw the roads used for the Melbourne Grand Prix in March each year, around Albert Park lake – a circuit of 5 kms, where unusually the cars race in a clockwise direction. The noise level is apparently unbelievable throughout the city when that event is taking place.

Our first stop this morning was at Fitzroy Gardens, just a couple of blocks away from our hotel. There is a cottage here known as Captain Cook’s cottage, but we didn’t have time to explore inside this very quaint small house. The paths in this park are set out in the pattern of a Union Jack – this will help us find the way if we walk home while we are here. Further on, across the road from the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, was a large memorial to those who died in the First World War, built by those actually returning from the war. As the weather was so warm and sunny, we decided at this stop, to wander around the various themed gardens in the Botanical Gardens looking at indigenous trees and plants in a very beautiful settings along the river. Our next visit was St Kildas, a coastal resort and port to the south of the city, where we could see a huge car holding plant for all the imported cars to be distributed all over the country – covered with a fine black material to keep the salt off the paintwork. From here, to the west of the city, stretched the largest industrial and manufacturing area in Australia, accessed by the new Westgate Bridge, a span across the Yarra River measuring 3.6 kms – it has boom gates at either end in case of a terrorist attack - a huge pipeline from the Bass Strait fields brings crude oil straight into a terminus here. Tasmania is only 130 kms to the south, and all the supplies for the island are transported from these docks.

The tour was only for the morning so we returned to the city and stopped for a bite of lunch, and visited the Post Office to purchase more posting boxes, before strolling back to the hotel. It was very pleasant wandering along the leafy lanes and through the Fitzroy Gardens in the sun to our hotel. We had a couple of hours before we started on our next tour, so we packed up all the paperwork we had garnered since Singapore, and the CDs with our photos on and sent them home – they don’t do surface mail here, so even though the parcel was smaller than our previous mailing, it cost more. But at least the cases should be a little lighter.

We had booked a second tour today, which picked us up around 16.45, taking us to Phillip Island, about 80 kms from Melbourne, off the southern coast, where Little Penguins come ashore every night, walk across the beach to find their burrows in the sand hills behind. They only come ashore when it is dark, to avoid their predators, such as sea eagles and foxes, and return to the ocean before it is fully light the following morning. Not every penguin comes ashore every night - they can stay at sea for three or four days at a time - and not all penguins return to the water in the morning - particularly in the breeding season, when the females incubates the eggs. Also, once a year, usually around April, they go to sea and have a really good feed, so that they are bloated, and then stay ashore for about three weeks to moult and grow new feathers. They have a small gland under the tail, which releases the necessary oil for them to preen their feathers and make them waterproof. They can swim almost to Antarctica to find food – they like pilchards best of all, but will adapt to eating other fish if pilchards are in short supply.

Little Penguins lay two eggs at a time, and from when these hatch, the parents completely share the task of raising them – cleaning, feeding and protecting them - until they are about eight weeks old, when they are about the same size as their parents and have learnt to fish and fend for themselves.

This small island is 27 kms long and 13 kms wide (about 13 miles x 7 miles) at most, and it is only around the western peninsula that these creatures come ashore here. They are also found in small pockets along the coastline from Sydney to the south eastern tip at Wilsons Promontory, but this is one of the only easily accessible locations to see them. Also in the evening great flocks of black short tailed sheerwaters come in land and nest amongst the penguin burrows. Apart from the wildlife about 100,000 people come to see the 500cc Motor Cycle Grand Prix held on the circuit here annually, as well as moto-cross and V* super-car racing.

Once on the island, the driver took a detour around the coast, to show us the hundreds of small holes in the sandy cliffs – many of them very steep – and the tracks which the penguins use each night. We were also entertained here by lots of wallabies, staring at us, or hopping around. These smaller versions of the kangaroo, are very cute and their facial expressions are quite inquisitive – as if asking what we are looking at. The whole coach played “Spot the Wallaby”.

We arrived about 19.45 at the visitor centre as the sun was almost below the horizon, and the sky was pink with the reflection. We had booked a special tour, so that we would have a front seat on the sands, close to where the penguins come ashore and be accompanied by a local ranger who would be able to keep us informed about the life of Little Penguins. We were told in no uncertain terms no photography was allowed once we entered the Visitor Centre and absolutely no litter – but of course, one girl was caught taking a photo and severely reprimanded and other people left coke beakers in the viewing areas!

We met Lucy, our ranger, and two other people in the group (there should have been six, but two didn’t turn up). She gave us windproof jackets, foldaway cushions and night time binoculars before showing us some displays about the life cycle of the penguins and their surroundings. It was then time to take our places on the sands – there were hundreds of people there to see this amazing spectacle (apparently on Boxing Day there can be as many as 4000 people here) – sitting on purpose built steps overlooking the beach, but we were sitting right at the front on the sands. We were glad of the seats – they not only supported your back, but kept the damp out – and the windproof jackets were a godsend. By now it was twilight and everyone was staring out to sea, to see the first bird come ashore. There was a long stretch of kelp along the edge of waves which the penguins would have to climb over. As it was almost totally dark – the area had special subdued lighting around the seating areas that would not affect the penguins’ eyes – the first little bird scrambled over the seaweed and on to the beach. He was on his own, and almost immediately ran back into the water. The penguins like to travel across the beach in small groups of around twenty – safety in numbers from any skulking predator. Their back feathers are really dark blue, but obviously look black as they emerge from the water, and their fronts are white. They are only about 18 inches tall. Then, at the far end of the beach a group of penguins waddled up over the sands to the cliffs. We could see these clearly through the binoculars and it looked like a cartoon of “Pingu” and his friends swaying from side to side as they limped up the beach. These birds are excellent swimmers, but walking is much harder. Some more came out of the water nearby where we were sitting, gathered in a group, always checking that all their “mates” were with them, before starting their trek of about 20 metres across the beach and up into the grass and sand dunes. They always return to the same burrow every time they land, and live close to the area where they were born. In the 1950’s the council allowed some houses to be built on the sand dunes in this area, and they are now being compulsorily purchased and demolished as funds allow, so that there is nothing to disturb the life of the penguins. Where these house have been taken down, the land is compacted, so they have introduced wooden “burrows” for the penguins to reintroduce them to the area while the vegetation develops once more. They seem to be very successful, and most are inhabited during the night. As many as 30% of penguins die in their first year, but those who survive, can live to be 15 or 16 years of age. The rangers have a protection programme and have been tagging the penguins for many years (people first came here to watch this daily ritual as early as 1920).

The first group had just made it to the back of the beach when another group emerged from the water, and then another, and for a fascinating half an hour we watched as hundreds of penguins came ashore and made their way to their burrows. As many as about 6,000 make this trip here every evening, but there are about 60,000 in this colony. While all this exertion was taking place with the penguins, the sheerwaters flew in, in dark skeins across the sky – almost invisible to the naked eye – to their nests at the back of the sand dunes, near the visitor centre.

After about half an hour, we decided to move to the far end of the beach, and watch more of the penguins, as they toddled up the sandy tracks, beside and under a boardwalk, to find their burrows. They would stop and preen their feathers on the way, and look at each other, and call to find their mates. Some even copulated along the way – once away from the beach they are not at all shy. The rangers have a lookout tower on the beach, and for 50 minutes every night (no one is sure why this length of time is used) rangers count the penguins coming ashore and record the numbers – a very difficult task, as some come in and out of the water several times, before making the trip. At the end of 50 minutes all the lights are turned out, as some penguins will not come ashore if there is any light at all – although most of the penguins are now used to the lights. All too soon the spectacle was over, and we had to return to the visitor centre and the coach.

When we arrived at the coach, one solitary penguin was walking up the side of the roadway, having landed on the other side of the peninsula and was making its way home. All the coaches and cars in the vicinity had to stop and turn off their headlights while the penguin waddled by. Only when it had safely passed, did the coaches and cars leave the car park. It had been an absolutely fascinating evening, and we would have loved to have stayed longer, but by the time we left it was already nearly 22.30 and we had a long drive back. The coach dropped us all off at our respective hotels (our’s being slightly out of the city centre we were obviously the stop) and it was around 00.30 by the time we arrived back at Magnolia Court.

We spoke and thought about Elaine and Darryl getting married and wondered exactly what time the service was and wished them well in our thoughts – we are eleven hours ahead of the UK. It seemed strange to think that the wedding was taking place on the other side of the world while we had been looking at penguins.